Neon Pink Angles

Every now and then I decide I want to risk the removal wrath of a polish with actual glitter shards in it. Each time, I marvel at my nails, and then curse myself when I remove the darn polish. This time was no different, but  it was briefly fun to wear!

Colors:
~ Black with fuchsia glitter: Cult Nails – Disillusion
~ Pink: Born Pretty – Warm Tea, Crimson Cheeks
~ Stamp: BP – 43

That’s it for today. Not sure why, but I am going to consider these at least moderately fall-themed. Hot pick is like red…. :-p hope you enjoyed!

Sharp and Soft in Red

I have no idea what else to call this manicure, it was kinda off-the-cuff make-it-up-as-you-go but people LOVED it. I am talking people stopping me to comment on how cool my nails look. Given how often I paint my nails, that happens surprisingly rarely, so this was a pleasant surprise!

What you see here are two coats of Ragnarok You Like a Hurricane by Chirality from Polish Pickup Jan 2019 over black creme. I feel like I haven’t posted a new polish swatch in so long! Although to be fair what with my in-hospital time picking up, I havent had as much time to devote to picking over polish to buy! Anyway, Ragnarok is a black crelly with fine green/silver glitter and and a mix of tiny, small, medium, and large (yes, 4 sizes or so) of red glitter. Its really striking! I also love the name.

Colors:
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Black with red glitter: Chirality – Ragnarok You Like a Hurricane
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur Renaissance
~ Stamp: BM – S107

That is all for today! Let me know what you guys think about this randomness. Was it worth as many comments as it received? Is it just ok (my personal opinion)? Should I be doing this random mix of stamping and freehand swoops more often?

Leaf Mesh

Simple but pretty! Although I do wish I had a black that was able to stamp in True Black rather than sometimes-grey! The end result was pretty but I don’t love that the leaf stamp on my ring finger looks more grey than black! Although, I am happy that I managed to make a quasi-fall themed manicure in some color combination that does not involve yellow, orange, or red in any fashion!

Colors:
~ Black with holo: Zoya – Storm
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Cream with black glitter: Cadillacquer – Darling, Red Isn’t Your Colors
~ Stamp: UC – Lovely Leaves 02

Hope you all enjoyed! Be prepared to see more fall nail art next week. This might (read: total is) my favorite time of year for nail art!

Exploding Pastels

I have failed, slightly. I managed to make every day of posting line up with the corresponding day of the 31 Day Challenge, except this. The final day, and I have failed! Really, I just did not have time to make a tutorial, so I decided to instead go with the 31st day of the Challenge prompt, honor nails you love.

This nail art was inspired by @urbannailart and other than not having the best hand at curlicues yet, I actually think I did it justice! I need a grainier black holo, apparently. I adore most things that Urban Nail Art puts together, they are both colorful and innovative!

Colors:
~ Sheer nude: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Pastel green: Maybelline – Green with Envy
~ Blue: KBShimmer – I’d Rather be with Blue
~ Pastel purple: Sally Hansen – Lacey Lilac
~ Pastel pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Pastel yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~ Black holo: A England – Fated Prince
~ Stamp: BM – 616

Of course, the sun did not cooperate, so there are not as many photos as I would like, sorry! Overall, I hope you enjoyed my nail art for the 31 Day Challenge as much as I enjoyed creating them! The next few weeks will be not nearly as pretty; all my good art is used up :-p. Phew! Also, apparently yesterday was my 7th blogaversary. 7 years of Flight of Whimsy! I am almost impressed with myself!

Japanese Ink

I love this mani. I absolutely adore it. I feel like I am saying this a lot, but I think it might be one of my very favorites of 2019. It was time consuming (a weird mix of advanced stamping and freehand) but totally worth it! I also looked up about 15 ink paintings to get a sense of composition and color before I started :-p

Also, is there anything more fitting for “artwork” than this? I feel as though I have a lot of Japanese art around my house, but nothing quite this scroll-like!

