Abstract Rainbow Stripes

What to say about this manicure. It is weird. I don’t usually do a gradient from yellow…most gradients go over white! I also don’t usually alternate nails quite as markedly as this. However, since I wanted the whole thing to glow in the dark like crazy, I was stuck using Dayglow as a base which dictated how the rest of the manicure looked!

Dayglow is one of those polishes that I forget I own until I see someone else’s cool glow in the dark manicure. And then I decided that I absolutely need to do one. There was no particular inspiration for this manicure…I just wanted some combination of glow in the dark and rainbows! Honestly, I think it looks pretty cool if rather odd.

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Glow-in-the-dark: Serum No 5: Dayglow
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

That’s all for today! I feel like a bright rainbow is suitably summer-like for todays 100 degree and 99% humidity, but then again I wore this back in the winter *shrug*. Hope you enjoyed!

Unnamed Orange

Apparently I forgot to write down what I used for this mani. At all. I have no record of ever having painted this. Ugh! That said I have a pretty good guess…

I was sent some blooming ink polishes to review from the Born Pretty Store. I figured they were like jelly polishes right? Wrong! They are incredibly thin and runny (aka ‘ink’) and have some odd properties. You can’t really layer them to make the color brighter like you can with jellies…you blob it down. You can move it around and get rid of it just by going over it again. That’s how I got the weird blobby-depth to this orange/pink mani.

Basically, there are only two colors here: white polish and orange ink (aka Flowing Fire). I started with white, and then tried to swirl on the orange. Then blob it on. Then I just had fun with it. The end result was pretty cool, and had a look that I don’t think I could have achieved with regular polish! It was a dirty orange-brown, however, and quite ugly. Then the surprises began.

1. You cannot clean this with acetone. Seriously. My cuticles were orange-pink for DAYS. I edited them here because it was so embarrassing. Do not flood your cuticles with this stuff!
2. It changes color with topcoat! It went from orange-brown to neon orange-pink. Which is to say it became much prettier and much closer to the color of the ink in the bottle
3. It will eat all color. I tried to stamp over the design in white, which worked, and then add more topcoat to seal the white design. It ate through the white! I ended up re-stamping in white and not top coating the final stamp. If you look carefully you can almost, but honestly not really, see the initial white stamp of the same patter. Omg!

So, that’s that. This was a lot of fun to make and behaved in weird unpredictable ways. Will I use it again? Yah. Will I be more careful? Absolutely! If you want to play around with these inks yourself, head over to the born pretty store where you can find it for $2.99. The particular color you see here is called Flowing Fire. Enjoy!

Rainbow Fronds

I have no idea what I was going for here! The Overprint stamping series by Born Pretty has lots of awesome layered stamps, and I wanted to use the one that looked like a frond. It has a version where you can cover either the middle part of the tips of the leaves, and I wanted to fiddle with it!

I ended up using a bunch of neon polishes (don’t ask me which, I don’t remember) and layering them over each other in sets of pink, orange, yellow, and purple. I decided, somehow, that the end result wasn’t exciting enough, so I added more fronds to the rims of my nails. The end result is interesting? But super weird!

The base color is Reminisce by ILNP, although with how much I have covered it up,  you can hardly see the shift! The stamping plate is Overprint L002 from the Born Pretty Store.

I really don’t know you guys. This is a weird one, even for me! Also, sorry. I have completely lost track of days and obviously meant to post this yesterday!

Square Scales

Beautiful polish and simple art! I do wish I had more stamps that actually looked like scales, I don’t think this stamp does this polish justice! Oh well, still came out pretty :-p

What you see here are three coats of Princess of the Underworld by Rogue Lacquer from PPP Jan 2019. This polish is stunning! It appears to be a green jelly-based polish with a very strong red-gold-green shimmer, filled with large and small iridescent flakies that shift orange-gold-green. The overall appearance is a red shimmer on a murky green base with flashes of gold. Again, stunning. Also super easy to control!

