Memorial Day Manicure with Julep America

It's Memorial Day weekend! Yay! Three day weekend! Shopping, BBQs, the official beginning of summer. Let's take a minute to remember the reason for the holiday, which is to honor U.S. troops fallen in war. Here's the VA website that explains the origins of Memorial Day.

I have a lot of friends who served or are serving in the U.S. military, and I decided to honor them with a patriotic manicure!

Patriotic Manicure

I used a variety of polishes and techniques to make this manicure.

First, I did a Skittles mani with three different colors. A Skittles manicure is when you randomly paint your nails a bunch of different colors. Think about how Skittles look in the bowl. I did mine with ORLY Royal Navy (blue microglitter), Ulta Salon Lacquer Let the Flames Begin (red creme), and a Layla Cosmetics silver metallic that says CE27 on the cap but CL22 on the sticker on the base.

Step 1: Skittles Mani in Patriotic Colors

Next, I added some stamping. I used Sinful Colors Snow Me White and stamped over the blue nails with BM-H25 and the red nails with Mash-49.

Step 2: Stamping

I didn't stamp over the silver because it was really pretty already, and the goal of the stamping was just to add some dimension. In the end, the stars do not show through 100%, and they weren't meant to. This could be a cute patriotic mani on its own, but I had one goal for this mani, and that was to use Julep America!

Julep America gets a bad rap because Julep seems to have overproduced it and for a while it appeared in just about every mystery box. People got sick of seeing it. But it's really a fabulous nail polish. It has red microglitter, blue and silver multidimensional glitter, and larger silver stars in it. I think the reason people complain about it is there are so many out there that a lot of people ended up with duplicates, and unless you are the most patriotic person in America, you probably are not going to wear it all that often. But I think it's gorgeous, so I slapped that stuff on top of my mani so far and came out with this gorgeous creation! I wasn't very precise with the application, and that was on purpose so that some of the other colors and stamping would show through. But I love how my nails have a mix of red, blue and silver, stamped stars and glitter stars.

Finally, here's a photo of all the stuff I used! Hope you have a great holiday weekend. Take a few minutes to thank the veterans in your life.

NOTE: I am a Julep affiliate and affiliate links appear in this post. I wasn't paid for the opinions and I bought the nail polish myself.