Where I’ve been…

Hi everyone!

Yeah, I’ve been gone for a really, really, REALLY long time. Given that my last blog post was in February, I haven’t been back here in almost a year – and I thought my LAST absence was long! While I have continually been mulling over when I should write another post, a recent comment prompted me to write this update now.

Anyways, I’m fine overall, nothing especially bad in my life has been keeping me from blogging. On the contrary, I’ve been pretty occupied with a bunch of work stuff, plus I’ve been having more fun this year! I can really tell based on the number of phone pictures I’ve taken in the past few years: this year I already took triple the number of photos than in 2014, and double than in 2015. I’ve been lucky enough to go on some trips this year: Las Vegas, Israel, Washington D.C., Disneyland, and planned holiday travel. Despite some unpleasantness at work earlier this year, things overall have been looking up. If you guys are curious about life stuff, I’ll tuck the highlights towards the end of my post.

But of course I’ve still been painting my nails! Just less elaborately than before. Since I haven’t had a lot of time or energy for nail art (although I did a few designs this year), I’ve mostly been sticking to single colors or layered combinations. Here’s a grid of all the non-nail art photos I could find; I’ll post the individual photos in another post with info about the polish(es) and my thoughts. Probably I’ll tuck the nail art into other posts too, since otherwise this one would be too long.

End of 2015 Update

Hi everyone! So I haven’t been around for a while (haha October…). Anyhow, I wanted to leave a short update about life things that might explain why I haven’t written a blog post for the past 2-3 months, and what I have been doing in the interim. The jist of it is that, while I do intend to keep blogging and continue writing posts, that hasn’t happened for a while for a few reasons, and blogging in the future will be similarly difficult for me to keep up with.

SquareHue July 2015 Swatches, Comparisons, and Nail Art

Hi everyone! Today I have the SquareHue July 2015 box (the 1960s) to show off on the blog! Finally, I’ve gotten around to the subscription box posts! About time, too – it’s almost the end of the month…oops…  Anyways, this is the box that I was most looking forward to for the entire year because I figured that there would be some pretty “out there” polish inside. I was totally psyched for the crazy stuff! Indeed, SquareHue did not disappoint: this is the grooviest bunch of colors I’ve gotten so far from them; it’s highly appropriate for the ’60s and the summer. Since the psychedelic influence of the colors and names was very obvious, I combined all three polishes into an electric daisy design for some flower power on my nails.

Also, as I mentioned in my last post, I’m trying to explore my new neighborhood more now that I’ve moved into a new apartment. Given how much I was digging the ’60s inspiration behind this SquareHue box, I took the opportunity to conduct some firsthand “research” on the decade by traveling to one of the hotspots of the hippie movement on my way home from work one day. I’ve got a bit about that trip, with a few pictures, at the end of the post!

Moving Update

Hi everyone! I’m finally back! Unfortunately, it’s over a week later than I thought I would be, but moving was more stressful than I anticipated. I had a lovely vacation (during which I turned one year older), and I’m now settled into my new place! Thanks to my awesome family who helped me move into my new apartment – a task of Herculean proportions – I am now living in a sweet little place with lovely views in a quiet-ish neighborhood. Moving into my fourth floor walk-up apartment was an extremely difficult task that tired my body out big time, and the process of moving and unpacking was very mentally tiring as well. But I have calmed down now, recovered most of my misplaced valuables, and am ready to get back into blogging!

I don’t really have a coherent theme for this post, so I titled it “Moving Update” since that’s kind of what’s going on here.

Short Break

Hi everyone! I have some important news about some life stuff. First up: I’m going on vacation! I’ll be spending a week with my family, friends, and boyfriend – not adventurous, but relaxing anyways. This means that I’m going to be busy next week, and away from my nail polish stash.

Secondly: I’m moving!!! As in: changing residences. While I’m really looking forward to living in my new place, moving fills me with a huge amount of anxiety because I absolutely loathe upending all of my life and physically moving to another place; it’s one of the most disturbing and upsetting things to me. It pretty much stifles me for the entire month surrounding the move and, as you might imagine, nail art is the furthest thing from my mind. Also, moving is one of the biggest manicure-destroyers that I’ve dealt with, so it’s kinda pointless to do fab nail art.

Basically, the upshot is that I will (most likely) not be posting any nail art or swatches for the next two weeks, and I’ll be resuming my normal posts on July 15th (or maybe earlier, we’ll see!). This is really bums me out because I’d have loved to do a wow-tastic manicure for my favorite holiday/my birthday, and also get my subscription box posts up. Ah well, life is what it is.

