All That Glitters

  The other day as I was admiring my latest nail polish color and ogling over my color collecting addiction, I told my boyfriend I had enough nail polishes to paint my nails a different color every week for an entire year. To which he responded, "You should do that! And make a blog about it!"

WEEK 10: All That Glitters

Considering the fact that this whole blog began with the idea that I have enough polishes to use different ones every week and still have enough variety for an entire year, I decided to go through my polishes and see how I've been doing. To my surprise I have used 22 of the 61 colors I currently own in a mere 9 weeks of my 52 week 'challenge'. If you do the math, this is a problem. Why? Allow me to explain.

Based off these numbers, I've used 36% of my polish collection in 17% of the time frame. It does not take a mathematician to realize that this means I will run out of polishes before my year is up. Now, before you jump to the conclusion that my initial statement about being able to do this for a year was a lie, you have to realize that my claim was based off the idea of using only one color per week, but being the artistic person that I am, I cannot limit myself to such constraints. It's just too boring to use one color when I can use an array of colors to make a more intricate design. And even though roughly 2 out of every 10 polishes I use have been used in a post before, I am still burning through my unused color selection far too quickly.

Okay, I did lie, but not about that. I lied when I said this is a problem. Actually this only means I need to keep buying new polishes, which, honestly, how is that a bad thing? So rather than stretching out how many unused colors I introduce each week, let's just bust out three more of those bad boys.

Now, I wanted to use my golden yellow, appropriately named Excuse Me, but since such a bright and almost obnoxious color doesn't quite fit my somberness, as one of my co-workers has labeled my sense of style, I wanted to only use it as an accent. The problem with using it as an accent is that it's so light and translucent that's it's almost impossible to layer over another color, so you must use it as a base and work from there.

I started by using 3 to 4 layers to create a solid foundation, allowing some dry time between each coat. Then after all the nails had dried completely I used my wonderful little nail nape to mask off a line across the tip of each nail, except for my ring finger, and then smothered the surface in my gold flecked black polish.

 For the ring finger I wanted to stick to yellow while still adding a little more character. I used my second yellow, which was more flat and less metallic than the first, to create a strip down the center of the nail. After it dried I used the first polish again to create a thinner strip down the center of the previous one, creating some monochromatic depth. 

In the end, I honestly was quite surprised with how much I liked this design, even though it's quite out of character for me. Who knew that all that math would force me to step out of my color comfort zone in order to try something new. And here's the funny thing, I did not do all those calculations for the sake of writing about it, I genuinely sat down to figure out and work through all those percentages and calculations..... for fun. I actually really enjoy that kind of thing. So I guess you can be artistic and mathematical.
Hah! Take that stereotypes!

Products Used:
 

- Pure Ice - Excuse Me
- Personal Accents - Shimmering
- Sally Hansen Triple Shine - Lemon Shark
- *Nail Tape Stripe Decoration Stickers