Failed Quartz

I was trying to make a pseudo-marble manicure (since everyone else seems to e making marble nails) and I wanted something pretty and subtle…so I went with a light grey and pale pink. And then I added another shade of pink. And a blush. And then it was too pink and the grey looked blue so I added white. And then some rose gold glitter…and the whole thing just took a life of its own!

Colors:
~ Grey: Formula X – Delightful
~ Pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Nude: CND – Cashmere Wrap
~ Blush: KBShimmer – Caught on Tape
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Rose gold: ILNP – Juliette

In the end although I do think these nails look cool, they look nothing like I intended. I will have to re-try the marble theme at some point! And maybe they will actually end up marble-like by the time I am done :-p. Hope you enjoyed!

Perfectly Pinked

Ok, I really like this one. I don’t know how the colors work together or why this design caught my eye, but here we are! Honestly I think a real gold rather than a rose gold would have gone better with all the pinks…but you can hardly tell. Girly and glittery to the rescue!

Colors:
~ Rose gold: ILNP – Juliette
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Light pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Dark coral: Essie – Sunday Funday
~ Stamp: MoYou – Frenchy 14

Really the moral of this manicure is if you add enough glitter and colorful distraction, everything looks good. Again, this manicure should not work. I like it anyway :-D. Hope you enjoyed, and happy Friday!

Chinoise Bridge

This was honestly a great idea and a very poor execution. The biggest issue I have with stamping is positioning the stamp on my nails. This got much MUCH easier with the advent of clear stamper heads (I look back at my first few years of blogging and am both horrified and impressed with the tools we had and how we made them work). That said, unlike a regular single color stamped image which can be easily wiped off with a bit of acetone, an advanced stamping design cannot. It lives forever. Which is to say I had a LOT of trouble positioning the stamps for this manicure and it shows!

Colors:
~ Red metallic: Zoya – Isla
~ Red creme: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: MoYou – Porcelain 01

Please don’t judge my stamping position too harshly, I did try! Anyway, hope you enjoyed all the red and gold, and how much my nails look like elegant slightly lopsided bridges :-p Happy friday!

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!

Sienna Drapery

Maybe its because I am a doctor and love microscopy, but I see cells everywhere I look! These, to me, realllllly look like muscle cells. Spindle shaped, clusters of blue nuclei…anyway. They also might look like folds of cloth to more *ahem* normal folks so I decided to title this post after drapery and not immunofloresence staining.

The base polish her is a new-to-me polish called Sienna by Polished for Days. I have had my eyes on this polish (and others by PfD) for months just waiting for a sale! I maaaay have gone overboard 😀 but I can’t really regret it. PfD does the best flakie polishes! Anyway, Sienna is busy: dark blue base loaded with magenta/gold shimmer, scattered holo, and flakes that shift from a deep vibrant blue to gold. I may be obsessed. It is very pretty.

Colors:
~ Blue/red/gold shimmer: Polished for Days – Sienna
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Stamp: Lina – @urbannailart collab

I seem to be using the urban nail art collaboration plate a lot, I had been on the fence about buying it initially but I ended up loving it! Go figure. Anyway, hope you all enjoyed!

Summer Flower Gradient

I painted these in January. It was cold, there was a sleeting icy mess outside, and I decided it was time for some bright sunny colors. If the outside world would not cooperate, I would just have to make them happen myself! And that is how this manicure was born. Of course, its more fitting to post them in spring so here we are!

Colors:
~ Bright orange-yellow: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Hot pink: Zoya – Morgan
~ Golden shimmer: Ethereal – Rainforest
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – XL158

I have been on a kick of adding highlights with my few not-quite-opaque pastel multichromes, and it makes me very happy. This time I added some Rainforest over the center of the flowers just for a bit of variety! You can’t really see it in the sunlight (for example, the second photo) but indoors it was glittery and added just a little kick that I think helped overall. Hope you enjoyed 😀

Shimmer Flowers

This ended up being oddly delicate? I didn’t mean it to be but its actually rather pretty! Between the pastel grey-green base, the thin black lines, and the scattered gold glitter, I’ll take it!

