Fail! (...and one swatch)

Well, I spent a large part of the day swatching, and upon closer examination, my what a mess I've made! Behold the wreck I presumed to call a swatch:

 

So clearly, there are a few issues here: 

1.  Get hold of the camera manual (it's borrowed) and learn how to take proper macro images. 
2. Figure out lighting. This was taken indoors, with flash. Below the jump there's another one in sunlight, but that one didn't fare any better. 
3. Learn how to do freaking swatches! The polish is a huge mess, running everywhere, and I need to make it neater. So, as long as I'm posting this up, I might as well talk about the polish too, right? More swatch talk, as well as more fail after the jump!

So here we have Jade #393, otherwise known as Blue Award. I have to assume they meant Blue Ribbon and there was a translation fail somewhere along the way (oh look, more fail!) For as far as that goes, it works for the color. I chose this swatch to demonstrate my fail for a reason- I'm not overly fond of the color, either. I figured that as long as I'm posting something awful, I'm not going to waste one of my favorite polishes on it, right? 

Honestly, I'm not sure what exactly possessed me to purchase this particular shade. It's not part of a collection, it was just there and for some reason I bought it. It's fairly blah, a frosty, medium-blue that's not light enough to be called sky-blue, but not dark enough to be called rich. It also took five coats to get it opaque enough to swatch! In the name of fairness, it came on even as of the first coat, so it's probably good for layering. But five coats? I'm not going to put in that much effort. Maybe if the color was fantastic, but not this. 

 Wanna know something sad? That's not even the only fail in this post. Nor is it the worst. 

No, here's the worst fail: My attempts at nail shaping. I was getting tired of my natural-ish ovals, so I decided to experiment, and try and make square nails, sort of like what Scrangie has. Oh boy was that a huge mistake. First off, the ovals look fine, they suit my nail type- I have very small beds, so anything to add the illusion of length is a plus! Second, I kind of suck at nail shaping, it turns out. I lost a ton of length. The only bright spot is that I only did my right hand, so I still have my swatch hand intact. I'll just have to keep the length of my left hand at bay while I wait for the right hand to catch up. I put on a dark polish so you can really see the shapes, and not get distracted by the weird blocky shapes of my nail beds:

• Index finger: Shape not changed much, just a lot of length lost. Vaguely squarish, which would be ok if all of my nails were like that. 

• Middle finger: Short, stubby square. Sad little square. 

• Ring finger and pinky: These are halfway decent and kind of match each other, but they wouldn't work on any other nails. My pinky and ring fingers have the longest, most graceful (relatively speaking, yeah?) nail beds. And again, only if they actually looked like my other nails!

• Thumb: ARGH, MY EYES, MY EYES! 

No, I don't think I'm going to make my hands match. I'll just live with mismatched hands and wait for them to grow out. 

Also, the kids upstairs are having a party- happy independence day! They're loud and setting off fireworks, the whippersnappers. I feel old.