Nail Nail Boo Boo

Sometimes in life, your lemonade turns out to be too sour. No matter how good your intentions, some things just don't work out.

I have a newly acquired addiction hobby with nail polish and painting my nails. I paint them every few days trying new color combinations, polish brands and new nail art ideas. Sometimes I knock it out of the park (water marbling) and sometimes, I strike out. My latest nail art adventure was a big miss.

If you don't already, you need to follow thebeautydepartment.com. It's a great site from Lauren Conrad and two friends who blog about beauty and fashion. There are some great ideas and even greater tips and tricks from hair care to work wear. I have gotten a ton of manicure ideas from them. And they have always worked out. Until now.

Over the weekend, I gave one of their more recent ideas a try - gold leaf manicure (except I used copper leaf because it was more exciting and summery to me). This looks SO cool. Even better than how cool it looked was how easy it sounded to do. Of course, after water marbling, almost every nail art project sounds easy.

I got everything set up and decided to go bright now that spring has sprung. I decided to go with Essie One of a Kind - a bright orangey-red as my base color with the copper leaf on top. (I bought this from Michael's.) Honestly, doing the manicure was pretty painless. After I cleaned and filed my nails, I cut the sheets into small triangles. Then I readied my Q-tips, water, and polish remover so everything would be in place once my nails were polished and ready. I painted one coat on all 10 nails and let that dry well. Then I painted the second coat on my left hand and let it dry to tacky before placing the triangles on top. I repeated with my right hand after my left was fairly dry. I then painted all 10 with my Essie top coat. I was pretty pleased with the result.

A few hours later, I had a sewing project I wanted to finished up. So I sat down at my machine, threaded it and started sewing away. At one small point I forgot to adjust the tension and had to rip out about 2 inches of sewing. As I was placing that piece back in the machine to redo, I noticed my thumb and pointer finger on my right hand were badly chipped. But not just chipped, rubbed off as if the polish hadn't been dry even though it had been at least 3 hours since I completed the manicure. As I continued sewing the polish job got worse. I got so mad, I immediately got out the remover and the cotton balls and took it all off. (In my haste and disappointment, I completely forgot to take a picture.)

I don't consider sewing the kind of activity that would ruin a manicure, especially after it had a few hours to dry. I've never had that problem before. I don't know if it was the leafing product, the top coat on top, or just not enough drying time but this awesome manicure turned out to be not to awesome. I haven't given up completely - it's too awesome to do that - but I need to rethink the process and the materials before I attempt this one again.