This mani (by which I mean this base polish) exists because a coworker tipped me off that a local St Louis tchotchke (turns out I’ve never had to spell tchotchke before!) store was selling old Formula X polishes for $1 each. These used to be something like $12 each at Sephora (and I think I bought 4 of them when they were on some kind of sale) and this random odds and ends store had HUNDREDS of these polishes in boxes! So, of course, I pawed through them and ended up buying 12 polishes. For $12. Now, one was a top coat and one was a base coat (I had to test them…) but still. I am so happy!

Anyway. I doubt this polish is really available to purchase anywhere but I am going to review it regardless because it is new to me. This is two thin coats of Quantum by Forumula X. It is a pretty, subtle, pale grey-green and I quite like it! It is a bit more neutral than I usually reach for, but I don’t own anything quite like it and it was easy to wear and to match to things. I have already worn it again and I only bought the polish 3 months ago.

Colors:
~ Grey-green: Factor X – Quantum
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Gold glitter: Salon Perfect – Gold Leaf
~ Gold shimmer: Sephora by OPI – I Found a Pot of Gold
~ Stamp: Lina – Urbannailart

Hope you enjoyed this delicate art! I promise we are coming to the end of flower power posts. I just figured I would dump all my flower manicures online while it was still spring time! 😀

Scattered Roses on a Field of Gold

I told you there would be more flowers, and here they are! To be fair, I really really like how this mani came out (unlike the other two I posted this week). The theme appears to be color-in-flowers-with-jelly-polish. This manicure also gave me an excuse to play with another new polish :-D. I also almost forgot to post this (oops!) but its technically still Friday!

I wanted to see if the new pastel-ish multichromes from Emily de Molly we really worth buying…so I bought one that was different than anything else in my collection. Meet Goddess of Rays, an orange-gold-green-emerald pastel almost foil-like multichrome. I have to say, I was impressed! This covered very well in two coats, was only a tiny bit streaky, had a great shift, and was overall a pleasure to wear and a pleasure to look at!

Colors:
~ Orange/green multichrome: Emily de Molly – Goddess of Rays
~ Pink jelly: Zoya – Paloma
~ Pink creme: Zoya – Veronica
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B005

Initially I just added some black stamps, which I deemed too boring. So I decided to fill in the roses with a pink jelly polish, and add some matching dark pink creme dots as the little buds/berries! Ergo this weeks theme. To be fair, this manicure was shifty and awesome and more eye-catching than spring-like. But it fits! Hope you enjoyed 😀

Dotted Weave

I have NO idea why I decided on this design, and this actually looks really weird (weaved pattern with dots? muscle cells with blue nuclei? who knows!) but it was fun to make.

The base polish is another new Polished for Days concoction called Fireflies; this is the polish that first caught my eye almost a year ago and drew me to PfD. Fireflies needs three thin coats for coverage….but that just assures that you can see every ounce of the insane glittery madness within. It is a teal polish base with pink/red shimmer that shifts to gold and occasionally green, as well as holo, and large and small flakie shards that shift pink-gold-green. I could almost get away with wearing this without nail art, it is that busy!

Colors:
~ Teal/pink flakie shimmer: Polished for Days – Fireflies
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Stamp: Lina – @urbannailart collab

For whatever reason, I have lately been shying away from super-over-the-top-glittery polishes; I have been going back to neutrals/greys with a bit of shimmer or single type of glitter, or creme polishes. I had to grab this polish anyway and I am glad I did! However, I got 4 other glitter polishes at the same time, and I have not felt drawn to use any of them! Silly past Eva. Hope you enjoyed!

Tall Grey Trellis

Subtle but fun! With dots, of course. This one looked rather cool when I was wearing it, but really is subtle enough that photos do not do it justice. The grey stood out from the holographic background better IRL :-p

Colors
~ Grey-blue holo: ILNP – Timeless Vow
~ Grey: Zoya – Evvie
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: MoYou – Steampunk 06

Hope you enjoyed, and happy Friday! Stay inside. Next week I will bring you more colors to brighten up the indoor time!

In Blue Gear

Ok, so this one is weird. I keep trying to come up with a good manicure for Zoya Crystal, and I keep failing. If I am being honest, I think I just don’t like this polish that much? It is too sparkly and has too much going on to mesh well with well, literally anything I try to do. I keep buying new polish, and I have promised myself that I will not exceed the capacity of my current storage (aka 20 ikea spice racks) so I am going to need to get rid of some…likely including Crystal. This was a last ditch effort to make myself enjoy wearing this polish and I have failed.

