I've had a lot of fun over the last few weeks with clients. A lot of them are really embracing more adventurous nails, and while I still do my most obnoxious and involved stuff on myself, I'm slowly seeing a lot of my clients venture towards that end of the spectrum and I'm so excited. Below I'll show you six clients' nails and tell you what I used.
This month's Nail It! magazine had a really cool spread about this color combo; fluorescent pink, cobalt and white, and I was immediately a fan. The pink isn't just any neon pink, it's that light, bright neon Pepto pink that seems pretty hard to find. I used Essie Punchy Pink, which is one of my favorite neons, though between us, it chips like Hell. I used it along with Zoya Purity and Ulta Whatever Floats Your Moat, a cobalt I recently acquired. You could also use something similar like Revlon Royal, OPI Eurso Euro or even a more vibrant shade like Essie Butler Please. Either way, color blocking with these colors just makes it even more eye-catching. I painted the nails white, then added a pink triangle to the moons, then did an angular, exaggerated french with the blue, then one it was pretty dry, I added a white stripe down the center. Pretty simple, but if you're hand-painting maybe a little time consuming. If I did it again, I'd go find those utterly brilliant chevron-shaped french nail guides and use those. Why do these things always occur to me once they're no longer useful? Sigh...
It's been a few weeks since I did much nail art on myself, I've just been so pre-occupied. But I decided to use some of the Zoya Beach colors I got during the recent sale, and since Summer is nearing it's close, I wanted something very summery and fun, but not terribly time consuming. So, here's Pick Up The Party Line, a random mishmash of lines; straight, wavy, spattery, and crisscrossy. Those last two are officially words now ;P A quick note on the nail shape, they finally got long enough to start shaping back into almonds. I had a few breaks over the last couple months and had chopped them down and let them re-grow in squares and I just now got them into this vaguely almond shape. Can't wait till they get a bit longer again!
Products used:
Zoya Carly - $8 - zoya.com -
Just a reminder: there is still a sale at Zoya for BOGOFREE Beach & Surf polishes with the code SUMMER7 and will run through tomorrow as well. It's a great time to get some fun, bright polishes to enjoy the last month or so of summer with.
Carly is one of the Surf polishes, so it's part of the BOGOFREE going on right now. It's berry-magenta with an intense color payoff and a very dense foil finish. It sort of reminds me of China Glaze Steppin Out, which has been discontinued for a looooong time. Wow, that photo is so old, it really takes me back, lol. Carly is a great polish, and if you're taking advantage of the BOGOFREE, I highly recommend adding it to your cart, along with Zuza which also very excellent.
If you're interested in seeing some other Zoyas (that aren't part of the BOGOFREE) to add to your order, check out some of my Zoya swatches!
In the "Reaping" scene in the new Hunger Games movie, Effie Trinket wears a pretty and interesting nail look while she's drawing out the tributes' names. It's a sort of dark rose with a gold metallic sponged halfway down. It's such a simple and cute look to try to replicate, but I decided I wanted something slightly more blingy, so I did a different variation using a couple China Glaze polishes.
Products used:
I've long been a fan of Pucci prints as they're colorful and bold and always interesting, so I decided to try to emulate that style of pattern for a nail design. In the end, I didn't really think it looked very Pucci-esque, it's a little too random, but all-in-all I do like it a lot and the color combination was really cute. All of the design was done with a striping brush and six different nail polishes.
Products used:
I've wanted to do "graffiti" nails for a while and this is as close to that as I've come. I was inspired by a random photo of a mid-70s woman with a ratty old Union Jack tee. You know I love to do Union Jacks, but I thought this deconstructed black, white and grey version really was pretty cool. I've been getting pretty tired of Crackle polishes in general lately, but I thought it was perfect for this design, it makes it look like a nasty, dirty brick wall, so awesome.
Products used:
China Glaze's new Electro Pop collection is really inspiring. The colors are bright, beautiful and just beg to be used together. I paired up four of them, along with another China Glaze favorite to make this abstract springy floral design.
Electric Beat, a dusky periwinkle, was used as the base, then I used Sweet Hook and Dance Baby to make the flowers. With Gaga for Green and Electric Pineapple from the Island Escape collection for the leaves. Then I used a black striping polish to do really unstructured outlines to just suggest the form of the flowers and leaves. Without the black it literally just looks like blobs of color, and the black just made it pop.
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