Disney Queen of Hearts French Manicure

Hi everyone! I have some more nail art today, and it’s back to Disney nails for me! My latest manicure is this cute French manicure inspired by the temperamental Queen of Hearts from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. This design was prompted by yesterday’s celebration of my friend Kimi’s birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIMI!!! <3), at which my friends and I dressed up in “Disney chic” villains attire! Dressing in “Disney chic” (or anything “chic”, really) means that you assemble a bunch of normal, non-costume clothes in a way that emulates the way a particular Disney character looks or dresses. Over a month ago, my friends and I found this awesome compilation of Disney chic outfits based off of Disney villains, and we were pretty wowed. Dressing in Disney chic ended up being a part of Kimi’s birthday party, so Disney chic dress up finally happened! I swear I’m an adult, haha 😉

Out of the ten villain outfits they had on the website, I chose the one for the Queen of Hearts. This was partly because hers was one of my favorite outfits in the compilation, and partly because I happened to already have clothing that would work for the look. Of course, I had to think of a nail design to go with my outfit! I decided that this was one of the few occasions in my life when I would like my outfit do the talking rather than my nails, so I wanted something that wasn’t too garish. Quite a change of pace for me! After thinking about it, I decided to do a simple, clean French manicure with subtle hints at the Queen of Hearts. My final design consists of colorful double French tips on all nails, plus little card suit accents and a little golden crown on my thumb. It’s so adorable! This made me super excited to do the full dress up once I got my nails done 🙂

Julep InstaGrim Part III: Chevron Candy Corn

Hi everyone! I’ve got the third installment of my Julep InstaGrim series, which completes my Halloween manicures! As I’ve described before, I created a series of Halloween nail art designs for Julep in order to help them promote their contest on Instagram, and am dedicating a blog post to each one; you can read more about it in my first post of the series. This latest one is about my version of candy corn nail art, which is to make a “Chevron Candy Corn” manicure. In total, the designs are:

1. Haunted Hollow
2. Ghastly Gradient
3. Chevron Candy Corn

The chevron candy corn design was inspired by some chevron decals that Julep sold in the October Maven window, which I picked up. When I was thinking of nail art to do for the InstaGrim contest, I thought of candy corn nail art because I love candy corn, but then I thought – nah, that’s been done to death. But then I thought: well, what about candy corn with a twist? And then these chevron decals came to mind, and I was sold on the idea! Chevrons are a great graphic pattern (quite suitable for bright colors) and they’re very of-the-moment. Plus decals/stencils are so easy to use to create clean lines. I didn’t end up using the Julep decals because I thought my friend Kimi might like them, so I came up with a DIY alternative for those of you who are not in possession of chevron decals. They work, but you can probably get better results with the professional ones. Read on to learn how to do them and see the tutorial!