Spring Cherry Blossoms

Wow! I really thought that I'd be able to get up a blog post before I left for the Future Pro Expo trade show/competition on Saturday but I kinda procrastinated on packing and the Friday just flew by. Well I've finally recovered, mostly, from the crazy-fun-awesome weekend. Enough to write a blog post anyway. I think this will make up for my absence . . . and if it doesn't I'll just have to come up with something else.

I had been considering cherry blossoms for a couple weeks before I finally did this manicure. I was thinking it had been a while since I'd last done them, then I saw a couple posts on Facebook about cherry blossom nail art, then my husband did a couple paintings of cherry trees in full blossom. I officially had cherry blossoms on the brain.

This time I decided to go with a more traditional background color and picked Sinful Colors Cinderella as my base color.

I then used Zoya Angelina and a small brush to create branches.

I then layered L'Oreal How Romantic, Revlon Just Tinted Desire, and Rimmel London Burgundy Flirt to create the flowers. For the leaves I used Zoya Yara.

 Right hand

Left hand

This mani took me two and a half hours just for the nail art and after all that I think I still like my first cherry blossoms from last year better. I got lots of compliments though.


And don't forget to enter my 1 year anniversary giveaway!

It's been 1 year already!

I can hardly believe it's been one year since I started my little blog here. I admit, when I first started I hadn't meant for this to turn into polish, polish and more polish. I'd meant to post more about my gardening and jam-making but then I started cosmetology school and had hardly any time for anything else, I was lucky to be able to squeeze blog posts in on the weekends and at least I could take photos of my nails at school. So everything else got bumped out of the picture last year, perhaps it'll make a debut this year instead.

But for now I have a nice little giveaway to celebrate the occasion! Yeah, I thought you'd like that ;) The current prizes available are: Sinful Colors Cinderella, Milani Neon Awesome Orange, Rimmel London 60 Seconds Magnetise, Maybelline Express Finish Coral Glaze, Wet n Wild For-Bitten Love, Sally Girl 812112, and Sally Girl 812054.

I will also include a bottle of my newest Pixie Paints franken: Dragonfly. I loved this so much I made two bottles, one to keep for myself and one just for the winner of this giveaway.

All together that's six full-sized bottles of polish and two minis! All of this is going to one lucky winner! Will it be you? Why don't you enter and find out!

Rules: Open to residents of the US 18 years and older. Any information provided by the entrant will only be used to contact them in the case that they are the winner. This giveaway ends 12:01am EST June 1st. Winner will be contacted by email after the giveaway ends and must reply within 48 hours or a new winner will be drawn.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Frankens: Good enough to swap

So in my last post I mentioned two frankens that I made and swapped for two polishes from Amy over at I'm Feeling Nail-Venturous. Well here I am to tell you all about them!

First up is Make a Scene, a bright orange with copper and holo glitter. To make this polish I used Sinful Colors Pinky Glitter, All About You, Serena and Chloe, Pure Ice Hot Tamale, and Supernail glitter in Sunset & Silver Rush. This is actually the first bright orange that I've made. I had been trying to think of a color that was different from all other frankens I had done and realized that orange was not on my list yet. Considering my love for the color I just had to rectify that oversight!

This is two coats of Make a Scene with one coat of OTD top coat.

I just happened to be wearing this when I finally bought OPI A Roll in the Hague and just had to use it. So I did a diagonal tip with Rill in the Hague with a line of Pure Ice Jaguar to delineate the two orange polishes.

And if you think it can't get any better than that wait until you see the next polish! Prestidigitation is a gorgeous (if I do say so myself) purple jelly polish absolutely PACKED with iridescent and holo glitter. I lost count of the number of facebook notifications I got just after posting some of the following photos in one of the Facebook groups I'm in. The following photos show three coats of Prestidigitation and two coats of OTD top coat. Yeah, it's a bit of a hungry glitter and a pain to get off but oh so worth it!

Taken with flash

Close-up 

Full sun

Full sun

You better be clicking those photos to get the full effect because if you don't you are really missing out! To get such a glitter-packed polish I used Sinful Colors Pinky Glitter, SH HD Laser, WnW Blue Wants to be a Millionaire, and China Glaze Flying Dragon (finally, a good use for Flying Dragon!).

