Rose Golden Vines

I love this manicure. It is incredibly simple (its just a stamp) but the COLORS. Also, the base is seriously one of my favorite polishes. I almost never reach for it, but whenever I wear it I have to question my sanity about wearing anything else!

There isn’t much to say about this. I actually wore it back in late Fall (hence the darker colors) but I don’t care. It is stunning. I want a dress that looks like Marrow Sea. To be fair, I remain obsessed with shimmery polishes, and this one has it in spades!

Unfortunately, I still haven’t replaced my gold stamping polish, so all of my more recent manicures that involve metallic stamps have featured the same rose gold that you can see here. I really need to buy a new gold! I suppose it makes sense, but the only colors I ever run out of are my basic stamping polishes (black, white, gold, silver) and nude cremes. I want to buy more crazy glitters, but I never use them up! Too bad 🙂

Colors:
~ Teal multichrome: Illyrian Polish – Narrow Sea
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Stamp: BP – 19

That’s all for today! Hope you enjoyed 😀

Flowering in Gold

So this mani came out better than expected! I wanted a copperish-green and I almost missed entirely! I started of with a coat of Dragon, which is of course totally opaque in a single coat…and then decided it was too dark! So I topped it with a thin coat of a different green and then STAMPED with Dragon (and some gold). Voila!

I did have to scour a bunch of plates for actual designs though! And with the combo of green and reddish-gold I think it totally works for a quasi-thanksgiving manicure 😀

Colors:
~ Dark green holo: A England – Dragon
~ Lighter green with copper: Blush Lacquers – Nerida Singer
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamps: Whats Up Nails – B005, BPX – L018, BP – L067, BM – XL472

Luckily, I have part of tomorrow off, so I can at least join my husband and some of our residency friends for dinner, although I am on and overnight call on Friday into Saturday, so I have to hope that whatever awesome nail polish sales happen Friday will be ongoing until Sunday! I also need to apologize for some of the atrocious spelling and grammar at the end of Monday’s post, I should not write blog posts while exhausted. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!

Bronze Leaning Leaves

Although I don’t think the photos came out that well, I LOVED wearing this mani! The dark olive green with copper and stamped with copper…and just ugh. It was so shimmery!

I don’t have much else to say about this mani really? It has double stamping, which I remain proud of, and I absolutely love Nerida Singer when I can talk myself into wearing this polish. I still own too many olive green polishes and I refuse to part with any of them!

Colors:
~ Green: Blush Lacquers – Nerida Singer
~ Copper: Pure Ice – Magic
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamp: Whats up Nails – B005

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! Friday’s post is a bit less exciting (I don’t like the mani, but I feel compelled to post my failures so others do not repeat them!) so I wanted something pretty in advance!

Leave for the Tropics

These are one of my favorite nail designs that I have done recently (…that was not in the 31 Day Challenge, which is where I usually put my favorites). It is a bit of the wrong season, but it was 70 degrees out yesterday so it totally still feels almost-tropical! Basically I love these and I wanted to post them now :-p

These nails are based around water decals from the Born Pretty Store: all the leaves are decals! Which is absolutely amazing because they have white backgrounds and beautiful cut out edges and show up perfectly against a dark green base. I love when I don’t have to use a white base for water decals!!

The flowers I added by hand, because what is a mani with fun leaves without a few dotted petals? I like how colorful it is 🙂 but really I cannot wait to use the rest of these decals, maybe in spring when it is appropriate! But who knows. Snow leaves? I can make that a thing, perhaps!

Colors:
~ Dark green: Sinful Colors – Last Chance
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Dark pink: Zoya – Ciara

Hope you enjoyed these tropical nails in the Fall! I think the rest of this month will be a bit more Autumn-themed. I even have some pumpkins! October rather snuck up on me thought, so I only really have one Halloween manicure (which, the holiday is next week, how did that happen)! Hopefully I remember next year in advance and can put together some more fun seasonal manis :-p  Anyway, these decals are currently on sale for $1.59 for a set of three sheets, and I strongly recommend them.

