Sparkly Sparkly! Nail Art

It has long been my ambition to get some serious sparkle on my nails.  I don’t mean of the glitter variety, but of the rhinestone sort. 

Yes, this is me not some mind eating alien spawn.  I still have a 70% black wardrobe and I still wear and adore vintage.  I did however warn you a while ago that the simple housewife who likes neatness and order also has a strange thirst for decoden and over the top, Japanese styled nails. 

Prime examples here and here:

    

I do not know where my elegant, refined, classic and simplicity loving self {*snort* elegant, refined, classic?  Yeah.  Right.} vanishes too when I see pictures like the ones above, but vanishes she does and I am left positively longing to do this:

to my iPhone.  

DH was not impressed when I told him about my awesome idea.  Mainly because he is super obsessive over his technology almost to the point of OCD ~ each piece of equipment must be kept in pristine original condition.  That’s what you get when you marry a software developer I guess!

He did give me his old iPhone when he got the new one, so he most likely won’t want it back, but still.  Deco?  On the iPhone?   Oh noes!  >o<

Thankfully, he did come around, but only if I deco a case for the phone and not the phone itself.  Which is fair enough and what I was planning to do in the first place just in case I ended up hating it.

But the fact of the matter is I haven’t even gotten around to starting the iPhone deco project as I do not have a case, nor that many supplies yet.  So I have to make do with blinging up my nails instead.   Mind you, I didn’t really go all out, simply because these are my first experiments.  I don’t know how long the nail sparkles will last, or how to do proper gel nails. 

Or if I even want to do gel nails because I am petrified of ruining my admittedly already decent nail bed.  I get even nails with a nice length to them on a regular basis.  How long the evenness lasts depends on how rough I am and what I doing.  

But that was a side track.  Let’s get on with the real stuff.  Photos!! 

I have basically created a step by step of how I do my nails for no particular reason.  Hope you like.

  

Gather your materials  ~ I have a Konad Stamping Kit and BYS Matte Aqua Polish.   Then prepare your nails by cleaning them, pushing back the cuticles and putting on a base coat.  I use Sally Hansen’s Miracle Cure as it is a treatment and it dries super fast.

Yes, this is how I put my nail polish on.  It’s good because the bottle is firmly wedged between your knees so that you can’t knock it over, but it’s also bad because you have to be careful not to get nail polish on your favourite jeans!  >.<

 

I found this BYS polish to be really good.  It was so thick that after one coat your nails were the same colour as the bottle.  The aqua colour is not really aqua though ~ more like a dark sky blue.  It’s a very intense colour and the matte makes it look very saturated.  Also, at $3.00 a bottle, you can’t go wrong!!

Next step is to Konad ~ I did a polka dot bow on my right thumb and both ring fingers, and a dotted love heart on my left pointer and right middle finger.

Normally I’d do a top coat at this stage, because I find it definitely helps your nail art to last longer, but as this polish was matte and I don’t have a matte top coat, so it seemed a waste of time to me.   I guess I’ll just have to see how well the nails will last now.

    

Then it was sparkle time!!  I bought this nail art wheel that was chockers with different coloured rhinestones from a local beauty supplies shop.  It was a about $5.00 and I think the brand is Oker Brand.  Never heard of it before, but the wheel works really well.   The only thing was that all the different colours got muddled up in the packaging.   I haven’t sorted them out yet, and the gems are so small I don’t know if I can be bothered!  

Each gem is 2mm and I got the square ones. I decided on light purple and used super glue to attach them.  The super glue worked really well  You just had to make sure you didn’t get any on your finger or the gem would pull off again and leave a mess in your nail polish. 

I stuck three on my left thumb, one on my middle finger and two on my pinkie.   I did one on my right pointer and two on my right pinkie.

   

TaDa!!   The finished result! 

xox,

bonita