My Versatile Disney Manicure

Posted on Mar 19, 2014 in Manicures |

After wanting to go for years, I finally had the opportunity to take a day trip for a friend’s birthday to visit the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco.  I highly recommend it, though it’ll take longer than you think to go through it!  In honor of going there I wanted to do something Disney themed.  Because our 3-year old “niece” would also be coming, I wanted to do something simple that would evoke Minnie Mouse, I decided on a Disney manicure.  It evolved a few times, and ended up being one of my most ambitious manicures to date, involving new (to me) techniques and some on-the-fly Imagineering.

My Versatile Disney Manicure

I started with the idea that I’d do a base of Sally Hansen Red My Lips Complete Salon Manicure finally use my dotting tools do make white dots with Zoya Purity to match the signature Minnie fabric, with one accent nail reversed.  Well then I remembered that I actually have a polish from the OPI Nail Polish Lacquer Couture de Minnie Collection, ‘Nothin Mousie’bout It.  It’s a pink top top coat with big pink heart glitter in it, so instead of reversing the accent nail, I painted that over the white base.  Something possessed me to just make dots down the sides instead of a full dot pattern, and I liked the way that looked, but it also left me room to try my hand at a Mickey on my thumbs.  It’s a larger dot with two smaller ear dots, how hard could it be?  Well, slightly harder than I thought to get looking just right.  But, overall, I was happy with my Disney tribute nails, and thought my “niece” would be too!

Versatile Disney Manicure - with Minnie

Something funny happened the next day, though.  I’ve seen many nail pins, blogs, and tutorials use aluminum foil as a good surface to pout polish onto when doing nail art, so I went into the kitchen and just ripped off a clean corner of some foil that had been left out from baking something the night before.  I happen to use the Reynolds Wrap Heavy Duty Non-stick Aluminum Foil, and I found the next day that after the test dots I’d done had dried that they would peel right off!  I’m not sure if it was because I happened to have used the non-stick side up, or if they would have peeled off any foil after drying.  Regardless, it was an awesome discovery!  I cobbled together some of the cleaner black test dots and used nail tweezers to stick them onto my middle fingernail  in a Mickey configuration.  They actually stuck pretty well on their own during my placement process, but of course I put another coat of Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat over it.  Lasted as long as every other nail!  I also decided to break out one of my stamping plates and add white bows to the imperfect Mickey, thus hiding some of the shakiness and making them Minnie.  The macro shot on the left shows that the stamping isn’t perfect either, but I’m getting a better hang of stamping.  As you can see on the right, from a slight distance it’s not too noticeable.  And the big white bow definitely distracts from the imperfections of the mouse head underneath.

Disney Manicure - with more heart glitter

This manicure even had one more transformation in store!  Walt Disney is known to have said that Disneyland would never be finished so long as there was imagination in the world, and this Disney manicure ended up with a similar fate.  The Nothin’ Mousie Bout It top coat seemed to have a lot of pink hearts in it when looking at the bottle, but like a lot of chunky glitters, it was a hassle getting more than 2 hearts out per nail, and that took some finagling.  So a couple days later, staring at these mostly pink nails with 2 misplaced hearts, I broke out some loose heart glitter I’d found at Daiso Japan and used tweezers to apply another pink heart, a red heart, and a purple heart to both accent nails.

All told, this Disney Manicure went through 3 transformations.  When I do it again (yes, when, not if) I think I’m going to either omit the pink accent nail or stick with my original idea of just reversing it and doing a white base with red dots.  Sometimes, as with all art, you need to just adhere to the KISS acronym – Keep It Simple, Stupid?

Have you ever attempted a Disney manicure?  How did it turn out?