Ginkgo Green

While finishing up my move from the east coast to the midwest, I re-did my nails. After 4 days of packing my nails were a DISASTER, and with only one day left I figured maybe whatever I put on them would survive (at least until unloading)!

I had set aside (aka did not pack) about 10 polishes, 6 cool colors that I thought I might want to wear, and 4 “necessary” polishes: black, white, gold, and silver, all suitable for stamping. For this mani I grabbed one of the two greens I had out, O R’YLEH by Great Lakes Lacquer, and stamped with some gold ginkgo leaves using Good as Gold by Essie!

I had most of my full set of rectangular plates out as well, just because they pack nicely so I figured it would be ok to put them straight into my to-go suitcase. For some reason, these leaves spoke to me! They are from BPX plate L018, which is full of leaves, flowers, and birds.

That’s all for now! The photos look a bit wonky because I had packed away my usual set up, and was basically using my iPhone for all photos (generally my iPhone takes the sunlight/outdoor photos but my 14 year old cannon takes the indirect lighting photos). Oh well!

Hope you enjoyed!

Golden Shadowed Leaves

This is a bit of a sad day: tomorrow I leave Philly for St Louis. So, this is my last nail art post while in Philadelphia. Philly was where I first discovered nail art, and in the last 7 years my collection has gone from 2 polishes to over 400. I was thinking of posting a pretty skyline design I did, but I ran out of time to edit it (this is becoming a theme) so you’ll have to make do with some shimmery leaves.

This is the mani I created out of my pastel teal swatches, and so there are more teals than you might imagine! I did a dry brush of each of the 4 colors (three cremes and one holo) over each other, and then double stamped over the top with a gold glitter and then a green holo glitter. I really like how it came out!

I am glad I went for the dry brush technique, the bases all ended up looking roughly the same by the time I got to stamping. I also think this is the first time I’ve actually liked stamping the same image twice? Usually I try too hard or the colors are awkward together. But green and gold always works!

Colors:
~ Pastel mints: Zoya – Tiana, Maybelline – Green with Envy, Glitter Gal – No Worries
~ Mint holo: Serum No. 5 – Jaded
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Green: A England – Dragon
~ Stamp: BPX – L018

Initially, I was going to stamp gold then black, but my eyes fell on Dragon which I haven’t used in probably a year, and I grabbed it. A England polishes always stamp so well! It makes sense, since basically all of them are one-coaters. Adina is nuts. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! And goodbye Philly! My next post will be from St Louis…but since I move in on Monday we probably won’t have internet for a few days. Sorry! I will also have some freehand art up eventually…I do have some in the vault I just haven’t edited that either, I know it’s been a lot of stamping post recently!

Aloha

Finally, nail art and no more swatch comparisons! I thought I would open with the nails I painted for my Honeymoon back in March 🙂

Since I was traveling to Hawaii, I wanted some fun tropical nails! I didn’t have any stamping plates that were quite the correct flower, and the few hibiscus ones I have are…not the prettiest. So I tried to turn some flowers INTO something vaguely Hawaiian! I also couldn’t make up my mind between two different designs, so I just went ahead and used both. The mani ended up a bit busier than I intended (oops) but I still like it!

Colors:
~ Purple: Emily de Molly – Traverse the Skies
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Orange: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana?
~ Pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Green: Sinful Colors – Exotic Green
~ Stamps: BP – 067, Chic Peek BM – XL472

I also wish I had done some lava nails, since that may have been the single coolest thing I’ve ever seen (well, hottest really I suppose). Since my visit, the volcano on Hawaii has started erupting again, which is incredibly unfortunate for the people who live on the slopes of the volcano!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the tropical nails! Hopefully I can get my act together and actually have something to post the rest of this week as well 😀

Tropical Fronds

I am in Hawaii right now! Or, at least I should be. I am very excited. I was waiting to post these nails (which I painted back in December in honor of my cruise to the Caribbean) until the start of my next tropical vacation because I am a dork.

The design here was inspired by clairestelle8 and I honestly think I did a pretty decent job replicating her design! Unfortunately, the base gradient which looked really vibrant on my nails did not translate well in the photos. It isn’t pastel!

