What's on my nails today?

Hi everyone!

I looked at the week's prompt (Orange + Silver) and I was stumped... I didn't have a clue what to do with it! Usually with these prompts, I would pair two colors with white and go for a dotticure but I just wasn't in the mood for that. Then, all of a sudden, I realized there is another design that only asks for pretty colors: plaid! And that's what I did, an orange and silver plaid manicure:

Hi everyone,

Slowly but surely the world outside is changing to the most colorful season of the year: fall! And I couldn't resist doing a manicure in matching colors:

Hi everyone!

Hi everyone!


The ninth prompt for the 52 week nail art challenge... the tenth week of the year... what happened to the first nine? 2020 has only just started and now it's almost 20% over already!

Oh well, this week we had to create something with neon. As you can tell by the overwhelming amount of neon manicures on the blog, I don't really like neon on my nails. I can appreciate it on others and when it's sweltering hot I may venture into the sunglasses-needed-territory but that hardly ever happens. And as it's cold and gray and rainy outside at the moment, I don't feel like anything bright at all... but the challenge says neon so I did neon, with a bit of a wintery twist:

Hi everyone!


A new year, a new post and even a new feature... yep, definitely starting off on a high note ;)

First of all, I would like to wish you and yours all the best for 2020. I hope your year will turn out even better than you're dreaming it will be.

I haven't made any resolutions but I do hope to pick up blogging a bit more regularly and to do so, there's a new feature: 'My polish, your plate'. Michelle from Ordinary Misfit and I were chatting and we came up with a concept we thought would be fun: one of us picks a polish, the other picks an image of a stamping plate and we do our nails using both polish and image. We can use other colors but the chosen color has to be prominent. If the other doesn't have the chosen polish, she can send alternatives that are available and the one who picked the polish gets to pick the alternatives... and that's about all the rules we came up with. Oh, and we post our manicure on the first and third Friday of the month.

This is the first episode. Michelle picked the polish: OPI Hands Off My Kielbasa!, and I picked the plate: Pueen 83, the image in the lower-left corner that looks sort of like zigzags or lightning flashes. And here's my manicure using both:

Hi everyone!


It's that time again, the end of the month approaches and here is the post I never skip... the Triad manicure, where Juanita, Michelle and I take turns in picking a manicure from our to-do list and we all use that manicure as inspiration to do our own nail art. This month Juanita picked a lovely gradient-and-then-some by Courtney aka thenailartbabe. I was very tempted to do an exact recreation as I really love how it looks but in the end I decided to run wild with it and this is the end result:

Hi everyone!


Another month has passed and again, no posts from me... Life really should slow down but at this moment I don't see that happening in the near future. Oh well, at least every month there is the Friday Triad where Juanita, Michelle and I take turns in choosing a manicure that should inspire each of us. Sometimes the result is a recreation, sometimes it's completely different (I'm still waiting for black and white unicorns, Mich!), but the inspiration is the pick of the month one of us sends to the others. This month Michelle chose this pretty geometric design by Emilia aka polishpixie92.

I immediately knew I wanted to use autumnal colors and maybe a glitter crelly but apart from that, not a clue... It was only when I unwrapped a small gift from my hubby that inspiration started flowing and this is what my version looks like:

Hi everyone!


Today's post is coming to you from... my bedroom :(
Yup, the dreaded flu has struck again so I'm reduced to a sniffling, feverish, whining mess that would be convinced the world was coming to an end if I were a guy ;) Although, that's unfair to my guy who patiently dug up an ancient laptop, connected it to the internet, installed all security updates from the last ten years or so, and even got my photo editor on there (I know, he's the best... but in this case I think it may also have something to do with me reaching the limits of his patience with all the complaints about how I still had pictures waiting and week 45 was over already and I was way behind and I couldn't do a thing with this small mobile to edit pictures or write a post, yada yada yada... I really am the worst patient ever!).

Anyway, I got my connection to the outside world and I can finally show you what I did for the Orange + Yellow prompt that I was actually ready to skip until I first saw Michelle's and Juanita's manicures and then came across this gorgeous design by Chloé from Klo's to me... and I just knew I wanted to recreate it, with a little twist to make it mine of course ;)

Hi everyone!


It's the last Friday of the month again, so it's time for the Friday Triad manicure. This month I got to pick the inspiration and I did... sort of. What happened? Late September I had narrowed down my choice to a few swirly and/or floral designs (to be honest, I can't even remember which ones ;) so I asked my husband which one he liked best. He didn't like any of them as the end of October means Halloween so he figured I should go for dark, ghouly, creepy... and he wouldn't let me pick anything else! And me being the sweet wife that I am (ha, in his dreams!!!) I figured it wasn't a bad idea so I started searching for something that I liked. We finally settled on a cemetery scene by Bedizzlenails. Unfortunately neither blog or instagram of the creator are online so I can only link to the image itself. Here's my version:

Hi everyone!


The sun is still out and since I have a little more time for not-work-related things at the moment, I've been painting my nails... again ;) This time I was inspired by a friend who showed me her pedicure. I loved the color she'd used, so I quickly went through my stash to grab the same polish. A quick paint-and-stamp job later, my nails looked like this:

Hi everyone,


the last Friday of the month means Michelle, Juanita and me get to play with colors again. This time Juanita chose the inspiration and she predicted she would get death threats... and I can't say I wasn't tempted! I mean, come on, spiders? For real? (in case you don't know, I totally am a city girl and I despise crawly creepy insects) So be warned if you want to check out the manicure that was the inspiration for my nails (that are way less scary ;)

Hi everyone!


