Autumn Canopy

More fall! This was one basically just an excuse to make a whole bunch of dots. And we all know how much I love dots! The design was inspired by Snacks on Rotation although mine are much darker since I don’t have a gradient leaf stamp!

Colors:
~ Brown holo: Darling Diva – Brown Diamond
~ Brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red shimmer: ILNP – The Magician
~ Stamp: EdM – 07

Hope you enjoyed! Happy fall weather, and pumpkin spice everything if you are into that!

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!

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 🙂

Copperized Patterns

A post! Sorry its so late. Today was my day off and I still barely got everything done! Also the Blues won the Stanley Cup and now the whole city is honking and cheering. I suppose I should be posting blue nail art but I have nothing prepared at the moment! The stadium (well, both hockey and baseball) are about a mile from my house and there are helicopters circling overhead at the moment.

Anyway, this was a very fast manicure. Beautiful multichrome holo polish and a matching stamp. Ta-da! It helps that this stamp is both playful and elegant :-p

Colors:
~ Red-gold holo multichrome: Enchanted Polish – I Am the Walrus
~ Brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

Hope you guys enjoy, despite the late-ness! I am already dreading my shift in the emergency room tomorrow morning, I assume it will be full of people who over-indulged following the hockey win!

Risen on Wine

This manicure was SO straight-forward that…I kinda forgot to take photos of it. 80% of the photos that I have are oddly out of focus and 15% are badly framed. Oops! At least it is a simple one I suppose!

Colors:
~ Dark red: Confetti – Masquerade Ball
~ Red holo: A England – Rosebower
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

So…that’s all for today. Not much to say! Friday’s manicure is a bit more exciting I promise :-p

Subtle Purple Engraving

Super simple and super tiny nails today! After the Christmas holidays my nails broke down to tiny nubbins. Which means I was too lazy to do any real nail art on them, and just went ahead and stamped! And for some reason I was in a tone-on-tone mood (I think I wore these at the same time as Monday’s nails). Voila!

Colors:
~ Dark purple: Station – Happy Wine-y People
~ Purple holo: A England – Let Me In
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

So, not the most exciting manicure in the world, but cute enough! Hope you enjoyed. I remain incredibly jet lagged but quite happy (well, not to be back in the hospital, but certainly to be sleeping in my own bed)!

Interlocking Greatness

Yes, it is a pun off the name of the polish, yes I am a goofball! Also, today formally begins the series of holiday-appropriate nail art. This one was painted during autumn but is honestly more red/green than orange/green which was the initial intent!

Anyway, this is a very very simple manicure (as many are during things like residency). Just a polish and a stamp. Now, the polish happens to be a multichrome, and the stamp is a holo. Honestly, I didn’t think this color combo would work that well, but Dragon stamps amazingly well (I just need to acknowledge that A England makes polishes that stamp like magic).

Colors:
~ Copper/purple multichrome: ILNP – Greatness
~ Green: A England – Dragon
~ Stamp: EdM – 17

That’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for progressively more snow-themed and Christmas manis! My one hanukah mani is getting punted to next year :-p

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!

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!

Rungs

This mani ended up boring and almost ugly. I like the base polish a lot but every time I try to come up with some color to use over it, I turn to dark purple-grey or gold! And for some reason most of the designs end up wonky looking.

I don’t know why I picked this stamp (which seems to be a trend this week) but it ended up looking like rungs on a ladder or maybe the straps on a fancy jacket? If fancy jackets came in murky purple tones? I don’t know!

Colors:
~ Purple-grey: ILNP – Long Walks
~ Dark purple-grey: Sinful Colors – Muse
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamp: EdM – 01

Anyway, leaving all this aside, the 31 Day Challenge starts this weekend! I am not going to be participating every day because I don’t have enough manis backlogged and I certainly don’t have enough time to paint and edit that much, but I am going to keep to posting three times a week and matching my nails of the day to that days prompt! I think there will be a few where I jump a day forward or backwards, but I should have most of them sorted out. I love seeing what everyone puts together for the #31DC2018!

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!

Echoing Sparks

Something simple, yet rather unique! For this mani I grabbed (yet another, omg) new polish and stamped on it. I wanted something weird looking but somewhat geometric, and luckily I totally own that stamp!

The base here is one of the ILNP holiday collection polishes, called Sparks May Fly. What you see here are three thin coats of this odd-colored polish! It is a carmel-toned brown (a brownish gold) filled with glitter and holographic shards. I don’t own anything else like this, despite owning a lot of dark golds! I honestly don’t love this color against my skin, but I love how odd the color is (dark mustard? I don’t even know how to describe it) and it works well with nail art.

I stamped over Sparks May Fly with this super funky pattern from one of my Emily de Molly plates. I had just grabbed a new bottle of black polish, so it didn’t stamp quite as well as I had hoped (I need to wait for it to thicken up a bit before it will really stamp well) so sorry for the slightly see-through stamp!

