I’ve had the pleasure of doing some beautiful nails the last few weeks for my BFF’s 🙂 In case you are wondering, I get a lot of my inspiration from Instagram. Instagram has to be the number one spot for nail ideas these days. It’s crazy how many nail accounts are on there! I was totally overwhelmed when I first signed up and started following people, but once I got the hang of it and became comfortable on there, I love navigating around and trying to find the styles that reflect mine and my friends tastes the best. Some of my favorites are The Nail Guru, Haus of Lacquer, Pattie Yankee, Nail Decor, Nailstampfanatic, Noemihk, Nails4dummies, and many many more! Most of the accounts I follow just use regular polish but my favorites that I listed above are primarily licensed nail techs so they post pictures with gels and acrylics.

My pictures below are all gel polish…I only do gel polish or regular polish these days, ever since I “retired”, because I don’t want to file in my house and get dust everywhere and I don’t want fumes from hard gels and acrylics in my house.

Bright, Fun Summer Nails

These are cute Tennille’s nails. I was trying to replicate China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy in gel polish, which was really hard to do. I got as close as I could by layering OPI Are We There Yet with OPI Pompeii Purple GelColor and a light coat of Gelish Shake it Till You Samba. It’s really not that similar to Flip Flop Fantasy, which is a bright neon peachy pink, but Tennille loved it! She’s going to Phoenix this weekend and needed some funky summer nails. 🙂

Glamorous Modern Nails with Turquoise, Plum, and Gold

These nails were for the lovely, beautiful Nicole 🙂 I was trying to remember the nails from Instagram that inspired these and it was a combination of three different photos…none of which looked nothing like these turquoise and plum nails, but it gets the wheels turning in my brain looking at other people’s work 🙂

For the gold glitter accents, I mixed a few drops of Gelish Golden Treasure and loose gold glitter on a little scrap dish and then I actually apply it with the tip of an orange wood stick.

Grey and Pink Flirty Nails

For these nails I used OPI Gelcolor in Pink Flamenco and Alpine Snow and Gelish in Jet Set. I stamped the lips, hearts, and stripes on with OPI nail polish (for stamping it needs to be a polish that is almost opaque in one coat) and hand painted the monochromatic roses on the thumbs and dots on the index finger. I love how these turned out!