Hearts and Lace

This is so pink. SO PINK. It is too pink! I used a pink with a bit of glitter and added a pink with MORE glitter and then hearts. So, Valentine’s appropriate but it kinda made me cringe to wear it!

This was two thin coats of Mae by Zoya. It’s not a bad polish, two coats is great coverage…I just don’t love it. The glitter flakes are subtle and the shimmer has very little depth. It was an easy polish to wear, but if I want a shimmery pink I either want a lot of metallic depth or a glitter madhouse. I ended up gradienting on (mostly with dry-brush since trying to use a makeup sponge just transferred the darn glitters) Alegra by Zoya, which is a true deeper pink glitter polish, and one of my first ever Zoyas. I have to say, comparing Mae to Alegra, Mae just doesn’t measure up!

Colors:
~ Pink with shimmer: Zoya – Mae
~ Pink glitter: Zoya – Alegra
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: MoYou London – Frenchy 14

Of course I saw a heart stamp and figured my nails were already pink, so why not? And then the matching french tip stamps (I do rather love that this plate has both angled tip patterns and straight across tip patterns). SO MANY HEARTS. This is probably the most girly nail art I’ve worn this year.

Complicated Lace Drape

You guys, I just had a DAY (but Eva, it’s only 3pm! Yes but I woke up at 5:30, so it’s been a whole day and I am over it). Which means that today’s post will be short and sweet because I mostly want to bang my head into a wall. Repeatedly. And this mani? Not helping.

The base here is three coats of Delaney by Zoya. In the bottle this has a bit of a duochrome/multichrome finish, but that did not translate to the nail (which was pretty much as expected). This is, I think, the last of my haul from winning the Nail Art Canada holiday challenge…and of all the Zoya polishes I received, this is the one I was least excited about. So it went lest. This polish is basically a muted dull metallic purple, and I already have Zoya Gadia, which is amazing. So yah, this is three thin coats, and it looks fine but I have prettier version of this in my stash already.

For the design, I ended up doing a purple-to-white lace stamping gradient, getting bored, and adding a metric ton of dots! I think I went overboard I really need to stop trying to do lace gradients over purple, this is probably the third time I have tried something like this, and to date I have liked none of them!

Colors:
~ Purple metallic: Zoya – Delaney
~ Purple creme: L’Oreal – Royalty Reinvented
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamp: BP – L084

And that’s all for today! I know it isn’t great, but I’m working off my backlog. This one and the next post are just not my favorites, but then it should get good again (I tend to edit the photos in waves of things-I-love and things-I-dislike, and we are in a dislike wave, Monday’s post was the end of a love wave). Ok. Too much train of thought. Enjoy!

Grungy Floral Lace

I don’t really know what else to call this? The background is a bit grungy and I should really not have stamped over it with lace, because it really just came out looking messy.

The base of this is my swatch test for Mauve Nudes, which I then haphazardly dry-brushed over with each color. I went, for some reason that I cannot come up with in hindsight, with a lace floral stamp? And then colored in the flowers with jelly polish and added a gold bead to the middle. I think if the background was a consistent color rather than a mess, that this would have looked good! But alas, it does not.

Colors:
~ Tan nude: Zoya – Chantal
~ Pastel nude: Essense – I Nude It
~ Peach nude: CND – Cashmere Wrap
~ Pastel mauve: KBShimmer – Caught on Tape
~ Mauve: Zoya – Rue
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink jelly: Zoya – Paloma
~ Red jelly: OPI – My Wish List is You
~ Orange jelly: custom made
~ Stamp: BP – L084

So, that is a lot of colors for something that looks like it has at maximum 5 colors. Oh well! At least I tried?

I think I need to stay away from lace on nudes for a while, or just lace stamps n general. The last few manis that I have tried with them just don’t end up looking good!

Golden Lace

You guys. THIS POLISH. I feel like I say that about every polish that I pick up from the Polish Pickup Pack! I’ve been buying ~2 polishes every other month, since for some reason they seem to alternate off-months with things I love. I need to stop buying so many new polishes but each is more strange and incredible than the last!

