Where Have I Been for Five Days?

So, I have been pretty busy (in a fun way!) since Wednesday, and I thought I would give a little update about that.

On Thursday evening, I had the privilege of seeing one of my favorite bands for the second time: OK Go! The show was amazing. They are very charismatic performers and really enjoy getting personally involved with the audience. The show featured a few sessions of Q&A with audience members, Damien making his way into the crowd to play a few songs, Tim crowd surfing (by request), recording the audience making drum sounds and using them as the background track for a song, and inviting people up on stage to dance to the final song (which I got to do!!). Oh and Damien and Tim performed a scene from Les Miserables while Andy had some instrument trouble. All in all, a great show.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #24 - Inspired by a Book

Unfortunately, I have gotten pretty behind on this nail challenge. I completed these "Inspired by a Book" nails on Wednesday the 24th, but since then I have been quite busy! More on that in another post.

The book, or rather series of books, that I was inspired by is called "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman, otherwise known as the "Golden Compass" series. This is a young adult series about parallel universes, an elementary particle called "Dust", and a girl who must save all of the universes from the loss of this Dust with the help of some wonderful and diverse companions. It is actually quite a controversial series, as it portrays religion (specifically Christianity) in a very negative light. The series is a wonderful example of a fantasy story with elements of science fiction, while also touching on serious scientific and theological topics. I really enjoy Pullman's development and growth of the characters, and admire his ability to write such a heart-wrenching story ending. I highly recommend the series for young adults and old adults alike.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #23 - Inspired by a Movie

The movie I decided to use as inspiration for this mani is "Spirited Away". It is a very popular animated film from a well-known Japanese film maker and animator, Hayao Miyazaki. If you haven't seen one of his movies, I very highly recommend checking them out! Spirited Away is about a young girl who ends up getting trapped in the spirit world and must help out her new friend and her parents before she is able to leave. It's a cute, but sometimes frightening, coming of age story with an eccentric cast of characters. I decided to paint a few of these characters onto my nails.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #22 - Inspired by a Song

These "inspired by" challenges are really going to test my creativity and also encourage me to practice some more detailed designs, which I am excited about! The theme for Day #22 is "Inspired by a Song". The song I chose to take as my inspiration is called "Folding Chair" by Regina Spektor.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #21 - Inspired by a Color

The theme for Day #21 was "Inspired by a Color", which I took to mean to take inspiration from a nail polish color. Since we never had a theme for pink, I decided to take inspiration from the name of a pink glitter polish I have: LA Colors - Sparkling Jellyfish. I really like the polish as it is, but I thought I would try to make my own version of a sparkling jellyfish.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #20 - Water Marble

Water marbling: it can go so wrong, or it can go so so right. This is a very tricky technique, even for experienced nail artists. There are tons of blog posts providing tips and tricks for water marbling, and I will share a few that got me through this mani. This is my second attempt at water marbling, and while it doesn't look as fancy as some others I have seen, I am pretty proud of the results.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #19 - Galaxies

Galaxy nails are a very popular nail art design, but I never tried it out until now. To be honest, I always thought they looked really difficult, but they actually aren't all that bad. The technique is very forgiving and it's nearly impossible to make an irreversible mistake. I've never seen a bad galaxy nail design!

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #17/18 - Glitter/Half Moons

Once again, I am making up for a missed day by combining two themes together: "Glitter" and "Half Moons". I am definitely a fan of including glitter in many manis (who isn't??) so to make this extra special, I decided to do some hand placed glitter.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #16 - Geometric

Sorry for the delay in the posts, PhD life has caught up with me once again! I did complete the "Geometric" nail theme on Tuesday evening. Apparently this theme used to be "Tribal", but was changed to "Geometric" in order to be more culturally sensitive. I like this because it gave me an opportunity to try something I have wanted to do for awhile - a stained glass type effect.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #15 - Delicate Print

This marks the halfway point of the challenge! I am pretty proud of myself for making it this far and only missing one day. I do think its going to get more challenging with the upcoming "inspired by" themes though. Here's a reminder of the schedule (since I need one too):

