Work appropriate mani Monday: Nude holo gradient and freehand black stuff

Just slippin' in a work appropriate mani Monday post here and I'm going to pretend like I've been routinely doing these... err yup, yes I am.

A simple nude holo gradient with two beauties from Cirque Colours topped off with some freehand what appears to be leaf-like design with random swirls, cause what else do I do with freehand manis, let's be honest. Swirls or die.

I, of course, used my cuticle oil trick to yield clean, smooth lines with my sumi brush! Check out my post and video tutorial on this nail art hack here.

 

VIDEO TUTORIAL AT THE END OF THE POST!

Simple right angle mani inspired by one of my fav hand creams

Hurrah for inspiration from anywhere! This time I was mostly intrigued by the colour palette of one of my fav hand creams, Bath & Body Works' True Blue Spa Shea Cashmere & Silk cream. The photos on their website seem a little off in colour compared to their packaging in real life, so just ignore that and pay more attention to my pics. Who would have thought a bright blue-nearly-turquoise creme paired so well with medium browns?!

 

VIDEO TUTORIAL AT THE END OF THE POST!

Chocolate rosettes

Further to yesterday's boring ass striped nails post, I have something more appealing for you that is actually not really my thing: Florals. I don't know why, but I've never been into the stereotypical feminine nail designs (funny, cause nails art alone is gendered feminine), and by that I mean things like flowers, leopard print, paisley, hearts, butterflies..... ugh. *shudder*. Honestly, I can't stand that shit. But that doesn't mean I don't love it on other talented nail artists!

Earlier this month I surprised Margaret of @m_a_tom on Instagram with a mani swap and I chose her floral, stripes, and dotted nail design in part to challenge myself and step outself of my comfort zone in modern/abstract nail art design. Nearly immediately after, in early June, I decided I wanted to tackle the rosette mani again, and used her striped background as my base, just changing the colour scheme to brown.

Work appropriate mani Monday: Tan & white stripes

So you may be thinking to yourself that this is the most basic mani EVER... and that's cause it is. Like many of my other posts, this mani is the prelude to a more interesting mani that will be posted tomorrow. But, because this stage looks rather work appropriate, it suits the bill for today's post.

But it's still boring!

Burger shop themed nails

So there's this cool new(ish) burger place in Ottawa (Canada) that has some pretty awesome decor. Strange, I know. About a month ago I painted these nails after I was inspired by the colour scheme and the wood detail present inside of Burgers n' Fries Forever ("BFF"). Here's my nailspiration - a couple pics off their website so you get a feel for their style:

Images credit: BFF

And here's my mani:

Work appropropriate mani Monday: Neutral-hued chevron scaled gradient

I'm on a scaled gradient kick right now (see this post for my first real dive into the concept and for 8 helpful tips to achieve the effect). Today's mani is a work appropriate version by using neutral-hued polishes, but with a little bit of holo action. If you've been following my blog then you already know that my definition of a 'work appropriate mani' is likely more adventurous or colourful than most others definitions. I don't know about you, but scaling my usual colourful and contrasted designs way down to blah just to suit the office hurts my soul. Instead I look for a compromise. Something that isn't crazy and in-your-face, but still has enough nail art and splash of colour (or holo or glitter!) in it to satisfy me and my nail art addiction.

 

VIDEO TUTORIAL AT THE END OF THE POST!

Art Deco burgundy and gold stripes

Today's post I feel pretty meh about, mainly because of the way the photos turned out. Experimenting with new DSL-R settings... and clearly not winning.

The design is pretty simple and straightforward, executed with three different polishes and striping tape. I was following Nail It Magazine's themed call-out for 'Art Deco' inspired mani submissions - I submitted this design along with another that will be posted in due time. Nail It is inviting submissions up until June 6th. Those chosen will appear in the September/October edition. I don't think this one is a winner mainly because of the photo quality, but I need to keep f**king up to learn which settings are just NO.

Random brown triangles over sheer black

Further to the sheer black polish trend that has taken the nail art community by storm a couple months ago (see an old post about my knowledge of its roots), I decided to see what else I could use it for, if not just for emulating the look of black lace. So I went with what I named on my computer as 'Brown amazon triangles' and what I think after mattifying ressembles brown amazonian clay. Like something my grandmother would have made potterty with. But for the sake of this post and making sense to other people, I think 'Random brown triangles' is probably the better name to go with.

