Fabulous Tip of the Day: All About That Base

Today's Fab Tip: 

A nude mani is classy and a polished but low-key way to pull together an outfit that already has a really strong statement piece. You don't want any accessories or your nail, which is in a way an accessory, to compete with your statement item. Here's a tip to make sure your nude manicure is smooth and flattering:

"Nude polish goes on pretty sheer, so if your nails have ridges, be sure to apply a ridge-filling base coat first. Otherwise, the lacquer will highlight every lint and crack in your nail bed."

--Taken from Life & Style magazine, April 27, 2016, page 50,

This tip also works well for pale pinks and other light shades. 

XOXO

Gossip Ghoul.

Fabulous Tip of the Day: Easy Tie-Dyed Nail Art

Today's Fab Tip:

I've mentioned before that I kinda suck at nail art, so I'm always happy to find an easy hack for a lazy girl like me to have adorable nails.

"Swirl pastels for a tie-dyed look."
-- Taken from Glamour magazine, May 2015, page 110.

Seriously, it's that simple. Take two pastel nail polishes and swirl them together on your nails to make it look tie-dyed and artsy. Plus it's a way to use two fun colors at once when you can't decide. ;-) Just dip a q-tip in nail polish remover and clean up around your nail bed if you accidentally color outside the lines. Personally, I'd love to pair a mint and pale petal pink together for this kind of look. If you want to get a little more complex, add in a third polish.

What colors are you going to use together for tie-dyed nails? Let me know in the comments, or tweet me a picture of your mani @ak_gossipghoul. 

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul.

Fabulous Tip of the Day: Nail File Hack

Today's Fab Tip:

"How to fix a chip: ...
Grab a matchbook. If you didn't pack a nail file, use the striking strip of a matchbook to fix a small chip. Lightly move it in one directly (away from your nail) until you don't see the chip."
-- Taken from Allure magazine, April 2015, page 71.

This little hack is great for when you're out and don't have a nail file. Of course, if you don't have access to a matchbook, but if you're at a club or a hotel on vacation, it could come in handy.

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul 

Fabulous Tip of the Day: Nude Mani Hack

Today's Fab Tip:

A nude manicure is an instant way to polish your look and make it sophisticated and modern. It's also great for balance: if your outfit is mainly bold colors and prints, your nails (as an accessory) stay neutral to keep from being over the top. This particular tip,  from New York Fashion Week Spring 2015, is a new take on the nude mani.

"Use ridge filler as polish. As seen at Alexander Wang[,] Essie celeb manicurist Michelle Saunders layered a coat of ridge filler over neutral polish. It acts like an Instagram filter, adding extra brightness to your mani."
-- Taken from People Style Watch March 2015, p. 150.

Additionally, using the ridge filler over your polish means you can skip top coat, which means your mani is done faster, so this works well for a last minute touching up your nails thing in the morning before work.

Stay fabulous, readers.

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul

Weekly Favorites: Thor: The Dark World and Loki Feels

Hey, everyone! Did you have a good week? These are the highlights of mine. This past week was Geek Week on YouTube, which itself is pretty exciting, but what was particularly fantastic was the new trailer for Thor: The Dark World. It's a long trailer and features more action and a lot more Loki than the teaser did, yay!


So awesome, right? November is going to be a great month for movies! Between Catching Fire and Thor, I'm going to be in fangirl heaven... while crying my eyes out, that is. But in the meantime, that trailer was perfect fuel for my Thorki feels. Yes, I absolutely ship Thorki. That means I ship Thor and Loki together, for those of you who don't speak fangirl, and since the trailer has come out, I've been looking up all sorts of fanart like this:

Picture from Deviant Art

So cute!! It was drawn by VanTheFirst.  I'm sure more fanart will be posted online as November draws near, and I am definitely looking forward to that.

Secondly, there is the song of the week, and this time what's played in my head most is Cherry Pie by Warrant. That one is going to be on loop for a while longer, I'm betting.

My nail color this week has been very pink and sparkly with OPI's liquid sand Pussy Galore from the Bond Girl collection with China Glaze's 3D glitter Material Girl as the accent nail. It's sweet and fun.

Picture from OPI

 

Picture from China Glaze

Finally, this week's chosen makeup tutorial is Waterproof Your Makeup by Michelle Phan. A few nights ago I was caught walking home in heavy rain without an umbrella, and I wish I'd used tips from this tutorial because my makeup was a complete mess by the time I got home.


I'm hoping this week will be good. Tomorrow will be, at least, since it's Moonday. Time for more fangirling!

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul.

Aurora's Weekly Favorites: Om Shanti Avengers

Hey, everyone! Some people call Sunday the beginning of the week while others consider it the very end. For the purposes of the Gossip Ghoul Blog, I'm considering Sunday the end with a recap of some weekly favorites. Not all of these are from this week or were put online this week, of course. These are just things that I've been loving this past week and want to share so that you can enjoy as well.