Anyways, I hope you all bear with me during this short two-week break! I’ll see you all on the 15th – thanks for reading!

– Emi

Emi’s Manis Turns One! Part Two

Hi everyone! I apologize for keeping you all waiting for longer than I expected, but I got kind of burned out for a few weeks and didn’t feel like I had enough energy for blogging. Now that I’m feeling better, I present to you: the second installment of my first blogiversary! In the first part, I talked about how much the past year has meant to me with this blog, and in this post, I want to do a couple of commemorative things to really celebrate the personal significance of this occasion.

And what better way to do that than with nail art? Since I figured this was supposed to be a post commemorating the first year that I’ve been blogging about my nails, I decided to do some nail art styled after the very first mani I blogged about. I didn’t want to do exactly the same thing, just mimic it. Plus, as a bonus, I’ve got a special something for my readers – a GIVEAWAY!!! My first one ever! I hope you like it 🙂

Emi’s Manis Turns 1! Part One

Hi everyone! Today is a pretty special day on the blog because – guess what – it’s my 1 year blogiversary!!! As of today, I’ve been blogging for one whole year, which is completely crazy for me to think about. I’m absolutely thrilled to have made it this far with nail art-ing, and the past year has been so rewarding for me. To celebrate my blogiversary, I’m going to write up two blog posts! Partly because I don’t have time to write one really long post, and also it’d probably be more fun to break it up into two posts anyways. I’m timing this first “reflection” post on the exact day of my blogiversary so that I can commemorate the occasion properly.

I’m trying to remember what was going on in my professional/personal life a year ago, and a LOT has happened between then and now. Ever since May 14th, 2014, there have been an incredible amount of changes and challenges that I’ve had to deal with, and this nail art blog has followed me through all of them. It’s been an activity that entertains me when I’m bored or lonely, a hobby to channel my creativity, an outlet for my frustration, and an awesome way to connect with people with whom I share an interest. When I started out blogging, I didn’t have any clear intentions in mind of what I wanted to accomplish, so I can’t really say how well I met my expectations for myself (other than me succeeding at keeping this blog going for a whole year). I definitely did manage to do quite a lot in the past year, though, so l wrote up a look back at the past year on my blog!

LLAP

Given yesterday’s very sad news, I thought I’d share a little about the rather odd intersection in my life of Star Trek and painting my nails. I talked about it a little bit before, but I think it deserves another mention.

Valentine’s Day Mani Swap with @fishnails on Instagram – My Design!

Hi everyone! I’ve got something special today – a mani swap! The super awesome @fishnails on Instagram and I decided to do a Valentine’s Day-themed mani swap (each person comes up with a nail art design and then copies the other person’s design) and it was so fun! I had never done a mani swap before, and now I’m absolutely stoked to do more in the future!

Since this is really two nail art designs, I’m going to divide the mani swap up into two posts! This one will be about my design for the swap, which features a glittery, electrocardiogram-like heart rhythm on top of a subtle gradient French tip. While it may not be the most original design (there are a lot of heartbeat nail designs on the internet), I really like the heartbeat pattern for Valentine’s Day because it’s a bit offbeat and nerdy, but still relevant. Of course, I couldn’t waste an opportunity to talk about science on my blog, so I have a small bit at the end about the parts of a “heartbeat” on an electrocardiogram (also known as an EKG or ECG). Before I move on to technique, here’s the pic of the mani swap! AAHHH SO CUTE!!!

The Great Nail Polish Stash Organization Project (What I’ve Been Up To)!

Hi everyone! I suppose I’ve been away from blogging for a while…oops…I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to leave my blog alone for this long! Things just got really busy for me, and blogging kind of fell by the wayside. If you’ve been checking my Instagram, you can probably tell that I wasn’t doing nothing all this time. Somehow, though, I didn’t have quite enough energy to post everything on my blog. To make up for it, I’ve prepared a whopping 5 posts that will come out in the next few days, so you readers have something to look forward to!

Anyways, I thought I’d update you on my progress with my New Year’s Resolutions, specifically the first one: destash! My goal is to get rid of 100 bottles of nail polish by the end of March, and I’m well on my way there with over 60 bottles in my destash box already. While deciding which bottles to get rid of, I realized that I’m beyond the point where I can rely on my memory to tell me what I have, and I should probably develop a system of cataloging my stash so that I can prevent getting lots of dupes. After thinking about it for a little while, I’ve figured out how I want to get organized, and I’m making progress!