Birthday nails

Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing fine :-) I am, it's just a little hectic right now which is the reason of me posting so little lately. But I've got many new ideas to post once things slow down a bit, including tutorials and perhaps the start of my attempt on the 31 day challenge! I'm so looking forward to it! :)

For this post I'd like to share this birthday mani with you that I made for one of my dear readers. Since I am always occupied with other things that need to be arranged on my own birthdays, and usually just end up with a simple creme or glitter on my nails because of the lack of time, I decided to make something cute that's not too difficult or time-consuming to recreate. My accent nail, is (obviously) a birthday candle! I began with three coats of yellow (M67 by Make-Up Studio, a new brand!). Then I used a pink for the "cake". Once it had dried I added the candle, the little flame and wick, and there you have it :) On the rest of my nails I'm wearing China Glaze For Audrey. I painted the irregular stripes that I'm so into lately, with a white French manicure striper. What I love about those is how opaque most of them are, as opposed to regular white polishes. To complete the party look I added an iridiscent glitter (OPI Last Friday Night), it's sparkly and still reveals the stripe design underneath. And that's basically it! Happy Birthday! ^^

Vintage clouds

Hi guys! For this post I have another request to show you. A little while ago I received an email from a reader who wanted me to come up with a funky mani for her informal dance soon. A few colors she liked were teal and coral, so I combined them in this "funky clouds" look. I like how simple this design is to achieve. Just pick three matching colors, one for you base color and two for the cloud shapes on top. The clouds are made by applying three strokes of polish next to each other, each smaller than the one before. My tip is to leave enough polish on the brush (but not too much!) so that when it touches the surface it will leave a nice, round dot as start point. This doesn't even need a lot of precision and you can just use the brush from your polish for this. And that's it :) Though I would advise using a fast drying top coat afterwards if you don't want to wait too long for your nails to dry, after all it's three coats of polish. (Four if you include base coat.) I like the way it looks here with plain cremes, but for a more festive look, a layer of (iridiscent) glitter can be added.

Below you can see the same look with China Glaze Midnight Kiss on the tips, which I made first. But after I took the pictures I noticed how Bella matched the rest of the polishes better so I just redid everything, for your viewing pleasure haha. Have a great night!

The polishes I used:
Essence - What Do U think? Version 1 (It looks less orange in real life)
China Glaze - For Audrey
Essence - Bella

Katy Perry inspired nails

Hello everybody :) For today's post I have dice nails to show you. They're made for a reader who requested Katy Perry inspired nails. And the first thing that crossed my mind were her outfits of course! Katy has worn tons of awesome, funny, colorful outfits throughout the years, so plenty of stuff to get inspired by. One of my favorite dresses of her has to be the red sequin dice dress, I love all the glitter and the colors and it's so fabulous Las Vegas! Anyhow, what better polish to wear as the basecolor than good ol' China Glaze Ruby Pumps... One of my all time favorites. It does need three coats to cover, but it's so worth it :) And the formula is great too. I used black and white acrylic paint to freehand the dice. There is a lot going on, but I sure can't pull off that amazing dress, so my last comfort are these nails, lol. What are your thoughts on these Katy Perry's dice dress inspired nails?

Image source

Gameboy nails

Hi guys, guess my nails! I'm not even sure if you can say that. And the title might've been a big hint haha... but they're gameboy nails :D I made these for a reader who is going to dress up as gameboy for halloween, how cool is that? I thought it was such a fun theme and was beyond excited to work on them. My base color was Essence Got A Secret and I freehanded all the gameboy features with a tiny brush. For the glamorous index finger I used Orly It's Not Rocket Science, it's supposed to be the screen. The screen's kind of green, right? ;-) Anyway, hope you like them and goodnight everybody! :)

Other polishes I've used:
OPI - Dim Sum Plum
China Glaze - Concrete Catwalk

The Mad Dollies nails

Hello guys! Today's post is another custom mani, I abosolutely love doing these! I got this request from a player from the Greensboro NC roller derby team The Mad Dollies. She asked if I could come up with some fierce nail art designs, in her team colors teal and yellow, that she could use for an upcoming game. She also loved the use of tape for nail art, so the first thing that came in mind was a fierce lightning bolt tape mani! ;-) (Which all went great until my topcoat decided to smudge my hard work!) On my thumb and pinky I have the symbols that two certain players carry on their helmet. I made the star using tape and I really like the design, but it took a lot of precision to get all the tape strips right. So I'm still thinking of a more efficient way to make the design in the future. And the index and middle finger resemble the distinctive tights I saw players on pictures wearing, mostly striped or fishnet. And luckily I had Konadplate M57 to make the last :)

So Kristin, I really hope you like these designs! You can use all five of them or just pick the ones you like best ;-) And good luck with the rest of this season!

I really enjoy working on these custom nails requests I'm getting lately, so if you would like me to make some designs for a special event or just for fun, feel free to leave your idea in the comments or send me an email at: nailside@gmail.com.

Polishes I used in this post:
Essence Stamp Me! White
Essence - Let's Get Lost
Color Club - Almost Famous
Color Club - Where's The Soiree?
China Glaze - Ink

Pink, black and bling

Hi everybody, today's post is something I made for a reader who'd requested a design for short nails. Two of her favorite colors were pink and black, so I made a simple stripe design with those colors. I love stripes, because they're never out of style in my opinion and also vertical stripes are a great way to make short nails seem a tad longer.

A stripe pattern with even-sized stripes is lovely, but it can be hard sometimes to make all the stripes exactly the same size. So I did a quick and easy-to-recreate pattern with random-sized stripes. The pink is OPI Don't Know Beets Me and for the stripes I used a China Glaze striper polish called Ink. (It's actually a very, very dark blue which looks pretty much black on the nails.) I just drew a few lines here and there, some bigger than others. And instead of actually drawing the stripes myself, I just let the whole length of the thin brush touch the surface while I pull it towards the tip, leaving pretty straight lines. So the brush does all the precise work for me ;-) Very easy and also nice with multiple colors, like I did here a couple of weeks ago. Just use pigmented polish for the job so you won't have to go over the same spot over and over again.

At last I added a few rhinestones for fun. I hope you like this, Maja! :)