Colors:
~ Gold: ILNP – Sparks May Fly
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: EdM – 21

The polish looked really cool in direct sunlight, but my camera wasn’t cooperating! I didn’t notice until later, but most of the images are out of focus

Hope you enjoyed!

Magnetic Teal Flowers

Readers, I am sorry about this. I tried so hard to make it pretty for you, and I only partly succeeded! But it wasn’t my fault…

So, I received two magnets (to go with magnetic polish) from the Born Pretty Store to review, and this is the second. It is N03, a star pattern. I have seen other people try and use star patterns online, and usually it doesn’t work well. I was hopefully with this one. When I tested it on my mat it worked well, but I forgot about the curvature of my nails! Ugh. Suffice to say the center of this magnet is useless (as it appears all star magnets are) and the side that works best is still iffy. Compared to the diagonal lines magnet (which I showed almost a month ago), this one is far less useful.

I ended up decided to stamp a floral star pattern over the magnetic art, centering the flower over the “center” of the star. The only finger that REALLY picked up the magnet (aka the one where I have the flattest nail bed) was my middle finger, and there the stamp looks great. Otherwise? Meh.

Colors:
~ Teal magnetic: Nails Inc – Whitehall
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: EdM – 09

I did end up loving the N02 magnet, so I can happily recommend picking it up! However, I have yet to see a star magnet that works, and this one is no exception. The magnets can be found here. Enjoy!

Purple Tilting Gold

This is one of my recent favorites! I was going to throw it into a “favorites” week (I have a few on back log) but I ran out of manis on my computer and I needed a last minute edit so here we go!

The design is actually very simple, but the polishes are anything but! A purple multichrome gradient with a gold multichrome, a deep triangle of gold glitter, and then stamping on a black triangle. The black triangle initially looked matte (as most stamped designs do) and I ended up LOVING how that looked so I re-matted the triangle at the end. I tried it completely glossy and it just didn’t have the same pop!

The base color here is yet another new holiday polish that I received from Nail Polish Canada. This one is called Tilted, by ILNP. What you see here are two thin coats of the polish, which shifts from indigo to purple to burgundy to red-gold to green. I posted a photo taken in my living room (hence the really funny lighting!) since I went downstairs to play some mariokart with a friend and the shift was super crazy strong! Under direct light its mostly an indigo and purple with hints of burgundy.

I have a slight problem…I definitely already own too many multichromes and in particular too many that start with purple. I think I might have to part with either this or one of my other three because this many is nuts! Or, I can make the shiftiest dragon egg every, but I would feel quite foolish wasting such a pretty color with polish that doesn’t make your nails fall off :-p

Colors:
~ Purple multichrome: ILNP – Tilted
~ Gold multichrome: Catrice – Genius in the Bottle
~ Gold glitter: ILNP – Clockwork
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: EdM – 03

I am a bit surprised at how hard it is to gradient with multichromes. Genius in the Bottle did NOT want to go on in any meaningful way! It is usually a gold-copper-green shifter and all you really see here is the gold. Still cool, but not quite what I was going for.

Hope you enjoyed! I am returning today, so I hope I can throw together a new post by Friday. If not, just know that it is Match day for residency and I might instead be out partying (or hiding away if I don’t get one of my top 5 choices).

Wrought Gold

I have a THING for paring green with gold. I always do it. I don’t even know why, other than in my mind those colors look the best together.

In this case, I really missed using one of my newer polishes that I had only worn once, Fotheringhay Castle, and just decided to stamp over it. In gold. Of course.

There isn’t much else to say about this design, except that I still love olive green polish!

Colors:
~ Green: A England – Fotheringhay Castle
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

Hope you enjoyed, and happy Friday!

Winged Love

In my head, the name of this mani is all Shakespeare-ified (Wing’ed Love) but I figured adding an apostrophe would confuse everyone…and I left it in normal English. Anyway, today starts my Valentine’s manis and I wanted to do something with birds!

Basically, I found this small stamp I had never used (despite owning the plate for years) and wanted to create a mani around it. That is the two doves image on my middle finger. I ended up using birds from 3 different stamping plates and leaves from a fourth. So. Many. Stamps!

This mani also uses the first of the polishes that I won from the Nail Polish Canada holiday nail art challenge! I ended up with 21 new polish (omg) about 2/3 of which I adore and 1/3 of which I would never have picked. This is one of the ones I would not have gone for. This is Once in a Blue Moon by ORLY, and is actually a nice pale blue-grey color, and is a two-coater which is great. However…it is also a frost. Can the nail polish community at large just agree to stop making frosty polishes? There are brush strokes all over the place and I would much rather see this as a shimmer or metallic, or even a creme. Also, I hate the ORLY brushes, they are far too wide for my poor pinky nail! All-in-all, I don’t know that I am going to try very hard to keep this particular color…it might end up going to my sister.