This is one I was hesitant about, since some of the swatch photos looked incredible and others looked forgettable. However, I have never owned a CbL polish and have always wanted one…and they are known for their holos! So I went with it and I am glad I did. This polish is awesome!

What you see here are three thin coats of Frohe Feiertage! (which I will never ever spell correctly without looking at the bottle). I probably could have gotten away with two if I was more careful. the polish dries a bit gritty, so this is with top coat. That said, this is such a pretty polish! It is from the December Polish Pickup, and thus is no longer available, but if you like funky cool polishes I recommend you join the fb group! You never have to buy anything if you don’t want.

The weird thing about this polish is that I couldn’t actuality tell what color it was. Supposedly the base is a silver holo, but honestly it is so full of shimmer and glitter that it isn’t remotely silver! The polish is swimming with gold and silver glitters, and packed with so much copper-to-gold shimmer that the overall look is a rose gold with flecks of gold and silver in it. I bought it to replace one of my favorite Mentality polishes when it turned out that Mentality was destroying my nails -_- and it is, if anything, much prettier than that darn polish!

Colors:
~ Rose gold glitter: Colors by Llarowe – Frohe Feiertage!
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Born Pretty – L020

Of course, being me, I ended up adding a floral lace stamp over the polish because I didn’t want to cover too much of it. Hope you enjoyed!

Russet Hearts of Lace

This mani ended up being a lot of fun! There are no stereotypical Valentine’s colors, but there are hearts and it is somewhat elegant. Subverting tropes!

I wanted to see what a lace patterned stamp would look like over a magnetic polish, and I figured my copper/burgundy magnetic was perfect for Valentine’s Day! It also helped that I was sent the ideal stamping plate to review from the Born Pretty Store (I love lace stamps, and this plate is chock full of them), AND  was sent two new magnets to play with!

For years, I have only had one, somewhat weak, wavy-patterned magnet to work with. Now, I have three! The one I am showing here is a simple diagonal line design, but it is very strong and the lines come through beautifully. I am so happy. This magnet is from the Born Pretty Store as well, and is listed as “N02”, on sale for $1.49. I should probably mention that it comes with a sticker over it with the pattern printed on it…that sticker is what holds the magnet to it’s positioning stick (so don’t remove it like I did or the magnet falls right out). Clearly, the magnet is strong enough to work through the sticker!

As mentioned above, I also love this stamp. The plate has a whole bunch of lace designs, and this one is entirely hearts! There are three large hearts (which mostly face in different directions from each other) so I used each of them on a nail, ergo all my nails are slightly different! I like it. I am also officially a fan of stamping lace over magnetic designs! The stamp is on sale right now for $2.99 over at the Born Pretty Store.

Colors:
~ Copper: Masura – Evening Before the Fireplace
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BP – L084

That’s all for today! My last heart-themed post will go up on Wednesday, and then we can move onto things like flowers and geometric patterns. :-p I also realized that due to my ridiculous backlog of posts, the actual post where this is a new polish hasn’t gone up yet! Whoops. At some point you’ll see this same base with a wavy design but suffice to say I wanted some multicolored magnet polishes and bought two Masuras….and they are (as expected) amazing. Sorry!

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.

Grey Trimmed Lace

Ok, so this is super boring. Like really really painfully boring. That said, it came out nicely and no one noticed any of the art in the hospital so I’ll cal it a win. It also gave me a chance to use that darn stamp…its been staring at me for years and I never figured out why someone would need some angled lace pattern!

I don’t have much to say about this. Pink. White. Grey. Some lace. I sound like a broken record…I really hope my current stint in the outpatient clinics is more forgiving of manis! I think it will be (I am barely getting graded for this, it is for my own edification).

