Cloud Mani for Valentine's Day!

Hey guys!  Valentine's Day may be over, but I wanted to share my look for the romantic weekend with all of you. 

Looking through my Jamberry collection, I found the very pink wraps that I won last year in Jamberry's Mother's Day giveaway.  They're much more pink and frilly than I like for my everyday style, but they're totally perfect for Valentine's Day, so I decided to use two of them!

 

Thus far, every time I've donned Jamberries I've had to remove them within a day.  Despite my best efforts I always end up with ripples at my nail tips AND at my cuticles.  Ugh.  But then one of my friends showed me the baseball method!  Cutting a tiny notch out of the side (or two sides, if your nails are suuuuper curved) allows the wrap to actually lay flat on my nail.  It only took about an extra 30 seconds per wrap and it allowed me to don the wraps for a few days until I was ready to redo my nails!

This was also the first time I tried out the cloud mani.  It was super easy - although deciding what order I should arrange the colors in took a while thanks to my indecisiveness. ;)  The darker purple at my cuticles is Zoya Demi, the lightest shade in the middle is Zoya Rue, and the medium rosy pink at my nail tips is Zoya Kate.  (Yay Kate!)

I didn't think to make a tutorial for this, so here's a link to the one that I followed to achieve this look.  Some day, I will remember that I bought a tripod for my phone so I can take videos of my nail art!

Derek and I went out to dinner on Saturday night to our favorite Mexican place, and we spent Sunday watching Netflix and playing games.  (I may or may not have played Sims 3 for a couple of hours.)  What did you do for Valentine's Day?  More importantly, what did you put on your nails for the holiday?  Let me know in the comments!

Happy Movember!

November has been lovingly known as Movember for a few years now, thanks to the "No-Shave November" trend.  (Is it a trend? a lifestyle? a challenge? I honestly don't know at this point.)  So I decided to do a quick and easy Jamberry manicure to celebrate!

I mixed things up because I have a TON of sample sheets of different wraps - my Jamberry representative loves sending out samples to her customers!  So I had a lot of fun with the accent nails.

Sadly, most of the wraps in this mani have been discontinued - Almond Ombre, which is on my left pinky finger, the mustache French tips, which are adorably called Uno Momo, and the plaid on my right pinky have all been discontinued.  The flowery wrap on my left middle finger is called Flapper and it's still around in Jamberry's shop, woohoo!  The animal print on my left pinky is Hear Me Roar.

A lot of people around the internet dislike Jamberry, for a variety of reasons.  The biggest one is that they're a lot harder to apply than the company makes it look - and that's definitely true.  I still need some practice - you can see the wrinkles on some of my nails.  But my favorite thing about Jamberry is that once I've finished applying them, I'm done.  This manicure may have taken me 45 minutes, but when I was done, I was able to whip up dinner immediately without having to worry about smudging, chipping, or denting my nails.  And honestly, 45 minutes for this many nail art designs is nothing!  (At least the way I paint my nails, ha.)  For a solid color nail, I definitely prefer polish, but I really like using Jamberry for nail art.

Have you ever tried Jamberry, or any other of the different kinds of nail wraps out there?  What did you think of them?  Let me know in the comments!

What did I do on vacation?

I spent the last two weeks of July in Michigan with my family and friends.  It was an amazingly fun time!  But, of course, I can't go two weeks without redoing my nails.  And, since my loved ones universally recognize me as The Nail Girl of the Family, I got several requests to do peoples' nails.  Let's have a look at what I spent my vacation downtime doing!

My first few days in Michigan were spent at my oldest sister's house.  Unfortunately, she couldn't take much time off of work.  But it was kind of okay, because I got to spend one entire day with my two year old nephew, and I had another whole day to myself - in which I spent most of the day painting my nails.  I wanted to match my new bathing suit and my new dress, a feat that would admittedly have been easier in high school when 80% of my wardrobe was the same shade of blue.  But I accepted the challenge with my intermediate nail art skills!

 

the clothes in question.

I used Jamberry Arcade on my thumb and pinky - a wrap that I bought specifically to match my dress.  Zoya Ryan was another easy choice for my middle and ring fingers to match both the dress and my bathing suit.  And to help match my bathing suit, I threw in one nail of CDB Lacquer Passionate.   

(side note: I used a blow dryer to heat up my Jamberry wraps this time, and 

they went on SO smoothly!  never using my space heater for wraps again!!!)

I painted my toes to match my bathing suit a bit more exclusively, but I was silly and didn't take a picture of it!  I used the dry brush technique and ORLY Saturated, Zoya Oceane, Sephora Papaya Daiquiri, and Passionate and Ryan again.  I'm so bummed that I didn't take a good picture of it!  Maybe I'll just have to recreate the pedi soon.  I am, after all, going on an end of summer vacation to Ocean City, Maryland this weekend, where I will be wearing my bathing suit a lot!

The same night that I did my nails, I painted my sister's nails.  Purple is her favorite color, so I definitely wanted to use Saturated on her.  Still on a dry brush kick, I did two accent nails using Zoya Tallulah and Sinful Colors Bikini.  The white background is Salon Perfect Sugar Cube.  

