Hi!

This week I did more flower nails! I don't know why I keep doing flower nails... I must be in a flowery mood or something...

I started with a base of my go-to white, Revlon Spirit (long tangent: I picked this up recently at a sale and discovered it's a much better white than Sally Hansen White On -- it dries about 3x faster for one thing). Then I drew stems of green with Sally Hansen Mint Sorbet and lastly sponged on "circles" of purple (BK #26). 

 In the first two photos, I used a regular glossy top coat (Seche, naturally). But another thing I picked up in the sale was a MATTE TOPCOAT! 

Of course, I had to try it out:

Which do you prefer, glossy or matte? I feel like these photos don't do a great job of showing the difference between the two... but personally I'm leaning towards matte, but that might just be because I'm in what I've decided to call my "matte honeymoon phase" where I'm basically like:

And one last thing -- I finally got my act together and built a lightbox! My photos are SO MUCH BETTER! I hope you think so too! The one thing I have trouble with is that I don't have a daylight light bulb, so my hands look a little reddish and the background looks a little purplish. 

I'm probably going to put a bunch of rambles about my DIY lightbox in the next couple of posts so I won't say much now. 

Thanks for reading!

The Nail Snail xx

Striping Tape Geometric Nails

Hi! Happy Monday!

A couple days ago I did my sister's nails. She's in elementary school and has TINY nails, so it was a bit difficult. I usually don't try to do her nails, but I just got the striping tape I've been waiting for and I already did my nails of the week, so... yeah. I'd been wanting to do this design for awhile but I didn't feel like cutting tape up into tiny strips (BORING) so I held off until I received my striping tape :)

Now, I'm not sure if these really count as geometric nails but I decided to call them geometric anyways... I mean, nobody's judging right?

(my sister can't really pose with her hand so I just kinda let it lay there)

I did this mani in what was probably the least smart/efficient way. I started with a base of white polish (Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On), used tape to make the next horizontal stripe of light green (Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mint Sorbet), and finally used more tape to make the third horizontal stripe of darker green (Sephora by O.P.I. Read My Palm). Then I put the striping tape on in random designs and painted purple over it (BK #26, I think). Unfortunately, I didn't wait for the polish to dry before trying to stick tape on it, so I ended up having to re-do a bunch of the nails and it ended up taking me over an hour. *sigh* If I do this again, I'd just freehand the green stripes -- I mean, you can barely see them anyways -- or maybe do a sponge gradient for the green. 

Though this was not a great first experience with striping tape, I definitely want to try more striping tape designs! Suggestions are welcome :) 

Tutorials/Other Versions:

I originally got the idea from Nail Stories' blog post (it's from a while back). She did it with black and red, yellow, and green stripes but I thought that would be too edgy for my elementary-school-aged sister... 

Thanks for reading and let me know what you think! 

The Nail Snail

P.S. This isn't nail-art related, but... the comment verification thingies ("Please prove you're not a robot" <-- I have now learned they are called captchas!) are a little ridiculous. I mean, seriously, today I got this:

What?? How am I supposed to tell what those numbers are? (or maybe my computer just has problems with images and the rest of y'all are like "what is she talking about those numbers are clear as daylight"...)