Colors:

~ Pink: ULTA – Baby Doll

~ Grey: Zoya – Dove

~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

~ Stamp: BM – 323

I hate posing for bottle photos with anything but Zoya or rectangular bottles. I don’t know why, but the shape fits well in my hand. This awkward straight-edged bottle? Not so much. So, thank you brands like Zoya and Emily de Molly for making easy-to-hold bottles :-p

Thats it for boring pink manis! There is one more subtle mani but at it least it isn’t pink or nude. Oy.

Dressed in Lace

This may or may not have been directly inspired by the tagline on Cherish. And I may or may not almost have added some 3D diamond-esque rhinestones and decided that would ruin the look. You’ll never know!

This is one of the rare occasions when, despite painting both hands, you are mostly only seeing my right! When I was in the hospital I could not go off-handed (when the nail polish on one hand is different than the other) because that would be incredibly unprofessional…but the designs were seldom perfectly identical! In the case of this mani, I was moving around the stamped image from nail to nail and I actually liked my right hand better (mostly cause of my pointer finger).

Regardless, this is a bit of a boring mani, sorry! That said, after this post…there are only two hospital manis left! For a while at least (I go back to the clinic next month but there is quite a back-log of posts during my month of free time!).

Colors

~ Nude: Picture Polish – Cherish

~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

~ Stamp: BM – 04

So yep, a bit boring, but so be it. I’ll likely get at least one of the remaining boring ones out of the way next week so we can move on to RAINBOWS and SPARKLES. 😀

Lace Negative Space

This mani is a bit odd…it looked awesome in person, but the photos all came out weird! I’ve posted the ones that look best, but it still doesn’t capture how cool these actually looked.

The art itself was inspired by Baroquen Nails, as all the best negative space manis are 🙂

To make this, I started with two coats of a sheer nude, then two coats of a frankened sheer black jelly (making the right tone of jelly took forever!). Next, I stamped the lacy pattern, and then freehanded the red. Finally, I added the 3D bits!

Colors
~ Nude: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Red: Confetti – Maquerade Ball
~ Stamp: BC – 10

Hope you enjoyed! I doubt you’ll be seeing much negative space in the near future, as of right now my nails are a blotchy odd mix of yellow and bright pink. Silly staining polish!

Simple Lace Nubbins

Ah, a throw-back to when I had to wear girly subtle nails to the clinic. Luckily, I have been able to get away with wearing more colorful nail art (as long as it looks professional) for the past month, but this was sitting in my folder so I wanted to get it posted!

There isn’t much to say about this. Its a purple-nude polish with a white lace stamp. It isn’t bad looking, it just isn’t at all exciting!

Colors
~ Nude: Zoya – Rue
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BP – L020

I am at least glad that I’ve been stockpiling nude and nude-ish polishes, since I imagine once I actually start residency I will need to pretend I am a fairly normal polishing person who only wears nudes, pinks, and reds…rather than the purple/blue/teal/green loving fanatic that I am. Ugh!

That’s all for today! Next week should bring something more exciting than this…although if you want exciting I think Wednesday’s post counts :-p

Greyscale Netting

Sometimes I just like to play with monochrome! In this case, I was excited to see that I actually had enough holo polish to make a gradient! Well, technically the black polish was a creme, but over a holo it still looked suitably glittery!

I actually did a second very similar mani (different stamp) that I like much better, but I’ll show that later. This one ended up looking like netting.

Remarkably, I got away with wearing this in the hospital…pathology is much more lenient about nail polish! Maybe because there was absolutely zero patient interaction?

Colors
~ White: Emily de Molly – Crystal Crown
~ Grey: A England – Fated Prince
~ Black: Wet n’ Wild – Black Creme
~ Stamp: Born Pretty Store (asian name) – L008

Next week starts my two weeks on outpatient in this rotation block, so I should be able to wear polish again. It really makes me angry when people enforce rules (like no nail polish in the OR) that have been throughly debunked. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this mani!

Doily Flowers

Simple easy work-friendly mani today!

