Pink Swoop Gradient

I was sent to pink polishes to review from the Warm Tea Series from Born Pretty. These are very small bottles of quite potent stamping polish. I do wish I had been given two different color families, but theses ones gradiented together well! I wanted to test them over a dark base to prove that they, especially the lighter pink, would work. Voila!

Of course, in retrospect, it might have been a better test of their ability to not put them over something quite so glittery, but I have to admit the effect in the sun was dazzling! This has also convinced me that at some point I really do need to go out and buy some more dedicated stamping polishes. My regular cremes would never be able to do this!

Colors:
~ Purple holo: Emily de Molly – State of Mind
~ Light pink: Born Pretty – Warm Tea, Cherry Blossoms
~ Dark pink: Born Pretty – Warm Tea, Crimson Cheeks
~ Stamp: EdM – 21

Hope you enjoyed! If you want to pick up either the lighter pink or the darker pink stamping polish you can find them here for $1.99 each. That said, keep in mind that these are very small polish bottles, only 6ml!

Abstract Minimalism

You guys, I don’t know what this is. Born Pretty Store sent me an un-asked for plate to review…and it is a mix of weird abstract flowers/animals, funky cats, and nude people?! I can’t wear naked people on my nails to work! Artistic it might be but appropriate it is NOT. So, I grabbed the only three images on the plate that I could even imagine what to do with, and googled “minimalist rose”. The very first hit is the rose on my middle finger – I think Born Pretty did the same thing and just turned it into a stamp! Anyway. All the google images were white-on-black so I just decided to reverse that idea and leave it alone. This plate was, at least, very well stamped. Even the tiny dots transferred perfectly onto my pointer finger!

Of course, I can’t make a mix-and-match with only three images. So I used two of the scribble images from a different plate (my ring finger and thumb) in an attempt to tie this all together. All in all I do not love this manicure. My style tends towards the orange and colorful. However, it gave me a chance to use this black glitter…I don’t think I have touched this polish in 3 years! And it still works perfectly. Score one for Sinful Colors 🙂

Colors:
~ Black glitter: Sinful Colors – Secret Admirer
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps: Born Pretty – Artist L004, Lina – Make Your Mark 02

If you want to see what you can do with some artistic minimalism/naked people, Artist L004 is available at the Born Pretty Store for $3.99. Good luck?

Shimmer Lace with Subtle Multichrome Accents

That is one hell of a title. But I couldn’t think of a better one! We have a pastel nude shimmery base (which is quite pretty), some lace, and then some awesome accents in a pastel multichrome and silver holo glitter. I honestly kind of love this manicure!

The base is two coats of Anthos by Sayuri, one of the monthly offerings (I cannot remember if this is from PPU or one of the other monthly polish groups). Anthos is a pastel pink that leans mauve, which is just filled with scattered holo, some tiny red glitters, and lots of translucent orange/pink flakie shards. The fact that it covers in just two coats is icing on the cake. This is a beautiful subtle sparkly polish, perfect for work! (Adding a bunch of glitter is less work-appropriate, but no one has complained in months).

Colors:
~ Nude shimmer holo: Sayuri – Anthos
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink pastel multichrome: POP Polish – Watermellon Bubbleslick
~ Silver holo: FUN Lacquer – 24 Karat Diamond
~ Stamp: BP – L084

For whatever reason, I just wanted to use one of the pastel slicks from POP Polish. It worked surprisingly well! Of course, Emily de Molly has made a surprisingly similar polish at this point so now I need to buy that and compare the two. I am getting off track, but so be it! Regardless, I hope you enjoyed it :-p

Medusa

This manicure was inspired by a stamping plate. I was sent plate Artist L005 to review from the Born Pretty store, and it is a weird plate! Typically Born Pretty lets me chose my own items to review, but this round they sent plates unprompted. And what they sent me was NOT my typical style! This plate has a lot of odd semi-people (bodies with plants as heads, tears, barbed wire…) honestly, very little that I would chose to wear and almost nothing that I think would be appropriate to wear to the hospital! And then I found Medusa.

I have been wanting to do a Medusa-inspired manicure for years. I adore Greek mythology, but faces are incredibly difficult! This face works beautifully. The plate is perfectly etched and every detail picked up nicely (I do wish I liked the patterns more!), making it quite easy to make an advanced stamping decal. The other snake patterns came from other plates, and honestly don’t pick up as well! Go figure.

Colors:
~ Green shimmer: Great Lakes – O R’lyeh?
~ Gold glitter: ILNP – Sparks May Fly
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Nude: CND – Cashmere Wrap
~ Stamps: Born Pretty – Artist L005, Whats Up Nails – B025, Moyra – 32 Nature

I spent longer than I strictly needed to picking what base to use as the background for Medusa’s face. The green was an easy pick, I adore R’lyeh! If you want to challenge yourself to figure out what on earth to do with this stamping plate, you can find it for $3.99 here. Enjoy!

