Glamorous Gray

  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 12: Glamorous Gray

Here's a fun fact about me: I adore all things unique and flashy, but at the same time I am obsessed with gray and black and all those shades in between. While you might assume I have to pick between these two passions when it comes to fashion and art, I am here today to prove you wrong. I firmly believe that you don't need a bright color to catch the eye, but through contrast and patterns even a simple gray scale color set can steal the show.

The biggest difficulty I face with a set like this is deciding the order in which to place the colors. You may not realize it, but some color sets, especially with this many different hues, can be great or awful depending on which colors are beside which. Like any form of art, it has to have a nice flow to it. So I always try to follow two rules when organizing them. One, I don't like to have any sudden changes from one extreme to the next (e.g. Jumping from black to white). Second, I don't like to go in order of darkest to lightest across the whole hand (e.g. White, light gray, dark gray, black). Honestly I find this rather boring. The best way I can think to describe what I try to achieve is a roller coaster of color, gradually going up and down in lightness and darkness of the color, so as to flow, but still have variety.

Once I had finally settled on an order, I used one color per nail to create a crisp and smooth base. Now, I did want to create a little bit of sudden contrast in my design to really catch the eye. To do this I took one of my fine point brushes and created a simple tribal print using basic lines and dots on two of my fingers. For the ultimate contrast I created black line work over my white nail and white line work over my black nail.

Now, you may not consider my taupe polish to be a gray scale color, since it's somewhere in between dark tan and gray, but I feel it brings some nice contrast while still being a fairly dull neutral color on its own. I also realized recently that while I had seen the word 'taupe' written out many times I was not actually sure how it was pronounced. So I looked it up. And I discovered two things. First off, apparently it's pronounced 'Toe-p'. Secondly, I have been sounding like an absolute idiot every time I have tried to fake my way through saying it correctly.So I have not only taught you something new, but also saved you from the embarrassing experience of stumbling through confusing a color.... with a fake hair piece. 

Don't get me wrong, I do love a good pop of bold color every now and again, but sometimes it's both fun and challenging to try to make my design pop without it. The added bonus when working entirely in neutrals is you never have to worry about your nails clashing with your outfit. So basically, you can live carefree. You're welcome.

Products Used:
 

- Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear - White On
- Candie's - Concrete Jungle
- Sally Hansen Hard As Nails - Tough Taupe
- PS Nail Polish - Dark Gray
- Sally Hansen - Black Out