52 Week Challenge: Pastels

With Easter right around the corner and Spring on its way, this week's theme for the challenge is PASTEL!

Unfortunately, my OPI Pirates of the Caribbean collection is back home on Long Island, and although I go home tonight, I did this manicure earlier in the week. Thus, I had to make do with what I had.

I will take better pictures that more accurately show you the colors. For some reason, my camera amped them up. In reality, these are pastels, all of them <3 (Or the closest I have to them anyway)

Colors used -

OPI Base Coat
Essie Navigate Her
Essie Bangle Jangle
OPI A Grape Fit
OPI Pink Friday
Zoya Danni
Zoya Midori
Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mellow Yellow
China Glaze Fairy Dust (Beautiful holo glitter topcoat)
OPI Top Coat

Thank you for reading!!

52 Week Challenge: Inspired by Pattern

Nothing too elaborate this time, but the pictures are pretty!
I used Sally Hansen Salon Effects nail polish strips in a pattern called Kitty, Kitty.

Because the strip is really sticky and thin, you need to work a little hard to get it to align right in one go and not fold in on itself. As you can see in the pic below, I left a lot of space in one of my nails. Ohhh well.

Overall, I really enjoyed the look. Easiest manicure I've done in a while, to say the least.

Pros -
The strips came with really nicely detailed instructions
Very easy to put on and take off
No bubbling
Cute packaging
Both ends are rounded and my nails are small enough that each strip can be used for two nails, so I did the entire manicure in 5 strips of polish, leaving me with plenty more left.

Cons -
Taking off the excess = gave me 'tipwear' from day one. By that, I mean that the file they gave to slough off the excess sort of crinkles and rips up the tip a little if you aren't careful. Next time, I'm going to wrap the polish strip around my nail and manually rip it off before filing the excess.
The overall wear time wasn't /that/ great. I lasted 4 days before getting annoyed and removing it
One of my strips grew a crack straight down the middle.

Doing the 52 Week Challenge

When GretalRabbit posted her 52 week nail art challenge, I mentally signed up as soon as I saw it.

Technically now, I began with the Metallic challenge. But I didn't keep up posting it on my blog, and I can't import my Wordpress posts into Blogger (Ew, I know) so I think...

I think I'm just going to pick up where I left off and continue to post challenge manicures on Blogger till I cycle back to Week 24 (Kawaii)! I'll post last year's manicure and a current take where such overlap occurs (ie...the weeks from Metallic till now), so you guys get to see some progress too.

The challenge list can be found here!