2012

This is my nail art gallery for the year 2012. I have been doing nail designs since sixth or seventh grade, but I didn’t start snapping photos until recently. Some of these photos are my nails, and some are my aunts and my grandmother, who will occasionally indulge me and let me do their nails. I don’t usually screw up completely, so their nails are relatively safe in my hands. 🙂

Rosh Hashana Nails

Rosh Hashana is the Jewish new year, literally “head of the year” in Hebrew. One Rosh Hashana tradition is dipping apple slices in honey, to symbolize the promise of a sweet new year. In this nail design, I used different colors of apples with swirls of golden “honey” on them.

Mauve Nail Color

In early October, my aunt came up with the idea of mixing light blue and dusty brownish nail polish together. I humored her and tried it, thinking it would look like mud or something, but it actually turned out to be a gleaming, pretty mauve color that my aunt liked a lot! I wouldn’t wear something this boring, but it was pretty, and I was impressed that my aunt’s idea had worked out, so I took a picture.

Trendsetting Swirls

This attempt to make a fancy nail design on my nails, with swirls of color, turned out better than I’d hoped. It became the start of a trend within my family to have me do nail designs on my mom and my aunt that included swirls. In fact, I’m getting a little bored of doing it over and over, week after week. I’d better come up with a new nail design my clients will fawn over, so I won’t have to do any more swirls!

Halloween Nails

I like to reflect the holidays in my nail designs, so for Halloween I alternated candy corn-inspired orange and yellow, purple nails with swirls on them, and spiderweb nails.

Above is a close-up of one of my spiderwebs. It’s not that great, but considering I did it freehand, with limited time, while my mom was distracting me I don’t think it’s too bad.

The Swirl Era

As I’ve mentioned previously, my mom and my aunt keep requesting that I put swirls on their nails. So, here are a few of the designs from this monotonous swirl dynasty. I guess I brought it on myself by advertising that I had now attained the skill to make swirls. At least it’s more fun than just a plain color, which is often all they want.

I don’t know if I’d consider the following design swirls or not. It isn’t quite as swirly as most, but it doesn’t seem to fall into any other particular category.

The design below was a little more interesting than usual because I sort of messed up on one of the swirls, and ended up turning it into a heart. The other swirled nail was average.

Francisco Nail Design

I did this nail design in mid-October in honor of our new fish, Francisco. This post contains more details about him and his relationship with our cat, Artemis. The turquoise nails represent his fins, and the orange ones are supposed to look like his body. Below is a closer look:

Meow!

Here are a couple cat-themed nail designs. They are about the easiest nail design for beginning manicurists. In fact, my first nail design several years ago was a combination of tiger stripes and rainbows.

The above nail design is my aunt’s nails. She was apprehensive about trying a tiger-stripe design, but ended up loving it.

This one is on my nails. The stripes are tiger stripes. The spotted ones are supposed to look like the spots on a cheetah or leopard.

Thanksgiving Manicure

I won’t deny it – one of the top items on my “I am thankful for” list is nail polish. In this nail design I honored Thanksgiving and nails at the same time, by using Thanksgiving colors and adding a design on top. It was sort of supposed to be reminiscent of traditional holiday pies: the red nails are like cherry pie, and the orange nails are pumpkin pie with whipped cream and chocolate on top. I hope everyone out there had a marvelous Thanksgiving by the way!

Are Swirls…Going Out of Fashion?!?!

It may be too soon to say. I don’t want to jinx it, but as of today, day after Thanksgiving, prospects are good that a new type of nail design may be about to replace the swirls in popularity among my clientele. I did this nail design for my aunt today, based on the lattice pattern on my Thanksgiving nails. I’m not sure if she really liked it as much as swirls, and maybe that’s a good thing. After all, doing a lattice pattern countless times could get even more boring than swirls. There’s less room for creativity!

Christmas Mint Nails

This nail design is intended to look like mints (of which I’m not a huge fan, but they look good). When I did the design I wasn’t consciously trying to incorporate a Christmas-y idea, but when my mom saw it she said, “are those Christmas mints?”

Come to think of it, they do look a little Christmas-y, like maybe the presents you’d get from your dentist for the holidays. (In the pictures I have some polish smeared on my fingers due to my low level of proffessionalism in applying the polish, but I usually peel that off the morning after I do my nails.)

Brown – Boring, but Somehow Good!

Above is my grandmother modeling a brown nail color I mixed using brown, purple, blue, and red. My aunt had looked at my bottle of “Lady Godiva” brown nail polish under bad light and thought it was a dark purple, and she was disappointed to discover that it was brown, so I tried to mix a brownish-purple color for her.

I don’t know how purple this is; it looks pretty brown to me. But my aunt and my grandmother both liked it, so I guess it was a success!

Hannukah 2012

As I’m writing this it is the eighth night of Hannukah, so the holiday is almost over. But I didn’t have any time to put up these pictures before because I’ve been super busy, so here is the belated publication of my Hannukah nail designs this year!

These are my mom’s nails. The dark blue nail polish is very watery, so it was hard to apply without getting it all over my mom’s fingers as shown. (The excess on the fingers comes off within one day.)

This design represents the eight candles on the menorah for the eight nights of Hannukah. Eight of her fingers are supposed to be flames, and the thumbs are Jewish stars.

This was the first time I ever attempted to do a Jewish star design on nails. My mom was really happy with it.

My nails are just basically Hannukah colors: blue and white and gold. I added some purple in the form of sparkly nail polish.

This design is not really that Hannukah – y at all. In fact, I had several people ask me if it was a “Christmas nail design.” I was pretty proud of how the thumb turned out though.

Christmas 2012

Is it appropriate for a Jewish girl to deck out her nails for Christmas? I think it’s okay, especially since this nail design is so fun to wear! (I did my Christmas nail design a week early so I wouldn’t be sick of planning it by the time I did it.)

Although I don’t approve of the massive commercialization of Christmas by greeting card companies and gift stores, I feel that some of the sentiment of Christmas can be applicable to people who don’t celebrate that particular holiday: it’s about being with family, being cheerful even in the depressing weather, and brightening people’s day with gifts and holiday cheer.

Of course, there is a religious aspect of the holiday, but I feel like generic “Christmas/holiday” cheer is applicable to anyone who wants to break the monotony of winter. Happy holidays to all!

Let it Snow!

My aunt saw my Christmas nails and knew she had to have the festive red I used on my gift-wrapped nails. So I applied the color, and added a wintery design.

The pointer fingers sport snowflakes. It’s a little hard to see in the picture, but here it is:

The pinkies have little silver dots to represent falling snow.

Happy New Year 2013

I couldn’t decide whether to put my official New Year nail design on the page for 2012 or 2013, so I decided to put it in both places. I hope that’s not too redundant of me. I just think it makes a good ending and a good beginning!

This nail design is based on a “New Year’s nail art” tutorial someone recommended I look at.

The sparkly nail polish at the tips of my nails is DS Bold, an OPI nail polish that contains a tiny amount of real diamond dust. I feel like a princess wearing nail polish made of diamonds. I just hope it isn’t too wasteful.

Below is a picture of my aunt’s nails for the New Year.

The design is based on my New Year’s Nails.

I think it turned out really well. She said she got some nice compliments on it.

Below are my Mom’s nails. We intended this design to look like sparkly confetti for a New Year’s celebration.

Happy New Year!

(I’m kind of sad now, because I love doing holiday themed nail designs. I won’t really get another opportunity to do one until Valentine’s day! 😦 I guess I’ll just have to be creative enough to come up with my own theme for nail designs. )