Office-Appropriate Nails and Reliving my Teen Years

Office-appropriate nails are always a dilemma of mine and I have spent many an evening going through my drawers of nail polishes trying to find a colour or shade that is suitable for an office environment.

In general, I tend to opt for subtle, natural shades such as nudes, beiges, greys, pale pinks - nothing that is too 'in-your-face'.  However, sometimes this all just gets, well, pretty boring, especially for a nail art obsessive like myself.  So, this evening I tried to come up with a compromise: I would stick with this subtle nail polish palette but I would incorporate it into a nail art design.


The key with my chosen nail art look was to stick to the subtle theme and keep it fairly understated which meant no neon colours and clumpy glitters (my heart just broke a little bit from writing that!).  This resulted in selecting only two simple nail polish colours, a grey-based nail polish by Topshop and a shimmery (well, I needed a little bit of glitter, I'm only human!) sheer nude-based nail polish by Maybelline (this is the same one that I used for my nail art looks in the posts Nail Update: Summer, glitter and sparkles! and Black Gloopy Nails, just in case you were wondering......were you actually wondering or have I overstepped the mark here?). 



Office ombre nails!


I went for an ombre nail design as it's a quite soft nail art look and a fairly easy process which doesn't take too long to achieve.  To start off with, I used my standard base coat which is OPI's Original Nail Envy Nail Strengthener followed by one coat of Maybelline's Color Show nail polish in Sugar Crystals.  Once this was dry, doing one nail at a time, I used a Topshop nail polish in the shade Hopscotch and painted the top third of my nail so that it looked like this (this bit does not need to be too neat):







A little messiness is just fine by me!

Once I'd applied the polish to the top third of my nail, I grabbed some tin foil and dropped a few blobs of the Topshop nail polish onto it.  I then grabbed my cosmetic sponge and dabbed it into the nail polish and lightly blotted it on the foil a couple of times before dabbing the nail polish onto my nail using the sponge.  I carefully brought the colour about halfway down, so that the colour faded out as it approached the bottom half of the nail.  I then finished this nail art look off with a coating of Seche Vite's Dry Fast Top Coat to blend the nail polishes together and soften the look even further.  The reason why I did one nail at a time was because I needed my Topshop nail polish to not be completely dry when adding my top coat otherwise it would not have blended as nicely.

Items used from left to right: Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat, OPI Original Nail Envy Nail Strengthener, Topshop nail polish in the shade Hopscotch, Maybelline Color Show nail polish in the shade Sugar Crystals and a cosmetic sponge.

I'm really happy with this look as I think that it is subtle enough to be acceptable for an office job but it's still slightly quirky and unique which is very much a good thing in my opinion. 

The irony of this whole nail art look was that whilst I was trying to achieve this 'mature' nail art design, I was reliving my teenage years and listening to 'The Best of Hilary Duff' on Spotify, I'm not even ashamed about it though.......and I'm definitely not ashamed about the fact that I still know all the words to 'So Yesterday'.  Not even a lit bit of shame here, only Hilary Duff-lyric-knowing pride - turns out my teenage years weren't wasted after all!




No shame here!

Feel free to let me know what you think of this look, or Hilary Duff, I'm not fussy!