Yellow Nails: I Actually Lurve Them! (AKA NOTD With Etude House Glittering Bloom Yellow)

Summer is coming, and all the brands are starting to put out their summer collections, and my nails are officially yellow! This is actually a really rare thing for me. If there are any longtime readers of my blog (love, love, love you guys!), you may vaguely remember that a long, long time ago, I had actually painted my nails yellow before, and I couldn't actually quite make up my mind as to whether I liked it or not. So I painted it that once, decided that maybe it wasn't really my cup of tea, and then I never wore it again. Or at least, I thought I would. You can see how that one turned out!

Easter Nail Art: Pastel and White Stripes!

Look at my Easter nail art for this year! It's all pastel-ly and stripe-y and totally inspired by the shades and designs of easter eggs! Although it's pretty simple, I really like how it looks. I know it isn't the most original nail art out there (if I'm not wrong, there are TONS of people doing Easter stripes nail art too), but I feel like for once, I actually did freehand nail art without screwing it up (too much), so this look is special to me!

For the base I used RBL Lulu for the pink, Illamasqua Jo'mina for the purple, Nails Inc Spring Mews for the green, and Maybelline Banana Puddin' for the yellow. I don't have that many pastels, so this was about it I think. Still, I was glad that they worked together without clashing or anything. For the stripes, I just used this LA Colors white striper that I got from another nail blogger sometime ago (I believe it was Scandalously Polished, but her blog is no longer up. *sobs*). I was worried that the striper would be too sheer, but it turned out alright.



Being pastels, some of these shades had difficult application - that's the thing about pastels, for some reason, they're always trickier to apply than un-pastel colours. Nails Inc Spring Mews and Illamasqua Jo'mina were good, and fully opaque in two coats. (I've actually featured Nails Inc Spring Mews before, not just once, but twice, for my Valentine's Day nails, and I've also blogged about Illamasqua Jo'mina too.) RBL was sort of a two-and-a-half-coater, meaning that it was opaque in two coats, but still streaky, so I had to use three to even everything out. Maybelline Banana Puddin' was just a pain in the behind to polish - it needed a full four coats before it was opaque and not streaky. (I've actually complained about Maybelline Banana Puddin' before, but in the end I just put up with the application for the colour...it's hard to find a yellow that looks great on my skintone.)



Anyway, despite the painful application on some of the colours, I really love my Easter manicure. It's not particularly original, or perfect, but I'm really loving it. I know Easter isn't really all about eggs and bunnies and things like that (it really has a much deeper meaning to it that's so powerful), but I figure that anyway I can celebrate Easter on my fingers can't be bad.

NOTD: Maybelline Banana Puddin': Pretty, but a PITA

I have a complicated relationship with yellow nail polish. I like how it looks like on others, but I've been too scared to actually try it out on myself. So everytime I consider picking yellow as a mani colour, my brain goes through this thought process: Wear yellow - Don't wear yellow - Wear yellow - Don't wear yellow - etc ad infinitum. Yeah as you can tell, I'm a deep thinker. :P

I decided to finally suck up the courage to actually try out a yellow, because I figured if I hated it on me, I need never look back, and I can finally stop vacillating over whether I should wear yellow or not. So I picked out a pastel yellow that didn't have too many warm tones in it - I figure it would ease me into the yellow shock I might have. And after scouring around, I found Maybelline Banana Puddin'.

Here is Banana Puddin' on me, taken outdoors in natural light. I actually think it's as pretty as pastel yellow can get, although it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea (I'm still trying to decide if it's mine or not):



Banana Puddin' is a colour that has long been discontinued (thanks, Maybelline), and apparently it's a HTF (hard to find) colour, and a pretty coveted one at that. Apparently it's desirability stems from the fact that it's a wearable yellow for cooler skintones. Warmer yellows can often make cooler skintones appear very ruddy and red, giving a "lobster hands" effect, but unfortunately most yellows are warm, so a cool yellow is hard to find.

I do think Banana Puddin' is wearable enough for cooler skintones. Of course it's still not going to be a colour everyone will like, but if you are going to wear yellow, this is probably one of the more wearable ones around. It's also a soft pastel yellow, as opposed to neon highlighter yellow, so it doesn't draw too much attention to itself. It's a good start if you're going to be trying yellow for the first time.



Here it is in indoor lights. You can see it's more yellow indoors.

While it's a pretty yellow, it was a total PITA to apply. Yellows in general do tend to be hard to apply though, so it was no surprise to me. Still, it's a pain when you're doing your mani, because it was sheer and streaky. These pictures show 4 coats. Yes, FOUR FREAKING COATS. If you are skilled and apply thicker coats that are even, you might get away with three, but I suspect most people are going to use four. I dinged my mani so many times while waiting for it to dry, because four not-that-thin coats is obviously going to dry slowly.

Unfortunately, my attempt to finally decide whether I liked yellow or not wasn't very successful, as even after trying Banana Puddin', I still feel ambivalent about yellow. I don't know how I feel about it, and the lousy application isn't helping. What do you think? Would you wear yellow?