Colors:
~ Blue metallic: Zoya – Crystal
~ Pastel blue: Zoya – Blu
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: MoYou – Steampunk 06

So, sorry, you probably will not in fact enjoy this manicure (I sure don’t) and I am not sure I have enjoyed anything I have ever made with Crystal! Womp womp. Sometimes polishes just don’t come out the way you think they will when looking at online swatches! Its rare but it happens.

Cosmic Threads

This manicure is pretty darn awesome. I got this, frankly, fantastic plate to review from the Born Pretty Store, and at the same time they sent me some gold powder. I decided to combine the two. Despite being a very simple manicure it looked awesome (if I do say so myself) although it required two extra layers of various to coats.

So, I started with a dark blue holographic polish (Downpour by ILNP), top coated it as usual (Seche Vite) and let it dry for the standard time (maybe 15 minutes). I then added matte top coat and let that dry. To make the gold stamping happen, I took my stamper and rubbed the gold glitter into the stamper head using the applicator/eyeshadow brush until there was a thin shiny film over the stamper head. Then I took my usual black polish (Black on Black by Sinful Colors, I didn’t even use a stamping polish not that I have many), applied it to the stamping plate, scraped it off, and picked it up using the stamper (so, business as usual). When I went to transfer the design to my nail the only part that came over was the area that had the black design under it. Clean up was a breeze.

Of course, I had to top coat with a water-based polish and wait for that to dry so as not to dull the glitter, and THEN another coat of Seche Vite. Needless to say, this mani lasted 7 days without any wear (which is what happens when you functionally use 4 layers of topcoat).

Prior to all of this, I tested a few stamping techniques with the glitter on my mat. If I stamped as normal and tried to rub glitter in over either a matte background or a normal glossy background it somewhat worked; glossy trapped more random off-target glitters than matte but neither worked very well. When I tried the apply-glitter-to-stamper over matte and glossy, the glitter only stuck exactly where the stamp was on a matte base, but stuck somewhat non-specifically for the glossy base (you could still see the design, but there was a lot more random gold around as well, and the transfer was not as crisp). Ergo, use glitter on the stamper head and apply the stamp over a matte coat of polish!

I cannot recommend either this plate (which I have already used two additional times in two weeks because the designs are incredible) or this gold glitter highly enough. The plate has since disappeared but I promise is lovely if it ever shows back up, and the glitter is $3.29, here. Hope you enjoyed these as much as I did!

Expanding Mauve Blooms

What to do with a mauve base? Use grey? Purple? Gold or silver? I never know! For whatever reason I used a purple topper on this, and the end result is thus a lot more purple than mauve. Not half bad, despite the color shift!

Colors:
~ Mauve: ILNP – Long Walks
~ Purple: Zoya – Monica
~ Gold glitter: OPI – Ski Slope Sweetie
~ Stamp: BM – XL158

I actually really like this stamp, which is why I thought it might be able to overcome my dislike of pointed/rounded nails…but I was wrong. I need to get over myself and just cut my nails short when I lose a corner of a nail. This nail shape looks awful! I think this is the last rounded-nail manicure I have, I haven’t broken my nails this badly in a while. Hope you enjoyed despite the nail shape!

Dot Floral Lace

Could this be any more boring? I don’t think so. The nude polish has the faintest hint of gold shimmer…but it doesn’t translate to the nail at all. Soooo boring.

Colors:
~ Nude: Essence – I Nude It
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: MoYou – Frenchy 14

I feel like maybe next year I should focus on more…interesting…nail designs around valentines day! Oh well, boring nude nails this year it is :-p

Light Jade

This was a bit of an odd one to make! I used one of Born Pretty’s “blooming” polishes (in green) to make the base color. I expected this to work like a normal jelly polish and I was quite wrong. The blooming polish is very very thin, changes color depending on what you do to it, and apparently eats through white polish!

I started with a white polish base. I added the blooming ink wash polish in little dabs and strokes (you can pretty much see what I did). I then top coated and added a white stamps…which was promptly devoured! So I went back and stamped in gold which did not get eaten by the green. I don’t know why the green ate the white, and I don’t know how I ended up with a blue tone on my pointer finger. These are the mysteries of the blooming polish! Also, the green color, while pretty, really is more of a jade blue-toned-green with a hint of brown than a true green.

