Wearable Purple And A LOOOOONG Post!

Hello there, Nail Friends!

I'm sitting down here in my Batcave (no, seriously, it's the best place EVER!)

No, SERIOUSLY! BATCAVE!

Anyway, I'm sitting down here in my Batcave, ready to tell you about the purple dot nails I did for Pretty Face Happy Bank's Wearable Week! Basically PFHB put a call out to nail bloggers to help her pair nails with wearable eye makeup designs because she tends to do, as she put it, "rainbow LSD" (rainbow LSD eye makeup is pretty sweet looking by the way!)

She called and I responded! And why wouldn't I choose purple? and DOTS! You know I love me some dots!

And for those of you thinking, "I can't wear purple...it's so vibrant and crazy! NO! You CAN wear purple. Purple is an equal opportunity lover and can be worn by everyone!


So here we go!



First I started with CND Stickey, my go-to base coat. Then I added Wet n Wild On A Trip! As you'll see in each of my pictures I have a little baldness on my nails, so I'd definitely do 3 coats of it! I used two. Lesson? Always make sure you have decent lighting when you do your nails or your pictures will make you sad.

Nail Pattern Baldness! -gasp-

By the way, I think the bottle lied to me.

Pro Brush? 

hahahaha no.

 But we aren't here to talk about On A Trip! We're here to talk about DOTS! I LOVE DOTS SO MUCH OMG CAPSLOCK!

Tools: 

• a dotter acquired from ebay, amazon, the internet. Or you could get creative! A flat-headed pin stuck through a pencil eraser, the end of a bobby pin. I'd avoid needles because they're poky and can dent your base coat.

I used this one.

• A piece of paper or a workspace you aren't afraid of getting nail polish on!

I used this one!

• Nails and Polish! (well duh!)

To dot is super easy! Allow me to give you some more bullet points!

• Take your polish cap brush and dab a polish blob on your paper. This is the start of your messy messy palette.
• Dip your tool in the polish blob and coat the end of it in polish
• Take your tool and gently touch the polishy end to your nail
• ???
• DOTS! (profit?)

Diagonal dots! Still classy, but more fun than a full dot nail!

Using Zoya Dove I chose to do small dots in a diagonal line because heck, I love diagonal lines and small dots are more subtle than large ones and this is wearables week!

Things to avoid: as you dot the polish will build up on your tool. Make sure to keep it clean or your dots will start getting bigger and weird shaped. Also your blobs will start to dry out and get stringy, so if you don't want to gets those strings on your nails abandon ship and make a new blob from your polish bottle!

Pictures!

Alternating Dove with Zoya Caitlin (I swear, it's impossible to grab one and not the other) makes it interesting, but from further away it's close enough to not be too intense. And this was cool...but I wanted something to make it pop a little bit! But what would go with purple? Well allow me to give you a mini lesson in color theory!

Primary Colors!

Primary colors are the colors we all learn about in preschool. Red, Blue and Yellow! And then when they make friends with each other they form 3 more colors, the Secondary Colors, Purple, Orange and Green!

Primary AND Secondary Colors!

Now once you have primary colors and secondary colors, you can see something interesting. While red and green can't be mixed very well, (unless you're looking for a really weird muted color) if you put them next to each other they look AMAZING. The other color pairs are blue/orange and yellow/purple! These are the most basic of what's called the Complimentary Colors and they pretty much always look fantastic! A cool color and a warm color that pop next to each other. (Want to know how prevalent they are? Start looking at action movie posters and count how many DON'T have a blue/orange color scheme. Not many.)

So of course my nails are currently purple. I'm going to add yellow! So I grabbed Cult Nails Feel Me Up and I got this:

Homage to Chalkboard Nails?

See how that little bit of yellow makes the whole thing come together? I also had a yellow dotline on my thumb. I'm a bit of a sucker for thumb/ring accent nails although pointer accents are growing on me!


So those are my purple dot nails! I topped it off with Cult Nails Wicked Fast (worth every penny of the 8 dollars +S/H. It's the BEST topcoat I've used thus far) and BAM! Awesome dotty mani!


Now I was using polish I already had, but if you're reading this because you're interested in wearable, you may not have these colors. I was using Zoya and CN, but if you didn't want to spend $8-10 a polish, here are some alternatives!

Zoya Dove - Revlon Smoky Canvas I don't believe these are dupes, because Smoky Canvas looks like a warmer gray, but it would definitely work!

Zoya Caitlin - Color Club Shabby Drab The Internet tells me these are dupes!

Cult Nails Feel Me Up - Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mellow Yellow I don't know if they're dupes, but it would definitely work for adding some complimentary pop!


Don't worry if your dots aren't perfectly round. (mine never are) Nail art is a process like any other art that requires practice and patience!


Don't forget to go read Pretty Face Happy Bank's sister post featuring a wearable purple eye-look!


Until next time, Nail Friends!
Same nail polish time, same nail polish place!