For the design itself, I had to hand-stamp each leaf, since I didn’t have a plate with thick enough frond leaves to work. Surprisingly, it didn’t take too long! Also, I didn’t like the idea of using a white border for flowers, so I used the darker of the blues instead, and I wish there was a tiny bit more delineation between the flower and the surroundings.

Colors:
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~ Green: Essie – The More the Merrier
~ Teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ Blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps: BPX – L018, BM – XL472, 313, 318

That’s all for today! Sorry preemptively for not responding to any comments for the next two weeks, meanwhile I hope you guys enjoy the posts I have lined up!

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!

Dreidel Dreidel

I figured I couldn’t let Hanukkah pass without at least some type of nail art, so here we are! Dreidel nails.

This design was inspired by Emi’s Manis, but her’s came out MUCH better. I love the color combo and I glad I based mine off of what she did! The nails are the hebrew letters on the dreidel, a spinning top game that is played for pennies or candy (sometimes gelt, candy shaped like coins), where the letter facing up decides what you do with your coins/candy.

I didn’t actually get to play dreidel this year, since I will have spent over half of Hanukkah traveling to interviews (and I don’t have a dreidel in my apartment, I don’t think). The letter’s don’t look quite right, we are going to ignore how small my nun is (pinky), and how fat my gadol is (ring)…and how weirdly shaped my shin is (pointer). As I said, the inspiration photo is just much much better, go check it out! Although I am going to blame the lack of thin lines on how cold it is and so my polish is all gloopy!

Colors:
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Light blue: Zoya – Blu
~ Silver: Revlon – Metallic

That’s all for today, and for Hanukkah. But, if you are feeling awesome can you please head over to Nail Polish Canada here and vote for “flightofwhimsy” so I can win some polish? If you click on my photo there it will take you to my post for Friday, but they are some pretty adorable nutcracker nails 😀 Thank you!!!

Foiled Foliage

I think I am pun-y! Well, it isn’t a pun, the title is basically just alliteration but it still makes me happy. As does this mani! It is technically still autumn…and currently the ground in Philly is completely covered in leaves. It is pretty, crunchy, and utterly ridiculous. When I walk outside I feel like I am eating leaves!

The base polish here is intended, I think, as a topper…but I wanted to make it opaque! This is three coats of Raging Fire by Born Pretty over one thin coat of a dark red base. Honestly, this polish was almost completely opaque at two coats! The final coat was mostly for my pinky, which I had painted more sparsely than the others. Despite looking uneven, the glitter was actually quite smooth after one coat of top coat. That said, the polish itself is thick and a bit goopy…good for dense flakie placement but it would have been difficult to get a light coat of polish.

The flakies themselves shift from pink/red to orange/copper to gold and emerald green at sharp angles. Since the flakes are at slightly different angles to each other, it is actually easy to get the whole color shift! It was mesmerizing.

I then made stamping decals using a left design from plate Floral BPX-L018 with Essie Good as Gold and colored in between the leaves with OPI Visions of Love. It looks quite fun and glittery! I know I could have instead just painted the leaves of the stamping decal with flakies…but this was so much more fun :-p

And, surprisingly, this was pretty easy to remove! Since they are flakies and not true glitter, they dissolve with acetone. The dark red was more painful since the color tends to stain my cuticles. If you want to pick up this flakie polish for yourself, head over to the Born Pretty Store, where you can find it on sale for $3.69. Enjoy!

Fall Shift

Well, apparently I forgot to write this post until this morning, and I have a 9-hour-long test in an hour, so this will be brief!

The art here was inspired by Manic Talons but oh dear god do I need to get some stamping polish! This is absurd. I tried 3 color combos before I found something that would even pretend to show up over the dark base.

Also, the pink/red shimmer in The Magician came through better in real life, but I wanted a photo on its own. Oh well!

Colors:
~ Blue: Zoya – Ibiza
~ Shimmer: ILNP – The Magician
~ Green and Orange random thick polish 😦
~ Stamp: BPX – L018

I do like the way Magician shifts with the colors over it!

That’s it for today. Wish me luck!!!