Luckily the ingredients for both of these polishes are still readily available so I was able to make a second set to send to Amy and keep the originals for myself ;)

Random Swatch Spam

I've had a bunch of swatches building up in the folder I have for blog photos so I think it would be a great time to post some of them so I can clean out the folder a bit. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the order of any of these.

 China Glaze Solar Power

Zoya Kate, artificial light

Sinful Colors Mercury Rising

Essie Sexy Divide, shade and sun

My product/polish haul for the week-ish

First off, many apologies for the lack of posts recently! It seems that every time I turn around there's something new that has to be done and things like updating my blog end up taking a backseat. So to catch up a bit I'm doing this quick post while trying to get my daughter back to sleep >.>

This is basically a "Huzzah for tax returns!" post. My husband got some fancy electronics to use for theater gigs, I splurged on beauty products and clothes. I have to wear solid black and/or white during the week at school so most of the clothes I got are black. How ironic that I've spent the last five years trying to get rid of some black and get more color in my wardrobe :P

On to the polish! These are all the polishes I've bought over the last just-over-a-week. Top row: Sally Hansen Fairy Teal; Essie Mod Square, It's Genius, Power Clutch, Raise Awareness, Tea & Crumpets; Revlon Matte Suede Powder Puff; OPI mini NLP1311056 (no idea on color name, mayhaps Skull & Glossbones? ). Bottom row: Nutra Nail smudge repair, OPI A Roll in the Hague, Sinful Colors Cinderella, L'Oreal L'orange, Savvy FC Totally Teal, Rimmel London Burgundy Flirt. And the cloth is my new scarf.

A couple of the Essies have been on my wishlist since early last year (It's Genius and Tea & Crumpets) and I am so happy to finally have them in my hot little hands along with A Roll in the Hague! I also got some nail mail today in the form of Rustic Remains and Man-maid Dreams from Amy at I'm Feeling Nail-Venturous! 

 And of course I had to get more than just polish, my hair and skin need some pampering too. Top row: Rockaholic texturizing spray, Kenzia argan oil, Soraya makeup removing cleansing milk. Bottom row: orange blossom hand soap, StraightSexy flat iron spray (freebie from Cosmoprof), WnW lipsticks in Mocha-licious and Vamp it Up, concealer stick, Rusk strong hold hairspray.

  And yes, I chose the hand soap mostly on the merits of the label.

So much for a quick post! LOL! My daughter is long since back in bed asleep and I should be too! I look forward to showing you more photos of the polishes in future posts!

Team Dyan Manicure

Hooray for snow days! That means I get to post this mani a day earlier than I was originally planning :D I'm especially happy because this mani is in honor of a very special young lady named Dyan. Late last year Dyan had a serious medical emergency but every day she is getting better and stronger. Her and her mother have an incredible determination to overcome the obstacles that have been placed before them that I have found very inspiring. And so, when a group of polish lovers, bloggers and non-bloggers alike, came up with the idea of doing special manis in honor of her I immediately started brainstorming ideas.

When I found out that Dyan loves the color blue I decided this would be the perfect opportunity to use my bottle of Sinful Colors Ciao Bella that I bought for my 4th of July mani last year. This is two coats, no top coat:

Please excuse my lack of cleanup here, there's a bit of layering to come yet.

I love this shade of blue but I'm not sure it really works well on me so I grabbed my bottle of Liquid Euphoria Euphoric and layered one coat over Ciao Bella:

Unfortunately my camera just couldn't capture the true beauty of this polish. Such a magnificent blue/green/teal shift! Next I created a gradient with Jesse's Girl Glee:

At certain angles you couldn't even tell the difference between the areas with the gradient and those without but I managed to get a photo at the right angle to see it. At this point I finally put a topcoat on so I could start with the stamping. I used one of my newest frankens, Orchid Wine, to stamp with Mash plate M-25, then I layered Mash plate M23 over it with OPI DS Classic.

Best shot of the DS Classic stamping I could get

I love how the final results of this mani turned out and I hope Dyan likes it as well. May you have a swift road to recovery, Dyan!

