August: Chevron Toenails, or: Did I Just Blow Your Mind?

This could also be titled, "The Month I Started Doing More than One Nail Pattern A Month That was Interesting Enough to Instagram" Check out that incredible orange and white chevron (fancy word that's inexplicably popular right now "for wiggly, zig-zag stripes") pattern on my toenails. Clean, smooth lines. Sharp contrast between the white and orange. Surely this must be some sort of stick-on decal that's not even really painting your nails at all (NOT GETTING TO IT! Google it yourselves)!

Nope! I created my own nail stencil by using tape. When I first thought about doing chevron nails (Sometimes I think of these ideas DAYS in advance), I figured I'd probably use tape. 1) Paint a layer of white, 2) Meticulously cut out chevron pattern of tape, 3) Layer the tape on toenails, 4) Paint over it in orange, 5) Peel off tape to reveal incredible nails. However, just in case, I went to the internet to see what they were were doing. Although some people were, in fact, painting it freehand like ballers and others were using tiny nail brushes (GIVE ME A MINUTE AND I'LL GET TO IT), most people were using tape. And yet, they were not cutting the tape up like I thought I'd have to do. They were using pinking sheers to help them meticulously cut up the tape, since they already have a chevron pattern embedded in them.

This is when I learned that using tape takes a lot of time. At least an hour or more. This is because you first have to cut up the tape, which, even using pinking sheers, takes a while since you want to make sure the width of each chevron is the same and that the top cut of the tape matches the bottom cut of the tape. It's clearly an immensely complex process much easier to describe using a YouTubetorial (TM, why not?) than me trying to write for you. Here is one is clearly mocking how much time it actually took me to do compared to how much time this video makes you think it will take.