Pumpkin Grins

Pumpkins! I feel like very year I try to do pumpkins, and ever year that I add faces I wish I hadn’t. Whoops! The design was loosely inspired by @nailsbycambria.

These didn’t come out too poorly, but they don’t look exactly like what I was going for! I can never get the mouths right (especially if I’m trying to make negative-space teeth. Oy)! Sadly, I will not get to carve pumpkins this year because I am both attending a wedding this weekend AND taking a 9-hour-long test in less than a week! Ergo, no time for pumpkins.

What makes matters worse is that I didn’t even carve a pumpkin last year because I was desperately planning for my own wedding (two days before Halloween)! Some day I will get to implement all the cool costume ideas that I have, but not now.

Colors:
~ Orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Light green: Zoya – Tiana
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

Anyway, back to studying (and flying) for me. Hope you enjoyed my slightly wonky jack o’lanterns!

Turning Leaves

I took far too many photos of this mani! Moreover, my favorite ended up being one I casually snapped while walking to the grocery store (hence the odd lighting) but LOOK AT THE SHIFT!

The theme here was end-of-autumn leaves, when the leaves themselves are red-to-brown, so I used a bunch of red and pink and copper multichromes! This is the companion piece to the one from last week. Oddly, while I liked that one better while I was wearing it, I like this one better in photos!

You can maybe see the shift in the leaves? I can at least, so I am happy. This might be one of the first multi-shaded multichrome designs where I think the shift is both visible and adds something to the mani. Finally!

There is in fact one more leaf-themed mani coming up prior to Halloween, but just one (and its next week)! Friday’s post is a little more…thematic.

Colors:
~ Green: ILNP – Mutagen
~ Pink-to-gold holo: Enchanted Polish – I Am the Walrus
~ Rose-to-gold: ILNP – Greatness
~ Copper-to-brown: Born Pretty – 212
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BPX-L018

That’s all for today! Stay tuned for something that is actually Halloween-themed rather than fall-themed :-p

Falling Leaves

I did two VERY similar manicures…one on each hand. Mostly because mutlichromes are fun and I at this point have too many of them :-p.

The other mani is shiftier, and will go up next week so that I don’t bore you guys with the same manicure twice, more-or-less. This one, although it shifts less, I actually think I like better (and that’s unusual)! The colors came together really well.

I started with a green multichrome base (this one shifts from an emerald green to a bright teal, and a deeper blue at steep angles) and then used advanced stamping (aka coloring in the design on the stamper) to add the leaves. Two of the leaf colors are multichromes, although the golden-brown one barely shifts (its mostly a gold to greenish-grey, but it was already a grey-gold to start with). The other one shifts from copper to brown, which is again, not a super big shift. I like it anyway!

Colors:
~ Green: ILNP – Reminisce
~ Gold: Revlon – Hypnotize
~ Copper-to-brown: Born Pretty – 212
~ Gold-to-olive: Catrice – Genius in the Bottle
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: BPX – L018

I will admit to staring at my nails and moving them around trying to capture the right angles for these photos…but I just gave up and picked ones that looked pretty and glow-y instead. So, pretend that they can shift at least a little? Meh. Still pretty! Now if only it would COOL DOWN around here…it should not be 80 degrees out in Philly in mid-October!

Winter Leaves

Grey leaves for winter! This was inspired by Christabellnails although her leaves were better! Also, I was bored with the solid grey nails so I added leave veins with textured polish.

I need to stop trying to paint full-veined leaves on my fingers. I’ve done it maybe 3 times this year and it never works out right!

Also, I can’t wait for snow. Its finally started falling below freezing in Philly, so maybe we won’t get a repeat of the craziness that was last year (when it was 80 degrees outside on Christmas). Then again, its currently freezing rain here, so maybe I take it back…

Colors
~ White: Wet n’ Wild – French White Creme
~ Grey: NYC – Sidewalkers
~ Dark grey: Sinful Colors – Muse
~ Textured black: OPI – Emotions
~ Textured grey: Zoya – London
~ Textured silver: OPI – It’s Frosty Outside

Hope you enjoyed!

