Flowering in Gold

So this mani came out better than expected! I wanted a copperish-green and I almost missed entirely! I started of with a coat of Dragon, which is of course totally opaque in a single coat…and then decided it was too dark! So I topped it with a thin coat of a different green and then STAMPED with Dragon (and some gold). Voila!

I did have to scour a bunch of plates for actual designs though! And with the combo of green and reddish-gold I think it totally works for a quasi-thanksgiving manicure 😀

Colors:
~ Dark green holo: A England – Dragon
~ Lighter green with copper: Blush Lacquers – Nerida Singer
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamps: Whats Up Nails – B005, BPX – L018, BP – L067, BM – XL472

Luckily, I have part of tomorrow off, so I can at least join my husband and some of our residency friends for dinner, although I am on and overnight call on Friday into Saturday, so I have to hope that whatever awesome nail polish sales happen Friday will be ongoing until Sunday! I also need to apologize for some of the atrocious spelling and grammar at the end of Monday’s post, I should not write blog posts while exhausted. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!

Bronze Leaning Leaves

Although I don’t think the photos came out that well, I LOVED wearing this mani! The dark olive green with copper and stamped with copper…and just ugh. It was so shimmery!

I don’t have much else to say about this mani really? It has double stamping, which I remain proud of, and I absolutely love Nerida Singer when I can talk myself into wearing this polish. I still own too many olive green polishes and I refuse to part with any of them!

Colors:
~ Green: Blush Lacquers – Nerida Singer
~ Copper: Pure Ice – Magic
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamp: Whats up Nails – B005

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! Friday’s post is a bit less exciting (I don’t like the mani, but I feel compelled to post my failures so others do not repeat them!) so I wanted something pretty in advance!

Foiled Foliage

I think I am pun-y! Well, it isn’t a pun, the title is basically just alliteration but it still makes me happy. As does this mani! It is technically still autumn…and currently the ground in Philly is completely covered in leaves. It is pretty, crunchy, and utterly ridiculous. When I walk outside I feel like I am eating leaves!

The base polish here is intended, I think, as a topper…but I wanted to make it opaque! This is three coats of Raging Fire by Born Pretty over one thin coat of a dark red base. Honestly, this polish was almost completely opaque at two coats! The final coat was mostly for my pinky, which I had painted more sparsely than the others. Despite looking uneven, the glitter was actually quite smooth after one coat of top coat. That said, the polish itself is thick and a bit goopy…good for dense flakie placement but it would have been difficult to get a light coat of polish.

The flakies themselves shift from pink/red to orange/copper to gold and emerald green at sharp angles. Since the flakes are at slightly different angles to each other, it is actually easy to get the whole color shift! It was mesmerizing.

I then made stamping decals using a left design from plate Floral BPX-L018 with Essie Good as Gold and colored in between the leaves with OPI Visions of Love. It looks quite fun and glittery! I know I could have instead just painted the leaves of the stamping decal with flakies…but this was so much more fun :-p

And, surprisingly, this was pretty easy to remove! Since they are flakies and not true glitter, they dissolve with acetone. The dark red was more painful since the color tends to stain my cuticles. If you want to pick up this flakie polish for yourself, head over to the Born Pretty Store, where you can find it on sale for $3.69. Enjoy!

Shadow Swirls on Brown

One final Fall-themed mani! I think there are still some brown/gold/red ones coming up, but I figured those could be holiday-themed as well so I moved them later. Also, sorry, I totally forgot to post this during normal people hours (my sister made me paint her nails, funnily enough).

This mani was my attempt at late-fall shadow stamping. That is to say, I wanted to use a glittery golden-brown with gold, but I also wanted to give the gold stamp a black shadow! In retrospect, this would have worked a lot better if I had used a lighter brown base. With this dark brown it was both hard to see where I had placed the initial black stamp so that I could stamp over it in gold, and hard to see the shadow in the final design!

That said, I maintain that I like this design. Glittery and brown and gold? And somewhat geometric? Yep.

Colors:
~ Brown: Spa Ritual – Starry Night
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: BP – 021

Well, also, this is Black Friday…so I hope you all had happy shopping! I had to stop myself from buying wayyy too much on-sale polish. But I want them alllll!

Harvest Patches

Fall-themed patchwark nail art! I rather love this design. I wanted to make some fun patches (because I loved the piece I did last year) and use only fall colors. Voila!

I realize this isn’t exactly Thanksgiving-themed, but it is close. Also, Wednesday’s post is 100% Thanksgiving (with turkeys and everything). Besides, scarecrows are maybe a holiday thing? Unless you live on a farm and use them for something other than looking cute :-p

In order to put this together, I had to come up with a set of three oranges that worked well together. In the end I just ended up using the oranges from the Washington DC collection, they were released last autumn and they are still seasonal!

Colors:
~ Light orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Dark orange: OPI – Yank my Doodle
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Snow me Black

Yes, there are a few stamps on there. No, I did not write down the plates that I used (sorry)! But they look cool! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Turning Leaves

I took far too many photos of this mani! Moreover, my favorite ended up being one I casually snapped while walking to the grocery store (hence the odd lighting) but LOOK AT THE SHIFT!

The theme here was end-of-autumn leaves, when the leaves themselves are red-to-brown, so I used a bunch of red and pink and copper multichromes! This is the companion piece to the one from last week. Oddly, while I liked that one better while I was wearing it, I like this one better in photos!

You can maybe see the shift in the leaves? I can at least, so I am happy. This might be one of the first multi-shaded multichrome designs where I think the shift is both visible and adds something to the mani. Finally!

There is in fact one more leaf-themed mani coming up prior to Halloween, but just one (and its next week)! Friday’s post is a little more…thematic.

Colors:
~ Green: ILNP – Mutagen
~ Pink-to-gold holo: Enchanted Polish – I Am the Walrus
~ Rose-to-gold: ILNP – Greatness
~ Copper-to-brown: Born Pretty – 212
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BPX-L018

That’s all for today! Stay tuned for something that is actually Halloween-themed rather than fall-themed :-p

Falling Leaves

I did two VERY similar manicures…one on each hand. Mostly because mutlichromes are fun and I at this point have too many of them :-p.

The other mani is shiftier, and will go up next week so that I don’t bore you guys with the same manicure twice, more-or-less. This one, although it shifts less, I actually think I like better (and that’s unusual)! The colors came together really well.

I started with a green multichrome base (this one shifts from an emerald green to a bright teal, and a deeper blue at steep angles) and then used advanced stamping (aka coloring in the design on the stamper) to add the leaves. Two of the leaf colors are multichromes, although the golden-brown one barely shifts (its mostly a gold to greenish-grey, but it was already a grey-gold to start with). The other one shifts from copper to brown, which is again, not a super big shift. I like it anyway!

Colors:
~ Green: ILNP – Reminisce
~ Gold: Revlon – Hypnotize
~ Copper-to-brown: Born Pretty – 212
~ Gold-to-olive: Catrice – Genius in the Bottle
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BPX – L018

I will admit to staring at my nails and moving them around trying to capture the right angles for these photos…but I just gave up and picked ones that looked pretty and glow-y instead. So, pretend that they can shift at least a little? Meh. Still pretty! Now if only it would COOL DOWN around here…it should not be 80 degrees out in Philly in mid-October!