No H8 in the nail art community

Hey y'all!

So over the weekend, some events transpired.  Instead of giving more attention to the low-class troublemakers in question or further pouring salt in the wound of those who were bullied, I am just going to say that it's really easy to be a cyber bully because you can do so anonymously, but it takes strength of character, maturity, and class to help lift others up when you're feeling down, instead of trying to drag them down with you.   At the end of the day, this is all JUST.NAIL.POLISH and I'd rather help spread a message of love and acceptance.  The manicure that I'm sporting today is a show of support for the No H8 movement - not just in nail polish, but in everything, really.  Hate is such a useless emotion and I wish we could all just move past it and stop hurting one another.

The glorious glitters I've used in this manicure are both from Quirk Polish - and y'all know my feelings about Quirk, but to sum up for the newbies... the brand was perfect, ugliness won out over someone trying to make a living, and the brand folded.  However, the ones I do have are gems in my indie collection and I thought this post was such an appropriate place to showcase these two beauties that I picked up just before the axe fell.

L-R: Quirk Songbird and Livin' Lilectric Dreams, and bottle shots from behind to show the full glory.

I started this manicure with one coat of OPI Tomorrow Never Dies on my index and middle finger, and one coat of Sinful Colors Inkwell on all the others.  I then brushed on one coat of Songbird to the index and middle, and two coats of Livin' Lilectric Dreams on all the others, and then topped everything with a coat of OPI Matte Topcoat.

I used a gold gel pen to write "No H8" across my index and middle fingers in a show of support for the "Two Fingers Up to Internet Trolls" campaign - but A) it feels really awkward for me to make that gesture, what with my overwhelmingly American personality, and B) I thought it would be weird to preach No H8 while flipping people off... so there's that.

If you read a lot of nail blogs, I challenge you to leave a positive message or comment for the bloggers that you follow instead of just clicking on through once you've seen the pics.  I can guarantee that leaving a message of appreciation, even if it's just to say "This is pretty!" will make that blogger feel good, and it will only cost you a few seconds of your day. Love, like hate, gets bigger the more we share it, so I challenge you to make a choice in favor of the positive rather than the passive or negative.

I sincerely mean it when I say thank you to every one of you who has ever taken the time to say something nice to me, or shared my work in a positive light.  I also promise to those of you whose blogs I read that I am going to make a conscious effort to let you know how much I appreciate the work you do.

If you've made it this far, thanks for letting me ramble.  I hope it helps.

***EDIT:  Firstly, thank you for all the support this post has received.  I'm a bit blown away by it all.  Secondly, I wanted to give links to some of the other blogs that have posted No H8 messages this week, because I've had questions about the incident and some of these are the bloggers who were directly involved so I think it's best to let them tell it.  Thanks to Kerrie at PishPosh and Polish for putting this inlinkz together! Also if you have written a No H8 post or know someone who has, please invite the blogger to join this link up!

An InLinkz Link-up