Lined Up Rainbow

Rainbow color time! I was in the process of re-creating one of my favorite manicures of all time (which will be posted separately later) and I decided to take photos at this stage before the whole thing was done.

In retrospect, the pink and red were too close to each other in color, and the dark pink was too dark! I have always liked blues and greens more than most other parts of the color spectrum, so I am a bit sad that my of my nails tend pink/orange/red! That said, it was still fun to do :-p

Colors:
~ Pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Red: Zoya – Sookie
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Teal: Zoya – Cecilia
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Indigo: Zoya – Danielle
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Dark pink: Zoya – Ciara

Hope you enjoyed ALL the colors! Stay tuned (at some point) or the completed manicure 🙂

Nude and White Splatter

This one is…interesting? I don’t honestly know where I was going with it, but I wanted rose-gold-on-nude and some splotches of white. I guess I achieved that? Regardless, it was somewhere between subtle and fun, which works! The stamps are from two different plates but they worked pretty well together.

Colors:
~ Nude shimmer: Picture Polish – Cherish
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps: EdM – 03, Lina – Make Your Mark 02

Short and sweet! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Glimmering Leaves

Simple but so good! This, despite being a manicure that took maybe 30 minutes (color nails green, stamp with black, color in with shimmer multichrome) is one of my favorite looks in the near past. I don’t usually like things that are so minimal, but the colors work, the stamping was perfect, and it just came together really well!

It helps that I have a new pretty green creme to work with, Josie by Zoya. I have been using Josie a lot (partially because the polish has been sitting in my two-swatch section on my desk, and partially because it is a very pretty green). It is a true medium-tone green, just a hair brighter than neutral, and honestly doesn’t seem to lean blue or yellow. This is two coats. I love it 😀

I do a little regret adding the glittery polish over the top of the stamp rather than under. It means that in indirect light you can’t see the veins in the leaves, all you see are the glitters! But the glitters are so pretty that I mostly don’t care.

Colors:
~ Green creme: Zoya – Josie
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink shimmer: POP Polish – Watermelon Bubbleslick
~ Stamp: UC – Lovely Leaves 02

That’s all for today! Hope you all enjoyed :-D. Friday’s is slightly more involved but less elegant, if you can call something green elegant!

Wild Ripples

Super straightforward but still pretty! Mostly because putting awesome teal flakies over slightly darker teal-blue polish is a recipe for nail happiness 🙂

Unfortunately I broke a nail prior to painting these, so my free edge is curved. I briefly thought about cutting my nails shorter but flat…but to cut them flat would have been to make them VERY short and I didn’t relish that thought! So, here we are.

Colors:
~ Blue metallic: Zoya – Estelle
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur Renaissance
~ Teal flakies: Zoya – Masie
~ Stamp: Moyra – 32 Nature

That’s all for today! Hope you enjoyed 🙂 stay tuned for more nature-themed art on Wednesday!

Bright Teal and Dark Roses

This was fun, and almost-but-not-quite perfect! Regardless of the imprecations (entirely my fault with color selection) I enjoyed wearing this! I also don’t know why I don’t actually have more floral manicures to post. What have I been painting if not flower?!

The design was inspired by @ponkle. In retrospect I wish I had used a brighter pink for the base of the roses! This ended up looking almost neon-with-goth because of the dark roses. I love it anyway. Of course, I also cheated. The dots are freehand and everything else is stamping 🙂

Colors:
~ Teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Pink: Love & Beauty – Pink
~ Dark pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Light green: Zoya – Josie
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Stamps: BP – L020, MoYou London – Frenchy 14

Short and sweet today, but with pretty pictures of course! Hope you enjoyed!

Highlighted in Orange

Oooooh another neon orange manicure! I had to stop myself from overdoing this one. I knew I wanted to use End of Silence, but I also knew I didn’t want it on every nail. Instead of my go-to plan (aka use white as a base for all nail art) I decided to pair End of Silence with a light lilac with pink/gold shimmer, because the swatch sticks happen to be lying next to each other. I thought the color of Little Oysters perfectly matched the shade of the glitters in End of Silence. So, unusual pairing but I really like the result!

The white was stamped, however the orange and gold were added by hand. I initially tried to use End of Silence as the orange highlights, but it is both a jelly and full of largish glitter…so that ended quickly. I ended up grabbing my neon orange cream and using that instead. It is just a hair darker, but that works well for something that I don’t want many coats of to be opaque!

Colors:
~ Orange glitter: Cadillacquer – End of Silence
~ Lilac: Ethereal Lacquer – Little Oysters
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Orange: Julep – Natasha
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B015

I don’t know why I have stopped doing geometric manicures, this one was both fun and pretty! I suppose I will have to start up again :-p. Hope you enjoyed!

