Reflection Post – My Julep Blog Feature and Star Trek Manicure Party

Hi everyone! Instead of posting nail art today (well, actually, I have another nail art post that I’ll get ready right after this one), I have a reflection post about a few exciting nail-related things that happened to me in the past week!

First, I have some fabulous news! Remember this manicure? With the gilded leaves? That featured some September colors from Julep? Well, as I usually do, I put a photo on Instagram:

But unlike how things usually happen with my blog/Instagram, Emi’s Manis kind of…exploded.

About 45 minutes after I posted the picture, I checked my blog and noticed an oddity: a few of the views that were referred to my site were coming from “julep.com”. I then visited Julep’s blog and saw that my nail art had been featured in a blog post! They had my Instagram photo, a link to my blog, and even a description of how I did it (one of the steps is inaccurate, though: I applied the gold before teal, not the other way around). How awesome is that?!? Up until recently, none of my nail art has been featured by anyone else except for a few people on Pinterest. And then, to have my stuff featured by Julep itself! I was beyond excited…I was THRILLED! I was very flattered that Julep liked my stuff enough to post it on their blog, especially since I really enjoy the majority of the stuff I’ve gotten from them (despite my lack of enthusiasm about most of the September colors…haha, I wonder if they read that…). So thank you, Julep, for the lovely blog feature; I greatly appreciate the time and effort you took to feature my work. I look forward to doing more nail art combos featuring the monthly box colors in the future. October looks intriguing, so I hope I can think of something good with the colors I chose!

I took a screenshot of the blog post so I could immortalize this forever:

And then, Julep uploaded my photo to their Instagram, where (last I checked) it has accrued more than 2,000 likes:

It also got on Facebook, where it has around 1,300 likes:

My blog’s views spiked like CRAZY. Normally, I get about 10-20 views a day on average…not all that much. On the day that Julep posted my nail art, I had 471 views by the end of the day! My followers on Instagram also more than tripled as a result of Julep’s post. So you can see how big of an effect this has had on my social media endeavors. This alone was astounding to me! But then I read the comments that people had posted on the Instagram photo. It seems like a good number of people really liked my nail art, and a few even mentioned wanting to replicate it themselves! I think I melted inside with warm and fuzzy feelings when I saw those comments. This is exactly what I was hoping to do when I started blogging: to share my stuff with other interested people, and maybe – just maybe – someone would get inspired by my work and get the same pleasure of having their nails done that I get myself. I have no idea if anyone has actually imitated my gilded leaves nail art, but I would LOVE to see any manicures inspired by mine! Maybe I’ll eventually see some in the future!

Unfortunately, like all of my nail art, the gilded leaves had to go eventually. I removed them a good 5 days after I did that manicure, making sure that I’d left them on for long enough for my friends and family to see them in real life. Here’s what my nails looked like right before I removed the polish:

As you can see, my nails held up quite well over the five days, with some tip wear but no significant chipping (true of my right hand as well). The only big indication that this manicure wasn’t new was that Ryan (the teal matte color) had started to wear away, especially near my nail tips; you can see this especially on my middle finger. Since I didn’t protect the matte finish with a topcoat, this wear wasn’t unexpected. Julep polishes tend to wear quite well on me (my usual manicure time is 6-7 days unless I remove it sooner), and this time was no exception. I liked my manicure more as I wore it throughout the five days. It was surprisingly versatile, and matched a number of outfits that I wore. I even kept on my nails during the Renaissance Faire (with me in costume) because I didn’t want to remove it!

But I had to remove it because I wanted to have…

A Star Trek Manicure Party!!!

Yeah, I bet you were wondering what I meant when I wrote that in the title. The Star Trek Manicure Party is something my sister and I invented a few years ago as a sort of “sibling-bonding” ritual. It’s exactly what it sounds like: we paint our nails while watching Star Trek on Netflix, and, of course, we provide our own commentary/conversation while watching. I have no idea when we first conceived the idea of a Star Trek Manicure Party; I suppose we just combined liking to watch Star Trek with liking to paint our nails and, at some point, we started calling it a Star Trek Manicure Party. Usually, we try to watch one Original Series (STTOS) episode and one or two episodes of the Next Generation (STTNG). As for the nails, we just paint whatever designs we want, and they definitely don’t have to be Star Trek-related. Just as long as we spend time with each other ❤ (love you, sister!).

For this Star Trek Manicure Party, I brought the entire OPI Nordic Collection, which I was lucky enough to receive in its entirety, so we had a lot of polish to choose from! The episodes we watched were:

1. Star Trek TOS S1E21: “Return of the Archons”
2. Star Trek TNG S5E13: “The Masterpiece Society” – kind of funny how similar it is to the TOS episode
3. Star Trek TNG S5E14: “Conundrum”

 

My nail art, which I am writing about in a separate blog post, used a lot of the browns and pinks of the collection to create a look inspired by fall foliage, specifically the tree in my family’s front yard. Here’s a preview:

My sister had a hard time deciding what to do. She at first wanted to use the pinks and purples to do something geometric, but she was unhappy with the results and was getting sleepy. So she painted her nails with the minty green (OPI My Dogsled is a Hybrid) and did glitter French tips with OPI My Voice is a Little Norse. It’s very cute!

That’s it for my reflection post! My nail art post about my nails from the Star Trek Manicure Party will be coming soon (like, in a few hours) so stay tuned!. Thanks for reading, if you got this far 🙂

– Emi