Colors:
~ Blue: ORLY – Once in a Blue Moon
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Stamps: BM – XL472, BC – 06, BP – L067, EdM – 07

Now I sort of wish I had tried to double stamp the birds in white, but it looks alright as it is! I am also glad that the border images from BM – XL472 seem to fit my nails :-).

That’s all for today, hope you enjoyed and get ready for more love-themed manis!

Bordered Blue Swirls

I bought this awesome indigo dress with a lace overlay, so I had to create some matching nails when I wore it to a wedding! I wish I had a photo of the dress ready to go, it was quite pretty 🙂

This is basically just blue and black quasi-lace. I thought lace alone was boring, so I only put that on my accent nails. The other nails got a thick black border and a swirly center. The blue polish I used as a base is one of those semi-metallic polishes that has a lot more depth depending on the angle, so they came out looking cool…but only if you got them in the right light! Otherwise the pattern was almost too subtle.

I had actually forgotten what a pretty color Blue my Mind is…but then I remembered that I hate how wide the Sally Hansen brushes are. Ugh!

Colors:
~ Blue: Sally Hansen – Blue my Mind
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: EdM – 22, BP – L020

That’s all for today! Friday’s post is significantly more colorful, I promise.

Misty Forest

This mani came out better than I had hoped, but I made a crucial error…I forgot to check that my nails were even before I started! If you are ever going to paint a scene across your tips, be sure that one of them isn’t crooked (sorry 4th finger, I’m looking at you).

Regardless, this was quite fun! I wanted to do something spooky, and I realized that I had yet to use an EdM stamping plate that I picked up a while ago! Unfortunately, the plate is not etched really deeply, so although the images pick up fine, they are not incredibly dark (to be fair, I used regular polish for this…my black stamping polish finally ran out).

I ended up double stamping some of the trees, the fox, and little bits of grass, which is how I got the grey-and-black difference. I quite like it! I am also glad I went with another EdM polish for the background. 🙂

Colors:
~ Purple-grey glitter: Emily de Molly – Shadow on the Moon
~ Purple-grey: Sinful Colors – Muse
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: EdM – 07

A few more fall-themed and Halloween-themed manis coming up! Most make a little more sense than this, but misty and creepy forest is totally a Halloween thing! Hope you enjoyed.

Abstractions

This mani is both a success and a disappointment…because I absolutely LOVE the base polish, but I had such a hard time picking what I was going to do once the polish was on!

I tried three different stamps with four different color polishes before settling on this design! And it wasn’t even my decision…I got so fed up of things I didn’t like that I shoved my nails in front of my husbands face and demanded to know what matched. He said “silver” so I just went with it!

I think I just default to EdM plate 03 if I don’t want to cover too much of a really pretty polish. It isn’t a terrible idea, but I have so many other plates!

Regardless, what you see here is three thin coats of Illyrian Polish Eleven, with two thick coats of top coat. This polish is a really cool mix of colors and finishes, especially since for me mixing reddish-purple with orange and gold is basically the height of nail polish. So, this polish has a wine-colored jelly base, and is filled with small and medium glitters that shift from red, through orange and gold, and finally to green. It also has a lot off scattered holo glitters which show up in the sunlight. Overall, this polish is amazing…BUT you will need two coats of top coat to smooth out the finish. It isn’t that the glitters stick up, but you will get uneven flatness over the larger glitters (as one does). Worth it!

Colors:
~ Purple glitter: Illyrian – Eleven
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ Stamps: EdM – 03

Ok, now that I am done drooling over this polish, I need to come up with other ways to wear it. Any suggestions? I don’t want to cover it but wearing polish alone is not fun enough! 😀 Also, this is my first Illyrian Polish, and I can safely say that I love their polishes! It went on well and had surprisingly good spread and pigmentation for a jelly with that much glitter!

Ripple Down

Raindrops are totally a pattern, right? So droplets must be! I was going to create a nautilus shell, but I didn’t want to spend hours painting each nail…I settled on this and I rather love it.

The design was actually inspired by a previous design of my own, Pond Ripples. Since I obviously still have the same colors, and I recently bought a new copy of the stamping plate I used (that now picks up much MUCH better), I was planning to exactly copy the design…but THEN I tested my teal flakies over a bunch of other polishes and picked a different base!

If nothing else, this mani is insanely glittery. Not in a holographic way, but just…a lot of layers of shimmer. You cannot tell in the photos but when I shift my nails its mesmerizing. I am also glad I bought a new copy of this plate, I really love this stamp!

Colors:
~ Teal glitter: Julie G – Mermaid’s Tale
~ Teal flakies: Zoya – Maisie
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

I actually added matte top coat to one finger just to see if I liked it better (because I have to do that whenever I add flakies) and although it was pretty, I liked the depth of shimmer better with shiny top coat. Shiny it is! Hope you enjoyed 🙂