Trailing Flowers

YOU GUYS. This polish is amazing. And I quite like the design I ended up with as well! I am drooling over my own photos. This is rare.

The polish here is called Grey Opal by Polished for Days. It is yet another excellent example of why everyone should join the Polish Pickup Pack! Grey Opal covered perfectly in two thin coats, and control of the polish was excellent. Honestly, I have been painting my nails for years and even so I almost always need to clean around my cuticles with acetone after I am done applying my base color. With this polish, I had no need…it went exactly and ONLY where I wanted it to go! I am impressed.

The polish has a grey jelly base with lots of silver shards, coral shifting flakies, and teal shifting flakies. It is very fun to look at, between the orange and the teal and the glitter! It somehow manages to be both fun and elegant. I loved this polish so much I ended up checking out the Polished for Days store and OMG it is amazing. I want most of it (many of the polishes seem to have as much depth to them as this one, which is just incredible) and I officially have a new indie polish crush for jelly/flakie/shard combos!

Anyway, I ended up making floral stamping decals using a coral polish that more or less matched the pink-orange shade of the flakies, and just going with it. I did paint in some green leaves, but they barely ever made it onto the nail (they were all off the edge, oops)! I want to say this is fitting because yesterday was the first day of spring…but it is 32 degrees out and snowing!

Colors:
~ Grey glitter: Polished for Days – Grey Opal
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Coral: L’Oreal – Orange You Jealous
~ Teal: Essie – Naughty Nautical
~ Stamp: BM – XL158

Hope you enjoyed! And seriously, if you are as addicted to polish as I am (which if you are reading this, I assume you are) go check out the Polish Pickup Pack. And thank me later 😀

Encroaching Stone

A lot of the time, I go into a mani not knowing what I want…other than that I have a new tool to play with (in this case, a stamping plate) and that I want to use one of my favorite polishes that I wear infrequently.

After I put Shadow on the Moon on my nails (and wow these photos never do it justice, I love this polish!) I messed around with which stamped design I wanted to use. I ended up settling on one that looked like bare tree branches…but stamping them in silver and black to look like veins in stone.

The photos did not come out as well as I would have liked, and the sun did not particularly cooperate! But I loved wearing this mani and it was different from my usual designs!

Colors:
~ Grey glitter: Emily de Molly – Shadow on the Moon
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – XL472

Happy Friday! I hope you enjoyed 🙂

Starlight

It turns out that thermal polishes are only intended to be good for 6 months…so all of my beautiful thermals are becoming less shift-y! Which clearly means I just need to use them more. It also means I wish my favorite brands would stop releasing thermals because I don’t want to buy things that stop working 😦

This was my trial with my shiftiest thermal, a clear-to-black with scattered holo shards, that used to have a darn impressive color range. The base here is actually a holographic blue-grey, but once I put the thermal top coat over it most of the color just went grey. This top coat used to be almost entirely see-through, and I am sad about this change! However, the shift is still VERY prominent so I am ok with it.

I think I want to try stamping with this polish at some point? I don’t know if it is quite opaque enough even in cold/black form but I am curious! Now I just need to plan up things to do with the other…6 or so…thermal polishes that I own. Two others are already shift-less 😦 (but luckily for both I liked the cold color better, which is where they stayed).

Colors:
~ Blue: Milani – Cyberspace
~ Grey/Black shift: Bow Polish – Black Thermo Top Coat
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps: BPX – L020, BM – 206, 607

Happy Friday! Next week is one of my last required classes for medical school, and our “rank list” goes in for where we want to go for residency. Mine has been in for about two weeks already, but I will certainly be double-checking! And I will be fleeing to Hawaii on my much-delayed honeymoon for two weeks after that, so I will be pre-posting. 😀

Hearts Galore

Happy Valentine’s Day! And happy birthday to my baby sister. She gets extra chocolate :-p

This is the mani out of the 5 that I chose to post today in particular because it both has the MOST hearts, and is primarily pink so I figured it fit the theme best! But seriously, SOOO many hearts. Wow.

The base here is yet another new polish from the holiday sets that I won from Nail Polish Canada, and yet another Zoya! This is Kelsey, a bright pink with blue undertones. This polish manages to be a dark-toned neon, which is pretty darn cool. My camera freaked out. The polish also covers well in two thin coats…and I probably could have gotten away with one thick coat instead…Zoya has been killing it with the consistency of the cremes in this collection! I don’t even like pinks and this is an awesome color. And finish. And everything.

