Mermaid Nails + A Mini Lesson in Photographing Flakies

Lately I haven't been feeling very inspired when it comes to nail art, but after swatching Sinful Colors Kissy yesterday the colors got me thinking of the mermaid/fish scale nails that I have seen around. I've been meaning to get more practice painting designs on my nails so I thought fish scales would be something fun and easy to do!

Accent nail is two coats of Sinful Colors Rise and Shine topped with one coat of Sinful Colors Kissy. The scales were painted with Rise and Shine. The other nails are two coats of Love and Beauty Nude topped with two coats of Essie Shine of the Times.
This mani is essentially a collaboration of many of the things that I love in nail polish: flakies, glitter, accent nails, nude polish, and teal/green polish. Love.

Something I've learned from photographing Shine of the Times (and I'm sure this applies to other flakies as well), sunlight is necessary if you really want to capture the flakies. It's the difference between this

and this!

Helllooo giant difference. Also, if you're wondering, that's one coat of Essie Shine of the Times over two coats of OPI Russian Navy.

Bloody Splatter

"It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood." Macbeth: Act 3, Scene 4

We just finished up doing Macbeth at my school so these were my nails for the week of the show. I started with two coats of Love and Beauty Nude. To do the splatter I dipped a straw into my bottle of OPI Bullish on OPI, aimed at my nail, and did a short, quick breath. I used a coffee-stirrer straw from subway to do this, because I find that normal drinking straws are too big and when I tried splattering with them I just got huge globs of paint all over my nails. I would also recommend taping around your nail because, as you can see, this gets messy.

All clean! Well, for the most part, I had a hard time cleaning up my cuticles.