Happy Pride + Birthday Nails!
Birthday nails are something that nail enthusiasts and technicians alike take to a whole new level. Every year, for at least the last 7 years, my fiancée and I go to Long Beach Lesbian & Gay Pride Festival to celebrate my birthday since they usually coincide. Therefore, Birthday + Pride = Crazy Nails. In past years I have done everything from each nail a different type of rainbow, wordage saying pride, rainbow roses, and pretty much anything involving a lot of color!
With so many to choose from, my all time favorite was always the recreation of Robin Moses “Rainbow and Stars” set. Something about the colorful hair flowing around made me think of the Pride festival environment, its energy and the music that everyone is dancing to. It’s just such a wonderful representation of how I feel when I’m in the middle of a crowd covered in rainbows and having the time of my life. The only thing missing was the idea of music.
So this year, I took inspiration from that recreation (say that ten times fast) and created a rainbow-haired goddess surrounded by holographic powder with 3D headphones! I used a sculpted set of Gelish PolyGel extensions as a base (an experiment I’m working on so stay tuned!), holo-fied my middle three fingers with EZFlow holo powder, then, painted the girl with acrylic paints. I used gel polish to stamp some music notes and a set of headphones from the MoYou London Rockstar Collection #11 plate on my pinky and thumb. Then, I used UV reactive gels to color in her hair and the stamps so they would show up under blacklight and, girl, do they ever glow?!
After sculpting out the headphones straight onto the nail I painted them with Gelish Black Shadow and used some holo with gel top coat to highlight. For my right hand, I had a set of sculpted mid-length PolyGel extensions with two coats of Gelish Black Shadow. I painted graphic rainbow stripes down the middle with the same UV reactive gels to give that throwback 80s block color vibe.
Safe to say this set gained some awesome comments while walking around Long Beach and at Pride. They also helped to get me into the energy of pride and are now my new favorite set of pride nails! Stay tuned to hear more about that Gelish PolyGel experiment and to see more nails!