It is a bit harder to see with all the rose gold bits on my nails after stamping, but the underlying polish did have a really stunning shimmer/shift to it that was apparent in low light and sunlight. It might have been closer to armor than scales!

Colors:
~ Green/red glitter: Rogue Lacquer – Princess of the Underworld
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Stamp: BM – 604

That’s it for today! I do feel the need to prepare you all, Friday’s post is significantly less awesome. I tried something, and it failed :-p

Mystical Blue Sea Monster

This is a rather fun manicure! I was in the mood for mystical creatures and I have done about 7 dragon manis thus far…but never a Nessie! So, enjoy the Loch Ness monster. But cuter. And purple.

All the designs came from the same plate, which was quite lucky. The version of the fairytale plate that I have is not stamped all that well on one side, but works like a charm on the other! Luckily, the parts of the plate that I needed for this manicure picked up well. I also got to make some fun multi-color blob stamps for the waves 🙂

Colors:
~ Periwinkle glitter: Painted Polish – Just One Look
~ Light purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Stamp: MoYou – Fairytale 02 

That’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed. Stay tuned for a stunning new polish on Wednesday.

Blossoms on Blue

If I am being completely honest, I do not like this manicure. The blue polish was just a tad too sheer to totally cover the beautiful pink glittery base, which made the whole design look shimmery. I wish the blue had remained creme! Oh well. Its a fun stamp anyway.

Colors:
~ Pink glitter: ILNP – Rosewater
~ Blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Stamp: MoYou – Porcelain 01

Only two photos today because by the time the sun came out I had enough tip wear that the photos are not fit for consumption! Oops :-p Hope you enjoyed anyway!

Pastel 4th of July

Since I was in the cardiac intensive care unit over the fourth of July last year, I needed nails that celebrated the holiday without being super blingy! I decided to make some pastel toned flags…and then to use grey-out holo polish so it was a bit more subtle indoors (it helped that OUTDOORS my nails were super glittery) 🙂

This mani, predictably, took quite some time since I had to use an infinite number of strips of striping tape! That said, I think the end result was worth it. These came out pretty darn cool! Even if they were far more subtle than my typical 4th of July art!

Colors:
~ Silver holo: Nabi – Silver
~ Pink: Milani – Digital
~ Blue: Nabi – Sky Blue
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur

I hope all of my American readers get to enjoy the fireworks tomorrow! I am off tomorrow night, so if I am lucky and we don’t get a deluge of rain, I will hopefully see some colorful explosions myself!

Safari Sunset

Scenery plates make awesome nail art surprisingly easy. All I had to do for this one was gradient, then stamp! The gradient, of course, took longer than anything else, and the result was very fun to wear! Once the gradient was done I actually painted over the whole thing with a yellow jelly polish to brighten the red and oranges, since the base polish was red (rather than white or yellow which are my go-to in a gradient like this).

The base color is a new-to-me red polish called Sookie by Zoya. This is three thin coats. The polish is very pretty and quite bright (I don’t know that neon red is a thing, but this is close), and covers well. It also, shockingly, removed very easily for a red! Most of my reds turn my cuticles red as the polish comes off, and this one played nicely.

I am actually really happy with how my yellow stamping polish gradiented, I wasn’t expecting to get much yellow tone over such a bright red!

Colors:
~ Red: Zoya – Sooki
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: Stamping polish
~ Yellow jelly: Soap Bubbles Yellow
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

That’s all for today, hope you enjoyed! My formal neurology residency starts today (as opposed to the medicine intern year I have been doing for the past 12 months) so my time is going to become even MORE limited. I will try to keep posting, but if the blog has some random blank days, I’m sorry! Blame work :-p

Forest Floor

Greeeen! I finally transferred a bunch of photos from my camera to my computer, so I can go back to posting seasonally-appropriate nail art! This one is just bright pretty green leaves, but they were fun to make!