The Day #15 theme is "Delicate Print". This was kind of tricky for me to come up with something, and I almost went with stamping, but decided to do something a little trickier instead. I was inspired by multiple recent posts I saw with henna-inspired nail art. For those of you unfamiliar with henna body art, you can learn more about it on wikipedia or just do a google image search to see the intricate designs that people make with the henna dye. I chose to follow a pattern I found by searching for henna nail art:

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #14 - Flowers

Flowers are definitely one of my favorite nail designs to do. There are so many ways to make flowers and so many color combinations, and they always look great! I have practiced this particular design before but I have never done it on my own nails. I was inspired by a post I saw on /r/RedditLaqueristas, but I only saved the imgur link and not the original post. If you recognize the design as your own, please feel free to claim it and I will give credit!

Ipsy September 2014

Ipsy is a monthly subscription box that focuses on makeup with some skincare, hair care, and nail polish products. It's $10/month (+ $.75 for tax (?)) for a small makeup bag plus 5 samples that are influenced by a quiz you take. You can earn Ipsy points for reviewing products, posting things to your facebook, and inviting friends. These points can be redeemed for additional full-sized products. These are the facts. Please see the end of this review for my opinions.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #13 - Animal Print

I really wanted to do a more unique animal print than the usual leopard print, zebra stripes, etc, so I asked my boyfriend for an idea. He suggested doing a sea turtle pattern, so that's what I did! Sea turtles come in many colors, but the general pattern is pretty basic.

Source

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #12 - Stripes

The theme for Day #12 was stripes. I decided to do a very simple horizontal stripe pattern and play with the finish of the polish. Here is what I used:

Wantable Makeup September 2014 UPDATED

UPDATE: I received my replacement item for the powder foundation that did not fit in with my preferences.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #11 - Polka Dots

For the polka dot mani, I wanted to do something classy and simple that wouldn't detract too much from all the science I have to talk about tomorrow at the conference. For this simple mani, I only needed two colors and a selection of three different dotting tools.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #9/10 - Rainbow/Gradient

Since I was unable to complete Day #9 Challenge on the 9th, I decided to combine its theme with the next day's theme for the 10th. This led to me doing a rainbow gradient across my nails. I chose colors that were more on the neon side of things to keep it nice and bright. I already got some gradient practice in the other day when I did the purple to silver gradient, so I was ready to go!

Birchbox September 2014

I love the beginning of the month because that's when subscription boxes start coming in! Birchbox is always the first to arrive and it's usually pretty awesome! For details about Birchbox, see my previous post or the Birchbox website.

Here is the box upon arrival:

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #8 - Metallic Nails

So, I fell a little behind on the challenge due to usual PhD stuff like prepping for a conference Friday, writing a giant review, and doing experiments! I completed Day #8 on the proper day, but I wasn't able to write about it yesterday or do Day #9. So after this, I'm going to combine the themes for Day #9 and Day #10 into an extra awesome mani!

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #7 - Black and White

For the black and white theme, I wanted to try out the "sugar spun" technique that seems to be popular lately. I figured it would be ideal for my white nail polish since the technique relies on the polish being kind of gooey and stringy, and as I mentioned in my Day #2 post, my white polish has been acting like that lately. Here are my polishes:

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #6 - Violet

 

The last day of the single color inspirations! I have made it through 6 days of nail color, even though I am one day behind on blogging it. I interpreted "violet" as being any shade of purple, which I think is pretty fair to the rainbow. Here are all of my purple nail polishes:

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #5 - Blue

For Day #5 - Blue, I got pretty lazy and just did a blue ombre across my nails. Because it's so simple, I figured I could also give a short review about each polish, especially because they are each a different brand!

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #4 - Green

For the "Green" theme of Day #4, I chose a very simple and classic design - the ruffian. I have actually never done this before, but I have always admired how classy it looks. To start off, I gathered all of my green nail polishes - significantly more than any color thus far! They didn't even fit on one shelf

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #3 - Yellow

In honor of the Yellow theme of Day #3, I gathered all of my yellow nail polish together. My yellow nail polish collection had been pretty severely lacking until more recently when I grabbed the Orly, Butter London, and O.P.I. Still, my choices for yellow were pretty slim.

