But even so, I thought my nails were a little fun!
The darker color is OPI Gelcolor's "Suzi Says Feng Shui", which is a jewel-toned teal creme color. I used two coats, and I did suffer a little bit of "shrinking" as you might be able to see at some angles, but it was nothing too drastic or noticeable in real life, and was probably caused by my error.
The lighter color is NaiLuv's "Merry Mermaid", which is one of the brand's more popular colors, I think. It's a great turquoise shade with lots of scattered micro silver sparkles. What you might call "Tiffany blue" or light teal/turquoise colors have been really popular for at least the last two or three summers, so it isn't too surprising that I hear about this color a lot! Even though the sparkles in this gel are silver, thanks to the dimension gel polishes give your nails, sometimes sparkles "hidden" in the turquoise gel shine through and give off a more green-blue light as well. By the way: the flash on my camera in the first picture definitely made this look rather neon; the second photo is more true to life! The first picture does, however, give you a bit of an idea of how the shimmer in this polish scatters the light that hits it a little differently than a creme polish would. Overall, though, the shimmer is pretty muted, so this color can easily play along with creme shades or even pass itself off as a creme from far away. I used two coats of this as well.
Oh, and just for the sake of it, I tried to get a macro shot of "Merry Mermaid" so you can see the glitters in it close up. All those little speckled spots are glitter flakes suspended in different layers of the gel:
For the nail "art" on my thumb, I just used the long end of my nail brush to swipe a diagonal line across my nails. Once again, the great thing with gels is that, if you're wobbly like me, you can easily clean up your lines with an extra brush dipped in a little isopropyl alcohol. You will never have to worry about making a mistake that you can't fix without redoing the whole nail!