The inspiration for this was a layered stamping plate sent to me from the Born Pretty Store to review. It has lots of deconstructed leaves, and a few deconstructed flowers. It is overall pretty great! The lines were crisp and picked up well, and the overlapping patterns fit nicely with each other. Since I really only used green (and gold) it is a bit harder to see some of the details of the layered design, but I promise its well done! I should be using this plate again come fall for some fun red/orange leaves 🙂

Colors:
~ Magentic green: Masura – Emerald Cat
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Dark green: Sinful Colors – Last Chance
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Stamps: BP – Overprint L002

If you are interested in some pretty layering leaves for yourself, head over to the Born Pretty Store. This plate is available for $2.99!

Orange Snake

This is a bit of an odd manicure. I wanted to show of my new thermal a polish, but I may have gone a little overboard? The design was cool, but the thermal polish is hardly the star of the show with so much else going on!

What you see here are three thin coats of POP Polish Leaves of Gold. This polish is overwhelmingly filled with flakies. Tons of flakies. Swimming in them. The polish color is a bright yellow (almost a green) when warm, which turns into a bright orange-red when cool. The flakies show up more distinctly in the yellow state but are obviously also very visible when orange. The color shift was easy, but not as dramatic as I expected despite the colors being quite different! For me, the polish mostly sat in a pale-orange state.

The design was made by stamping with the snake stamp, and then grabbing a red jelly polish and just coloring in part of the design. There is a part of me that wishes I had also added some gold, but that would have been even MORE distracting!

Colors:
~ Orange flakie thermal: POP Polish – Leaves of Gold
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black of Black
~ Red glitter: Zoya – Aphrodite
~ Stamp: Moyra – 32 Nature

Hope you enjoyed! I think this should be the last thermal post till Fall, there isn’t much color shifting happening in the summer!

Falling Rosy Leaves

Well, this is absolutely a fall manicure…that I am posting in the summer! Oops. I need to put the rest of my nail art (basically everything since Feburary or so) on my computer and I just haven’t gotten around to it yet! Hopefully the importing of more seasonally-appropriate nail art will happen tomorrow, but I didn’t want to leave you all without ANY designs today!

This was a very straight forward manicure, but it uses one of my favorite polishes (I do feel like I say this about every third mani…) so I like it regardless of its simplicity! It was also a fun color combo, deep murky red-blue and rose gold.

Colors:
~ Teal multichrome: Illyrian Polish – Narrow Sea
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Stamp: Floral BPX – L018

Sorry for the late post, and I hope you enjoyed! I’ll try to get back to pastels, neons, and florals by Wednesday :-p

Cutting in with Holo

Happy birthday to me! And its been pretty incredible so far…my intern year is finally over which both means I get a full week off (wow) and that I don’t have to do internal medicine anymore! Yay! Also, a friend of mine took my last ED shift so I didn’t even have to work and overnight into my birthday! Win all around 😀

Of course, no birthday is complete without some awesome nail art! I am currently wearing rainbows (obviously) but I figured it was about time to post these ones! I was inspired by @urbannailart and just ran with it!

I ended up duplicating her idea, that is to say cutting triangles out of silver to make the design, but since she used foil and I just used polish they were MUCH harder to place. I kinda wish I had just freehanded them! Oy. Still came out pretty nicely but it took much longer than expected!

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Silver holo: Color Club – Harp on It

Hope you enjoyed! I am looking forward to doing some more neon/crazy designs at home while I have the time and freedom to be out of the hospital!

Orange Conifer

I love so much about this manicure. The color, the funky plants, how much it shimmered…half of these photos were just snapped randomly but had such a cool color mix that I had to post them! I don’t know why I haven’t worn this polish again since I bought it a few months ago, but now I know what I am putting on next!

Just look at the shifty awesome-ness!

