Crimson Reflections

This post was inspired by a comment on my last post (thank you!). For those of you who don’t know my partner Michelle opened a salon suite doing nails with a coworker/friend named Kitty in March of this year. The salon is called Kira Kira Salon (https://kirakirasalon.com/) and they specialize in Japanese and Korean nail trends.

Michelle has been doing my nails since just before she started nail school around 2019-ish? and so over the past few years she’s done my nails several times specifically for lolita fashion events. I typically get a gel manicure with nail art on top of my natural nails which are long, but fairly small. I also sometimes get her to build a replacement nail using gel or acrylic if I’ve broken one of my nails.

I’m including nails done for lolita events and general ‘kawaii’ nails, but also, I work in an office, so I’ve also included just some general nail art she’s done for me that I really liked, and at the bottom I’ve put a few of my favorites of her nails that she’s done on herself.

Cherries & Berries

My current nails were designed to match Angelic Pretty’s French Cafe. I asked her for hand painted cherries and “egg flowers” (these cutesy daisies), polka dots and scallops, with a nude at the top so that it’s not as obvious when they grow out, and I picked out the cherry and bow charms. The thumb cherries aren’t a perfect color match and she actually recommended a metal+crystal charm that was a better match color-wise, but I liked the vibe of these ones more, so we went with these. I could have had her build cherries, but she was doing this after hours and we were both really tired so we went with making things more simple (Also this is why we went with the easier to paint egg flowers instead of proper daisies… but I also just really like the egg flowers!)

This is a different cherry set she did for me last summer (2023) for Tekko, and for this one she actually built the 3D cherries up from scratch, they aren’t a charm. The bows are a charm though on this one. I wanted this set to match multiple coords I was wearing, and I settled on berries/cherries, red and white being central themes across most of the pieces I was wearing that weekend.

This set from Spring of 2023 was strawberry themed. I asked her for something that looked a little more vintage / natural. I was really into Pink House and like wedgewood strawberry china pattern at the time.

Butterflies & Skies

Earlier this year, I had pastel rainbow skies. I really like the look of white on top of cute colors like this. Michelle describes this as a ‘Vertical jelly glitter ombre with clouds and stars’ and wrote that this was a ‘Gel Manicure with Advanced Nail Art (and removal) 1.25hrs’.

These are unfortunately a little grown out, but also earlier this year, she wanted to do demos of painting anime-inspired nails live at a local convention, so we did the pink sparkle base and then she added a sparkly dragonair and the sailor moon compact as well as the white sparkle details.

These are from April of last year, she hand painted the skies and clouds and then the butterflies on top are decals. Because my nails are so narrow / curved it can sometimes be hard to find decals that fit properly on my nails…

Tropical & Citrus

These are fun, but the little shapes are really hard to fit on my nails because they are so curved / small. This left her with a choice of either making my nails really thick, or leading them a little bumpy where the fruit shapes were to do a ‘dipped in jelly’ like look. This was fun, but, I probably won’t use the little clay cane shapes again unless I have her cut them down into halves / quarters.

I got these to match this dress and then it didn’t fit, which was the absolute worst. The dress is Angelic Pretty’s Dreamy Parfait OP, and it’s listed as “bust 86～101cm”, but because it’s an OP and all the shirring is in the back, and the neckline / sleeve area is so structured, it doesn’t really help make the front of the dress much bigger. Anyways, she did little lemon slices painted on with dots and little daisies. I like these painted on lemons a lot more than the clay slice ones TBH.

Hearts

Hearts are another motif that I come back to a lot, especially for lolita events because they are fairly neutral. This is a set I had her do for valentines day, and it also matched with a lot of my red x pink Angelic Pretty.

This is the set I had her do on me for Katsucon in 2023. I spent a long time with the dresses I wanted to wear figuring out which colors we could use that would match with all of them. Ultimately, we pulled out the sax and yellow from Angelic Pretty’s Lemonade Float, sax, yellow and a neutral pink to match with Angelic Pretty’s Happy Garland, and then the 3rd dress was Angelic Pretty’s Freshly Picked Strawberries in red, which also has some yellow and white and just kind of feels like it has pink due to the close red x white stripes in places. By keeping with a neutral base color and keeping the amount of each color small, and then adding in the 3D elements which were kind of “glass” looking, it helped hide that the exact shade of pink and blue weren’t identical to the dresses. The 3D elements also made the nails look a lot more deco-like, which works well with really OTT sweet coords.

We did something very similar to this with just sax and pink for tekko last fall, which I was able to match to Dolls Collection, Diner Doll and Happy Garland, but I don’t have good photos of that set.

Flowers for Spring, how ground breaking

This set was actually so she could test a new set of pastels she got, and I really enjoyed the pastel rainbows she did with it.

I believe these were for Easter 2023, we used a neutral base so that it was less obvious when the nails grew out, but also I just really like how nice and subtle the flowers look on this one.

This is one of my favorite floral looks, I really like the rainbow and the little egg flowers.

Special Occasions

These were specifically done to match a dress I wore to my sister in law’s bridal shower that was a pastel water color floral look.

Fall

I just really like leaves and pumpkins, I don’t know what to tell you. The last 3 pictures are all the same set, it’s a color change base that goes between that deep chocolate red brown that is almost black and the orangy red color. It changes color based on how warm it is, so it will automatically do like a french tip most of the time, but for the photos I’m forcing the color change with ice water like the doll babies of my childhood that had the tears that would vanish with hot water.

Christmas

These are two different winter / Christmas sets. One from this past December (2023) and one from 2019 when she was still a student. I just really enjoy the white x gold and white x silver x gold holiday look.

Bonus

These are not my nails, these are actually nails Michelle has done on herself that I really love and wanted to share with you all. For legal reasons, I want to emphasize that these specific nails were done on herself for her own enjoyment as a way to challenge herself to reproduce specific recognizable characters with accuracy in 2D / 3D.

I hope you enjoyed this quick little look at some of my past nails. I’m thinking that next time I got to a big lolita event want to get her to do a specific print to match something in my closet and just deal with it not matching my other coords, but I need to decide which print I should have her do. Cat’s tea party maybe? Or Day Dream Carnival? What specific print would be fun?

If you would like to see more of her work, I encourage you to follow her salon page on Insta. I believe Michelle and Kitty will be at Blerd con in Baltimore this year doing nails and sizing for press-ons. You can also message the salon on Insta to inquire about being fit for press-ons at events Michelle is attending like Katsucon, or in person if you are local.

p.s. I didn’t forget that I owe you all the final part of the Fanime posts, I am diligently working on editing the media for that post, and will post it soon.