Happy Fourth of July!

Here's what I did for the 4th of July (independence day for us in the states). I'm not hugely patriotic but I love opportunities for outlandish nail art! I tried to make each nail different but still fit with the general theme. Sorry my hands look so weird in this picture...they were impromptu pictures and my index fingers started chipping before I could take more. :( these were taken pre-cleanup.

Left:





Right:






Thanks for looking,

Until next time!

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!

Flying Dragon Konadicure

Just a quick post. This is the darker version of China Glaze Flying Dragon. It has neon pigments so it dries matte, but it is more of a dark purple than a bright neon.

More Claire's color changing polish!

I had so much fun the first time I wore Claire's Earthy/Happy, I decided to wear it again over the summer. I stamped some cute konad flowers on it, and then the whole thing reminded me of 70's bedsheets or curtains! Haha!

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Flash:

In a lot of lightings, for some reason, it looked almost exactly like my picture without flash. Kind of weird-swampy. I'm not sure why that happened this time, but in bright light it looked the way I remembered, all neon and happy. :) I forgot that I had said last time that I wouldn't put topcoat on it if I did it again, whoops. That really ate some of the brightness of this fun polish. Maybe third time's the charm?

Halloween Nails 2010

Happy belated Halloween! ♥

My actual Halloween nails weren't that spooky, but this is what I was wearing a few weeks earlier. Orly Glamrock stamped with silver and black bats on my right hand and silver spiders on black webs on my left! Pretty terrifying, am I right? I put a top coat on it to make it shiny, although Glamrock looks amazing matte as well. It took two coats to be totally opaque. The problem lay in the fauxnading (the konad spider was fine), or maybe the Wet n' Wild black. The spider webs in particular were a real pain to get on my nails.

Maybe because the stamping was such a hassle, the sun decided to cooperate with the pictures:

Way to set the atmosphere! That one sunbeam falling through my window onto the desk sure knew what it was doing! Unfortunately, my camera's pretty much dead, so I had to use a phone for these and didn't realize until later that I only had one good picture of my left hand.

Color Club Volt of Light

Sorry for the lack of posts recently; LacuqerMuse and I were busy with the end of term and moving out. Hopefully we'll be back in the swing of things soon! :)

I ordered a bottle of Color Club Volt of Light because I was really feeling the neons and this one looked extra bright. And it really is! It's like I colored my nails with highlighter! All of the neons in this series have an interesting blue flash in the color that makes them seem even more intensely neon.

I stamped on top of it with Konad plate m65 (I just realized I forgot to say what plate I used in my previous post! How embarrassing!) because the color was a little overwhelming for me when I first put it on and used Color Club Vivid topcoat. I really like Vivid. It really keeps the colors popping and gets nice and shiny. ♥

Flash:

No flash:

You can see a little more of the blue flash I mentioned in the picture without flash, but the first one really shows how bright this polish is! I considered putting stripes on this color but decided against it when it was pointed out to me that it would look so much like a yellow jacket. There were some buzzing around on campus and I didn't want to attract that kind of attention...

A Week of Orlys! ORLY Iron Butterfly

Interrupting the chain of spring colors is the matte black with silver glitter ORLY Iron Butterfly! I guess butterflies are spring-y, though, so it's still keeping with the theme in that way...

No flash:

I stamped butterflies from Konad plate m78 with China Glaze Millennium. These pictures are actually taken after a day of wear, so the finish is more satin than matte. I didn't think it would change so quickly! Originally this did look very matte. Iron Butterfly went on very smooth and opaque--I think this is only two coats. I might have done three on a couple fingers to even out some patches, but if you have better application than I do that really wouldn't be a problem.

I hadn't tried any ORLYs before this and hadn't used mattes in a while, so this was very fun for me. I was considering ORLY goth as well, but am glad I chose Iron Butterfly. The polishes in that series look very rich for metals to me. They really have depth to them. I think the flash picture especially hints at that. It would be more visible if I had put a shiny topcoat on, but even when it was very matte it was very interesting to look at.

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Flash:

The reason I did this mani was because a friend of mine wanted a bunch of us to dress up "sexy" when we went out to get sushi to celebrate the end of school/his birthday. Fortunately we had just ordered some polishes and this one arrived in the mail just in time. :)

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 Lemonade

Welcome to day five of A Week of Orlys! This is Orly lemonade, with Essie Tart Deco sponged on the tips and konaded with some tropical flowers (plate m57). I didn't know what to do with Orly Lemonade at first. I think it might have been my first yellow nail polish ever, haha.

I was so surprised at how much I liked this. I was just experimenting, as I haven't really done much sponging, but I think it turned out great! I prefer sponging to french tips, and I've been trying to get better at gradient manicures, so I think this was a lovely success.

This was a lot of fun, because it was totally out of my element. I never wear orange or yellow, even in nail polish, so at first I didn't know what to think about this. But I loved it! It was so fun, summery and clean, I felt like I should be sitting on the beach in Hawaii!

Just for fun, I thought an action shot would be neat. I love how well the colors match! This is my favorite of Hawaiian Sun juice.

What do you think? Are there colors you usually avoid but have begun to enjoy?

