Pinwheel swirls

Pinwheel swirls! Super cute, right? Ridiculously time consuming, though. :) The color choice makes it kinda hippy- looking, haha.

If I had had more time before my daughter's candy land themed birthday party, this would have been a cute design for my nails in her color theme!

White: Sally Hansen French White Tip
Blue: Sally Hansen XTreme Wear Blue Me Away
Yellow: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Lightning
Pink: Cosmetica Fantica Neon Pink
Top coat: Seche Vite

How to fix an Oopps

We have all had it happen to us before. Your mani looks perfect edges clean, polish smooth, and top coat applied and shiny and then you look down to admire your work and DUN DUN DUN you touched something and smudged your nail... ugh

Now you have to deal with it or redo the entire nail possibly ruining more nails in the process. But don't worry I have a trick that is nail safe and you don't have to start all over again!

All you need is some nail polish remover (I use pure acetone) and a flat paint brush. I used the one I use when I'm cleaning up after I do my nails. Ok first step, put a little remover into the cap and dip your brush in wipe it on the sides of the cap when you take it out so you have too much remover on your brush.

After that "paint" your nails with the remover until the paint smudge is flat and smooth. Don't worry if there are imperfections we can fix that. You just want it smooth. After everything is smoothed out then apply a coat of polish over top and tah dah! your Oopps is fixed apply your top coat and your done!

Looks like the Oopps never happened! :) Its a quick fix for any Oopps you might have in your nail polish. Now of course if you have any kinda of design on your nails this technique probably won't work but for just a basic mani its perfect!

By the way this is an Essie Mani I did to try and please my job's new rule that we can't have "wild" nails any more. It's a bit boring for me but I'm learning to live with it and see how far I can push my "wild" nails :) The dark pink is called Fancy Delancy and the light pink is called Raise Awareness.

As always thank you for reading and I hope I helped you out with any little Ooopps you get from now on!

:)

Fireworks!

My birthday is July 3- the day before Independence Day. When I was a little kid, my parents would tell me every year that the fireworks all over were for celebrating my birthday. And of course, I believed them for a few years. LOL. So I've always loved fireworks.

I was torn this year between doing my nails birthday themed or America themed. (I know, I have so many problems, right!?) So I chose fireworks- something that for me, signifies both!

I especially love big colorful fireworks, so that's what I did.
I painted a couple coats of Sinful Colors black on black and then picked out a few colors I thought would pop. I was concerned that the non-neon colors wouldn't be as bright- but they worked so well!

I tried different firework-painting techniques. Some I did long lines, others short. Some bent and falling and others going up and spreading. I played around by drawing fireworks on paper with chalk- a super fun 4th of July craft to do with my little girl.

As you might have noticed, I did this design on artificial nails so that I could take photos for my Etsy shop, Finger Candy. You can buy this design over there, if you want! Check out the link to my shop. :)

Black: Sinful Colors black on black
Blue: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Blue Me Away
Green: Cosmetica Fanatica neon green
Yellow: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Lightning
Neon Yellow: Cosmetica Fanatica neon yellow
Purple: Essence Color n Go Passion for Fashion
Orange: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Sunkissed
Pink: Cosmetica Fanatica neon pink
Top Coat: Seche Vite

Blue to pink gradient

I love this gorgeous gradient design. And I created it differently than I've ever made gradients before. This time, I used a fan nail art brush. It was *very* easy and it looks fantastic.

Instead of the hassle of sponging or the difficulty of blending with regular brushes, using a fan brush allowed me one stroke per nail to make this design. Yes, just one stroke! wow!

This is the brush I used. It is called a fan brush and it is part of a set of nail art brushes I bought from Amazon.de.

First, I practiced using the brush a bit, just to get the hang of it. I tend to practice brush strokes and make color dots on the back of tissue boxes. This is a very well-used tissue box, lol.

I played with a few color combinations before I settled on blue to purple to pink. I put color splashes of blue, purple and pink in that order one after another- close to each other but not touching.

I simply dragged the brush through the colors, pulling them downward. Then I dragged the brush from left to right across my nail. Simple as that! It does leave a good amount of polish all over your skin, though, so it requires a bit of clean up.

But, with some polish remover on q-tips for the big stains and an angled nail art brush dipped in polish remover for the cuticles, it looks perfect.

Add a top coat of Seche Vite for some shine and protection and you're done!

One of the best things about this mani is that it was just as easy to do on my right hand as it is on my left, which I know can be an issue for many DIY manicures.

