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

Expect Greytness or From Drab to Fab

Yeah, I'm on a roll with the cheesy titles XD

Ahem. Anyway, today I've got a bit of layering fun to show you. I started off with two coats of L'Oreal Greyt Expectations, a mauve-ish grey creme:

Then I used a makeup sponge to create a gradient with Milani Hi-Tech:

And topped with two coats of Nail-Venturous Rustic Remains:

I really wasn't feeling the balance of this though as I felt I had brought the gradient a bit too far up my nails. I needed something else to complement the middle-warm tones of Greyt Expectations but I wanted to keep with the texture of the holo/flakie polishes on top. So I freehanded a line along the edge of my nails with OPI DS Opulence:

The last photo comes closest to capturing the incredible sparkle of this combination but even it fall far short of reality. I think I'm going to try Rustic Remains over DS Opulence next since we have a few sunny days in the forecast this week!

Party Nails

A couple weeks ago I got to do a set of party nails at school on one of my friends (her nails have been featured on this blog before, in the Holiday Nail Art post). Party nails are basically quickie acrylics using nail tips, nail glue, and the acrylic polymer powder.

For the ring fingers I used some tips meant for use with gel nails as an accent and filled the remaining area with the acrylic. The remaining nails got two coats of Milani Ruby Jewels with a coat of Wet n Wild Hallucinate on the ring fingers and thumbs. Also on the thumbs I stamped Wet n Wild Black Creme with Mash plate M-16.

Anyone else up for a set? :)

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.

More Holo

Ok, I'm going through a bit of sunlight withdrawal what with getting up before sunrise and getting home at sunset and not being able to get enough time with the sun to be able to get decent photos for my blog. Guess it's time to pull out some of the older mani's I didn't post about this summer. Namely those with holographic polish.

This time around I have a lovely example of creative layering. I was attempting to use Jesse's Girl Confetti, a lovely purple-blue glass fleck polish . . . also a very SHEER polish. After hardly any coverage with two coats I gave up and applied Milani Hi-Res, then another coat of Confetti (just to get that blue shimmer over the holo), and of course I topped it with Out the Door top coat (if you haven't figured it out yet, I use OTD over everything).

Natural light

Full sun

Full sun with water lilly

One of these days I will do a full swatch of JG Confetti, if only to see how many coats it takes to actually achieve full coverage with it.

Snakeskin Effect Mani

I've been wanting to try a snakeskin mani ever since I first heard of it months ago. I even found a piece of shed skin this spring that I've been saving. Unfortunately I haven't been able to afford a new, thick, top coat so until then I'll just have to go with the effect rather than the real thing. Luckily I was able to find some mesh fabric in my mother in law's scrap fabric drawer.


Having just bought some new polishes I decided to start with Sinful Colors Nirvana and then I sponged Nina Ultra Pro Mossy Britches over the top. I wanted a gradient effect but I think I went too far up the nail. Oh well! After that I painted Sinful Colors All About You over the top.

Then for each nail I applied Zoya Casey to the mesh and layed it over the nail, pressing down lightly with a makeup sponge. I then sponged Milani Bijou Bronze over the lines and realized that the lines didn't show through that very well so I repeated the mesh step then filled in some "scales" with the Milani and sponged a bit more of All About You over the top.


Yes, it turned out to be just as much of a hot mess as it sounds:

 Left hand

Right hand

I wasn't quite sure what I had done wrong. I had done the same thing on my practice nail tip and hadn't needed to do a second mesh application. I think it might have been because the base colors were still damp on the tip and I had no finger attached to the nail getting in the way.

See how well the practice tip turned out?

So after thinking the problem over for a day I thought I had finally figured out how to overcome my problems. I grabbed one of my classmates to practice on (not that she complained!) and went to work with a slightly different set of colors. I started with Nirvana again and then sponged Bijou Bronze and Mossy Britches over it lightly. Then I used Sinful Colors What's Your Name on the mesh, pressed the mesh lightly onto her nails with a sponge and sponged All About You over the top. It worked!

