A Feather Manicure in Memory

This manicure was created with a special friend in mind.  I learned on Saturday that a long-time friend passed away suddenly.  He lived several hours away in Toronto so we didn’t see each other frequently, but we always kept in touch and he was one of those life-long friends that I could call at any time for any reason.  We helped each other through a lot of crap over the years and he never passed judgement even when I made the wrong choices.  The last time I saw him he was in town for his best friend’s wedding which he asked me to attend with him.  Prior to the wedding I had a dress picked out and of course wanted to match my nails to the dress… so he sat at my nail station with me for a couple of hours and waited and watched as I did my nails.  It was the first time I ever tried using a real feather for nail art.  He was completely fascinated by the process and at the wedding he kept showing everyone my feather nails and he even took pictures of them.  (This is the mani).

I had a bit of a rough weekend after hearing he passed and as I sat down to do my weekly mani I knew that I had to use feathers again in memory of him.  This time I went all out and put feathers on every nail!  Life is too short sometimes.  Had I known it would be the last time I would see my friend, I would have spent more time with him while he was here and given him a much tighter hug when he left.

For this mani I applied my Gelish base coat and cured.  From there I did each nail individually since using feathers is a little tricky.  I applied a layer of Gelish top coat over the base and while it was still wet, I placed a feather onto my nail and pressed it down into the top coat and then cured (these are small craft feathers that you can get online or at a craft store).  The feathers wanted to stick up on the sides, so I used an orangewood stick to hold the sides down while I was curing.  Sometimes the feathers still stuck up a bit, so I applied more top coat over the feather one side at a time and again held it in place while curing.

At this point the feather still extended over the top edge of the nail, so I trimmed it down with scissors and then filed the remainder off.  Because I didn’t use a base color underneath, the tips of my nails were exposed slightly, so I used Couture Little Black Dress to cap the edges and hide the visible tips.  And then I finally topped it all off with one last layer of top coat.