Interwoven Cheers

This was another pick a polish and a stamp manicure! I own a lot of polishes (no, really?) some of which are great for nail art (cremes, jellies, neutrals) and some of which are just so darn complicated on their own that all I can really get away with is stamping over them with one color. Cheers to the Holidays is one of the latter types of polishes, but it does make for a pretty manicure in a pinch! That said, this is one of the few polishes I own that I was really disappointed by: it is a holographic multichrome but it isn’t SPECIAL (I have maybe four multichromes that I would consider special for one reason or another) and I thought it would be. The photos on the FUN Lacquer website honestly made it look more spectacular than it is.

Colors:
~ Purple multichrome: FUN Lacquer – Cheers to the Holidays (H)
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: EdM – 22

Not much else to say today. I don’t know if others have been misled by polishes in pictures in the past! Its why I love it when brands send to multiple swatters, although there are some people who can literally make anything look good. Regardless, something like 95% of my polish collection is exactly what I expected it to be, and a fair number of the remaining 5% were drugstore polishes that just smell funny but work fine :-p. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!

Pointed Periwinkle Gradient

This was just for fun! I had a full afternoon off (that never happens!) and decided that meant I had enough time to play with stamping tape. I used a three-color gradient and then a two-color over it (my darker purple was not transferring enough hue so I used a darker blue and then covered it with the purple again). Then I decided I wanted more design so I stamped a diamond at the bottom. I quite liked these!

Colors:
~ Light periwinkle: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ Periwinkle: Zoya – Danielle
~ Blue: OPI – Yoga-ta Get This Blue!
~ Stamp: EdM – 03

I feel like I go through cycles with colors. Sometimes I will end up using reds for a whole month, then purples. I try to remind myself to vary it, but I end up stuck in a color-loving rut! These, clearly, happened in a purple-centric time for me. Friday’s nails did too :-p stay tuned! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Golden Eye

I feel like this might be the closest thing to a new years manicure that I have done in the past few weeks, it is semi-geometric, evocative of the 1920s (rather than 2020 but who is counting), and glittery. Also, my husband loved this and so it deserves to be the first nail art post of the new year!

Colors:
~ Gold shards: ILNP – Juliette
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Holo diamond: Sephora by OPI – I Found a Pot of Gold!
~ Stamp: EdM – 09

Not much else to say today, hope you enjoyed! Hopefully I can get my act together and get designs edited for next week; i go onto a night rotation for two weeks and I doubt I will have time to do the edits I would otherwise like to do!

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.