Magnetic Fail

When I heard about magnetic nail polish I was curious to try it out. I knew before I tried this that it would not look exactly as the advertisements claim. Regardless, I got Essie's Restyle. So when I finally got a chance to paint my nails I found that it doesn't look like a reptile at all! Ha ha. After I finished it, I found on a blog that it worked best when you hold up the magnet AFTER painting a top coat. I wish I saw that before I painted my nails! For me it would create the pattern nicely, then lose the pattern as it dried. Another thing I had trouble with was hover the magnet over the nails while they were wet. It's hard to get it close enough to activate the magnets without touching your wet nails.

So here is how it turned out on my first try:

The photo doesn't show as much depth as in person, but the pattern looks almost three dimensional.

Although I had a lot of negative things to say about the polish, it isn't that bad! It definitely does not create the exact pattern that it claims to do, but I was impressed by the idea behind it and it sort of worked. If I use this again and it turns out better, I'll create an update about it! I will definitely try applying the top coat before holding the magnet up. That's my biggest tip to those who want to try this.


I had a lovely Christmas and am enjoying my break from classes. Hope you had a great holiday, too and Happy New Year!

Christmas Past

Every year I do Christmas nails. I plan on painting again soon, but for now I have these nails from a two years ago. It's Christmas movie themed! Have you seen these classics?

The first photo has Rudolf, the Abominable Snowman (from Rudolf), the Grinch, and the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. The thumb photo is a scene from the Nightmare Before Christmas. 

Penguins and Snowflakes

Hooray for procrastination! My motivation to do work right now is sloping downward due to a few factors. For one, I just had an awesome Thanksgiving break from classes. I finally got to go home for a week and saw my family and friends. Second off, the semester is coming to an end. I've worked hard for the past few months and I just want to be done with this semester.

Since I feel like doing nothing and I just got back to school, I painted my nails! It was colder than usual when I arrived back here so I decided it is now appropriate to paint winter theme nails. I've got snowflakes, penguins and glitter! 

Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving and enjoy the holiday season! :)

Golden Stars

I was at the store and HAD TO get this sheer gold color. It's so pretty! The sheer color is by Essie and is called "As Gold as it Gets". I love it! I layered it over "Innocent Nude" by Sally Hansen. Since I can't handle my nails being one solid color, I had to add stars to it.

Since it has glitter, it looks so much better in person. It has a slight gold shimmer from the top layer.

Off With Their Head!

Halloween is here! For us college kids, this weekend is when all the costume parties are. We celebrate Halloween this weekend, not on the actual day. Or at least my friends and I follow that. I have class very early the next morning.

I'm so excited to get all dressed up! Any occasion that I get to do fun hair and makeup is so exciting! I never do anything to my hair, so when I do it automatically makes my day 10x better. This year I didn't get a chance to paint Halloween nails, but instead I painted my nails to match my costume. I am going to be the Queen of Hearts. I originally wanted to paint each suit in a card deck on each hand (spades, diamonds, clubs and hearts) but I'm short on time. I went with the minimalist approach and I really love it! My definition for "minimalist" regarding nails is a little different from most people's! Ha ha. 

I used "White Tip" by Sally Hansen, "Caliente Coral" by Maybelline, and "Set in Stones" by Essie (My favorite!)

This manicure is so girly and sparkly! I can see this as a good nail design for Valentine's Day, too. Or any time. As an engineering major, I need more girlyness like this in my life. 

Have a safe and happy Halloween! <3

Halloween Nails: Take 1

I'm sad to see that I have not posted anything fancy in a while. Unfortunately, this semester has been keeping me away from having free time. Last week I had 3 exams in 4 days; It was crazy. Thus, no nail painting for me :(

Currently my nails are still naked (sigh) but I have some nail designs from before this blog started! This nail design was from high school around sophomore or junior year, maybe...? Anyways, here it is! 

Not too bad for a high school kid with lots of time. Ha ha. I guess these nails should be "October Nails" rather than strictly Halloween since I had the breast cancer nail on my ring finger. One of the thumb nails turned out failing and I don't know what happened to the one next to the M&M nail. It was probably a fail nail, too. 

Get excited for Halloween! Yay! Just 2 more weeks!

Cinderella Shatter

Lately I haven't had time to paint my nails. Super sad face :(

But we had a "girl's night" event for an organization I'm involved in. We painted nails together which gave me an opportunity to do these nails. They're just a simple Cinderella blue with a silver shatter coat on top. It's not as fancy as I'd wish, but it took less time to do than usual. And it's still cute!

Hope you have a lovely day!

