Blue and Purple Path

Yes, there is a gradient from blue-to-purple and a black stamp. There is ALSO a reversed stamp (purple-to-blue) under the black one made of swirls, it just does’t show up well!

I couldn’t decide if this looked more like cobblestones (which was the intention) or funky corn. I have seen images on line with other bloggers using the stamp as corn and it looks amazing, so I might stick with that in the future! Although it means I will have to paint my nails yellow (wwwww).

Colors:
~ Purple metallic: Zoya – Rea
~ Blue holo: Color Club – Over the Moon
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: Moyra – 32 Nature

That’s it for this week! Hopefully I can get my act together and put together something a little more interested for next week (or at least aim for a theme that isn’t “stamped”). I did 3-4 valentines-themed manicures so that’s what will hopefully get posted! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Orchid over Purple

More blurple! I don’t know…I haven’t had a chance to transfer a lot of my newer designs onto my computer yet and I am running out of options. These are from early fall. And, of course, feature a darker periwinkle.

I wanted to play with floral stamps because, in general, I either want to be playing with stamps that are flowers, swirls, or purely geometric. I have a LOT of similarly themed stamping plates!

Colors:
~ Purple glitter: Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: BP – L067, BM – XL472

This was fun just because the base is so SPARKLY and how often do you get to color in orchids? Not often! Anyway, hope you enjoyed, and hopefully I will get my life together enough that I can post something more winter-themed come Wednesday!

Sheer Black Floral

This was actually the base to a much longer and more complicated manicure that you guys will see…at some point. Not now. But it is one of only two times in all of 2018 (the other being a perfect rainbow gradient that I was loathe to cover up) that I actually took pictures of the under-art nail, because it looked cool!

Which is really just a long-winded way of saying that I would have worn these even WITHOUT the glitter and pastel swirls that I ended up painting over them. Honestly, I was impressed that I liked these; that is a LOT of naked nail to be seen! I did use 3 coats of a very sheer nude so my nails don’t look as yellow and mildly stained as they really are, but still. Very naked. And not actually bad!

Colors:
~ Sheer nude: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – 616

Hope you enjoyed! Friday I have somehow another set of blurple nails…although they are closer to periwinkle than the ones I posted on Monday. Oops! I maybe should have delayed them but I like them, so oh well :-p

Flowers on the Diagonal

More flowers! And yes, these were supposed to go up on Friday after Thanksgiving, and instead I was distracted by buying too much polish. And too many stamping plates (who am I kidding, no such thing!). Regardless, this makes me feel better about not posting black nails for black friday :-p

More places that I love ended up having sales than I expected, but I wasn’t too terrible? I think I ended up with 9 new polishes and 7 stamping plates. Oh well!

Colors:
~ Purple glitter: Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: BP – L002, BM – 616

Hope you enjoyed these glowing blurple flowers and lines, and had fun picking up deals!

Shower Curtain

This title is odd. I was trying to figure out what this mani looked like, and my husband thinks it looks like ikea furniture. Honestly, I can kinda see it. I got a new stamper for free for buying farrrr too many stamping plates from Whats up Nails during their stamping sale. Ooops! Anwyay the stamper is huge and squishy and SUPER see-through and honestly worked perfectly on the first try. It is also amazing for layering. My older (and beloved) clear stamper couldn’t have aligned these so easily!

So anyway I wanted to stamp this fun triangle pattern in black, and then go over it shifted in white to make a funky striped triangle pattern. I did that on my middle and ring fingers (and it was so easy to align, it was almost unfair, this stamper is awesome). Then I decided that I liked the design better with just the black stamp alone! So I left my other three fingers without any white at all.

Colors:
~ Grey holo: Emily de Molly – Crystal Crown
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Moyra – Matrix 54

The sad end to this story is that I got a bit of polish on the covered end of the stamper, and I tried to wipe it off with acetone. I should have known better. DO NOT USE ACETONE ON PLASTIC…now it is no longer opaque! I want to cut the end off so that the whole thing is hollow (and useable) but I can’t find my hand-saw. So, sadly, I am now back to one useable see-through stamper.

