Violet Quartz from the new Pantone+Sephora collection. It was much redder than anticipated, but subtly lovely.

Daphne, by Julep. Sort of the essence of teal. It goes on oddly thin for a Julep polish, but this is two coats and it’s much darker than expected. I like that. Makes it less 80s and more … strange.

Delaunay from the Julep/Trina Turk collection. I ordinarily don’t wear red nail polish (I feel like I’m a career girl in the ’80s if I do), but this tomatoey shade actually looks pretty great on me. It’s bright, and as subtle as red can be.

Otte, from the Julep/Trina Turk line. I have no idea how I feel about this color. It’s the color of actual pea soup. Or dried mustard? Maybe someone else could work it, but with my skin tone? Nope.

Jolie en Rose by Sally Hansen. It looks like Nicki Minaj threw up on my nails and I kind of love it. I couldn’t get a photo that showed how super neon this pink is. Very 80s.

This is the first color I’ve swatched that I’ve legitimately disliked against my skin tone. It’s Chocolate by Elf, and it’s very very chocolatey. Like I melted a Hershey bar on my hand. It would be lovely as a pattern on a buttery-creamy color, on someone else. However, it did remind me that I need to pick up more ELF colors because this went on like a dream. This is just one coat! I’m going to look for some at Target this weekend.

I was going through the polish cabinet and nothing felt right or exciting. I kept thinking “I want brighter!” So eventually I just gave up and decided to go big.

Two coats of maybe the sparkliest thing in my stash, Mattesse Elite’s Seduction. It’s pure glitter, but surprisingly colorful. There’s little spots of red and orange and blue and it’s stunning in the sunlight. Cheered me to death. For a slightly more restrained take, here’s a speed manicure I did for Chelle, two coats of Seduction on the tip of two coats of Sally Hansen’s Blue It.

Inspired by this photo, I busted out the tape and tried some color blocking of my own. I was going for proof of concept here, so I did the blue coat (Melanie by Julep) a day ahead, then cut the shapes for the blue coat out of tape. That way, instead of putting down tape and painting blocks, then waiting for that to fully dry (because nothing destroys hard work like tape on wet nails), then doing the third color, I could just paint the top (Morgan by Julep) and bottom (Sandra by Julep) at the same time. When my guinea pig gets back from Florida, I’ll see if I can do the overlapping sections.

Note: Unlike with the braiding, the colors don’t have to be super opaque. You can leave the tape down and do two coats, as long as you do them quick.

Julep’s Melanie, from the August It Girl box, out in the sun at Lollapalooza. This is a fun, pearly, slatey blue. And it made a great base for the nail art I’m going to post about later!

I had this braided nails tutorial from cutepolish burning a hole in my pocket and then the August Julep It Girl box arrived ad it was too tempting. As you can tell, this is a first try. My points don’t line up and the red isn’t opaque enough. (This really needs the opaquest colors you can find. I need to invent a scale of opaqueness.)

The red is Meep-Meep-Meep from OPI’s Muppets collection, the creamsicle orange is Julep’s Sasha and the duct-tapey silver is Harley, from this month’s Julep Maven.