She loved her nails so much!  Steph has never much bothered with makeup or nail polish, and now that she's a mom she bothers even less.  I painted her nails in her basement hunched over an end table, but we might as well have been at a high-class spa for how excited she was about her manicure!  Then, when she woke up her son in the morning and was trying to put his clothes on, he grabbed at her nails and said, "what's that?!"  <3

At a girls' night with my best friends from high school, my friend Melanie wanted a simple grey manicure.  I used China Glaze Intelligence, Integrity, and Courage on most of her nails with an accent of CDB Lacquer He Sees All.

I painted a few other peoples' nails, but I was having too much fun with them to really think about taking pictures for the blog.  All of the other manis that I did were simple colors with an accent color, though, so you're not missing out on any super-special nail art!

What's your favorite look from this post?  Have you ever painted your nails to match a vacation or trip?  Let me know in the comments!

Something different: Jamberry Nail Wraps

There may be only a few posts on this blog, but it's already time for something a little different!  There's no nail polish in this blog post whatsoever.

A few months ago, my cousin held an online party for Jamberry Nail Wraps.  I'd never heard of them, but I pretty much jumped on the wagon immediately because, like any girlie party (Tupperware, Pure Romance, and the like), there were free prizes for participating in the Facebook group - and we all know how much I love free things!

Anyway, I ended up choosing only one design to buy: "Aloha Flower" (unfortunately, this style isn't in the shop anymore, so I can't give you a link for it).  A huge reason I picked that one is because it totally matches my awesome tank top that I got early this summer!  And, while I haven't posted any clothes-matching manis on the blog yet, I LOVE it when my nails match my clothes.  (Check it: here and here.)

Phone quality, because I forgot to take a picture with the tank top when I had my camera and lamp set up.

I finally decided to try out the wraps today, and I'm pretty impressed!  The instructions mentioned "if applying over lacquer," which I took to mean that it's safe to apply on top of polish.  (They sell a few patterns with a clear background.)  I threw on my usual two coats of Sally Hansen Hard as Nails, to help my nails stay stronger with extra layers of stuff on them.

Application of the wraps is a little bit tricky, but it's a pretty simple concept.  You pick the wrap that best fits your nail and grab it with either tweezers or an orangewood stick, then heat it up.  The website and instructions tell you to use a special mini heater (which of course Jamberry sells), or else use a blow dryer.  I don't own a blow dryer, so I used my bedroom space heater, and it worked just fine!  Hold the wrap in front of the heat for a few seconds until it warms up, then stick it on your nail.  Cut off the excess, then file off any bits of wrap extending above the edge of your nail.

 I'm holding Zoya "Wendy" in this one, if you're curious.

I found that it was easier to avoid wrinkles on the edge of the wrap if I cut it fairly close to the length of my nail before putting it on.  For the first three nails, I left the wraps at their full length - one and a half inches - and I ended up with LOTS of wrinkles at the very tip of my nails.  (Most of my nails are close to half an inch long.  That's a LOT of excess wrap!)  By my ring finger, I realized that if I cut the wrap much shorter first, it was less likely to wrinkle at the tip.

Pretty severe wrinkling here.

I wanted to paint one nail on each hand on my own - I happen to have the perfect blue to match the background of this pattern, and a pretty good green and orange and of course a white - but I chickened out.  For one thing, it was getting too close to dinner time, and for another, I didn't want to have eight computer-perfect designed nails and then two nails that look just a little too wibbly.  But each Jamberry set comes with two stickers of every size, so I'll be able to do this again, and maybe then I'll try my hand at painting to match!

Here, I'm holding Zoya "Mitzi."

(I think it's worth noting that the pattern doesn't look as dot-y as it does in the super closeup pictures that I took.  To the naked eye, this is a perfectly smooth pattern.)

Obligatory "holding the product" shot, even though it's fairly awkward to hold the floppy envelope for a picture.

Also, will my pinky nail ever NOT be partially hidden underneath my ring finger?

Jamberry says that these wraps can last up to 14 days.  I definitely won't be wearing them for that long, because I'll need to change my nails in order to write another blog post!  I'll update this post to talk about how they fare after the weekend, and I'll also mention how well they come off.

Update 9/7/14

I  took the wraps off late Saturday night.  Predictably, the wraps that had wrinkled on the edges started to peel off a little bit.  The peeling wasn't so bad that the wraps risked falling off, but it did make my nails sort of painful, like they had teeny tiny swords on the edges of them.  On the few nails with perfect application, I had no peeling on the edges of my nails and would have been happy to keep them on until I was ready to change my nails!

Let me just say this before I describe the process:  DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, WEAR THESE ON TOP OF ANY KIND OF NAIL POLISH, LACQUER, OR NAIL STRENGTHENER/HARDENER.

The website and packaging give you three different ways to remove the wraps: re-heat them in front of your heat source and peel them off; soak your nails in acetone for a few seconds and peel them off; or soak your nails in warm water for a few seconds and peel them off.  NONE of these methods work properly if the wraps were applied over lacquer.  It seems that the glue on the wraps bonded to the strengthener on my nails, making it very difficult to take the wraps off.  Everything was a sticky mess.  What ended up working was: I dipped an orangewood stick in acetone and worked it underneath the wraps, then pulled them off and cleaned the goo off my nails with more acetone.  Since I had the nail strengthener on all of my nails, I can't say for certain whether the wraps would leave a gooey mess on bare nails; I certainly hope not!

All in all, I was quite happy with these wraps and I definitely recommend trying them out!