Sharp Holo Overload

I promised you color, so here is color! And glitter. And triangle shapes. Basically, while I was on night float in the hospital, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be seeing an attending physician (head doctor) for two whole weeks, and that the senior resident working with me couldn’t care less about my nails. So I wen’t nuts. Bright colors? Landscapes? GLITTER? yes please!

THis particular design was inspired by Simply Nailogical, because I had 90% of the same polish she did. But then I added extra holo because 1) I love it and 2) I figured she would approve. Voila!

Colors:
~ Purple holo: Cupcake Polish – Berry Good Looking
~ Black creme: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Black holo: Stella Chroma – Kavaraki
~ Silver holo: Color Club – Harp On It

This mani still makes me smile because it is so bright and glittery. Its been a while since I’ve had that kind of freedom! Hope you enjoyed!

Pumpkins and Webs

Happy almost-halloween! This year my husband and I ended up at two different pumpkin carving events, so now we have four pumpkins. Which is double our previous yearly count of pumpkins. I carved a set: a dragon and a castle. My husband carved a pokemon (because of course he did)…and a pumpkin. Into his pumpkin. He is an absolute dork!

Anyway, I have a bunch of fall manis lined up, but I only did one halloween manicure this year! I kinda forgot that October meant Halloween. Oops. I’ll do better next year! This year’s halloween mani is decided to stamping jack-o-lanterns. I received another plate to review from the Born Pretty Store (which was thankfully well-etched) and went to town! Unfortunately, the dark orange I used for the pumpkins is more a jelly than a cream, but I still got away with single-pass stamping on some nails (thumb and ring finger). That said, I am not surprised I had to double stamp, I need to stop using glitter polish bases! But when trying to pick a base color my head just went ‘GOOOOLD’ so here we are!

Colors:
~ Gold: ILNP – Fame
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Bright orange: Nubar – Hot Orange
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BP – Halloween – L004

Hope you enjoyed! And I hope everyone gets lots of candy and tasty treats. If you want to pick up this pumpkin and web-decked plate, head over to the Born Pretty Store where you can find it on sale for $2.99.

Oranged Lines

Honestly, I was aiming for a completely different manicure when I started this, but my gradient came out all wrong so I ended up with this instead!

I was going for a light orange-orange-red-purple style, and as you can see it is 95% orange an 5% red with no purple at all! I tried. I really did. In retrospect, I should have known it wasn’t going to work since the purple I was trying to use is currently a dried up blobby mess. Live and learn!

I ended up deciding that all gradients (as long as the colors aren’t terrible and need to be flat-out started over) look good with some geometric patterns. I wanted something a bit more delicate so I went with this design, and of course added colors to the dots and diamonds. I think this is the third time I have done this same thing with different colors.

Colors:
~ Pastel orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Neon purple: Sinful Colors – Dream On
~ Dark purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: EdM – 03

That’s all for today! There is a similar gradient floating around on the blog too, since I was on night float and thus was able to do slightly different nails (and keep this poor blog running)! Hope you enjoy!

Phoenix

I have done phoenix nails before, but possibly never this insanely bright! I got lucky that one of my stamping plates already had all these images, or I would have been painting flames for years :-p

The design itself was inspired by @nails4cocktails, although I didn’t have holo polish in the right colors, so I just added some shimmer on top. I really need to get Fairy Dust by China Glaze, I keep winging it with my glitter toppers!

Colors:
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Shimmer: Sally Hansen – Diamond
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Exoticism BPX – L012

Hope you enjoyed! I do love flames 😀 even if I often can’t wear them on my nails because they are too disruptive at work. Maybe next year I can have more fun with my nails NOT on weekends!

Astral Shifts

Ok, so, I love this mani. I love how it looks, I love the colors, and I LOVE the magnet! I got a new magnetic polish from the Born Pretty Store to review…and somehow, unlike every other magnetic polish I own, this one works like a charm. Maybe I am just getting better, but the design on my pointer finger stayed looking perfect for three days. Most magnetic polishes just can’t do that!

