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!

Strawberry Fields

Okay, so I have these two ancient Old Navy minis, and I'm trying to find a dupe for the pink one. I got Strawberry Fields thinking it might match it and it doesn't really, but it's still a pretty color. It's brighter and a little cooler than my mini, but I liked wearing it anyway. It's a very princess-y sort of pink, so I put little crown stickers on it.

Flash:

Natural Light:

This is three coats that applied pretty normally. Nothing unexpected for better or worse. Wear time was pretty average on this too--I think it got four days with minor chipping.

Also, I'm really sorry about the delay again! :( Both Lacquermuse and I started work this week and things have been really chaotic in the personal as well as job worlds.

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!

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~

No flash:

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. ^^

No flash:

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"...!

China Glaze TTYL

Hello again! It was nice and sunny when I did my nails for these pictures, so I wanted to use polish that could take advantage of that! I decided to try China Glaze TTYL since I hadn't used it yet but love the collection and layer Nfu Oh 38 on top of it. I was worried that since TTYL is so linear and subtle (compared to some of the other ones in the OMG collection) it would get eaten by the flakies. For a while when it was drying I thought that it really would just vanish, but fortunately I was wrong! Check it out~

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Flash:

I think putting the Nfu Oh on top did change the base color a bit, which I didn't really like. Well, not change it so much (you can see it looks very much like the bottle color), but dull it a little. It had more intense color and holo before I put the flakies on. But hey. Flakies! ♥

The funny thing about wearing this was that depending on the light and the angle, I would either see strong holo or strong flakes. Dim lighting tended to bring out the Nfu Oh, but it also grayed out TTYL a little. I think next time I wear this color, I'll let it speak for itself.

I also put little pink flower rhinestones on my thumbs, just for fun. This was several weeks ago, but funnily I still know where both of them are. One of them fell into the drawer with all the nail polish when I was taking it off, and I found the other in my jacket pocket on Friday. They're following me!

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:

No flash:

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!

Essie Pop-Art Pink

I tried Essie for the first time. :)

I wanted to try a jelly, so I used Essie Pop-Art Pink, but it came off as more of a pastel cream. That might have been my fault, though, since I probably should have stopped at three coats instead of putting on a fourth. I applied it in kind of a rush, though, so it was streaky and I wanted to even it out. I think someone who was more careful than me could get this to a really pretty light pink semi-jelly.

I thought it needed a little something extra, so I put a coat of China Glaze Treasure Chest on top.

Flash:

No flash:

Lacquermuse told me it looked like cupcakes at a five-year-old's birthday party! I think she's right! ♥

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!

The Little-Known Zoya Kaitlyn

Happy Girl's Day! Today I thought I would show you a rather rare (but not discontinued!) polish. I have never seen a swatch or reference to Zoya Kaitlyn. She just isn't very popular in the nail blogging world, it seems. Kaitlyn is an older Zoya, with no listed collection. Zoya ranks her as a sheer, with a 2/5 in opacity. They also list her as a cool-toned pink, but I think she's pretty neutral. Now, with my history of picking poor polishes, I like to see several swatches before I make my decisions. But Kaitlyn is my first name, spelling and all, so I was drawn to this polish. Because I take my pictures when I get home at night, they are all done under artificial light. The last one was taken with added flash.

Zoya Kaitlyn is a milky pink sheer. This is shown with four or five coats, because it was streaky the first time I wore it. However, I have swatched it since then with minimal difficulties, so I blame application at least partially. I believe this is designed to be a base for a french manicure, but I've never mastered those, so I wore it as is. The sheer color made my nails look very long, almost as if I were wearing artificial ones.

Because of the amount of coats I used to build up the color, I did not want to risk stamping with konad. My nails did look rather bare, though, so I decorated with some cherry blossoms from Konad's 3D stickers. I don't know if these have a number or not, but this particular sheet has pink and blue sakura on it. I used a yellow-out basecoat (the same that Aquajogger has already blogged about) that is notorious for chipping, and that plus the four+ coats is why I had to change my polish after only a couple days.

I never wear sheers because I have some staining lurking beneath all those layers of lacquer, but I quite enjoy Kaitlyn. It was certainly different for me, but I felt so chic. I'm sure I'll wear this again later in spring or even summer.

Until next time! <3

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! :)