Work appropriate mani Monday: Nude & blue chevrons

Here's a simple but striking look that I'm going to argue is work appropriate no matter where you work. Bland beige nails is so 2002. Today you can pull off nude nails with a twist at the office and still be taken seriously (I would say this about any nail polish though... so maybe don't listen to me).

I used four Essie polishes (including 2 specialty ones from the Encrusted Treasures collection - see swatches and a review of this collection by Polish Aholic) to create this look. Nail vinyls in the shape of single chevrons were used to guide the application of the three mid-nail arrow-looking shapes.

Work appropriate mani Monday: Neutral looping effect

This is a version of what I call the looping effect mani (see original post here), but made for the office! I have not made a tutorial for it since I have basically no one except my cats checking out this blog on a daily basis, but if there were ever some interest I'm sure I'd do it for the millions of fans I might have one day. This is about as probable as my cats replicating my manis.

The looping effect mani is a very simple concept on its own but in this one I've embossed the loops by adding both light and dark accents. And some random dots cause even though my mind was telling me to quit.... my paintbrush just kept going. Story of our lives.

I actually did this mani in February of 2014 so you can breathe a sigh of relief since you don't have to look through some crappy older manis/photography that I clearly just post to make it look like I do my nails every day (I don't.... yet).

Work appropriate mani Monday: Neutral gradient with french X tips

Here's a very simple work appropriate mani I did in October of 2013. I had an interview and I must say it made me super sad to take off my likely neon or sparkly polish and to replace it with THIS. But, at least I gave off a profesh appearance, right? After all, we all know that once we start a new job we tend to do our nail art on the mild side and then... give it a few weeks or a couple of months and then BAM no one can judge you for your neon holo-flakie-glitter laden nails because they already know you're crazy.

A basic ombre using three neutral hues and a makeup sponge, topped with hand painted X's on the tips. At the time I had not yet experienced the magic of striping tape, so the X's are messy for the new standard striping tape has set!

Work appropriate mani Monday: Neutral ombre

Have you ever done a mani that was SO obnoxious it was drop dead gorgeous? Yeah me too, except others at the office are all like errr... NOT SO MUCH. It's a sad sad time in our careers when we have to tone down the crazy on our nails so as to not offend co-workers/superiors, or at least in effort to maintain some illusion of sanity. Deep down you're all obsessed with colour, contrast and SPARKLIES, but that is precisely what nail art blogs are for - so we can get it all out on the internets and not embarass ourselves at the office (woops).

For this reason I'll start a weekly tradition (*cough* let's see how long this lasts) of posting a work appropriate mani every Monday. This idea isn't new - after a quick search I found that SpecialGirl Nails and A Little Polish have posting some neutral, simple and beautiful manis meant for the office (sometimes on Mondays, go figure).

This week we have a simple taupe neutral mani...

...until I made it not so simple - stay tuned for what I ended up overlaying it with next week MU HA HA (this is the part where the sanity drops off because we can never leave our simple base coats alone, can we?)

What do you ladies think, would you wear this to a semi-sophisticated-business-casual-dress office?

Earthy feminine quad

The 'quad' is a simple design that essentially divides the nail into four equal parts. Here's a pink, brown and gold theme that was designed around one of Sephora X's new polishes, 'Love chemistry', which is an opaque gold glitter with light rose hexagon glitters.

I painted these about four months ago in November of 2013. It was a strange time for my nail length, my pinky was so long it was as if it was ASKING for me to sniff some coke out of it.

... obviously I didn't - that would interfere with my ability to be a reliable blog poster.

Coffee in New York... minus the 87263057512837 people

This design was originally done around three or four years ago when I went through a phase of what I called 'tri-folds'. Now having not been acclimated to the nail blogging community until the last year or so, it's entirely possible that someone other than myself had already invented this three-layer design and called it (GASP) something more intelligent than tri-fold.

This one is reminiscent of coffee in New York because of its simple design and edgy but neutral
(and some might argue office-friendly) colour scheme.