Anyway, this is two coats of Astral Realm over black. The first coat was thin and the second coat was thick; I magnetized both times (and again when I put top coat on, although the magnetic particles didn’t actually move). Astral Realm is a multichrome magnetic. I was doubtful at first, but its actually true! The shift is a bit more subtle than pure multichromes of the same color range, but it is definitely there. This polish shifts from a bright fuchsia to pink (the primary colors) and then to orange and gold. I even saw hints of green at sharp angles!

I got a whole bunch of compliments on this at work. People were stopping me as I was typing on the computer to ask me how I got my nails to look like this :-D. I also love the stamps! When Whats Up Nails had their stamping sale, this is one of the 6 plates (oops!) that I picked up! I bought it on a whim but it has turned out to possibly be my favorite of the bunch. Stars! Moons! A super fancy sun! Anyway.

It is rare that I only use three colors in a mani, especially when only two of them are visible! But the magnetic polish was cool enough that I thought adding anything else to this would be a waste.

Colors:
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Magnetic multichrome: Born Pretty (Magnetic Aurora Series) – Astral Realm
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: BM – XL213

That’s all for today! I hope you enjoyed! In case anyone was curious…my pinky I just magnetized the very edge of my cuticle, for the ring and middle I used one of those strong magnetics to make a line (diagonal vs horizontal), my pointer I used a repeating diagonal line full-nail magnet, and my thumb I pushed around the polish using the rounded head of a strong double-sided magnetic wand. You can pick up Astral Realm at the Born Pretty Store for $5.39, which is a lot for a tiny 6ml bottle, but it does work!

Twisted Triangles

How about some silver triangles on a multichrome glitter base? Don’t mind if I do!

I don’t really know where this manicure came from, just that I wanted to play with Aurora and felt like using a funky triangle stamp. I do love funky geometric stamps! Lets be honest, a lot of stamps are things I could do freehand if I just had enough time. But perfect swirls and perfect geometric lines I could not do without hours! Which is probably why most of my favorite stamps are either straight lines or swirly bits.

Colors:
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Multichrome: piCture pOlish – Aurora
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B015

That’s it for today! But happy Friday, and I hope you enjoyed the multichrome shininess of Aurora as much as I did! It almost doesn’t matter in this age of a million multichromes, but I had Aurora long before multichrome toppers were much of a thing :-p yes I am a hipster nail polish owner.

Skyline Sunset

Remember how I said on Monday that most of my nail art was mimicking someone or another? Well, todays post is a good example of that!

This design was inspired by Cathy at More Nail Polish, which I figured was fitting since she is usually the queen of the 31 Day Challenge (although she is participating late this year since she is on an extended vacation at the moment)! Also, I just love cityscape nail art.

Colors:
~ Pastel blue: Zoya – Blu
~ Bright pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Bright purple: Sinful Colors – Dream On
~ Bright blue: Sinful Colors – Endless Blue
~ Black: Sinful Colors- Black on Black
~ Holo: Orly – Sparkling Garbage

This has also reminded me that I really need to invest in a sparkly holo top coat, sparkling garbage is excellent but it turns everything under it a shade of pale teal! Not ideal when working with pinks. :-p Hope you enjoyed!

Holland

The final day of the 31 Day Challenge of 2018 is here! I only participated in about half (a little under half if we’re being honest) of the total and I am still exhausted. Major kudos to all of you who were following along, and to my past self who somehow managed to post daily!

Anyway, today is “honor nails you love” and I have a bit of a different thing happening. Probably 25-30% of all my nail art is based either loosely or exactly on designs I have seen other people do. This time around, I decided to do a design off of the website for a product! Although it is also the nail art used by that product.

What I am trying to say is that today’s post was inspired by, of all things, the stamping plate website itself! I cannot find the original artist (and trust me, I’ve been looking) but I literally bought this plate because this image showed up in my email and I needed to replicate it! So voila. I think I’ve done a pretty good job honestly!