I'm firmly stuck in season appropriate colors and manicures... so here's another fall inspired manicure that features a gem I found hidden in my stash :)

Hi everyone,


it's September so that means summer is almost over and fall is eagerly waiting for its turn. This morning I smelled that special scent in the air that says fall's almost here and I decided to make my nails look like the glorious sunny autumn day that I remember from a trip to Canada, with trees dressed in all sorts of gorgeous reds and oranges and golds and twittering birds hidden in those leaves (instead of the drabby yellowy-greens and browns and screeching seagulls that are outside my window at the moment ;) And this is the final manicure:

Hi everyone,


yesterday I had to give a presentation and I must admit I was pretty nervous about it. Usually I take the safe route for work related events and go for unobtrusive, office friendly etc. but I really needed a mental boost so I figured I'd go for something more colorful (and there would be only colleagues there, no externs or higher management folks or other people whose disapproval would actually mean anything ;) and this is what I ended up with:

Hi everyone!


I was totally stumped for the letter U. I thought of unicorns and uniform and understated but nothing inspired me to even start looking for colors, let alone do a complete manicure. All I could think of were fall colors, especially deep reds... Fortunately I have this wonderful person in my life who usually comes up with the weirdest ideas but has his moments of genius and this weekend one of those moments happened. He asked me why I didn't do a manicure with all untried polishes... Why didn't I think of that?! I had already seen a gorgeous fall manicure that was on my want-to-recreate list so I decided to brave Mount Untried and find colors for my version of it... and this is what my nails look like at the moment:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!

This is just a placeholder until I have time, internet connection and a working computer instead of trying this on a mobile phone who has a completely different dictionary than the one I use... the woes of a nail blogger are endless!

Guess what? I'm not at home at the moment!! My hubby surprised me with a week-long getaway in a lovely romantic little town called Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which is in Bayern, South Germany. We had been talking about taking some time off to get away from normal day life with all its duties and chores and just spend some time together, and he picked this place to go to. Of course I totally objected (because why would I want to do absolutely nothing but enjoy the company and the gorgeous views and not think of work or any other duties) so he just about had to drag me there kicking and screaming ;)

Anyway, before we left I remembered the ABC Challenge would start again since the 31 Day Challenge (read: 31 days of absolute madness) were over so I decided to go with a re-creation for the letter R and take pictures in advance so I could write a post once the InLinkz would be available, even if I wasn't home yet. I already knew what manicure I wanted to recreate, this one! I just love the colors and the fall vibe. The only thing I changed was that I didn't put the stamped image on all nails and, since I wanted to push myself a little, I decided to try and mirror the stamped image on my left hand so my hands would be completely symmetrical. This is the result:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


Totally uninspired title for an equally inspired manicure... but I think it didn't turn out too bad in the end :)

I've been racking my brain to come up with a theme for the letter O but my imagination stopped at orange. I didn't even think of onyx or opal or obsidian or anything else that might have been original (<- yet another O word that kept eluding me) so with just half an hour before my bedtime and naked nails that were waiting for a paint job I settled on orange.

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


Today was a lovely lazy Sunday. Hubby was playing some computer games and I had absolutely nothing to do but play with colors... and so I did :) I had to come up with a manicure for the letter J so I decided to do a classic technique that I'd never tried before: a jelly sandwich. About an hour later I had a pile of dirty cotton pads, about half an inch less nail polish remover, and the knowledge that I absolutely can't stand VNL (Visible Nail Line, when you see the white tips of your nail through all the coats of polish you put on) on my nails... so I tried to think of something else that didn't involve jelly polishes. Of course by then any kind of inspiration had disappeared so I was just sitting there, googling for words that started with a J that I could turn into a manicure. Cue hubby who innocently asked me why I didn't use an opaque base color first... I swear, that man has flashes of genius even Albert Einstein would be jealous of :D

I didn't feel like layering a bajillion coats of alternating jelly and stamps on my nails again so I decided to try something else: a watercolor like manicure with jellies (as I still had to do something with a J ;) and this is what I created:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


When trying to find inspiration for the manicure I wanted to make for the letter I, I kept ending up with ivory. If you've seen more posts on my blog you might have noticed I use ivory, white and pale nude as a base quite often so I tried to think of different words with an I and of course my happy helper (aka husband) thought along with me: irrational, irritating, infuriating (could actually have done that... blobbicure comes to mind now that I'm typing this ;), idyllic, icey, immature... and the list of I words he produced went on and on but I won't bore you with that. Finally I decided to just skip the I for the moment and do something fun and summer-y, so I picked a yellow and an orange polish and then inspiration struck like a meteor! Next to the orange was a bottle that shouldn't have been there at all: Zoya Chloe, a polish from way back when flakies were not multichrome and opaque in two coats but sheer and... (wait for it)... IRIDESCENT (trumpets start to blare).

So I started out with the two polishes I picked, the stray one next to it and an assortment of tools and this is what my hard work looks like:

indoors, no flash

Hi everyone!


Quick post in my lunch break... yep, it's still ridiculously busy at the moment and it looks like it will be like this for another week :(

For the letter D I thought of lots of different things: dry marble, delicate, dotticure, daffodils, dandelions... and my husband came up with demon, diablo, dogs, doodoo (... I REALLY wonder what goes on it that head of his ;) but I finally settled on double stamping and added a few dots as well:

indoors, no flash