The base here is the other “pastel multichrome” that I bought to play with from POP Polish. This is three thin coats of Slick Days of Summer. Much like the pink Watermelon Bubbleslick, Summer isn’t exactly a perfect multichrome, which is to say the polish isn’t smooth like a metallic, rather it is a collection of tiny flakes which you can see based on how they scatter light. Other than that…it is pretty much perfect. It is a bright red/orange through orange to apple green multichrome, and you can honestly see all of the colors just on regular glances. None of this contort-your-hand-backwards nonsense!

I then went ahead and did some advance stamping. I decided to color-match to the orange, and just grabbed some polishes in the color family I wanted. Then I found the PERFECT stamp. Its halfway between a pine cone (hence conifer) and a flower! I die.

Colors:
~ Orange multichrome: POP Polish – Slick Days of Summer
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Light green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Light peach: OPI – Freedom to Peach
~ Peach: OPI – Yank my Doodle
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Stamp: Moyra – 45 I Fill You

Also this stamping plate is made of amazing images. I want to color them all in…but it takes hours!! That said, I have a full week of next week (omg) so maybe I will actually get around to it. Who knows? Hope you enjoyed!

Sea Storm

My birthday is the end of this week! It is also the first day of my end-of-intern-year-break. It is going to be amazing to actually be doing my speciality after the end of this month. Regardless, I decided to celebrate by posting a week of some of my more favorite recent manicures! Starting with this one.

In addition to looking like fancy lightening, this mani showcases a fantastic base color! What you see here are three thin coats of Narrow Sea by Illyrian from lat years March PPP. Yes, I wore these almost a year a go and never posted them. I was saving them for something special, because omg I love this color. I honestly could have gotten away with two coats of the polish, but I wanted more shimmer! My only complaint, and it is a tiny one, is that the polish is a bit thicker than I expected, but leveled well regardless.

To get the nail art I dabbed on some white and covered it with a dark grey-green and grey-purple to make the clouds and surf, and freehanded some lightning strikes! I wanted them to glow, so I added some shimmery polish. I am so happy with how this came out!

Colors:
~ Dark teal shimmer: Illyrian – Narrow Sea
~ White: LA Girl – White On
~ Dark grey-green: Zoya – Evvie
~ Dark grey-purple: Sinful Colors – Muse
~ Holo shimmer: ILNP – Rosewater

That’s it for today. Stay tuned for more of my favorite manis on Wednesday and Friday. Hope you enjoyed!

Pagoda and Maple

I love this mani. The leaves are upside-down from where they should be (oops) but it still looks awesome. Also, I finally did a stamp transfer to make a mirror image! That has NEVER worked for me before!

The base polish here is a new-to-me beauty called Darling, Red Isn’t Your Color by Cadillaquer. It is an off-white jelly base filled with tiny red glitters and small and medium black glitters. It is subtle and amazing and I love it. I am always looking for more off-white crellies and this is a success! This is three thin coats.

I then stamped in black, colored the leaves in pale grey and the roof in two different shades of red (you can’t really see the gradient but it made me happy), and voila! Next time I do this (cause lets be honest, this combination of designs is happening again) I will make sure the maple leaves point DOWN not UP. Oops!

Colors:
~ White crelly: Cadillacquer – Darling, Red Isn’t Your Color
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love
~ Stamps: MoYou – Porcelain 01

That’s it for today! Happy Friday. It is currently only in the low 80s in St Louis…I hope this cooler weather holds until I have a few days off next week!!

Copperized Patterns

A post! Sorry its so late. Today was my day off and I still barely got everything done! Also the Blues won the Stanley Cup and now the whole city is honking and cheering. I suppose I should be posting blue nail art but I have nothing prepared at the moment! The stadium (well, both hockey and baseball) are about a mile from my house and there are helicopters circling overhead at the moment.

