26gnai – black base

i’m going to start by apologizing: i’m sorry but this is not a happy post. feel free to skip to the photo (after that is were i get back to nail business).

but things suck right now. hard. i’m sad, embarrassed, angry, ashamed, confused. what happened tuesday was a failure of the system. people were told to be scared. i guess it’s not surprising that they ended up scared. scared enough to vote for hatred. scared enough to look past all the proven bad behavior and still want to follow.

and now, we’re being bombarded with stories of bullies (on both sides, but mainly directed at minorities). one day after the election and people’s better selves have gone into hibernation. people believe they are now free to treat others in atrocious and disgusting ways.

my only silver lining is that hillary actually won the popular vote. not by much (3-4 hundred thousand, depending on which source you look at), but i have to hold on to the fact that most people didn’t want trump. that does little good for this country, but restores my faith in humanity a bit at least. but who knows, maybe the “electors” will use their legal rights to change their vote and fix this error. i’m not holding my breath though – only 3 electors have changed their vote in the past 30 years (although if we go back further we see many more people with minds of their own: in 1832 32 electors changed their votes, 1836 there were 23 and in 1872 there were 63!). read more about this at fairvote.com and watch the video above to see why this system no longer works.

so nails… when i originally read this prompt my plan was to do rainbow stripes on top of a black base. i was in a hopeful, optimistic mood. no longer. i am in mourning. my country is in mourning. so my nails reflect that. i did a matte and shiny combo of the american flag (sorry it’s not super accurate, still trying to get better at small details).

i love the matte/shiny look but i had a dickens of a time trying to photograph it! i got the best results using a flash – it lit up the matte part while reflecting off the shiny, hopefully making it clear whats going on. i don’t typically use a flash because it makes everything look so washed out. but i took the photos into photoshop and added a little color back to my skin (i’m not a zombie i swear!)

colors used: style me up black, sally hansen invisible.