Fun with Julep Joy- Nail Art Fails and Success

So I've had Julep Joy for a while, but I have not gotten around to playing with it.  Joy is a Boho Glam color from earlier in the year.  For more info about the Julep Maven program, check out my post about the May box!

Bottom of bottle of Julep Joy

First, just look at Joy by herself on the nail- this only took one coat to get full coverage! I really like the color- it's like a deep pink and just different enough from my skin to look lovely, but not in your face. It glided on easily and quickly! It dried really fast too, which I also appreciated!

Julep Joy (1 coat), no top coat

I decided to use the Matte Top Coat (which came in the November boxes) over it, because I wanted to try quilted nails (this was my nail fail). I really loved the look of this color matted though- it gives it such an elegant look!

Julep Joy (one coat) matted

So, for the quilted nails, I had seen a tutorial that showed using dental floss to create the grooves in a diamond pattern. Easy, right? Wrong. It looked terrible on my nails.I used two coats of Joy on these nails, so the grooves could be deeper. I went ahead and finished with Zoya Blu dots between the diamonds, as the quilted nail look goes. I was hoping it would help but it certainly did not.  I hate to show such a failure, but hey, nobody's perfect. Lesson learned: DO NOT USE DENTAL FLOSS FOR QUILTED NAILS. ;)

My nail art failure- these look awful! Sorry. Dental floss does not make a pretty quilted pattern.

My ring and pinkie nail were the least terrible, so here they are a bit closer. Still not great!!

BUT it did make me think, hey, polka dots would be awesome on Julep Joy!! So I looked at all the nearby colors for one to use spots with. (Let me just say, I LOVE polka dots. I can't get enough. A lot of my clothes involve polka dots...) I ended up picking Millie (maybe the smell wasn't as bad as I remembered? WRONG). The smell was bad. But I liked the color!! And putting a drop of it on my "palette" which is a clear plastic baggie, wasn't tooooo terrible. I went as quickly as I could.  Here is the result though:

Julep Joy matted with Julep Millie polka dots on top!

Another image of Julep Joy matted with Julep Millie polka dots!

You can see a few strings between the spots. Millie started to dry before I finished, but I was loathe to get a new spot of polish to work with because of the smell... so I used it longer than I should have (polish gets stringy as it dries out!)

I loved this look so much, I did it on my right hand too and noticed it matched my PJ shorts! Told ya- I like polka dots!!

My right hand across my PJ shorts! Lovin' polka dots!

My right hand with Julep Joy and Millie!

My right hand is never as pretty, since I am right hand dominant, and my left hand cannot coordinate well enough to paint so nicely. But this way you get to see both hands looks! :) 

Note/Tip: If you haven't done polka dots, I've found the way they will look the best is to do staggered lines of dots. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it looks so much nicer than when you scatter the spots!