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #2 - Orange

Here is day #2 of the Nail Art Challenge. Most of my posts will probably be one day behind so I can get some good pictures in natural lighting. Again, I got together all of my orange nail polishes to survey my options:

I have:
E.L.F. - Mango Madness
GAP - Love Story
O.P.I. - Toucan Do It If You Try
Sinful Colors - Big Daddy
L'Oreal - Mango Mamma
Orly - Old School Orange
Revlon - Tangerine
Klean Color - Mango

I chose to use the Orly polish since I just got it recently and wanted to try it out. Without a top coat, the polish has a nice satin finish that is part of their Plastix collection. Next time, I might use it without a top coat to take advantage of the unique finish. Here are the polishes and tools I used to complete this mani:

Base coat: Seche Clear
Polishes: Orly - Old School Orange
              Sinful Colors - Jolt
              Wet 'n' Wild - French White Creme
Tools: regular Scotch tape
            craft scissors in a wavy pattern
Top coat: Seche Vite

I used the craft scissors to cut wavy strips of the Scotch tape as thick as I wanted two wavy stripes to be. In order for the tape not to peel away the polish, I had to put a coat of Seche Vite down before placing the tape. I painted my base coat of the Orly orange color, layered with top coat, and placed the tape once it was dry with a small gap between pieces. There, I painted the Sinful Colors blue color and quickly peeled away the tape. After another application of top coat, I placed two more pieces of tape shifted down slightly and painted the Wet 'n' Wild white color. Maybe I can post some tutorial pictures later to make this more clear.

I topped it all off with a final coat of Seche Vite, and did some minor clean-up. And this is the final result!

I think the colors go really well together. For my first attempt making my own fancy striping tape, I think it went really well and precision will come with time. =]

31 Day Nail Art Challenge: Day #1 - Red

UPDATE: Nails in natural lighting - looks much better!

I know it's been awhile since I last posted, but I have been gearing up for the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge! I got the idea from one of the nail blogs I follow: More Details Here! Many nail bloggers do this challenge in September, which doesn't make much sense because September only has 30 days, but that's how they do it! Here is the schedule for the challenge:

As you can see, Day #1 has the theme "Red Nails". As a start, I decided to get together all of my red nail polishes and take a look at what I have:

Here are the polishes listed out from left to right:
Ruffian Nail Laquer - Rosary
Pixi Nail Polish - No. 18 Red Shimmer
Covergirl Outlast Stay Brilliant Glossy Nail Color - Lingering Spice
Nicole by O.P.I. - Challenge Red-y
Klean Color - Red
Sephora Lacquer Nail Polish - Cherry Popsicle
Covergirl Outlast Stay Brilliant Glossy Nail Color - Sangria
Sinful Colors - Decadent
E.L.F. - Blushing Bombshell

I decided to choose two reds with different tones with some negative space (my natural nail) between. I chose the Nicole by O.P.I, which is more of a blue-based true red, and the Covergirl Outlast in Sangria, which is more orange-leaning. I decided to use Seche Clear as a base since I didn't want anything altering my natural nail color. For a nice shiny finish, I picked Seche Vite for my top coat. My additional tool was striping tape.

I decided to do a triangle starting at the base of the nail and peaking near the center of my nail. After one coat of Seche Clear, I cut a bunch of the white striping tape and placed them in the triangle shape two strips of tape wide.

I used the Covergirl Outlast on the lower part of my nail and the Nicole by O.P.I. on the upper part. Both of them were opaque with one coat, which is important with this technique. I worked on one nail at a time, applying each color and removing the tape almost immediately. The Nicole by O.P.I. dries very quickly, so it was important to work fast. It was very difficult to be neat and paint in such tiny areas, so the nails looked very messy pre-cleanup.

I used a small nail art brush dipped in acetone to clean up around the edges of the nail as best as I could. Here is the final product!

I think the colors look less similar in person, so I will try to snap a picture in natural light and update tomorrow. Either way, tune in to see tomorrow's look: Orange!