This is also another stamp that I’ve had for a while and just…never used. I chose to stamp with a pale grey rather than a white polish, and I regret that a little…I had to double stamp the flower design because the grey didn’t stand out as much as I wanted! Although I do think coloring in the flowers with a bright pink chunky glitter was awesome 🙂

Colors:
~ Pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Grey: Maybelline – Bare Escape
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Pink glitter: Different Dimension – Cranfairy
~ Stamp: BM – XL205

That’s all for today! I hope you get a lot of chocolate, maybe some flowers, and suitable affection from everyone (partners, pets, kids…all that jazz)!

Stormy Heart

This is it, the final boring mani that I wore to interviews! Although if I am being honest, this one is not all that boring. It is also February  which means I am permitted to start posting hearts (not that I have any other pink manis prepared…I spent the last few weeks wearing subtle pink and so I have been avoiding the color altogether. Can I make a blue Valentine’s mani???). Anyway, have some shimmer and some hearts!

I knew what I wanted to do with this mani, and trialled three different grey/grey combos before settling on this one. I am a little sad because the hearts take up so much space you can barely see the base! This only matters because the base is Crystal Crown, which I have just now realized was discontinued at some point in the past. This is awful because it is easily my most-used grey, and the bottle is half empty! Ooops. I need to keep a better eye on when indie polishes discontinue my favorites!

But anyway, this was basically advanced stamping with grey and white over grey. It looks rather nice for all that, and was suitably almost-subtle and heart-shaped!

Colors:
~ Grey shimmer: Emily de Molly – Crystal Crown
~ Grey: Zoya – Dove
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BM – 620

Happy Friday! And this ends the run of boring manis. Now all I need to do is actually pick where I want to be next year (and for the next 10 or so years, yikes!) and get started on some actual Valentine’s manis!

Pearly White

This mani is a bit special…I ended up doing quite a few back-to-back interviews during the fall (which I do NOT recommend, I could have used some recharging time!) but only one of those involved two interviews in different cities, which is to say I flew from one to another with an intervening weekend spend at a friend’s place.

During this weekend, I repainted my nails using polish I traveled with, since I knew that nothing I was going to be able to do would make a mani last for over a week! This means that these nails are 3 days old by the time I got home to image them, and that they were painted in my friend’s bathroom using absolutely minimal supplies. I even ran out of acetone (ergo cleaning up the stamps were…difficult). This means that these are not the best example of my work. Regardless, they are suitably subtle while still having a pop of glitter!

I can also safely say that there are only 4 remaining designs, so there will only be one more week of boring posts! Also, 3/4 have “storm” or “winter” in their titles so I am going to assume that past-me turned to a more grey-themed palette :-p

Colors:
~ Grey holo: Emily de Molly – Crystal Crown
~ Silver holo: F.U.N. Lacquer – 24k Diamond

I think it is time for me to get a head start on Valentine’s nails, and finally start planning out my honeymoon to Hawaii…only a year a half after the actual wedding! Anyway, happy Wednesday!

Mind the Grey Gaps

Happy New Years! This was not intended as a New Years mani since I wore it early in December, but it is sufficiently glittery, and all that I really have on deck at the moment so here we are!

The design was, yet again, inspired by Sveta Sanders. I should have just gone with the naked nail base, but I thought the purple and grey would go well together! I regret that decision, as it made the whole design look much darker than intended. Also, I should probably have done this mani with longer nails! And I was trying to decide between ALL of my multichromes for this mani…and ended up going with a holographic multichrome.

I feel like I should probably let you all know that I will not be responding to comments or anything for a little over a week, as I am on a cruise boat somewhere in the Caribbean! Given how cold the east coast is right now, this whole beachy summer boat thing is pretty darn awesome, or so I assume 🙂

Colors:
~ Grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Purple holo multichrome: Emily de Molly – State of Mind

The one biggest triumph here though is the design on my pointer: I need you all to know that I used striping tape to make that triangle base. And a little bit of creative polishing. I do not own those cool triangle stencils that everyone else seems to have! Anyway, happy New Years and I hope you guys all had fun last night!