Purple and Gold Tilt Marble

I don’t know the actual name for this technique, but I am going to call it tilt marbling. Water marbling uses water, dry marbling happens directly on your nail, and tilt marbling happens on an external surface by adding lots of polish and tilting the surface to get a cool pattern. In this case, I used a base of magnetic purple (inspired by Urban Nail Art, which was genius), then red creme, yellow creme, and gold sparkle polish, and tilted my stamper until my pattern was perfect. I would then try and re-center the blob of polish so one area wasn’t thicker than anything else.

Because I did this on the stamper, it was very easy to remove. Had I done this on my mat I imagine I would have needed to add top coat to thicken the decal before I could apply it, and I love my decals thin. Luckily, I have three largish stampers and was able to cover all 5 nails by just making the decals cover most of the stamper face and then cutting them in half.

Colors:
~ Purple magnetic: Nails Inc – Houses of Parliament
~ Red: Zoya – Sookie
~ Yellow: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana
~ Glitter: Zoya – Faye

In retrospect, I do wish I had used less gold glitter. I tried to cut it down by the time I reached my third stamper head, and even so it took over! I do love that I used (and then magnetized) the purple polish, you can see the magnet effect best at the tip of my middle finger, and it looks awesome. Next time I do this, I might use two magnetic polishes. We shall see! Hope you enjoyed!

Bright Quadrants

Rainbow(ish) bright colors! I just wanted to play with some pastel and darker cremes in the same color family. My nails were quite short so I went for a stamp that I can only use with short nails, and voila!

In the end this is more colorful than really, anything else. But it mad me happy to wear it, and it summer, so be it! It also really proves to me that I own a truly ridiculous number of Zoya creme polishes. To be fair, I purposely buy most of my cremes from Zoya, but this is next level!

Colors:
~ Light mint: Zoya – Tiana
~ Mint: Zoya – Cecilia
~ Light blue: Zoya – Blu
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Light purple: Zoya – Abby
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Light pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Light orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Stamp: MoYou – Pro 02

Hope you enjoyed! Happy Friday 😀

Flowers Trailing Dots

This was a brushstroke marble, and it only kind of worked. I used different wet polishes gently brushed over each other to make a sideways pattern, and then transferred it with a stamper. The pattern looked cool on my mat, but when it transferred it got blurry! This was a class example of an over-engineered design. I wish I had just stamped without adding glitter. Oops!

Colors:
~ Light purple: Zoya – Abby
~ Purple: L’oreal – Royalty Reinvented
~ Teal: Zoya – Wednesday
~ Neon teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Grey glitter: Emily de Molly – Shadow on the Moon
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B005

Of course, the sun also did not want to cooperate with me during the days I wore this manicure, so unfortunately all you get are indoor photos! I swear the flowers were glittery…they were just leo smushed. To make up for this poor showing, on friday you get neon rainbows! Ok? Ok.

Failure Fire

I tried to make an “easy” water marble by making only one marble…and taking it off the water. The resulting decal was so thin that it fragmented into pieces as soon as I tried to apply it! I ended up using it as a water decal (including dunking my nails in water so I could reposition the super thin layer of polish) and it was still a disaster. I don’t know how those other people do it…maybe they use more polish so it isn’t as thin? Regardless, this took much longer than a normal water marble although, the one shining point, the cleanup was easier :-p

Of course the end result after all that toil was also boring…so I added dots. I wish I had made the dots white or black in retrospect, the orange doesn’t add much!

Colors:
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Red: Zoya – Sookie

Despite this failure of a fire-themed mani I hope you got a little enjoyment. Stay tuned on Wednesday for something slightly less pathetic!

Trailing Vines to Silver

This was simple, but fun! And for once my propensity to add dots to everything definitely made the mani better :-p

I just really wanted to use Sapphire in a manicure. It has been a while, and it is a close-to-perfect blue. That said, with the silver and white and pink of this manicure it looks black! Oops. I don’t know why I decided to try and gradient a white cream to a silver holo, but it somewhat worked? I think I might stick with the same type of finish for gradients in the future. But you don’t learn anything without experimentation!

Colors:
~ Dark blue with glitter: KBShimmer – Sapphire
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Silver holo: Color Club – Harp On It
~ Light pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Stamp: UC – Lovely Leaves 02

Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed! This week was fantastically easy for me compared to the previous weeks, and next week will be worse again. So I apologize in advance if I miss a post!

Abstract Rainbow Stripes

What to say about this manicure. It is weird. I don’t usually do a gradient from yellow…most gradients go over white! I also don’t usually alternate nails quite as markedly as this. However, since I wanted the whole thing to glow in the dark like crazy, I was stuck using Dayglow as a base which dictated how the rest of the manicure looked!