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Grey: WOW – # 333
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Stamps: MoYou – Porcelain 01, Born Pretty – Chinese L003, UC – Lovely Leaves 2

Anyway. I hope you all enjoyed! I do not have a post ready for Monday yet because I honestly just did not have enough time to ready a tutorial this year. I will likely do a “honor nails you love” a day early. Sorry!

Red Roses and Black Lace

A member of my husband’s family was very ill, and we were preparing for the likelihood that we would have to attend a funeral within a week. With that in mind, I went for a week-and-a-half with dark, appropriately somber, nails. These nails arose from that period of time, and I am not embarrassed to say that I love them (the person in question passed away later, so these did not end up being funeral nails, merely vampy nails with a funeral in mind).

Since these were intended for a particular occasion, and to match a particular (black) outfit, I consider them somewhat fashionable, and am posing them for “fashion” day in the 31 Day Challenge!

Colors:
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Red glitter: Chirality – Ragnarok You Like a Hurricane
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Red: City Colors – Masquerade
~ Dark red: Zoya – Isla
~ Darkest red: Confetti – Masquerade Ball
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Stamps: BP – L002, L003, MoYou Frenchy 14

That’s all for today! Stay tuned for some more awesome nail art on Friday. Hope you enjoyed, despite the somber tone!

Maleficent

This might be my favorite nail art for the 31 Day Challenge and possibly for this year altogether? I adore Maleficent as a villain, and in college my dorm hall made a meme where each of us was a disney character; they assigned me Maleficient and made a photo of my face on the character’s body (tinged green, of course). So, when Movie day came up, I knew what I needed to grab! Sadly, this one is from the unposted archives and is actually from 2017 (embarrassing, I know!). The sister post (Sleeping Beauty, of course) will go up the day after the Challenge ends 😀

The design for this was inspired by Definitely Meg  (although her blog appears to have closed down since then) own to trying to figure out what shades of green I could combine to make that glowing background she has! It has been a while since I have tried to negative space flames, and I forgot how time consuming it was! Also, do not try to freehand a raven, it is difficult!

Colors:
~ Neon green: Salon Perfect – Loopy Lime
~ Green holo topper: ORLY – Sparkling Garbage
~ Pastel green: Zoya – Tiana
~ Purple holo: LA Girl – Purple Effect
~ Purple creme: Formula X – Ignition
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

That is all for today, but the rest of this week should also be a bunch of impressive manicures (if I do say so myself)! Hope you enjoyed!

Rainbow Bubbles

This manicure was FUN. It was super messy and took forever to clean up, but I really enjoyed making it!

I had been staring at the rainbow + circles manicure by de_briz for months. I watched the video.  I wanted to do it. I tried using her technique on my thumb (although honestly I think her white polish wasn’t dry yet when she did this? That is the only reason I can think that her polish really spread) and it looked ok but not great. It also doesn’t help that my yellow jelly polish, despite being almost full, is thick and gloopy. I also only had pink/yellow/blue/purple to work with, and I wanted oranges and greens so I needed to go heavy on the yellow. Then I just starting messing around.

My white base was dry and top coated already, so I knew it was safe to play around on top of it. I starting putting massive blobs of polish down on my nails in a mostly random pattern (but with lots of yellow) and tried to tilt my nails to get the polish to flow. That failed. (Clearly I have been watching too many of those “liquid art” and “flow art” videos!). Then I gave up and just starting shaking my hands, hard, in various directions. That worked! The nail polish started moving, and blobs of it fell off my nail (on mostly the mat, but also the desk, my other arm, and the poor innocent polish bottles). The end result was bright and looked surprisingly like watercolors. I repeated the process on my other nails, although I clearly used too much purple on my ring finger and I accidentally scraped half the color off my pinky and had to half-redo it (which only somewhat worked) while top coating my other hand. Yikes!

After that i was just adding lots of circles. Unlike de_briz, I don’t own the prefect circle plate, so I had to improvise. In the end I used three plates and then added dots with a dotting tool just to round it out. I kinda love it!