First off, I found this little gem from the San Diego Comic Con on Fashionably Geek. It's from the masquerade featuring a group of cosplayers performing Om Shanti Avengers. Yes, it is an Avengers and Bollywood crossover. The costumes are hilarious, and the dancing is very Bollywood-esque. It made me laugh a lot. Here is the video from the masquerade:



And here is a clip from the Bollywood film Om Shanti Om. It's an especially awesome movie if you understand even some of the self-referential insider jokes about the industry. Either way, watch, and your heart too may be filled with the pain of disco.



Yeah, not going to lie, but I love Bollywood and find that highly enjoyable.

Speaking of music, my song of the week has been Girls, Girls, Girls by Motley Crue. It's been in my head all week, and now it can be in yours.

My nail polish of the week has been Noho by Nails Inc. from the leather effect line,  with China Glaze's Stone Cold from the Hunger Games collection as the accent nails.

Picture from Sephora.com

Aditionally, I plan to spotlight a great beauty tutorial from YouTube every week. Inspiration for different looks can come from anywhere. Today's video is the geekily fantastic Daenerys of Game of Thrones look by Michelle Phan.



Of course, there's more to life than makeup, as demonstrated in this list of five lessons about life learned from Cosmopolitan magazine. I've often been criticized for my love of Cosmo. Just yesterday at the bus stop a woman felt the need to rant at me about how the women in those pages aren't real because they're wearing makeup and have had their hair done professionally and how that's horrible for people to see because they can never look like that. Yes, I will never look as amazing as celebrities in glamorous red carpet photos, but there's so much more to Cosmo than that, and the list in this link really summarizes it well.

I hope you enjoyed the little things that have made me smile this week, and I hope we all have an enjoyable week ahead of us. Fingers crossed.

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul.

Deformed Squiggles: My Early Attempts At Nail Art

Only a fraction of my nail polish collection, of course.

I have to admit that I love nail art, and I really admire the people who do such fantastic designs, like at The Daily Nail Blog. The problem with nail art, however, is that if you suck at art in general -- in other words, are unable to draw a circle without it being misshapen or even a straight line -- then you most likely suck at nail art. And by you, I mean me.

OK, so I don't suck at all nail art. I can do well with very simplistic designs. Sally Hansen's nail art pens and fine-tipped Sharpies make things easier, like polka dots or a deformed squiggle. Not to brag or anything, but I'm super skilled at deformed squiggles that are so terrible that they don't look remotely like alike on any of my nails.

Picture from The Daily Nail Blog

Now, I definitely don't want to sound like a hipster, but I was doing nail art before it was big. My first masterpiece was for the opening of Spider-man 3. On my left hand, I did stripes of alternating cherry red and midnight blue Wet N Wild polish because, you know, red and blue are Spider-man's colors. Duh. Then on my right hand I alternated dark purples because, being an optimistic idiot, I actually thought Venom was going to be an important part of the film. Silly me. Years later I did a similar concept for the opening day of The Amazing Spider-man. I got the minis set from OPI's tie-in collection for the movie and alternated the nails of my left hand in Into The Night (a gorgeous deep blue) and Your Web Or Mine (a pinky red) and my right hand with the silvery-greens of Just Spotted The Lizard and Number One Nemesis, although these were solid nails, not stripes. However, I didn't have my Spider-man hair ribbons to wear to the premier, so I wasn't quite as geekily awesome that time.

My best nail art ever was for the premier of the Watchmen movie. I actually had to go to four different stores to find yellow nail polish, and eventually I got a tiny bottle from Claires. I recreated the book cover on each of my nails (minus the title and text). I did three coats of yellow (since it was such a thin color) and then a swipe of black from Hot Topic down the middle, trying to make it as oval as possible. Next I put a slash of blood-red diagonally through the black to be the splatter of blood across the smiley face eye, and finally I sealed it all with a top coat. Very simplistic, but fantastic. I keep thinking I should recreate it sometime.

The following summer, I attempted to make Rorschach ink blots on my nails when the director's cut of Watchmen was released on DVD, but that attempt at nail art was a fail. Symmetrical, abstract blobs of black are a lot harder to pain than they sound. For the record, the Batman symbol is also very difficult to paint. Kudos to anyone who can accomplish that.

Picture from The Daily Nail Blog

Not all nail art has to be nerdy, of course. That's just the direction I happen to lean in. Sometimes nail art can be as easy as using a crackle or shatter, magnetic, or texture polish. And for the lazy girls like me, there's always nail wraps, those stickers or strips of nail polish, many with fabulous designs. For those, it doesn't matter if you suck at art; you can still have fantastic nails no matter where your talents lie.

Btw, if anyone can pull of Rorschach nails, tweet me the pictures (@ak_gossipghoul) so that I can glower at them in envy and awe.

XOXO
Gossip Ghoul.