Unfortunately, the sun did not cooperate, so you can’t see how peachy this looks in the light, with its contrasting bright pink flash. You can see a hint of it in the direct light photos, but still!

Colors
~ Pink: Femme Fatale – Mr. Pinchy
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BC – 10

I did so many lace nails in a row back in September that I am completely done with them for the time being. That being said, there are a few more waiting in the wings.

Enjoy!

Dangles and Lace

This did not come out how I planned…mostly because I can’t make curved dotted lines on my non-dominant hand! This was initially supposed to be a slightly modified version of @twi_star@twi_star. I like that I added extra draped beads (and the silver) but I wish I had been able to make the delineating dots consistent! Also water decals >> stamps. I just don’t have the right water decals. Whoops!

In other news, I really hate the names of Nails Inc polishes. I know they are named after places in England…but they are impossible to remember. Give me SOMETHING more creative!

Colors
~ Purple: L’oreal – Royalty Reinvented
~ Black: Wet n’ Wild – Black Creme
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Stamp: BC – 10

That’s all for today. My current rotation is kicking my butt and I didn’t get a chance to edit my nail art this past weekend cause of Thanksgiving!

Lace Down

I saw a gradient with light lace stamping on it, and thought “oh, fun!” so here we are!

Really, the colors (again) got darker than I expected more quickly than I expected…I apparently am lacking in medium-dark pink cremes. Who knew? I don’t even like pink that much (mostly because everyone else does…yes, I am a hipster nail polish person), but maybe I should invest in a medium dark pink at some point!

Unfortunately, the stamping plate I was using has rounded edges…not just corners, the whole side is beveled down! The stamp I used was on this beveled section, and so part of it wouldn’t transfer no matter what I tried (it wouldn’t pick up at all, since the etching was much more shallow over the beveled section), so I had to add white lines by hand to the tips of my nails. Oops! And this is why I buy un-beveled plates. I can’t be too upset, this was free for me to review months ago!

Colors
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Dark pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Born Pretty – L008

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! And happy Friday!

Rue-ful Lace

The title is a pun! Because the base color is named Rue. I might be tired.

Anyway, today is “delicate print” day. I have a LOT of lace manis to pick from in my to-be-posted folder, mostly because I painted a lot of subtle lace (ok, I stamped a lot of subtle lace) while I was in the hospital. This might be the least-subtle of the ones I have, so here we go!

Despite the colors being actually quite different here, no one noticed my nails in the hospital! It helps that my entire team was male (I mean, it is surgery), so maybe they didn’t even think to look! I also didn’t cut the nails on my left hand down quite as much my last week (although I did on my right, which you don’t get to see since they are the same pattern. I can be professional!).

Colors
~ Nude: Zoya – Rue
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BC -10

So, subtle (ish) nail art for the hospital, but still delicate! Tomorrow’s nail art is NOT in the delicate spectrum 😀

Dots and Flowered Vines

Flower day in the 31 Day Challenge was easy for me to pick…this has a whole bunch of flowers! It’s also quite old (I painted this back in spring and its almost the end of summer…whoops!). I also think its cute, if a little grandmother-y.

The design was inspired by this bit of nail art which is not watermarked so I have no idea who it belongs to! Nor where it came from at all. But it is pretty so I went with it!

I don’t know that I would have decided to mix flowers + color change + dots if left to my own devices…this mani is really busy! It works because so many of the colors are in the pale-neutral shades I think.

Colors
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Blue: Essie – Rock the Boat
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Green: Sinful Colors – Exotic Green
~ Light purple: Sally Hansen – Lacey Lilac
~ Purple: Zoya – Malia

That’s all for today! Hope you enjoyed!

Monochrome Carnival

Don’t ask about the title. I don’t have a good reason other than that it sounded good! This is what I am posting for Day 7: Black and White. There is some awesome holo silver-y goodness in there, but that is sorta white. Also, everything looks better with glitter.

