Beauty-loving bookworms, Taylor Freeman has a site for you to bookmark: Novels and Nail Polish. The Los Angeles-based blogger, who works in social media marketing, has loved reading and manicures for as long as she can remember, and what better way to combine the two than by painting versions of the cover art of her favorite novels onto her nails?
She launched the current version of the site in 2014 with an homage to the smoky cover of John Green’s young adult novel Looking for Alaska, and has since shared general thoughts on book and beauty culture, from getting out of a reading slump (“Don’t read what you THINK you should be reading, read what you WANT to read”) to riffing on the pink and black of Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl and spring nail polish trends. Some people write fan fiction; Freeman expresses her admiration in a different way. “I want to honor the work of these inspiring authors the best way I know how,” she told YouBeauty.
Freeman doesn’t just recreate the basic colors of the covers, but is dedicating to creating a mini masterpiece on her ten tiny canvases, whether they’re a solid color or a more intricate design. For Fifty Shades of Grey, which she indulged not because she’s a fan of the book but a fan of ombre, she debated between trying actual grey polishes or making her own. She finally decided on the latter using L’Oreal’s I Will ($5.99) and Sally Hansen’s Black Out ($4.70). “After a bit of experimentation (and some failure!), I came to the conclusion that lightening the black would keep all five shades of grey in the same family.”
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