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink: Zoya – Paloma
~ Yellow: Esmalta da Kelly – Yellow Soap Bubbles
~ Blue: Zoya – Frida
~ Purple: Zoya – Katherine
~ Stamps: Moyra – 60 Cuts, Whats Up Nails – B015, BP – L002

Anyway, if this isn’t suitably rainbow for day 9 of the 31 Day Challenge, then I don’t know what is! Enjoy 😀

Thick Vampy Curls

This was designed to match an outfit, which was a shimmery purple shirt with thick black velvet swirls over it. The nails matched perfectly! Of course, because the nails were matted, they also fell apart faster than I would have liked

Regardless, they are suitably purple/violet for Day 6 of the Challenge! They also reminded me that I need to wear more matte nails…at some point in the future when I am not wearing gloves all the time or squirting cleaning solution on my hands in the hospital.

Colors:
~ Purple: Zoya – Valerie
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Matte: KBShimmer – Oh Matte!
~ Stamp: Moyra – 50 Ornaments 3

Hope you enjoyed! Things get more fun next week…I think the entire week ended up being a collection of some of my favorite recent manicures!

Abstract Sky

Ok, so this isn’t QUITE a fail, it just isn’t nearly as good as I expected. Of course, I now own the item I wanted to use (gold glitter for stamping) but I didn’t have it when I painted these! Oops.

The base color here is two coats of Gaia by KBShimmer from Jan 2019 PPP. This is a deep blue jelly that appears cobalt due to all the glitters: iridescent shards that shift teal to purple and coarse silver holo glitters. Both are plentiful. This polish takes just a bit of spreading due to the flakie load, but it dries down nicely on the nail! I love it.

The design was inspired by de_briz. So, I started with Gaia, then layered on some MORE flakies (just for fun) and then stamped some dots in black. Sadly, my plate with swirly dots does not stamp well! This is doubly sad because the swirly dot design is literally mine…I had done it years ago and when the “make your own” stamping plate series became a thing I submitted it, and it got in. So this pattern was designed by me…and this plate hardly stamped. So, I started in black (which is not visible at all) and then tried to go over it in gold…and it was patchy and awful. So I top coated and tried to convince myself it was good enough. However, if I am anything in the nail art world, I am the woman who adds too many dots…so I fixed it by going over every dot by hand. With the same gold. I have to say, it looks much better. I also didn’t bother top coating at the end since the gold polish is a quick dry that actually lives up to its name, and I do love vaguely textured nails!

Colors:

~ Blue glitter: KBShimmer – Gaia

~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

~ Gold glitter: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold

~Stamp: BM – 607

~Flakies: orange/green from the Born Pretty Store

That’s it for today! I’ll have to try something like this mani without spending an extra hour free handing the dots next time. Live and learn!

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!

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!

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!

Safari Sunset

Scenery plates make awesome nail art surprisingly easy. All I had to do for this one was gradient, then stamp! The gradient, of course, took longer than anything else, and the result was very fun to wear! Once the gradient was done I actually painted over the whole thing with a yellow jelly polish to brighten the red and oranges, since the base polish was red (rather than white or yellow which are my go-to in a gradient like this).

The base color is a new-to-me red polish called Sookie by Zoya. This is three thin coats. The polish is very pretty and quite bright (I don’t know that neon red is a thing, but this is close), and covers well. It also, shockingly, removed very easily for a red! Most of my reds turn my cuticles red as the polish comes off, and this one played nicely.

I am actually really happy with how my yellow stamping polish gradiented, I wasn’t expecting to get much yellow tone over such a bright red!

Colors:
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: Stamping polish
~ Yellow jelly: Soap Bubbles Yellow
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

That’s all for today, hope you enjoyed! My formal neurology residency starts today (as opposed to the medicine intern year I have been doing for the past 12 months) so my time is going to become even MORE limited. I will try to keep posting, but if the blog has some random blank days, I’m sorry! Blame work :-p

Forest Floor

Greeeen! I finally transferred a bunch of photos from my camera to my computer, so I can go back to posting seasonally-appropriate nail art! This one is just bright pretty green leaves, but they were fun to make!

