Manicure Monday (92): The Truth About Forever

Hi and welcome to Manicure Monday, a feature that combines my love of reading and nail polish. Each week I’ll showcase one of my current reads along with a matching book manicure.

Hello, hello! I am super excited about today’s manicure. It came out much cooler than I anticipated and I’ve been wearing it all weekend. This week’s manicure was inspired by the new cover to Sarah Dessen’s The Truth About Forever. I believe that all of Dessen’s books were released with new, updated covers a year or two ago.  I have only read one other book by Dessen before and figured it was high time that I read a few more. I picked this one up at the library last week.

As you can see, this is a very simple cover that doesn’t have a lot going on. I really focused on the turquoise beads because of their bright color and cool texture. I had remembered reading a tutorial not too long ago on how to create turquoise stone nails and thought that this would be a great time to try the technique.  There are a bunch of tutorials available on how to do it but I used a technique similar to the one found in this post.

First, I applied 2 coats of Orly Frisky, a really bright and pretty turquoise blue. Let this base layer dry completely before you do the next steps. I actually painted my nails the day before doing this so I wouldn’t have to wait around for it to try before moving on.

Next, I used a piece of crumpled up plastic wrap to dab gold foil nail polish into random patterns on top of the blue. This gives the look a bit of dimension and sparkle. Let this dry completely before moving onto the next step. Use scotch tape to tape around your nail base so that the next part is easy to clean up. Now here comes the tricky part, using a cup of lukewarm water, drop a dab of a black creme polish into the center. As it spreads, spray a bit of hairspray onto it so that the polish starts to separate. You can keep spraying until the polish is how you like it. This was really hard for me, I don’t know if it was my polish or my hair spray or just the combo of them, but I had a very hard time getting my polish to separate. Sometimes it would just sink to the bottom or I would spray it so much that it would eventually get stuck on itself again and become a little ball of unusable polish. But once it has separated the way you like it, dip a finger face down into the polish to get it onto your nail. Remove the tape and use a brush and acetone for further clean up. If this sounds confusing, I highly recommend doing an internet search for a video tutorial of this process.

After all that work you get some really cool, turquoise stone nails. This process sounds harder than it actually is. I had some issues with the black polish but other than that, it was a really easy manicure that looks very impressive. I did have to go and buy hair spray to do this though, since I don’t normally use it.

Hope you all enjoyed today’s look and let me know if you try this technique out. Happy reading!