Anyway, this was a very fast manicure. Beautiful multichrome holo polish and a matching stamp. Ta-da! It helps that this stamp is both playful and elegant :-p

Colors:
~ Red-gold holo multichrome: Enchanted Polish – I Am the Walrus
~ Brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

Hope you guys enjoy, despite the late-ness! I am already dreading my shift in the emergency room tomorrow morning, I assume it will be full of people who over-indulged following the hockey win!

Purple Petals

More flowers! I figure it is nearing the end of spring so I need to get them posted now :-D. This was another straight forward color-in-some-petals mani. It didn’t come out quite as lovely as the pink one from two weeks ago, but I still like it!

The base here is yet another new polish. What you see here is three thin coats of Zoya Abby. I had been looking for a pale purple creme to replace my almost empty go-to of Sally Hansen Lacey Lilac, and I think I found it! It makes me a tad bit sad that this isn’t one of those perfect two-coat Zoya cremes, but it dries fast enough that 3 coats is acceptable.

Colors:
~ Light purple: Zoya – Abby
~ Purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Dark purple: L’oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Dark blurple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Moyra – 45 I Fill You

I wish I had a bit of a BETTER gradient for the purple petals (two of the purples are very dark!) but oh well! This seems to be a theme. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!

Rainbow Gradient

Rainbow time! it has been a LONG time since I posted a rainbow (or painted a rainbow honestly). I need to do more rainbows!

So, anyway, this is a simple rainbow gradient. I went with fairly neon colors because…well, I felt like it. At some point I’ll need to do a pastel and dark rainbow with my newer wider selection of colors (again, it’s been a while).

Colors:
~ Bright pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Bright orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Neon green: Salon Perfect – Loopy Lime
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Purple: Zoya – Margo

That’s all I have for today! Hope you enjoyed, and happy weekend!

Neon Fronds

This mani was fun to wear and a pain in the butt to photograph! Also a pain to edit. That bright orange-red is really messing with my color correction!

The base polish here is a new-to-me beauty called End of Silence by Cadillaquer. This polish covered perfectly in three thin coats, and dried quickly (although if my memory serves me right it dried semi-matte due to the neon component). Regardless, the application was smooth despite the glitters. Honestly, my only complaint is that the color is SO BRIGHT that it is spazzing out my camera! And let’s be honest, that is hardly a complaint.

I ended up stamping some negative space leaves, just because. Obviously my black polish is not intended as a stamping polish, but the end result was a red-grey that I didn’t mind. I did end up adding pale peach highlights to the long stems of the leaves, because why not? They picked up the color of the glitters. This whole mani took maybe 45 minutes.

Colors:
~ Neon coral: Cadillacquer: End of Silence
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink: L’oreal – Orange you Jealous?
~ Stamp: UC – Lovely Leaves 2

That’s it for today! Hope you enjoyed. Friday’s post is…remarkably colorful :-p

Taking Off Purple

This is a comparison AND nail art! I wanted to compare all of my pastel purples, specifically to see if my newest was a good replacement! What you see here are two coats of the sadly dried up Lacey Lilac by Sally Hansen on my pinky and thumb, 4 coats of Essie Full Steam Ahead on my middle finger (I love this polish but FOUR coats is too many), and three coats of Abby on my pointer and ring finger.

In the end, Abby and Lilac are very close, so I am happy! Steam is a bit darker, a bit more blue-tinged, and has subtle shimmer. It remains a very pretty polish that I sadly have little use for because I can seldom wait for 4 coats of polish to dry!

Of course, then I added a gradient and just had fun with stamping one design a different angels. I am so happy I bought a bunch more Moyra stamping plates!

Colors:
~ Pastel purple: Zoya – Abby
~ Pastel purple: Sally Hansen – Lacey Lilac
~ Light purple: Essie – Full Steam Ahead
~ Purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Stamp: Moyra – 32 Nature

Hope you enjoyed! I think there are going to be a few more swatches with nail art this week. We shall see if I can get them edited up in time!