The inspiration for this was a layered stamping plate sent to me from the Born Pretty Store to review. It has lots of deconstructed leaves, and a few deconstructed flowers. It is overall pretty great! The lines were crisp and picked up well, and the overlapping patterns fit nicely with each other. Since I really only used green (and gold) it is a bit harder to see some of the details of the layered design, but I promise its well done! I should be using this plate again come fall for some fun red/orange leaves 🙂

Colors:
~ Magentic green: Masura – Emerald Cat
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Dark green: Sinful Colors – Last Chance
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Stamps: BP – Overprint L002

If you are interested in some pretty layering leaves for yourself, head over to the Born Pretty Store. This plate is available for $2.99!

Orange Conifer

I love so much about this manicure. The color, the funky plants, how much it shimmered…half of these photos were just snapped randomly but had such a cool color mix that I had to post them! I don’t know why I haven’t worn this polish again since I bought it a few months ago, but now I know what I am putting on next!

Just look at the shifty awesome-ness!

The base here is the other “pastel multichrome” that I bought to play with from POP Polish. This is three thin coats of Slick Days of Summer. Much like the pink Watermelon Bubbleslick, Summer isn’t exactly a perfect multichrome, which is to say the polish isn’t smooth like a metallic, rather it is a collection of tiny flakes which you can see based on how they scatter light. Other than that…it is pretty much perfect. It is a bright red/orange through orange to apple green multichrome, and you can honestly see all of the colors just on regular glances. None of this contort-your-hand-backwards nonsense!

I then went ahead and did some advance stamping. I decided to color-match to the orange, and just grabbed some polishes in the color family I wanted. Then I found the PERFECT stamp. Its halfway between a pine cone (hence conifer) and a flower! I die.

Colors:
~ Orange multichrome: POP Polish – Slick Days of Summer
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Light peach: OPI – Freedom to Peach
~ Peach: OPI – Yank my Doodle
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Stamp: Moyra – 45 I Fill You

Also this stamping plate is made of amazing images. I want to color them all in…but it takes hours!! That said, I have a full week of next week (omg) so maybe I will actually get around to it. Who knows? Hope you enjoyed!

Pagoda and Maple

I love this mani. The leaves are upside-down from where they should be (oops) but it still looks awesome. Also, I finally did a stamp transfer to make a mirror image! That has NEVER worked for me before!

The base polish here is a new-to-me beauty called Darling, Red Isn’t Your Color by Cadillaquer. It is an off-white jelly base filled with tiny red glitters and small and medium black glitters. It is subtle and amazing and I love it. I am always looking for more off-white crellies and this is a success! This is three thin coats.

I then stamped in black, colored the leaves in pale grey and the roof in two different shades of red (you can’t really see the gradient but it made me happy), and voila! Next time I do this (cause lets be honest, this combination of designs is happening again) I will make sure the maple leaves point DOWN not UP. Oops!

Colors:
~ White crelly: Cadillacquer – Darling, Red Isn’t Your Color
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love
~ Stamps: MoYou – Porcelain 01

That’s it for today! Happy Friday. It is currently only in the low 80s in St Louis…I hope this cooler weather holds until I have a few days off next week!!

Purple Petals

More flowers! I figure it is nearing the end of spring so I need to get them posted now :-D. This was another straight forward color-in-some-petals mani. It didn’t come out quite as lovely as the pink one from two weeks ago, but I still like it!

The base here is yet another new polish. What you see here is three thin coats of Zoya Abby. I had been looking for a pale purple creme to replace my almost empty go-to of Sally Hansen Lacey Lilac, and I think I found it! It makes me a tad bit sad that this isn’t one of those perfect two-coat Zoya cremes, but it dries fast enough that 3 coats is acceptable.

Colors:
~ Light purple: Zoya – Abby
~ Purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Dark purple: L’oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Dark blurple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Moyra – 45 I Fill You

I wish I had a bit of a BETTER gradient for the purple petals (two of the purples are very dark!) but oh well! This seems to be a theme. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!