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 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!

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!

A Week of Orlys! Orly Bon Bon + OPI Significant Other Color

Welcome to a week of Orlys! For the next seven days I'll be showing Orly Bon Bon and the Orly Sweet Collection.

I've been looking for a lovely light purple for a while now, but I haven't yet stumbled upon my perfect one. I've heard that Bon Bon is hard to wear, but I found it to be sheer, milky, and delicate. It definitely wasn't as unflattering on me as Orly Lollipop (which I will show you soon).

It did take longer to dry, as I think Orly polishes tend to, and because it was watery I did have some pooling around my cuticles. Unfortunately I did get some small dents hours after topping it with Seche Vite. I love the soft, squishy look it has, though. A lovely look for early spring, especially.

The other thing I felt was noteworthy was that this polish is ridiculously shiny! You know the shine polish has when it's freshly painted and extremely wet? Bon Bon keeps that same shine. I'd say the shine from it is comparable with that from my Seche Vite or Diamont topcoats, if not more so.

I wanted to do something to spice it up a little, but I couldn't decide what. I finally added two coats of OPI Significant Other Color to it, and it was completely transformed. The OPI is usually very sheer, too sheer for me to wear on its own because of the stains on my nails. However, over Bon Bon it became opaque and quite pretty. I am not usually drawn to this sort of finish, but I love the soft delicate purple so it was a fun experiment.

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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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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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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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!

Chinese Dragons

Happy May, everyone! This is a mani I did over spring break back in March. I really liked it and had a hard time convincing myself to take it off later even though I felt like it was time for a change.

I used Borghese Stellare Notte with Nfu Oh 38 layered on top. I really like the flaky look and I wanted to try and do something that would look like scales. Dragon scales! ♥

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Chinese Imperial dragons have five claws and carry a pearl, so I stuck on a little white "pearl" on my index fingers.

I really liked the way this looked different in different lights/angles. Stellare Notte is really quite beautiful! You can see in some of these pictures that it looks purple, while in others it looks green. I've heard it described as looking like a beetle, and that seems about right. It's a duochrome, but it's not as smooth a transition as the Nubars are. More grainy, but in a good way. It's very fun to play with and was a nice contrast to the warm-tone flakies.

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