Proud

You were promised colors, and here they are! It has been farrrr too long since I did a rainbow manicure. Moreover, I miss them…since I am currently on the interview trail for residency, my nails for the past two weeks have been incredibly boring! I am going to do a few weeks worth of “work-appropriate” nail art posts at some point, that are basically what I am forcing myself to wear during November and December as I fly all over the country.

Anyway, this mani serves many purposes: I painted it for my birthday (ergo rainbows), and to celebrate being done with my hardest medical rotation (ergo not subtle mani). Also, I went to San Francisco (ergo bright colored mani), and attended the Pride parade while I was there (ergo more rainbows)!

What that actually means…yes, I painted this back in June. I just never got around to posting them for whatever reason! So rainbows it is 🙂

Colors:
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Purple: Sephora X – Ignition
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colos – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BP – L050

I had to modify the gradient for my pinky nail, because it was just too short for all the colors as I had them arraigned. Hopefully it doesn’t look too bad! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Flags of Blue and Yellow

Initially, I was going to do the purple and yellow-sun design from Tangled for this, but I figured that I’ve done that already and I want to try and bring attention to the places hit by hurricane Irma. However, most of those flags either would not go well together or would be far too complicated to paint, so I settled on this.

This was designed around the flags for the Bahamas and Saint Lucia, but then I just went and grabbed other yellow-and-blue flags that I thought would work well together. I’m quite pleased with how this came out!

Most of the nails are vertical (so if the flag were sideways it would start at my cuticle), my thumb is horizontal, and I totally messed up the orientation of my middle finger! I like the aesthetics of it, but technically the triangle should start from the left side of my nail, not the nail base. Artistic license? Anyway, the flags are: pinky – Ukraine, ring – Bahamas, middle – Saint Lucia, pointer – Sweden, and thumb – Barbados.

Colors:
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Light blue: Zoya – Rocky
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Sia
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

Usually this is one of my most dreaded prompts (up there with “supernatural” and “fashion”) but this year I’ve liked all of them! I suppose its fitting, since this is likely my last year participating in the 31 Day Challenge.

The Rainbow Fish

I love painting nails inspired by children’s books…and I’ve been wanting to try The Rainbow Fish for a while! I just haven’t had the time (until now).

The inspiration came from Adventures in Acetone, although I decided to stay true to the book and use only creme polishes for the scales other than the rainbow silver scales. I do wish, in retrospect, that I had used a lighter pink (even though I don’t actually have a good one)!

The story is about the joy that one person can get from sharing. Its quite a nice message! It also was one of my favorite books growing up (not that I wanted to be taught to share with my sisters) but because the shiny fish scales were just so pretty. This mani is a bit darker than I imagine the fish being, but still pretty and suitably colorful! Who wants to play with silver holo? 🙂

Colors:
~ Light blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Blue: Maybelline – Shocking Seas
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Teal: Salon Perfect – Escape to Neverland
~ Purple: L’oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Holo: Color Club – Harp On It
~ Yellow: WOW – #301

These took FOREVER to paint because I had to do one scale at a time, and couldn’t put two wet dots next to each other or they’d run! I still love the end result though 😀 Hope you enjoyed! It looks like I wasn’t the only one to do Rainbow Fish this year!

Sunflowers

This mani is the opposite of my post from Day 2 (the orange flowers) in that here I have a new OPI Washington DC polish which I love AND a floral stamp that works perfectly.

The design was inspired by @hdinails, because I never would have thought of floating sunflowers on my own! That said, the stamp I used is not actually sunflowers, but we can pretend that they are 😀

My new OPI polish here is Stay Off the Lawn, a deep vampy green creme with blue undertones (almost a deep green-leaning turquoise). This is two thin coats, and this polish is great! It self-levels nicely, and goes on smooth. I also love the color, although I do always love jewel-tone polishes. I am really glad I bought this one.

Colors:
~ Dark green: OPI – Stay off the Lawn!
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Brown: Zoya – Dea
~ Dark yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Stamp: Floral BPX-L018

I made these flowers with stamping decals (rather than direct application like I did two days ago) and honestly I like direct application better! It is more time-consuming because you have to go one nail at a time unless you have multiple clear stampers (I only have one that works) but you don’t end up with any dead space around the stamped design, or tons of bubbles. Hope you enjoyed! This is likely to be one of my favorites from this Challenge, we shall see!

Bumblebee!

It is a huge struggle for me to come up with a mani I like (and want to paint) for day 3 of the 31 Day Challenge, since I hate the color yellow! But even I have to admit that these nails are cute.

The design was inspired by Girlteen-vip (who is now feminamodeon, which was a pain to track down!) but anyway, the link is here.

Although the original artist had partially nude nails, my previous mani (which I haven’t posted yet, of course the 31 Day Challenge makes me go out of order) stained my nails bright pink, so no nudes for me! I figured a pastel blue-to-yellow gradient worked just as well 🙂

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Blue: Zoya – Blu
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Shimmer: Sally Hansen – Platinum
~ Bee stamp: BM – 301

I am grateful for the one singular stamp on here though…that little bee is from a bundle monster plate! I can’t really imaging having to freehand tiny iridescent wings. That’s it for today! Cute little bees. Check back tomorrow for Day 4, which is in my opinion truly epic 😀

Lit Up Neon

COLOR. Oh my gosh you guys I AM SO EXCITED. I wore these when I went to San Francisco for my first vacation after hospital time! Also for my birthday :-p

I was trying to recreate a gradient from ilaeti but I think I need more blue! I love how the colors came out though, so I imagine I will be trying again…and this time showing a gradient-only photo, it was so pretty! Don’t get me wrong, I like the stamping, but that gradient.

I wish my nails were longer, the hint of neon green you can see at the tip of my thumb made me happy.

Colors:

~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

~ Blue: Zoya – Rocky

~ Purple: Sephora X – Ignition

~ Pink: WOW – #371

~ Yellow: Love & Beauty – Yellow

~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

~ Stamp: B Loves Plates – 03 Mind Blown

That’s all! More colors and fun designs next week. I am so happy I had a least a month to wear whatever I wanted on my nails! Residency is going to be painful if I need to keep my nails ‘tame’. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that I won’t have time for nail art, just color and a stamp if I’m lucky. I don’t know whats going to happen to the blog next year. Yikes…

Flame

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to use this plate, which was sent to me for review from the Born Pretty Store. Fire-colored gradient with black stamping? Gradient stamping? I tried doing yellow and orange and red…but they didn’t pop against black! So I had the brilliant idea of layering them over GOLD. Because that just sounded like fun.

I ended up using a gold glitter rather than a metallic, so the fire looks a little more granular. I think if I were to do this again, I’d try it with a metallic and see what happens! I do like this quite a bit though.

In the end, each nail got stamped 4 times: twice in gold with the two overlaid designs, once with a yellow-orange blotted mix, and finally with a purple-red mix. Surprisingly, this didn’t take that long! Mostly because the plate was so well-etched that transferring the designs was a piece of cake. Even the solid body of the bird on my thumb!

Colors
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Purple: Zoya – Margo
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Monica
~ Stamp: BP – X012 (Exoticism)

That’s it for today…awesome fire! I’ve honestly had my eyes on this stamp forever because I love flames but I HATE hand-painting them! And this stamp has SO MANY FLAMES. You can pick it up for yourself at the Born Pretty Store on sale for $1.99. Don’t forget to use my 15% off coded, LY5X31!