Until next time!

A Week of Orlys! Orly Lollipop

I was really excited about Orly Lollipop, because I was looking for a lovely delicate purple. Lollipop unfortunately doesn't really work with my skin as well as I would have liked. I have one picture bare, but I think it looked worse in real life.

I remedied the situation by stamping over Lollipop with Borghese Carnevale Grape. Carnevale Grape is a purple cream polish that unfortunately becomes a brownish purple color so dark it is almost black. It was a real disappointment for me. But look at what a beautiful color it stamps! Now it is my go-to purple color for konad.

This is one of the few times I was very resistant to changing my nails. At first I thought it was really busy and almost garish, but since I did it before bed I didn't want to do it again. I was going to change in in the morning, but I left it on since I was short on time, and I'm glad I did! I totally fell in love with this look and was reluctant to take it off!

I got many compliments on this color. It is so striking and playful! I think the soft purple of Lollipop keeps it fresh and clean looking.

Until next time!

A Week of Orlys! Orly Gumdrop

The rest of this week will be showcasing Orly Sweet Collection, their spring collection for this year. Since these colors have already been out for several months I won't be doing swatches of them so much as what I did to give these interesting colors a little more interest. I will show them in the order I wore them.

Orly Gumdrop is a beautiful Tiffany Blue. I've heard it is a near-dupe to China Glaze For Audrey, but I haven't been able to compare them myself.

I stamped pink roses using OPI Suzi Sells Sushi By The Sea Shore and Konad m76 for the design. I topped it all with a coat of Sinful Pearl Harbor for a delicate sparkly effect.

The style of the roses and reminds me a bit of La Belle et La Bête / Beauty and the Beast.

Until next time!

Rainbow Nails!

Hello! I'm really excited to show you these pictures! During spring break, Lacquermuse and I walked to all sorts of places where we thought we might find nail polish. (Fear the determination of us car-less students!) One of these places was a Ross, where we found a set of Color Club Poptastic. :) I used them right away, but couldn't settle on a single color so I decided to use five of the seven. Check it out~

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Flash:

From left to right this is: Color Club Poptastic, Pucci-licious, Almost Famous, Twiggie, Chelsea Girl Blue

The flash picture is much better, I think, but they're both pretty true to color. The other colors in the set were Warhol and Wham! Pow!, a bright magenta-y pink and a neon orange. I actually like both of them best (although I'm also really fond of Almost Famous), but they were too neon and didn't go with the rest of them as well. ...Chelsea Girl kind of sticks out too, but I stuck it on my pinky so it didn't bother me so much.

I got a bunch of compliments on my nails when I wore this. On the first day I had them painted this way we rode the train to Portland and both ways someone asked about them. ^^

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Flash:

I had a lot of fun deciding what animals to stamp on what color. It's a zoo! I ended up putting bunnies on pink because they had hearts, cats on purple because... they just looked like they would like that..., chicks on yellow, pandas on green for the bamboo, and dogs/sheep on blue because that was the animal design I liked next best, lol.

I actually really like those chicks. I was so sad to see them go. But then I stamped them on my toes twice in a row. They're just so cute. They say "pi"...!

Sakura

This is a mani I did a few weeks ago in anticipation of the cherry blossoms that show up in spring all around my campus. :) I used Sinful Colors Dancing Nails and stamped plate s9 with Island Girl Pineapple Plantation. Pineapple Plantation is a really nice white for stamping with. I wouldn't want to paint my nails with it, since it looks really stark and chalky, but it's quite thick and is easily picked up by the stamper.

Flash:

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You'll have to enlarge the pictures to see, but I also put a layer of Nfu.Oh 38 on top of Dancing Nails before stamping. The effect was pretty subtle. I didn't want to put too many layers and make the surface rough. I enjoyed wearing this, even if I wish the pink would have come out a little warmer and less metallic. I originally bought it to stamp with, but the formula wasn't thick enough... :( This plate is one of my favorites, though, so I liked having it on my nails anyway!

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.

Painting the Roses...Red?

Here's another Borghese. This is Borghese Red, a bright tomato-red creme. Formula was great on this one, I did two coats here but one was completely opaque and sufficient. The pictures without flash made me look incredibly jaundiced, so I chose not to scare you with them. :P

I used Konad plate m65 for the roses. They remind me of ladybugs from farther away, though. Either way, it was a lot of fun!

Until next time!

Quick R&J Post + Giveaway

I apologize for the lack of posts, this week has been a really busy one. I'm hoping to get the Orly Sweet collection by the end of the week, so that's something to look forward to, anyway.

This is an old one from the vault, if you will. As a lover of Shakespeare, I just had to try out OPI Romeo & Joliet (I believe this was from the Route 66 collection?). It's a rich burgundy brown frost. I think this was three coats. To maximize the tragicness of R&J, I added a black rose with Konad plate m 54. I don't think it's quite this red in person, but it's pretty close. R&J is a pretty color. It's not one I usually wear, but great for fall.

It's really late, but if any of you are interested, Crystaliciousss is having a fun giveaway for spring. It ends tomorrow, the 7th of April, so hurry and enter! Check out the prize:

Find more details here.

Until next time!