Day 16: Tribal Print

I had a hard time coming up with a design for this challenge. Here are two attempts at a tribal design.

The above design was created using a grey base color and some cheap-o water decals I got at Dollar Tree. It wasn't really "tribal" enough for me, so here's what I tried next:

This design is more "tribally," but I still didn't like it. Anyway, the inspiration is from a YouTube video by an overly chipper young woman.

Day 13: Animal Print Nails

Hey, y'all. I'm back.

This is a manicure from the end of January for my Day 13: Animal Print Nails. I found these awesome Kiss Stick-On Nail Strips at Dollar General for just $3. They work infinitely better than those piece of shit Duracolour ones.

 

There are 18 stickers in each package. I think these are version 1.0 of the nail dress stickers that a bunch of bloggers got in their Voxbox from Influenster. I won a set of those, the version 2.0 ones, from Kiss's Facebook page. ;)  Those come in a plastic box package and have 28 stickers plus a little booklet of ideas.

Anyway, here are the pink zebra stripes on my nails. They only lasted a few days for me because I didn't use any top coat and because I kept picking at them. Since my nails are so short, it was hard to get the edges cut properly. I trimmed them with scissors before applying them, which helped some, but filing the ends down was tough.

The benefit of having short nails, though, is that I have enough of these stickers left for another manicure, and maybe even a pedicure. Wheee!

Have you seen this version 1.0 of the Kiss nail stickers? Have you tried these or the other version yet?

Day 2: Orange - Del Sol: Sun Kissed

Ladies (and gentlemen), if you ever get the brilliant idea to start a nail blog, make sure you don't start it just days before the holiday season kicks in and you have three major papers to turn in for grad school.  Otherwise you'll end up like me with almost a month between your first and second "real" posts.

So, day two is supposed to be orange nails, and I have a few photos of Del Sol's Sun Kissed.  In theory, Del Sol is the coolest nail polish out there. It's UV-activated so it changes color in sunlight! I first heard about Del Sol products on my first cruise in May 2009, but I thought they just had color-changing T-shirts so I didn't even visit their stores.  In 2010, though, my husband and I brought my parents on a Caribbean cruise with us, and they wanted to hear the shop talks, and lo and behold, the shopping director had Del Sol nail polish! He showed off Ruby Slipper (which I'll show you later on), and it just blew me away.  I got a few Del Sol polishes at their shop in Nassau, Bahamas, including this one: Sun Kissed.

Like I said, in theory, this stuff should be the most awesome nail polish in the world -- and some colors are -- but Sun Kissed is a major dud.  It starts off a pale (and I mean super pale) orange color inside (see image above).  I have to use at least three coats, and it's still too translucent for my tastes.

The top of the bottle shows a bright red color as the UV-activated shade, but again, not on my nails, or at least not from my bottle of Sun Kissed:

That's outside in full sun.  The bottle cap shows a red color, but the best the polish and the painted nail wheel will do is a darker orange than when inside. You could call it tangerine, I guess, or coral, but that's as close to red as it gets.  The nails on the nail wheel are three coats, two coats, and one coat.

Anyway, this bottle of orange polish makes me mad every time I use it. Even when I tested it in full Caribbean sun in the late spring, the best color change I got was from pale, boring orange to slightly darker, slightly pink coral. However, my other Del Sol polishes work well (especially that Ruby Slipper one I linked to earlier). I'll show off a few more Del Sols as the colors come up.

Do you have any funky color-changing nail polishes, either by Del Sol or Claire's (which has those "mood changing" polishes)? Do you have better luck with them than I do?