In case you haven't seen them, here are a few more Team Dyan manis:

On Pretty and Polished

On Rebecca Likes Nails

On Sonoma Nail Art

On Polish Ninja

On Dressed up Digits

On Good Lack, Nail!

When you can't find the sun . . .

. . . Paint sunshine on your nails! Well, that was the idea anyway. So I got out my bottle of China Glaze Sun Worshiper . . . and three coats later I still had VNL! D: Either this polish is not representative of most neons or I must be spoiled by Zoya's neons which cover to opacity in just two coats. Still, I love the color itself.

So, rather that just continue to layer coats on until it reached opacity I decided to layer something else on top. I chose Sinful Colors Serena & Chloe. Here's two coats over Sun Worshiper:

I loved the contrast of this with my sugar dish from my tea set!

And since I'm still experimenting with all the flakies I got I decided to layer Finger Paints Asylum on top:

Not content with that I decided to try some nail art but I had no idea what to do. This was before my stamper arrived so I couldn't use my plates at this point. I should have known better and just let it be. But no, I couldn't do the smart thing. So I grabbed Zoya Harmonie and managed to totally flub everything.

I know, most of you will probably actually like it, but it just wasn't what I was picturing in my mind. I really should learn to have a concrete plan before going ahead with these things.

Oh, by the by, I have started up a Facebook page for my blog! I haven't figured out how to get a button for it in my sidebar yet though so until then here's the link: Painted Pixies on Facebook. Hope to see you over there!

Belated Holiday Nail Art

I was just now looking through my unposted photo stash and realized that I never posted my Christmas or New Year manis! Shame on me! So I'm posting them now. Better late than never . . . right?

First up is a mani I did for a friend at school. I used Milani Ruby Jewels and Pure Ice Peach Sorbet:

Next is the mani I did the week before Christmas. The base is Zoya Sooki with a coat of Milani Ruby Jewels. The stripes are China Glaze It's Alive and Sinful Colors This is It and the "snowflakes" are NYC French Tip White. I think the glitter on top is Wet n Wild Hallucinate.

And last but not least, my New Year mani. The base color is Borghese Stellare Notte with one coat of Finger Paints Motley, Wet n Wild Blue Wants to be a Millionaire sponged on the tips, and a second layer of Motley on top.

Winterberry and Flakies

Ok, so last week I posted about the new Sally Hansen Diamond Strength polish bottles. At the end I posted a pic of the SH flakie I picked up along with Sinful Colors Winterberry. I had lots of fun playing with the combo last week, especially since I picked up two of the new Essie Luxeffects colors: Shine of the Times and As Gold as it Gets! My flakie collection is now up to four if you count the Revlon Scented Orange Fizz polish I got this summer.

My new flakies!

Sinful Colors Winterberry; two coats

Winterberry with one coat of SH Glass Slipper

Plus one coat of Essie Shine of the Times, artificial light

In shade

Full sun

Blurred to see the sparkle better

And of course I couldn't leave it at that so I put black tips on with Sinful Colors Black on Black:

Then covered the whole thing with another coat of Shine of the Times:

I'm really looking forward to experimenting more with my new flakies :D

Hoot Owl

I can't believe I'm only now getting around to posting this one. I bought this polish on my birthday and it's taken me this long to use it, get photos and post them. Well without further delay I give you L'Oreal Owl's Night:

This is two coats of Owl's Night and one coat of OTD top coat in full sun. I almost didn't need two coats actually but since I'm far from being perfect I decided two coats would be better. I'll admit it now, I am a complete sucker for almost any polish with a gold shimmer/sparkle/what-have-you so this one was a definite must have. I love the color, I love the application, I love this polish <3

Only one thing can make a good polish better and that is nail art! Since I really liked the earthy tone of this color I decided to stick to something subtle so I taped off my nails and put a stripe of Sinful Colors This is It down the middle.

It was perhaps a bit too subtle. So for a bit more definition I used China Glaze Midtown Magic to put a thin stripe on either side of the first stripe. MUCH better!

I just might have to do this mani again sometime :D