Just look at those beautiful, blinged out nails! I finally realized that the effect just doesn't work when you try to put the copper over the lines. Once I stopped trying to beat my head against a brick wall (metaphorically speaking) I was able to pull it all together for a perfect manicure <3

It's Franken Time!

A couple days ago I saw a picture where someone had layered green polish over copper and then buffed the green off in spots to expose the copper underneath for an oxidized copper look. It was really pretty and I really wanted to try it myself except that, when I looked through my green polishes, nothing I had was the right shade! Then I spied a half-empty bottle of old base coat. Eureka!

I scooped up the base coat and my green polishes and got ready for some experimenting. I didn't want to use up a lot of polish so I decided to use the original brushes to drip the polishes into the bottle of base coat. I used 5 drops of Petites Sea, 20 drops of Street Wear Hippy Dippy, 50 drops of Revlon Scented Beach and 10 drops of Revlon Aqua Blast.

.

I thought the drips of polish falling into the bottle looked really cool

I used Milani Bijou Bronze for the copper. Lovely application, smooth and opaque in two coats, but yesterday's weather was horrendously humid so I had a bunch of bubbles.

And here is my brand new franken: Oxidized Copper! It ended up a little more sheer than I wanted but that actually works to my advantage.

I then brushed my new franken over the copper in small patchy areas, varying the placement on each nail. I used about five coats to build up the color in my chosen areas, sometimes overlapping a bit to make it look more natural. With so many coats built up the oxidized copper does tend to bubble but that actually makes it look even more authentic oddly enough!

I took photos of both hands this time since I did different placements on every nail.

 Left hand.

Right hand.

Double Holo Goodness

I had never quite understood the whole holographic polish hype until I finally got two of the Milani holos. Now that I have them though I would never give them up. I seriously do not want to take this mani off, unfortunately I'll soon have to since it's starting to chip. But for now I'll enjoy my little personal rainbow while I write this post.

I started off with Milani Hi-Res and decided to try out a little trick that had been talked about over in the Polish-aholics Anonymous group on Facebook. I layered a top coat between two layers of the holo. It worked like a charm. I managed a couple days of wear with no chipping, even moving around set pieces and strapping someone into full plate armour and getting it off him again!

Hi-Res under artificial light.

Hi-Res with flash.

Hi-Res in full sunlight.

 After a couple days I was starting to think about ways to switch it up a bit without loosing the holo and then I came home to find my package containing a spectraflair holo top coat from the lovely Lori sitting on my laptop stand <3 

So I grabbed my bottle of Zoya Malia and free-handed a swipe across the tip of each nail, then I used a stripe of Barielle Lava Rock to demarcate the two.

Then I topped Malia with the SFTC:

Just look at that lovely rainbow action <3 I certainly am! I just can't stop staring at my own nails! And just in case you can't get enough of purple here's a photo I took of Malia herself back when I first got her:

And let's see that holo one more time . . . close-up!

Independence Day Mani

Ok, it is past time for me to do another polish post methinks. I bet you can guess what is coming . . . That's right, another 4th of July themed mani. After looking at all the manis being posted I had plenty of ideas but very little in the way of concrete plans. So first I got out the colors I was planning on using: Zoya Sooki, Sinful Colors Ciao Bella, New York Color French Tip White, Confetti Ice Ice Baby, and Milani 3D Holographic HD.

The first step was to get the base colors on. I decided to start with Sooki as a base with my ringer finger as an accent in the French Tip White. I did two coats of each and then topped my nails with Out the Door top coat . . . and neglected to do the white nails first. Big mistake. I ended up with pink streaks on my white nails.

That's when I decided how to use the Milani holo: over my accent nails to disguise the streaks!

Then I used my french tip guides (yes, I love those things, they are one of my must-have mani tools) and made little blue half moons, used my striper brush to add white dots for stars, and topped everything with a coat of Ice Ice Baby and another layer of top coat.

I really love how this turned out. You might notice I was very careful to get five stars on each nail. If you add them up on both hands you get 50 stars, the same as the number of states in the US of A :D I considered doing the 13 stripes but figured that might be going overboard just a tiny bit.