Go Hokies!

If you didn't know this about me, I am currently a student in college. I am proud to say that I am studying at Virginia Tech. I LOVE my school and tonight is the first home game of the season! I am so excited for the game tonight! So for the first game of the season, I have my nails dressed for the occasion. I love these nails! YAY hokie pride!

GO HOKIES!

Hope you are enjoying the start of college football season!

Tribal Print

For me, classes start on Monday. The beginning of this semester is bittersweet for me. I had a great summer but I feel like I need to challenge myself again. Also, I'm looking forward to a fresh start.
As my summer comes to an end, I painted one of my favorite summer trends: tribal print. I love that the patterns are bold and funky. Since I didn't use multiple colors, I made each nail design different.

I used "Sunset Sail" by China Glaze for the base color and "Black Out" by Sally Hansen.


Hope you had a great summer and good luck to all of those going back to school this year!

Nautical Toes

I usually only paint a solid color on my toes because I don't like a lot of attention to my feet. Feet are weird. ALL feet are weird. Also, it's harder to paint.
But this time, I painted a little bit of detail. It's summer and I'm obsessed with all things nautical so I had to do beachy things on my nails. So here are stripes, an anchor and a palm tree.

Like my tan line that's there even in the winter? :(



Have a wonderful, sunshiny day!

Baby Cheetah

"Baby" cheetah? Yes, baby cheetah.
At the National Zoo there are two baby cheetahs that were born this year and are finally on display. I'm hoping to be able to see them while they're little because their pictures are very cute! Thus, here are my cheetah nails:

The First Ocean Nails

Last month I posted "Ocean Friends" and I said that I has done ocean themed nails before and I will post it later. Well, here is that post! This design was from two years ago, before I created this blog.

You can tell this was a while ago because my painting style has improved since then. haha 

Have a wonderful day! :)

Cornered

Simple and sweet nails this time. It was super easy to make this design and it looks so classy! I haven't done something so simple in a while.

I used "Sweetie Pie" by Maybelline and "Set in Stones" by Essie.
If you want to remake this design, I'd suggest waiting for the base coat to fully dry and using tape to create straight lines for the corners.



Hope you are having a wonderful day :)

Sparkle

A while ago I got these cool chunks of sparkly stuff from Sally's. I thought they would look good with a solid color but concentrated on the tips. They turned out nice but I don't think they will last long on my fingers. I usually don't do put things other than paint on my nails and I forgot that since these are slices of plastic, they don't lay flat. So each little chunk sticks out and is sharp. Each time my finger tips tough my skin, my skin gets scratched lightly. Also, they peel and fall off easily. ...But they look so cool! And they're sparkly!!!

...yea, I'm taking these off soon.

The color I used is Coral Reef by Sally Hansen (I am obsessed with coral for the summer!)

My nails look better in person :( Since the sparkles don't lay flat, they don't look very clean up close.

And here are the sparkly things I got: 

If I do use them again, it will be for a special occasion that's only one night. Or maybe I'll only use the glitter on a couple nails. They look nice, but they're inconvenient.


Hope you're staying cool in this summer heat! (Lesson learned today: even 10am is too hot to run here!)

Ocean Friends

I've painted beachy/ocean nails before (I will post them another time) but I wanted to do another version of it since I love fun summer nails so much! This time I did ocean animals. I love the way that they turned out! They're so fun :)

As I was painting them, I couldn't help but get "Under the Sea" stuck in my head!

I have so many photos for this post because I wanted a view of all of them together and a close up so you can see each of them better.

The only one that might be harder to distinguish is the yellow ball thing. That's a puffer fish! ha ha


The base coat is "Blue Me Away" by Sally Hansen.
Other colors I used include:
"Coral Reef", "Wet Cement", "White Tip", "Sun Kissed", "Cherry Red", "Mellow Yellow" all by Sally Hansen,
"Jade is the New Black" by OPI, "Fifth Avenue" by China Glaze, "Sunset Sail" by China Glaze, "Minty" by Maybelline, "Pink Sophistication" by Maybelline, a black thin brush by Kiss Nail Art, a green thin brush by SoEasy Stripe Rite


Have an awesome day!

Slices of Summer

Summer's almost here! For me, it has already started! Unfortunately that means summer classes have started :(
But anyways, I thought citrus fruits were cute to feature on nails for the season.

More summer designs soon to come!

Panda Nails

This is a throwback design from a couple years ago. I love going to the zoo and the pandas are one of my favorite animals to see. I felt the need to paint these at the time because of Tai Shan, a giant panda. Tai Shan was the first panda to be born at the National Zoo in DC and was sent back to China in 2010.  I was so sad that he left so in honor of his departure, I painted these panda and bamboo nails!

