Holland

The final day of the 31 Day Challenge of 2018 is here! I only participated in about half (a little under half if we’re being honest) of the total and I am still exhausted. Major kudos to all of you who were following along, and to my past self who somehow managed to post daily!

Anyway, today is “honor nails you love” and I have a bit of a different thing happening. Probably 25-30% of all my nail art is based either loosely or exactly on designs I have seen other people do. This time around, I decided to do a design off of the website for a product! Although it is also the nail art used by that product.

What I am trying to say is that today’s post was inspired by, of all things, the stamping plate website itself! I cannot find the original artist (and trust me, I’ve been looking) but I literally bought this plate because this image showed up in my email and I needed to replicate it! So voila. I think I’ve done a pretty good job honestly!

Colors:
~ Blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Blue shimmer: Sinful Colors – Cinderella
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Light grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Dark grey: WOW – #333
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark green: Sinful Colors – Exotic Green
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

And that’s all for the 31 Day Challenge! Hopefully I will still be around and posting next year, but as residency gets harder we shall see! I am still painting my nails and enjoying it, so I am hopefully. As it turns out, yesterday was my 6 year blogaversary, so I have been blogging for longer than I thought! Go me?

Floating Feathers

As it stands, this is my least favorite mani that I have pre-set for this month. I was trying to go for something cute and whimsical…but it honestly just came out boring. Sorry!

I did stick to the black/white/grey theme at least, unlike in previous years when I added color pops. Maybe that is why I don’t like it though, color is my jam!

Colors:
~ Grey holo: Emily de Molly – Crystal Crown
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

Anyway, this post is a bit lackluster but next weeks is much better, stay tuned for gradient day on Monday! Happy weekend 🙂

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!

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)!