Pink Glitter Gradient!

Here's my latest mani, a deep pink to nude-pink gradient. I sponged OPI's Ali's Big Break over the tips, covered the whole thing with a coat of Teenage Dream, and used Konad to stamp accents on my ring finger and thumb.







I love how this came out! Bright, pretty, and fabulously sparkly.





At lunch yesterday I was reminded when I ordered this delicious desert at one of my favorite restaurants. This is "Lady in Red", a strawberry and guava delight.





Mmm, strawberry-guava cake! Words cannot describe this beauty.

Hope you enjoyed! Until next time!

Color Club Chelsea Girl

Hello again! :)

I bought another Kleancolor last summer, with blue glitter. It's so pretty! Unfortunately, my first attempt at wearing it kind of flopped. I had decided to leave Color Club's Chelsea Girl at home instead of bringing it back to school with me, but I felt like I should wear it properly before I shipped off. It's not a color I really like on me, but I thought that it might make a good base for it. Instead, it just came off kind of... flat.

No flash:

Flash:

It looked even worse close up! I'm not sure what was going on, but the Kleancolor and the Color Club started separating from each other pretty quickly, and all these weird bubbles formed between them. Gross!

In the end, I decided to leave both of them at home. They're both very pretty but neither really did anything for me.

A Week of Orlys! Orly Cotton Candy

I love this color. If you were patient, you could probably achieve bottle color in two coats, but I used three.

I used OPI My Private Jet (new, non-holo brownish black w/small semi-holo glitter) and Konad plate m28 to stamp the unicorn, and topped it all with a coat of Orly Prisma Gloss in silver. I love that this topcoat is subtle enough that it doesn't interfere with the image, but you can still appreciate the wonderful glitteryness of it.

Cotton Candy is an adorable soft, squishy pink. It's quite warm, nearly peachy in appearance, and it photographs like a neon. I apologize for that, as my pictures are far from color accurate.

Until next time!

A Week of Orlys! Orly Pixy Stix + China Glaze Bad Kitty

I'm afraid I could not get this color accurate to save my life. For some reason, Pixy Stix and Cotton Candy photograph like neons, even though they aren't.

This is two coats of Pixy Stix under two coats of China Glaze Bad Kitty. Bad Kitty (which I would love for the name alone) is a lovely watermelon color in the bottle, but comes out so sheer on the nail that achieving bottle color would be extremely difficult at best. Pixy Stix however is a gorgeous watermelon creme, and the base colors matched wonderfully.

This was fun and feminine without being sickly sweet. The playfulness of the glitter was really delightful. I even had a friend ask to borrow my lacquers so that she would recreate the same combination!

I took a ton of pictures but I just couldn't really get the true color. I know there are many good swatches of this out there, though, taken with cameras much better than mine! This last one is probably the most color accurate. Taken in sun through a window.

Until next time!

Color Club Wild and Willing

I cut my nails short. Actually, I cut them even shorter a few manis after this. It will be even easier to tell my and Lacquermuse's posts apart! Now that I've warned everyone, let's move on to the pictures...

This is Color Club's Wild and Willing, stamped with Jordana Black with Konad plate m77.

Flash:

No flash:

The polish really does get both of those colors! Ignore how gross my skin looks in the second one, but that's the sort of greenish orange the polish is most of the time. When the glitter this polish is just packed with is at the right angle to catch the light, it turns that brighter orange of the flash picture. It will even go a bright pink that you can just see hints of in the top picture. It's really quite a stunner.

The glitter that I mentioned makes up the bulk of the color in this polish. You can see it coating the side of the bottle in these pictures. I was really uncertain about this color at first because at one coat the glitter just made my nails look gritty and dirty. It really starts to come to life after the second coat! I think this is four coats, but three would have been sufficient.

Claire's Mood Nail Polish: Calm/Wild

I apologize for the abruptness of this post. The charger for my computer is on its last legs, so I'm trying to use it sparingly. This is a slightly older mani, before I cropped my nails down. I wanted to post while this polish was still available. Claire's Mood nail polish! This is calm/wild, a purple-to-pink polish and the only one with glitter (silver) in the collection. I believe there are five? total, but this is the only one that really caught my eye.

