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.