I seldom reach for black-and-white of my own volition, but this mani got in my head and I had to try it! I spent a lot of time picking which of my many silver holos to use for the base (linear fine? linear coarse? subtle and light grey? subtle and white? I think I might have too many silver-based holo polishes) and settled on light grey and NOT subtle. 😀

After that came a white stamp and a black stamp made of waves and awesome curly patterns that reminded me of going to a carnival!

Colors
~ Silver holo: Emily de Molly – Stockpile
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

Technically these were my birthday nails (so this post has been waiting since June). I don’t have anything planned out for tomorrow (metallic) and the next day (rainbow) although I think I should have something lying around!

Frills and Foofaraw

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get the line that Zoe (from Firefly) says out of my head  while painting these “Too much foofaraw. If I’m going to wear a dress, I’d want something with some slink.” Hence, Frills and Foofaraw!

This another of the designs where I used my newest review-haul from the Born Pretty Store. The water decals I used here are stunning, but I was at a loss for what to do under them because they were so complicated! I wanted to use bits from each part of the design (the water decal is one of those long continuous ones) and I kept arguing ‘gradient? ombre? glitter? colors?’ and settled on a subtle holo-shimmer in light grey because contrast is better.

I finally get off my surgical rotation this friday, so I can start growing my nails out again! It also means I can wear more awesome crazy nails and less subtle sadness (I haven’t posted many of the subtle manis yet because I am putting off editing them). I might even go back to posting daily, we shall see!

Colors
~ Grey holo: Emily de Molly – Crystal Crown
(no, I don’t know why I made a color list for just one color. Go with it).

Hope you enjoyed! And if you want to pick up this complicated yet cool water decal for yourself, you can find it at the Born Pretty Store for $0.99. Don’t forget to use my 10% off code, LY5X31!

Neon Summer Snow

I hate hand-painting snowflakes. It takes forever and they never quite come out right. It’s awful. When I saw this plate at the Born Pretty Store that combined snowflakes and lace, I knew I needed it!

The designs on the plate are really well etched and quite pretty. They vary between huge (a snowflake that would never fit onto one nail) and quite small (actually nail sized). I used both sizes here, and basically just placed whichever snowflake I wanted at the tip of my nail and let the connected lacy pattern trail down.

I went ahead and used non-typical colors (really, more white or silver snowflakes on blue? Nope) because it seemed like fun. My base is a pink-green duochrome with a grey base called For The Twill of It by Essie, and the stamp is a hot pink stamping polish. Although you can barely see the pink of the duochrome behind the neon pink, the combo still looks alright!

This mani almost didn’t happen…I was hit with debilitating vertigo just as I was going to add the stamps, and had to lie down for the rest of the night. I’ve never had vertigo before, it was awful!! On the plus side, my ear problems seem to have righted themselves so maybe it will never happen again. I can only hope.

If you want to get this snowy lacy stamping plate, head over to the Born Pretty Store! The stamping plate is $2.99, so have fun! Enjoy!

Mauve Lace

While I was doing my brief return-to-medicine rotation, I wore two manicures. The first one was SUPER subtle, and you’ll see it tomorrow. The other one was slightly prettier (because it contains no pink and I like lace) which you’ll see today!

I figured after the first week with my teeny tiny pink nails, that I could get away with a grey-purple polish and some white lace stamps. No one even noticed my nails had designs on them, so I count it as a win! They weren’t grading me anyway…and one of the poor interns on my teams had a truly horrifying shade of slightly see-through light blue. Her nails looked diseased.

Regardless, purple, white, and lace! I actually bought this purple about 6 months ago explicitly so I could wear it on the wards with no one noticing. It is just interesting enough (with the shimmer and the tiny gold flakies) for me to be happy with it, but subtle enough that no one else could tell there was anything unusual going on with my nails!

Colors
~ Purple: ILNP – Long Walks
~ White: Wet n’ Wild – French White Creme
~ Stamp: BC – 10

This is a week of “tiny nails” so, I’m sorry about that! For what its worth, they all look ok (I mean, I am biased) but still. I miss my longer nails!