When I was a little girl I had a pair of pants that had one purple leg and one pink leg. Those were my favorite colors, so you can imagine how much I loved those pants. Even though I wasn't sure the colors would be flattering on my skintone (it looked cooler toned and I am neutral/warm), I just had to get this one in honor of my favorite pants. The first trip to Claire's they had already sold out of this color, but when they restocked a couple weeks later I pounced on it. The colors on my pants were a bit deeper, but this is very reminiscent of them:

The pink does get brighter than this when exposed to heat (such as hot water, etc), but I am usually on the colder side, so it did not get really bright when I wore it.

I'm waiting for when they invent polish that changes to a myriad of colors. This will hold me over 'til then, though. ;)

How do you feel about color-changing polish like this? At least it's an easy way to get a colorful french if your nails are long enough!

Until next time!

Revisiting China Glaze Atlantis (Picture Heavy)

I finally got to try DV8, the first polish that really caught my eye in China Glaze's OMG collection. Amusingly enough, I acquired 5 other OMGs before this one, because blues and greens are not the easiest for me to wear with my skintone. DV8 is a beautiful aqua/teal color, and on me it tends to lean on the bluer side. As always, pictures are clickable.

With flash:

Artificial light:

Finally, a little sunlight!

Sorry for the weird angle, but you can see more of the holo goodness here. Also taken in sunlight.

It wasn't bad, but was a tad too blue, so I added two coats of China Glaze Atlantis to it, and I LOVE it now. Because Atlantis is a jelly, you can still see a little of DV8's dimension through it. If I had layered it over a creme, I think it would have lost more of its depth.

Using my light box:

With flash:

Isn't it pretty?

I really love how these layered together. DV8's holo makes a fantastic base for Atlantis.

Until next time!

Still More Giveaways, and Weekend Glitters!

I know all (11!!!) of you are probably tired of hearing about all the giveaways going around, so I'll be brief. These are just too neat for me to pass by. If you aren't interested, feel free to scroll down to the mani pics. :)

painted Lady Fingers is having another great giveaway! This giveaway is for four hard to find polishes (including China Glaze Crystal Ball) and full sized bottles of Skin MD, in regular and spf.

This ends on April 10th. More details can be found here.

Nailstah is having her first giveaway! Hello Kitty, China Glaze, and more! Check it out here. This ends on April 12.

Laura at Sawan is having a (really) huge and terribly exciting giveaway! From lacquer to files to fun accessories, this one's got it all! Check out all the goodies you could win here. This ends on the 30th of April.

This is the manicure I was going to do this weekend, but I chickened out and chose something else instead. I took pictures of this because I thought it was fun, anyway.

To prevent visible nail line, I used Sinful Mint Apple (thumb, middle, and pinky) and OPI DS Extravagance (index and ring) as a base. Then I followed with three coats of China Glaze Atlantis over Mint Apple and one coat of Island Girl Island Sunset over Extravagance. Next time I think I'll use a darker base for Atlantis to give it more depth.

This one came out a bit blurry, but I thought it was a better shot of the sparkly glitter:

Until next time!

Typhoon

I did a mani with Sinful Colors What's Your Name and China Glaze Millennium. Unfortunately, the über-amazing blue/purple shimmer in the Sinful is much more subtle on the nail. I could still see the colors when it was in bright light, which was good enough for me. :) Other than that it was a deep navy erring on black. All the better to make the silver konad show up, right?

Here it is in the bottle. So pretty! And gets Lynyrd Skynyrd stuck in my head.

Sorry about the wear on these. I didn't take pictures until a couple days later. Still, two/three days and this is how they look? Not bad, right? Right? I was going for storm clouds and rain, so I used Konad plates m8 (for the rain) and m56 (for the clouds).

Pre-New Year Mani

Hello! I'm Aquajogger, the other blogger here with my first post, another set of Chinese New Year nails. I actually did these the week before New Year, so they're not as fancy but they were fun to look at anyway.

This was actually my third try. I had found a bottle of Island Girl Yellow Out that I had never used, so I decided to give it a try as a base coat--not doing that again. An hour or so later, all my polish had come off in big nail-sized pieces. I tried again with a regular base coat, but I guess I didn't wash off all the residue properly (or two coats of Nubar Sugar made it too thick) because the same thing happened again. I finally got pictures of the finished product the next day on my third go at it.

1) Island Girl "Nail Stregthener"

2) OPI Conquistadorable Color (two coats)

3) Nubar Sugar (one coat)

4) Jordana Black (stamping)

5) Zoya Armor

Konad Plate: m8

Hope to post later with our haul from shopping on the 14th! :)