As part of Mother's day celebrations, we set up in Milkface's Ottawa South location to give away free manicures (for Mothers especially, but anyone could have stopped by!). It was a beautiful sunny Sunday and we loved to give some Mum's a nice little gift and be surrounded by adorable babies at the same time!
Check out some of the fun manicures we came up with:
A bright Lisa Frank-inspired tiger print nail:
The awesome Nina rawwring for the camera!
A beautiful deep dark eggplant version of our fairy nails
Super fun and bright yellow and pink modern French tip manicure
The always classic and beautiful nude Fairy Nails
A great colour combo - turquoise and neon green leopard print! Love it.
Here is Kristina hard at work on a set of Fairy nails!
We had a great time working with Milkface...it's a beautiful shop and the lovely ladies who work there are so awesome to hang out with. It was great to see all the Moms getting the help they need picking out mom-and-baby supplies. We would love to manicures there again! We hope all you Mommies had a great weekend!
We had the pleasure of doing two sisters' nails last week and, sometimes, the manicures are so adorable and special that we must share them! They requested strawberry nails (an all-time favourite of ours) and bunny nails! We had never done bunny nails before so we were really excited. Plus, with the berry & bunny combination on our minds, we couldn't help think about spring ...is it here yet? Yeesh!
Here is Kristina creating some adorable neon coral strawberry nails:
We used Revlon's Coral Me Wild for the base.
Juicy!
Here I am improvising some bunny nails:
They are coming together! Such a cute seafoam green background - we used Minted by Revlon for the background.
Valentine's Day is such a great excuse to surround yourself in adorable pink things and hearts. It doesn't matter if you're in a relationship/dating - just take full advantage of the theme. I can't help it! I picked up some heart shaped post-it notes yesterday and somehow can't avoid wearing something pink or red every day. This manicure is a perfect example.
I used OPI's Pink Friday from the Nicki Minaj collection.
I LOVE this pink. It's an adorable chalky, light pink that goes on extremely opaque in two coats. It's a happy medium between OPI's Mod about You and Shorts Story - slightly lighter than the classic Barbie pink but so perfect and girly.
I painted on tiny white hearts French-manicure style along the tip by creating tiny little "V" shapes. Then I painted a bigger heart on the ring fingers and added loops around the edge to make it look like a doily.
Are you guys immersing yourselves in the pink and red spirit?
We hemmed and hawed about how to recreate a summer storm on our nails for a while. It took a few tweaks here and there but we have finally pinpointed a process. It involves several layers of pinks and purples, lots of dabbing with a small brush, and, finally a lightening streak. A step-by-step how-to could be in the works if you guys are interested! Let us know.
And, here it is, a Beauty School Dropouts' original - Summer Lightning Storm:
I have wanted to try this manicure for a while now. I saw this picture of Alexa Chung and saved it in my "nail folder" (filed next to my hair folder on my computer...yup) and it has been waiting to be recreated.
Pretty spooky, right? I love it. Plus, this weekend I went to a psychic convention with my friend Kat. We browsed the stalls set up by local mediums and psychics and, other than the psychics' crafty handmade signs advertising their specialities, there wasn't much to look at other than a stall of pretty amazing jewelry. This woman was selling a whole range of jewelry, including sacred geometry pendants which are quite amazing looking. In the end, I went home with an evil eye pendant for $5 that looks something like this (except it had silver eyelashes on the top lid):
I think it will look pretty neat on a thin silver chain. Apparently, evil eye jewelry protects the wearer from the evil eye and its harmful consequences (essentially, bad luck). In fact, the jewelry fights evil energies and will bring you happiness, prosperity, professional success, true love, friendship, good health, etc, etc, etc. Whoa! Prettay prettay prettay impressive.
For the manicure, I used Deborah Lippmann's Waking up in Vegas as the base (because it is my go-to neutral greige and can also be a little bit spooky if used correctly). Then, I hand-painted the white shape of the eye, outlined it in black, and added the blue iris by using the back of a paintbrush. The pupil was added with a dotting tool. This is how it turned out:
Did you watch the Golden Globes last night? There were a couple wins I was super happy about - Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) and Jessica Lange (American Horror Story) - amazing actors and amazing shows. But what I was most excited about last night was Zooey Deschanel's tuxedo manicure! I was so glad to see adorable nail art making an appearance on the red carpet. Plus, she looked amazing (as always). That hair!... So soft and voluminous. I just want to touch it. (Is that weird? Oh well!). Also, kudos for the two nominations! Such a hilarious show. I first spotted her manicure in a post she made on Instagram and Twitter. Check it out:
So sweet! And, not to mention, pretty cool when paired with her custom Prada gown. (One thing though...moisturize those cuticles, Zooey!)
Zooey Deschanel at the 2012 Golden Globes.
Photo: Getty Images
Ooh la la. So, obviously, I had to attempt this manicure myself. I started with a base coat, two coats of opaque white polish, and a coat of Seche Vite (see below for why I am adding a top coat here).
Since I'm a tiny bit of a perfectionist (lol), I decided to use the taping-off technique for the black nail tip instead of free hand (the free hand technique could definitely work here though if you're pressed for time or don't have any tape lying around). When using tape in a manicure, the top coat (Seche Vite) in between the steps is key to making sure polish will not get peeled off. The next step was applying the nail stickers, leaving an even strip along the tip of the nail. I used Nailene's Perfect Tips and Toes French Polish Guides.
This pack comes with straight and curved stickers for doing french manicures. For this manicure, I chose the curved stickers but here is an example of how you could use the straight stickers.
After making sure the stickers were pressed down all along the nail, I carefully painted on one coat of black polish.
Then, I gently peeled off the stickers and the nails looked like this:
I painted on the bows with a small paintbrush and added the black buttons with a dotting tool. And voila! The Beauty School Dropouts version of Zooey's red carpet manicure:
I can't wait to see what other nail art adventures Zooey embarks on!
I have loved this song since I first listened to Rihanna's Talk That Talk album - it's definitely one of the few songs on the radio that I blast whenever it comes on while I'm driving. Take a listen! (Warning: be prepared to witness a both unnecessary and excessive amount crotch-grabbing)
Other than the aforementioned aspect, the video is pretty fun to watch. I also had a feeling that her video would have some sort of awesome manicure and, sure enough, it does! Here are some screen shots if you didn't catch it:
Cool, right? I'm really loving simple, geometric manicures with sharp lines like this one. It creates a cool look without being too busy. To start off, I did a basecoat (as always) and two coats of white and then top coat (Seche Vite). Then, I ended up letting it sit overnight but half an hour to an hour would be sufficient. This way, you can be sure that the tape in the next step won't pull up the white polish (Seche Vite is key here). Otherwise, the whole manicure could be ruined by a little white section being pulled off.
Then, with regular Scotch tape, I taped off a little triangle section starting at the cuticle and ending about 3/4 of the way toward the nail tip.
This is what it looked like (kind of hard to see on the white):
Then, I painted Essie's Licorice on the section left uncovered by the tape, making sure to cover all the white polish at the cuticle.
These big tape pieces make hand movement pretty awkward so I could really only do one hand at a time. However, you could trim the pieces and it would be much easier.
I let the black polish dry for about 15 minutes, carefully peeled off the tape, added another coat of Seche Vite to lock it all in and here's how it turned out:
Other than the fact that I don't have the long claws Rihanna does, I really like the way this manicure turned out. It's very dramatic and eye catching and also has a similar elongating effect as the geometric holiday manicure I did here. What do you think? Would you rock this mani?
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