Dayglow is one of those polishes that I forget I own until I see someone else’s cool glow in the dark manicure. And then I decided that I absolutely need to do one. There was no particular inspiration for this manicure…I just wanted some combination of glow in the dark and rainbows! Honestly, I think it looks pretty cool if rather odd.

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Glow-in-the-dark: Serum No 5: Dayglow
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

That’s all for today! I feel like a bright rainbow is suitably summer-like for todays 100 degree and 99% humidity, but then again I wore this back in the winter *shrug*. Hope you enjoyed!

Unnamed Orange

Apparently I forgot to write down what I used for this mani. At all. I have no record of ever having painted this. Ugh! That said I have a pretty good guess…

I was sent some blooming ink polishes to review from the Born Pretty Store. I figured they were like jelly polishes right? Wrong! They are incredibly thin and runny (aka ‘ink’) and have some odd properties. You can’t really layer them to make the color brighter like you can with jellies…you blob it down. You can move it around and get rid of it just by going over it again. That’s how I got the weird blobby-depth to this orange/pink mani.

Basically, there are only two colors here: white polish and orange ink (aka Flowing Fire). I started with white, and then tried to swirl on the orange. Then blob it on. Then I just had fun with it. The end result was pretty cool, and had a look that I don’t think I could have achieved with regular polish! It was a dirty orange-brown, however, and quite ugly. Then the surprises began.

1. You cannot clean this with acetone. Seriously. My cuticles were orange-pink for DAYS. I edited them here because it was so embarrassing. Do not flood your cuticles with this stuff!
2. It changes color with topcoat! It went from orange-brown to neon orange-pink. Which is to say it became much prettier and much closer to the color of the ink in the bottle
3. It will eat all color. I tried to stamp over the design in white, which worked, and then add more topcoat to seal the white design. It ate through the white! I ended up re-stamping in white and not top coating the final stamp. If you look carefully you can almost, but honestly not really, see the initial white stamp of the same patter. Omg!

So, that’s that. This was a lot of fun to make and behaved in weird unpredictable ways. Will I use it again? Yah. Will I be more careful? Absolutely! If you want to play around with these inks yourself, head over to the born pretty store where you can find it for $2.99. The particular color you see here is called Flowing Fire. Enjoy!

Rainbow Fronds

I have no idea what I was going for here! The Overprint stamping series by Born Pretty has lots of awesome layered stamps, and I wanted to use the one that looked like a frond. It has a version where you can cover either the middle part of the tips of the leaves, and I wanted to fiddle with it!

I ended up using a bunch of neon polishes (don’t ask me which, I don’t remember) and layering them over each other in sets of pink, orange, yellow, and purple. I decided, somehow, that the end result wasn’t exciting enough, so I added more fronds to the rims of my nails. The end result is interesting? But super weird!

The base color is Reminisce by ILNP, although with how much I have covered it up,  you can hardly see the shift! The stamping plate is Overprint L002 from the Born Pretty Store.

I really don’t know you guys. This is a weird one, even for me! Also, sorry. I have completely lost track of days and obviously meant to post this yesterday!

Square Scales

Beautiful polish and simple art! I do wish I had more stamps that actually looked like scales, I don’t think this stamp does this polish justice! Oh well, still came out pretty :-p

What you see here are three coats of Princess of the Underworld by Rogue Lacquer from PPP Jan 2019. This polish is stunning! It appears to be a green jelly-based polish with a very strong red-gold-green shimmer, filled with large and small iridescent flakies that shift orange-gold-green. The overall appearance is a red shimmer on a murky green base with flashes of gold. Again, stunning. Also super easy to control!

It is a bit harder to see with all the rose gold bits on my nails after stamping, but the underlying polish did have a really stunning shimmer/shift to it that was apparent in low light and sunlight. It might have been closer to armor than scales!

Colors:
~ Green/red glitter: Rogue Lacquer – Princess of the Underworld
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Stamp: BM – 604

That’s it for today! I do feel the need to prepare you all, Friday’s post is significantly less awesome. I tried something, and it failed :-p

Mystical Blue Sea Monster

This is a rather fun manicure! I was in the mood for mystical creatures and I have done about 7 dragon manis thus far…but never a Nessie! So, enjoy the Loch Ness monster. But cuter. And purple.

All the designs came from the same plate, which was quite lucky. The version of the fairytale plate that I have is not stamped all that well on one side, but works like a charm on the other! Luckily, the parts of the plate that I needed for this manicure picked up well. I also got to make some fun multi-color blob stamps for the waves 🙂

Colors:
~ Periwinkle glitter: Painted Polish – Just One Look
~ Light purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Stamp: MoYou – Fairytale 02 

That’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed. Stay tuned for a stunning new polish on Wednesday.