Evil Eye Nails

I don't often attempt nail art (mainly due to lack of skill and imagination), but when I saw this picture on Katy Perry's Instagram, I loved it so much I immediately saved it to my phone for future reference. One night when I was particularly bored and had a lot of time on my hands, I attempted to recreate it. It seemed like a design that wasn't overly challenging to duplicate, or at the very least sloppily approximate.

(Source: @katyperry)

One of the advantages of having a stupidly large nail polish collection is that I generally don't struggle to find the colour I'm after. Even if I might not have the exact same shade, chances are I'll have something similar. For the neutral, sandy base, I opted for Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Café Au Lait, a polish I found intolerably dull painted on my nails alone, but in the context of this design, surprisingly works well. Of course, I had a white and black polish handy (NYC Nail Colour in Lili White and the glittery black Chi Chi Salon Formula in Wednesday respectively). The hardest part was trying to pick the kind of blue used on Katy Perry's toes. While I do love my blue polishes, I have mostly ice/baby blues, greenish/seafoamy blues or dark marine blues. I lack a medium, bright, Santorini-esque blue. Consulting good ol' Wikipedia for "shades of blue", I guess the closest to what I was looking for is Persian blue or Egyptian blue. In the end, I picked Essie Bikini So Teeny because it was the least wrong.

After Café Au Lait dried, I painted freehand the white half moon shape. Being right-handed, my left hand fared much better than the right, where things got a little outta control. If I was supposed to remain faithful to the original inspiration, I faltered since the white area was too large. It was also difficult to get an even curve without expanding the white half moon even more, a problem compounded by the fact three layers were needed to achieve full opacity. Painting over the white with Café Au Lait to correct any mistakes was out of the question since that would've resulted in a super uneven, patchwork job.

Pressing on nonetheless, I then dotted Essie Bikini So Teeny in the centre of the white with the nail polish brush (no nail art tools here) and made a smaller dot with the black polish. Once again, my left hand was much more uniform and presentable than my right, which was all over the place. Uneven sized black dots, wonky placement, out of proportion blue dots compared with the white crescent.

But that's the perfectionist in me talking. All in all, as William Hung said, I gave my best. I'm unlikely to attempt this again any time soon, but I do like the end result and have been enjoying something new and different on my nails. If only I had the accompanying Greek islands vacation to go with it.