Simply thankful

Technically, Day 8 of the 31 Day Challenge was supposed to be metallic nails. But I was ready to move on from the black and white gradient (bottom half of post) two days before Thanksgiving, so since I'm doing this challenge on my own, I decided to do Day 9: Rainbow Nails first! Besides which, sometimes there seems to be a fine line between shimmer and metallic, so some of these might qualify either way. On to the rainbow!

I was daunted by the idea of rainbow nails at first, thinking all my atrophied-by-motherhood brain could come up with was gradients or cutesy little rainbows ending in puffy clouds on each nail. Ack! But then I realized I could do skittles of different autumn-y colors for Thanksgiving, and it would make a pseudo-rainbow of muted jewel tones! LOVE.

Next dilemma: not having exactly the right shades/finishes of some colors I wanted. Playing around with polishes, I had stumbled across the fact that Sinful Colors You Just Wait, which I first took to be a sheer peach shimmer, has a duochrome to green that makes black polish look like green metallic! Oh. my. GOSH! I decided in the end to layer it over NYC Flat Iron Green, instead, just b/c I didn't want any stray black edges showing, although Flat Iron Green is almost black anyway. And the purple I used on my pinkies is almost too dark to differentiate, too, so I layered Sinful Colors Bali Mist over it.

Another issue: Everything but my thumb and ring fingers showed brush strokes. I HATE brush strokes. I'd seen someone's neat trick (on Pinterest, maybe?) of sponging a final, thin layer of the same polish over metallic or shimmery polishes that have brush strokes. Genius, totally worked!

Yet another issue: The shimmer in Sinful Colors Midnight Blue is much finer than all the other colors I used, so while it is just about as perfect as a polish can get (in my book, anyway!), the slightly different texture/finish was glaringly obvious. I decided to sponge on a layer of Pure Ice Calypso...without first painting a layer on...because I'm lazier than the day is long...which is why my ring fingers look a little blotchy with Midnight Blue peeping through at full strenth. But live and learn, now I know I can't cut that corner any more!

sunlight (Check out that coppery shimmer!)

Not so much feeling the love on the indoor light pic, mostly b/c I'm too frickin' lazy to pull out my camera tripod and the pic is fuzzy. That's OK, because...

TADA!! Flash: possibly one of my fave pics of my nails EVAH.

Nina Ultra Pro Brandywine, Sally Hansen Lustre Shine Copperhead, NYC Flat Iron Green snuggled up close to its partner in crime Sinful Colors You Just Wait, SC Midnight Blue paired with Pure Ice Calypso, and Wet 'n' Wild Megalast Disturbia (love the name) in tandem with Sinful Colors Bali Mist

Despite the fact that I'm notorious for not being able to wear my nails w/o some sort of design or art, I loved this one and didn't want to take it off! I could not stop staring at my nails, which in my experience, is not something a log of nail bloggers say about a hand full of cheapo polishes like these. I have a serious love of deep and/or bright colors, so maybe that combined with all the shimmer was love at first sight...and second glance...and...