Roses of Purple

Today is the final wedding-potential mani! Yes, there were a LOT of purple manis until I found the one I wanted to wear to my wedding! This was made using a stamping decal and coloring in the rose petals. Unfortunately, it came out really dark, so it is getting posted last!

When I was first painting all the colors, the plan was to have the rose go from light-to-dark with the center being lighter purples and the outer layer of petals being darkest. It rather worked, but all the purple are so close to each other you can barely tell! Also all of them are darker than they usually look (which I suppose is to be expected when I stamped the outline with black).

Regardless, this was nice in theory but not so great in delivery. I used a glitter bomb polish as the background because I though the grey and pinkish-purple would go well with the purples in the flower petals. While I wasn’t wrong, since the purples ended up being darker than usual the whole thing just looks unbalanced. Whoops!

I used a lot of purples which I am not going to bother naming here since I won’t be repeating this manicure. The only important polish is the base, which is Sakura by Emily de Molly. I still love it!

Hope you enjoyed (maybe more than I did!). There is another almost-purple mani on friday (that has nothing to do with the wedding at all…it just fit the color scheme)!

Leaves of Fall

I needed something fast, fall-themed, and elegant enough not to (hopefully) get me in trouble in the hospital, and this is what I came up with!

It isn’t exactly a Halloween mani, but the colors are right so I’m just gonna post it now! I am actually hanging out on my “mini-moon” which is apparently what you call something that is too short to be a honeymoon (which is happening next year) but is still a small post-wedding vacation. Go figure!

The leaf pattern is stamped with a random mix of yellow and orange which was visible in real life, but unfortunately not particularly easy to see in the photos. Sorry!

Colors
~ Red: A England – Rosebower
~ Orange: Mentality – Orange Opaque
~ Yellow: Mentality – Yellow Opaque
~ Stamp: BP – 19

Hope you enjoyed! Happy Halloween!

Thresh

I was going to do something wheat-like, and I found this plate! It is technically feathers but I thought it looked a little like fall-themed grain, hence thresh 🙂

The base for this gradient is one of the KBShimmer 2016 ‘misfit’ polishes called Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana, a pastel neon orangey-yellow. It is almost exactly the color of a goldfish snack! (I found this out while eating goldfish before I added the gradient. It was glorious). The polish is a bit streaky and chalky (as one might expect of a pastel neon), and dries to a semi-matte. I used three coats for even coverage, and although you could still a little bit see where I passed the brush, overall it looked rather nice! The color is totally unique in my collection and really quite fun. It is shown here with top coat.

I feel like I’ve been doing this color scheme gradient a lot (even if I haven’t shown some of the designs yet) but I guess it makes sense…fall and all! I tried to add yellow to the tips of my nails, but you can barely see it over the pastel orange base. Oh well, still pretty!

Colors
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Light orange: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red: OPI – All I Want For Christmas (is OPI)
~ Purple: Zoya – Monica
~ Black: Mentality – Black Opaque
~ Stamp: BM – XL209

As a heads-up, I should have a post ready for Friday…but wether or not I get ANY up next week depends on how much last minute editing I can do. My wedding is this Saturday (OH SHIT) and I am still rushing around doing last minute things for that! So in advance, if there are no posts next week that’s why!

Hope you enjoyed!

Fall Fail

I was trying to make something like this and I failed. Whoops! I needed it to be impressive enough that I wouldn’t get in trouble wearing it to the hospital and this just doesn’t quite make it.

I should have done entirely golden leaves. I tried to mix in a few shimmery browns and yellow…and instead you can hardly tell the brown from the gold and the yellow is too faint to see! Grr.

So, fall fail. It happens! I have a few more seasonal manis that I want to put together before winter hits, hopefully they come off better! I even made stamping decals for these just so I could get the placement perfect *sigh*.

Colors
~ Red: Zoya – India
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Brown holo: Darling Diva – Chocolate Diamond
~ Yellow: Revlon – Hypnotic
~ Stamp: BP – 19

Live and learn! Sorry :-p. The next few fall/halloween manis are a bit better I promise!