Gameday Nails - Week 5

Hey, football fans!

This week my Cornhuskers start conference play, and face their toughest test to date, and possibly the toughest of the season. The Wisconsin Badgers are a potential National Title contender, and will pose a serious challenge for Nebraska.

An interesting note for this game is the similarity of the uniforms.

Nebraska's Uniforms

Wisconsin's Uniforms

As you can see, both schools are rocking classic uniforms in red and white from Adidas. As I've mentioned before, Nebraskans pay attention to nearly every detail of our football program, uniforms included. Speculation has been flying about the uniforms since Wisconsin was added to the schedule and rumors have been circulating that we may change up the uniforms and incorporate some black to make it easier to differentiate between the players on the field. I'm hoping this isn't the case. If these guys can't tell the difference between red and white jerseys on the field, I am going to start questioning our academic standards, but I get the idea.

Both schools are known for filling the stands with a sea of red, and obviously, this game would make it hard to tell whose fans are who. This has prompted Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne to call on the Nebraska fans traveling to "pack the black" in support of the Nebraska Blackshirt defense.

The name "Blackshirt" traditionally refers to the starting defensive players. In short, black jerseys were once used to differentiate between the offensive and defensive players in practice. Eventually, they were only handed out to the starting 11 defensive players, and are now only given when coach Bo Pelini feels his players deserve them. Blackshirts can be lost if performance standards are not met. Nebraska's defense has traditionally been known for being tough and a little nasty (it's a violent sport), and the merchandise usually features a skull and crossbones.

Sweet gloves worn on the field.

The skull and crossbones is why you see Nebraska fans and players "throwing the bones" when the defense makes a big play.

Nebraska All American, Heisman Trophy Candidate and now Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ndomukong Suh "throws the bones" for Nebraska fans. Suh is and was known for terrorizing quarterbacks and led the resurgence of the Blackshirts after a brief period of lackluster play.

Even if you're not a hardcore football fan, the Blackshirt tradition is actually a pretty cool story. You can read more about it here.

Now, though, the part you've surely been waiting for. In honor of the "pack your black" theme this week, I opted for a black polish. I've been wearing a lot of my standard black, Liquid Leather from China Glaze lately, so I decided to switch it up a little. I finally settled on Revvvolution from Color Club. It's black, but with holographic glitter. The name seems fitting, since Nebraska's decision to leave the Big 12 conference in favor of the more stable B1G TEN seems to have started the collapse of the Longhorn Conference, er, Big 12. It's a nice, edgy color. I couldn't resist amping it up a little, though with a glitter ombre with Color Club Starry Temptress Topcoat. Starry Temptress leaves a rough finish with all the rainbow glitter, so I topped it off with 3 coats of my usual top coat to give an awesome gloss.

Indoor, Semi-direct Sunlight

Indoor lighting with flash

Fuzzy, but sparkly!

The Nikon has decided to only take shots in macro mode when it feels like it, so these are all courtesy of my Thunderbolt's phone camera. Also, I was running out of sunlight, so I didn't clean up my cuticles at all. Thankfully, Color Club has nice brushes.

Postgame Update: Sadly, my nails looked better than Nebraska today, even with a chip or two. Rando was concerned about the yelling and hid under my bed for the majority of the game, and the majority of my tweets and facebook posts from fellow fans were in all caps. Not pretty at all.