Hope you're having a great day! :)

Spring Floral Nails

Today was such a beautiful day: sunny with a few fluffy clouds, high of 80, not humid. It's finally feeling like spring here! I wish the weather was like this all the time. As the weather is getting nicer, and finals are upon us, I am catching spring fever. I find it very difficult to study for finals this week. I just lack all motivation to do anything productive. Am I the only one who feels like this? I wanted to paint instead of study tonight so here's what I came up with: It's a floral design to celebrate the nice weather that we finally get to enjoy. I got the idea from my love of the spring trend of floral shorts (I just got a pair and I love them!).

To be honest, I did the stripes because I was too lazy to do the entire hand flowers. But I think it makes a nice balance to the busy floral.

Hope you are having a great day!

Galaxy

This design has been all over the internet and I finally got a chance to try it out! I participated in a service auction whose benefits went to Relay for Life. I was auctioned off and my service was to do someone's nails.I got to paint my friend Rachel's nails. She wanted me to do galaxy nails. Here's how they turned out:

I forgot to take a photo myself before she left, so thanks, Rachel, for the photo!


I'm hoping to do my own nails sometime soon so look for another post by me at the end of the week. (Two posts in one week?! wat?)

See you later!

Blue and Pink Gradient

Tonight was the first time I've painted my nails in a very very long time. For me, a 'very very long time' is a month. I know, it's awful. Between school work, extracurricular events and attempting to have a social life, I've been pushing aside my nail hobby. It's been the toughest semester yet and a few unfortunate things have happened in my personal life recently. It made me happy to finally get to do something that I used to love to do.

But anyways...

Here's what I painted: It's a pink, white and blue gradient. This is my first time doing a gradient with a sponge. I used one of those make up sponges from the drug store. It's not perfect, but it's my first try and I like how the colors combined. They're bright, Spring colors.

I used 5 colors starting from the tips: Mesmerize by Essie, Blue Me Away by Sally Hansen, White Tip by Sally Hansen, Sweetie Pie by Maybelline, and Bubblegum Pink by Sally Hansen

The colors are a lot brighter and bold in person. I know I've written before that the nail designs look better in person than in a photo, and it still applies. Sigh...It always will apply. 

Hope you are enjoying the warming weather! The trees are still blossoming here and they're so beautiful! Flowers always brighten my mood. 

Pink Black White Marble

Good news for those of you who have tried water marbling and it did not turn out as nice as you wanted: Every time I have marbled, I have gotten better at it each time. So no worries, you'll get it! It just takes practice and patience. One piece of advice is to not swirl it with the toothpick as much. That's what I learned this time.

ughhh, that second photo is the hand I did first. Just as I said, I get better each time! haha

Here's what I used:

Valentines Hearts and More

As you might have seen, my last post was my effort to acknowledge Valentine's Day. Here are my nails from a few years ago (when I was in high school and had lots of free time: something I no longer have. sigh.). But anyways, the design follows the classic Valentines-y theme, unlike this year's design.

I don't know what I painted on that one pointer finger that's out of the frame. I guess it was my way of censoring a crappy looking nail. ha ha ha

Valentines Nails..? Maybe...?

I LOVE SPARKLES! I am obsessed with this sparkly pink color! It's sooooo cute! I didn't want to do an over the top Valentines day nail design this year but I thought this design was a little Valentines-ey because it's pink and girly (Can I get away with that? Is that right?). Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of Valentine's day, but I like that I have a reason to use girly pink sparkles! You could probably get away with painting it even when it's not the holiday but it's not something I personally would do (not exactly like this).

The first photo has a nice view of the gradient I did but the second photo has a better angle to show the color of the sparkles. It's so hard to get both!

I used Essie's "We Can Do It Pink!" for the base color and "A Cut Above" for the sparkles.

Hope you have a great Valentine's Day!

Music Notes

At the time I was feeling a matte color for my next nail design. I thought the music notes would look nice. The matte looks better than the gloss finish for this case.

If I were to do this design again, I would have made most of my nails the nude color. I like how that turned out better than the black with white notes. I may be biased because I'm not a black nails kinda girl.

Batman or Superman? Both!

Here is another 'flashback' design. Last year I painted my roommate's nails. She didn't usually like to paint her nails, until she met me!

She loves super heroes and she couldn't decide between Batman or Superman. So we decided on both!

This is a fairly easy nail design because there is only detail on two nails. One hand was blue, and the other was black.

Hope you have a SUPER day :)