Colors:
~ Blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Blue shimmer: Sinful Colors – Cinderella
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Light grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Dark grey: WOW – #333
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark green: Sinful Colors – Exotic Green
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

And that’s all for the 31 Day Challenge! Hopefully I will still be around and posting next year, but as residency gets harder we shall see! I am still painting my nails and enjoying it, so I am hopefully. As it turns out, yesterday was my 6 year blogaversary, so I have been blogging for longer than I thought! Go me?

EKG

EKG, also known as an ECG, is short for echocardiogram, and it is how we analyze heart rhythms in the hospital. Since I have been on some form of cardiology for MONTHS at this point, I though it was high time I did EKG nails!

The study also tends to be a very discernible pattern (in fact the heart rhythm is defined by the pattern we see on EKG) so I thought it would be pretty funny to use this design for my “pattern” day in the 31 day challenge!

Basically I am trying to be clever. Anyone in the medical field would hopefully ALSO think I was being clever, but otherwise these just look like pink boxed paper with some black squiggles.

Of note, real EKGs don’t actually have pink sparkly hearts in them :-p

Colors:
~ Pastel pink: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Light pink: Sinful Colors – Pink Forever
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink glitter: Zoya – Alegra
~ Stamps: BP – L002, BM – 620

I was super proud of these when I did them, because  I had to double stamp the black lines….my stamp had much wider spaced crosshatches and I wanted tiny narrow ones to match the spacing of the black EKG lines! Voila.

Stained Glass

I’ve been doing so much stamping (mostly due to lack of time) that I haven’t been using many of my inspiration photos recently! This is another stamping day, but this one comes with inspiration, and is super glittery.

Years ago, I saw this stained glass mani at Emily de Molly and I died inside. I wanted the polish and the stamp and the whole thing. I finally bought the stamping plate, and thanks to the Polish Pickup Pack, I owned the perfect polish. This mani makes me so happy!

What you see here are three thin coats of Playing With Fire, which is a black opal inspired polish by Ever After. It is stunning! Black jelly base loaded with orange, red and a few green color-shifting flakes as well as tiny blue holographic hex glitters and even tinier green microglitter squares. I hope this polish is easier to take off than it looks, because it looks like a glitterbomb, but all the glitter is flakies!

Unfortunately, the polish is no longer available since it was one of the January polish pickup options, but since I’ve been buying 1-3 polishes per month with polish pickup, I have no shortage of incredible new polishes to play with!

Colors:
~ Black glitter: Ever After – Playing with Fire
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: EdM – 01

So, super simple mani, incredibly glittery, and I finally fulfilled my dreams of making stained glass on my nails!

Peek-a-Rainbow

Rainbow nails! Finally! This is kinda a combo of day 9 “rainbow” and day 10 “gradient” cause it is a rainbow gradient! I haven’t been brave enough to wear rainbows to the hospital yet; these are from the vault.

I absolutely love this mani. Bright colors, strips, gradients…it has it all! That said, the post going up on Wednesday for stripes day has even MORE stripes. Or at least, they are the focus of the nail art itself.

I always find myself gravitating towards sparkly polish with shimmer and flakes and holo…and then I have to remind myself that if I’m being honest I use my brightly colored creme polishes a LOT more frequently than any of my crazy glitters! Because they really are better for nail art.

That said, I have yet to buy an appropriate neon green creme, so the subtle shimmer in this mani is from the neon green polish! It was a gift, but I really need a creme variety. If you guys have any advice for bright neon green cremes let me know!

Colors:
~ Pastel green: Zoya – Tiana
~ Bright pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Bright orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Neon green: Salon Perfect – Loopy Lime
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Purple: Zoya – Margo
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

That’s it for today! I’m really enjoying stalking Facebook, IG, and the linkup for everyone else’s manicures! The other Eva, in particular, is – as usual – blowing everything out of the water 😀

Silver No Holo

So, this is a bit of a fail. I was sent a water-based base coat/top coat to review from the Born Pretty Store, with the intent to use it as a protective layer for foils. I have one water based top coat, but it is a mess to use and takes a very long time to dry. Needless to say, at least that one works, this one does not!