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Green jelly: Born Pretty – Blooming, Constant Jade
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamps: Lina – Make Your Mark 02, BPX – L020

I do actually really like these inks, but I need to remember they wash off with water and soap, not acetone! My cuticles also stayed green for days as a result of trying acetone first and fixing the color into my nail beds. Oops! Anyway, if you want to play around with any of these polishes, you can find them for $2.99 each at this link. Enjoy!

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!

Menorah and Circles

I wore these for Hanukkah LAST year because I never manage to get my nails together in a timely fashion! Anyway, I was testing some new blue polish (which is to say I was playing with polishes I bought on black friday) and decided that dark blue would be a perfect base for a menorah. Unfortunately, none of the swatch photos of my background polish came out in focus! In fact, I only had maybe two in focus pictures out of the whole set. Silly camera!

The background of this manicure was two thin coats of Ryan by Zoya, a beautiful deep dark blue. It was almost a one-coater. What makes this better is that the polish stayed on without cracking and with minimal tip wear for 5 days! I think at this point I am just hooked on Zoya blues…I own almost all of them. Since the whole point of the timing of this manicure was Hanukkah, I freehanded some menorahs. However, once I painted my menorahs, I was at a loss. I didn’t have the time (or the patience) to paint a menorah on every nail…and then I decided to just go with weird sketchy circles. Don’t ask me why. But honestly, it came out pretty cool looking! I had been wondering why these circles even existed on that stamping plate, and now I know 😀

Colors:
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Light blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Gold holo: Sparkly Vernis – Gilded Lemon Drops
~ Stamps: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

So, happy Hanukkah even if it is a bit (a lot) delayed to the point of being the following year! Hope you enjoyed, and have fun not setting things other than candles on fire :-p Also Merry Christmas because, yes, I decided to be different and post Hanukkah nails on Christmas Day 😀

Blue Organic Blooms

I had been staring at this design by Urban Nail Art for months now, and finally decided to do my own take on it! Unfortunately I do not actually own much in the way of stamping polish, so I improvised with colors. Mine is a little bolder than hers, but not half bad!

Colors:
~ Blue holo: Color Club – Over the Moon
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Purple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Gold: CbL – Frohe Feiertage!
~ Stamp: BP – L008

Luckily, she had posted a list of polishes she used, so I knew to start with a blue holo base – my instinct would have been silver and I feel like in retrospect that would have looked quite odd! I also don’t own her stamping plates, and when trying to decide between very thin lines and thicker lines, I ended up going with thicker so you could see the pattern. Voila! Of course I only realized after I took my photos that for all but maybe 5 pictures the camera was on the wrong light setting…so they are unusable. Sorry!

Beglittered Swirl Vines

I really like how this one came out! It helps that I used a very pretty polish as the base, but somehow the red/gold with the blue and gold metallic just work! I also love vines (I am wearing this particular stamp right now, with a different manicure).

Colors:
~ Red/Gold multichrome holo: Enchanted – I am the Walrus
~ Blue: Zoya – Blake
~ Gold: Salon Perfect – Gold Leaf
~ Stamp: BPX Floral – L018

I have a whole bunch of actual holiday nail art…lets hope I get a chance to transfer them onto my computer and get them edited up by next week! Honestly I have my doubts, I have to many outside obligations at the moment. :-p Hope you all enjoyed!

Golden Aurora

You guys! This was very easy and looked so darn awesome. Although at least a part of that might have to do with my aurora obsession. Anyway. As mentioned on Wednesday this is another glitter stamping design using a new plate from the Born Pretty Store, Nicole Diary – 090. I again started with a normal polish base (Ibiza by Zoya), matted it, put gold glitter on the stamper head, and then stamped as normal with black polish. The design (including the tiny little dots) transferred remarkably well!

In terms of the design, the etchings on the plate are fun, if oddly sized. Of course, it doesn’t help that I accidentally placed the aurora design upside-down (oops)! I’ll have to use the same stamp at some point but with a gradient background or something. I am looking forward to it!

Honestly I mostly wanted this plate for that aurora image, I have been obsessed with the aurora since seeing it in Iceland in March! I should try a winter-colored one instead of just blue (lets see how long it takes me to actually make this happen…). Regardless, I hope you guys enjoyed! You can find the stamping plate here for $2.29 and the gold powder here for $1.79 (it has gone up in price since Wednesday?).