Getting Started

So, the first 26 years of my life I had little to no interest in nail polish.

And then suddenly, friends that I spent lots of time with were ALL ABOUT NAIL POLISH. Talking about it almost daily, buying pretty polishes and sharing pictures of nail conquests. At the time, I owned precisely zero nail polishes.

Welp, turns out nail polish enthusiasm is contagious.

It also turns out that eBay has ridiculously cheap nail brush sets.

It also also turns out that Zoya 3 for 3 sales are hard to turn down.

Going to the store every Monday to buy my lunches for the week means walking down the cosmetics aisle... which means that I'm slowly stocking up on polish. My first polish purchase was when their fanciest polish was on sale, so I got four really pretty colors for about $10. I figured I also needed a topcoat, but the only option was a French manicure set of three.

Oh well! I can totally use the white and sheer pink too. And bonus sticky guides!

So, y'know what I did? I went home and made the most obnoxious nail art EVER.

I started with two coats of Merlot and then one coat of Pearl Harbor by Sinful Colors, which resulted in a sleek, classy red peppered with bumpy, greenish spots (not the fault of the polish - this was me being TERRIBLE at applying the stuff). Yet, this wasn't enough for the ambitious me of December 2011; there needed to be an actual design.

The Sally Hansen French manicure kit had come with something like 40 curved and 40 straight guides. Inspiration struck - I would make an elegant white swoosh with an elegance that elegance itself would bow down to. One swoosh per nail. Genius.

The number of guides was limited, so I figured that they must be used sparingly and repeatedly. So, for all the swooshes, on both hands, I used four guides. To create the swoosh I simply put the two guides at an angle to each other, and then painted within the gap, starting with the thumb and moving towards the pinkie.

Now, the thing about reusing guides is, nail polish dries and globs with each use, filling in the narrow end of the gap between them and generally making them much more likely to leak.

By the time I finished the pinkie nail, the swoosh was looking pretty ragged.

So I had gaudy red sparkly nails with a white swoosh on them.

Clearly not enough.

I NEEDED DOTS.

Three dots, diminishing in size, along the top of the swoosh. This was going to be epic.

And y'know, the dots didn't turn out too badly. A bit lopsided, but generally circular and smooth-ish.

Topcoat, and then wait for three hours for the thick slop of polish to dry and harden!

And, naturally, I didn't know how to/didn't want to bother with cleanup before snapping a cameraphone image of my creation to show off.

I didn't figure out the importance of cleanup until just a few weeks ago.

Here's the masterpiece:

I am amazing. Clearly.