Beauty disaster, readers: I recently walked, index-fingernail-first into a door. I hate having just one short nail; they were all going to have to be filed down — and on the hand I photograph. Fetch my smelling salts!
Hoping to turn my lemons into lemonade, I decided to make this a swatching opportunity. Though I am enthusiastically in love with ShocKen Pink from Le Metier de Beaute’s debut resort collection, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Yield to Yellow. But some colors look better on short nails, so this seemed like the perfect time to go for it.
Yield to Yellow is yellow-mustard yellow. Big Bird yellow. Golden arches yellow. Truthfully, I’m not crazy about it on me (surely this color would look better on another skintone?). But I took a cue from Ladies Home Journal and asked myself, “can this manicure be saved?”
Inspired by polka dot bikinis (and pop art), I decided to go the nail art route. I viciously stabbed a toothpick into a magazine (to blunt the tip), then dipped it in Wet ‘n’ Wild black (notoriously opaque in one coat) and started free-hand dotting.
Should I stop here?
Nah.
Not bad.
My tinkering actually didn’t stop there. I added one coat of OPI’s Big Hair Big Nails — and that’s where things started to get messy. I should have either topcoated the polka dots or polka-dotted after the sheer coat, because too many swipes of Big Hair Big Nails made my dots start to run. I did discover one more trick though: wiping most of the polish off your brush, then applying a quick, single stroke made for a messy, artistic gradient (like when a chef makes a stripe of sauce on a fancy-presentation plate). It’s something I’ll continue to play with.
Yield to Yellow is $18, available exclusively at Neiman Marcus (because it was a collaboration with Ken Downing).
And here’s one last, bonus picture of Yield to Yellow, taken indoors. It looks more fluorescent under fluorescent lighting.
wait..these are your nails post file? omg..your nail beds are so long! even short,they look long.can we say j-e-a-l-o-u-s?
To be fair, the first and last pictures are pre-shaping (I wanted to photograph my nails before, in case I messed them up).
Your nails are amazing! I wish I could get mine to grow like that!
I think this color of yellow works well for you. So well that I had to come read this post. And this is coming from a staunch “yellow extreme disliker”, and I just had to stop and say I really like this on you.