Base coat: Revlon Multi Care 965
Blue: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Blue Me Away
Purple: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Deep Purple
Pink: Butter London's Primrose Hill Picnic
Top coat: Seche Vite

Cherry blossoms

This is one of my favorite nail designs, and I totally winged it so I'm pretty proud of it. :)

They're not actually even on my nails- a friend requested I do some flowers on her nails. Fara and I went through some different designs on Pinterest and settled on a pretty cherry blossom design. We changed around the colors and like I said - I just winged it.

It's all free-handed. The black branches are done with a striper brush, the black and green dots are done with a ball-point pen dipped in polish. The dark pink flowers are down with a regular paintbrush.

Unfortunately, I never took the rest of the photos I took of this mani off my iPhone, and my phone was recently stolen. :( So this is the only photo I have of it. Here is a close-up of the design on the thumb.

Light pink: Sally Hansen's Diamond Strength Passion Flower
Dark pink: NYC's Greenwich Village
Green: NYC's Big Money Frost
Black: So Easy Stripe Rite in Blackest Black
Base and top coat: Revlon Multi-Care 965

Neon polka dots

For a while now, I've wanted to try out neon nail polish. On Mother's Day, my husband, daughter and I went to the local Fruhlingsfest- Spring Festival. There was a cosmetic booth there selling makeup and nail polish (why at a festival? go figure...) so my husband bought me a few new polishes- three of which were neon! Yay!

I also have new dotting tools I wanted to try out...
So I used my new dotting tools with my new neon polishes and came up with this really, really cool mani. I love it way more than I was expecting.

It's pretty awesome, right?!

 And a close up...

I just love the way the color pops! I think if I were to do this again, I'd do fewer dots, but I still think this looks so great.
If I had a blacklight, this mani would be under it ASAP!

The black base is three coats of Sinful Colors Black on Black. I normally only use two coats, but I, forever being the optimist- painted the first two coats while my child was napping and my husband was at work. Duhhh... of course she woke up and you can only imagine what holding a very wiggly baby does to nails that aren't quite entirely dry... but a third coat fixed it no problem.

The neon colors are Cosmetica Fanatica. I also have neon green, which I did not use for this design. These polishes specify that they are for acrylic nails, but I used them on my natural nails.

My fabulous new dotting tools:

Black base: Sinful Colors Black on Black
Pink: Cosmetica Fanatica neon pink
Yellow: Cosmetica Fanatica neon yellow
Top coat: Revlon Base & Top Coat 965

Flower paisley stamping

As I mentioned before, I bought a new Konad stamper and some plates recently. I've mostly just played around with stamping small designs and tip designs, until now. I tried a full-cover nail art stamp and I adore it.

I used a flowers and paisley design, it's cute and feminine.
Here is a closer view of the design.

I was originally going for a lighter pink base so that the white wouldn't stand out nearly as much, but I just couldn't resist trying it on top of a matted color. I do have a clear polish that will turn any color into matte, but I didn't want to layer too much.

I chose not to use a top coat in order to preserve the matted look.

Pink base: Sinful Colors Professional Matte Collection's Dream On
White: Konad Special Polish in white
Design: Konad image plate M64

Florida Sunset Nails

I wasn't quite sure what to do to my nails but I know I wanted to use the color orange because that is my mom's favorite color and I was going to have these nails on for mother's day. I picked out a few colors that I thought went with the orange and I decided they looked like a Florida sunset and that is what I decided to do!

They turned out better then I even expected! And I got TONS of compliments on them! This is how I did it.

I used 3 colors for the sunset part the orange is Nina's Ultra Pro - Orange Flame, the pink is a Cosmetic Arts color but the sticker fell off so i don't know the name but its a Neon Pink and the purple is Orly - Close Your Eyes. I started with my normal Nail Life base coat and finished with Seche Vite top coat to make it extra shiny. To start this look you need one of those white makeup sponges, you can get them at the dollar store they are super cheap!

You have to paint the colors in the order you want directly on to the sponge. It works best when you get the sponge wet and then ring out as much water as possible because it stays a little damp and doesn't suck up as much nail polish.

I tested mine out on a piece of paper first just to make sure that it looked like i wanted it to. After you get it looking like you want then instead of stamping on the paper you stamp it on your nails.

I'm not gonna lie it makes a MESS!!! I definitely should have taped off my nails first so that there wasn't so much clean up.

I used an angled brush that you can get from any arts and crafts store and dipped it into pure acetone to clean up my cuticles. I also used a Qtip and some cotton pads for the bugger mess. Oh and I've used just a regular flat brush to clean up my cuticles but an angled one works SOOOOO much better!

This was the after math of my nails I made a bit of a mess lol

I love these nails and my mom did too!! As always thanks for reading and I hope I added a little inspiration to your day!

:)
  Kristy