I know this is going to sound like a lie, but it isn’t: I was totally wearing sparkly nail polish before any of you were wearing sparkly nail polish. I’m pretty sure it is the only trend I have ever been ahead of the curve on, but I was definitely rocking sparkly random nails in like, 2008. And I’m only slightly bitter that Lauren Conrad is getting all the credit, because I’m mostly a gracious person.

Seriously, though. I’m not a particularly girly girl. I’m too tall for high heels and I couldn’t put on liquid eyeliner if my life depended on it. Nail polish is my one super-girly indulgence. I know it’s dumb, but sparkly nail polish is just so fun. It’s a really good way to add whimsy to your whole situation.

My obsession with attention-grabbing nails might be my mom’s fault. Whenever my sisters and I got a manicures as a kid (which was always a special occasion thing) we really weren’t allowed to get funky with colors. Any blue or green or purple was a no-no. Mom likes pale pink polish that is basically the exact color of our nail beds. So, obviously, now that I’m an adult and 3000 miles away, I get some degree of satisfaction out of rebelling.

(This rebellion, like most of my rebellions, is completely pointless. At this point my mother literally could not give less of a crap about our nail polish. I imagine she’d have a reaction if we, like, drew swastikas on them, but since we don’t play that… she doesn’t care. She’s evolved. She also lets me stay out past 11:30 now. On weekends.)

Back to the nails. I can’t afford to get a manicure every week (I don’t really have the money, and I definitely, definitely don’t have the time), but I suck at doing my own nails. I have a very shaky right hand and my left hand is ridiculously uncoordinated. Sometimes I’m not even sure that it belongs to my brain.

Luckily… sparkly nail polish exists. See, sparkly nail polish is a godsend for chicks like me who suck at actually applying nail polish, because with sparkly nail polish, you can just kind of glob it on and it looks good. It doesn’t have to be perfectly even because you can’t see brush strokes and you can put on as many coats as you need to without it starting to look weird and clumpy. Then you just clean up the edges with an Essie nail corrector pen and sit around trying to resist the urge to tweet while they’re drying.

These two are my new favorites. Deborah Lippman polishes are $20 a pop, which is expensive when you grew up on Wet ‘N’ Wild, but they are really good quality and they keep me from feeling like I need to go get an actual manicure.

The gold one (which has actual 24k gold in it, because I’m fancy, y’all) is called “Boom Boom Pow” and the blue-silver one is called “Today Was a Fairytale.” It’s a nail polish named after a Taylor Swift song, you guys. It’s basically a beautiful unicorn in a bottle.

If you have a Real Job, the gold one is subtle enough that you won’t feel like a 14-year-old at work. I hope to never have a real job, so I like to wear both at the same time. (Another good sparkly nail polish for people with Real Jobs is “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry for OPI. It’s pale pink and sparkly but not obnoxiously so.)

The one annoying thing about sparkly nail polish is that it’s really hard to get off. The key to solving that problem is to double up on the base coat – the more polish between the sparkle and your fingernail, the better. Also, you’ll want a top coat, because sparkly nail polish can be kind of bumpy otherwise and the little edges of the larger sparkles can snag on your tights. OPI has a really good top/basecoat.

Another awesome thing about the Deborah Lippman nail polish? If it chips, you can just kind of glomp more on. You don’t have to take off the whole nail and start over like you do with regular nail polish. It’s amazing.

And now I’m really mad at myself for being able to write that much about nail polish, of all things. I think my next blog will be about the situation in the Middle East. I have opinions on that, too.

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