I started by painting my nails with a faintly holographic silver polish, Diamond by Darling Diva. I then top coated with my standard top coat (Seche Vite) and waited for the nails to dry.

After they were totally dry, I painted them with JNR Star Glue, which is also from the born pretty store and is basically Elmer’s glue in a nail polish bottle. It works great…as does Elmer’s glue. Once the white faded to clear, I threw on some silver vaguely disco-ball-eque foils, which looked amazing. I wish I had taken photos at this stage, since I had two perfect nails (which never happens) and most of the other nails looked pretty darn good!

I then added the Born Pretty water based base coat, and let it dry. Unlike regular top coat, the foils only shrunk and shriveled up a bit, but you could still see the design in the foil. I stamped with Sinful Colors Black on Black using plate EdM 17, and then added another layer of normal top coat. With my usual aqua base, adding regular top coat does not ruin the foil finish. This time, it did. What ever is in Born Pretty’s water base does not protect the underlying foil from being destroyed by regular top coat.

So, in the end, I have a fun silver and black geometric design, but I do not have silver holographic disco ball nails. You can find the water base at the Born Pretty Store for $3.99, but I cannot recommend it since my nails still ended up effectively foil-less!

Fading Purple Curls

Ok, so I might have messed up. When I was moving I put together a few manicures (one of which is frankly not even worth putting on the blog, so you guys will never see it), and I typed up which polishes I used and the basics of the manicure and emailed it to myself. The problem is that at the time I didn’t have internet…so when I finally got the documents on my computer and it connected to the internet, they appear to have deleted themselves!

What this means is that for this a and a few other manis, I am guessing what I did. Luckily for this particular manicure I only own one purple magnetic polish, and it easy to identify a particular stamp. But still, sorry in advance!

Colors:
~ Purple magnetic: Nails Inc – Houses of Parliment
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BP – L050

Also, I promise this is the last magnetic post in a while! I don’t know why I lumped them all back-to-back in my editing folder but somehow I did! Luckily I think they all look different enough that you guys aren’t ready to behead me yet :-p. So, no more magnets! Even if I love how this mani came out. Enjoy!

Teal Magnetic Swirls

Magnets! I love magnetics. They make my nails look cool with little-to-no effort on my part other than holding still for a few seconds. Stamping over them just looks so cool!

Anyway, this was basically just having fun with straight magnets and some silver stamps. The magnetic polish is a teal-to-black called Whitehall by Nails Inc. The silver is Excalibur by A England and the stamp is from Moyra plate 50 – Ornaments 3.

To make this, I applied the straight line magnet on a diagonal on all the nails except my thumb. The magnet is super strong the raised teal line was incredibly sharp…until it wasn’t. As always happens, the magnetic turning point blurred as the polish dried, so I went from a super sharp line to a smudge, but it still looks cool. Honestly, maybe I need thinner coats of polish! On my thumb I tried to create a curved pattern using the small circular end of the magnetic stick. I love it. I think making this nail was more fun than using the straight line!

The double-headed magnet that I used is from the Born Pretty Store, and it is both cheap and works well. You can find it for $2.99.

Enjoy!

Messy Green-Blue Gradient

Sometime, I just want to throw together a bunch of bright colors and play with stamps. The Make Your Mark plate series by Lina makes that REALLY EASY. So here is another mani using it!

I feel like I’ve been using a lot of vampy metallic bases, or pastel ones. Not so much neon. That changes today. Hello neon!

To make this mani, I started with a light green base, then tried to create a gradient over it using greens and teals. But, the teal was too dark! So I switched to a bright blue. After that was dry, I double stamped using two similar designs from the same plate in white then black.

Colors:
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Yellow: Yellow Opaque
~ Neon green: Salon Perfect – Loopy Lime
~ Dark teal: OPI – Stay Off the Lawn!!
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

That’s all for today! I am too tired to write a longer post, so I’ll just let you enjoy the photos. Happy Friday!