Ionian Arches

This was simple but a lot of fun to wear! I figured that pairing a magnetic polish (and magnetizing it sideways) with a weird 1920’s style stamp would look awesome. Voila! Of course, it also gave me an excuse to play with a cool new-to-me stamping plate from MoYou’s steampunk collection.

Colors:
~ Grey magnetic: Nails Inc – Trafalgar Square
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk|
~ Stamp: MoYou – Steampunk 06

Hope you enjoyed! I know there are only two photos, but when there is no sunlight AND my nails are tiny I don’t tend to take as many pictures!

(just FYI: I am moving these next two weeks, and there is a chance that I don’t get around to editing nail art and posting. I will be back! But if the blog is post-less for the next twoish weeks it is because I am moving and did not appropriately edit nail art in advance!)

Jupiter in Purple

I love this mani. I have been meaning to make a watermable with glitter so that it looks variegated (instead of just swoopy lines, to get some irregularity) and this worked! It kinda looks like the surface of Jupiter to me, if Jupiter was purple and the red spot was also purple (my middle finger tip).

I’m not going to lie, the sparkly stripe down the middle of my ring finger was…augmented…with extra polish. There was already some glitter there, but I wanted MORE. It was so shiny!

Colors:
~ Light pink: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Shimmery lilac: Ethereal Lacquer – Little Oysters
~ Light periwinkle: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ Purple: L’oreal – Royalty Reinvented
~ Periwinkle: Zoya – Danielle
~ Purple/green glitter: Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz

In retrospect, I think these also look a bit like geode nails? People were obsessed with those for a while, and the craze somewhat seems to have died down. I never did paint my own geode nails, and I should honestly do that sometime soon! The ones others have done a pretty :-D. Hope you enjoyed these!

Embracing Blurple

This came out better than I expected! It is very hard to see the teal metallic stamping polish, but the colors go nicely and I have missed geometrics 🙂

When I start a manicure I generally have an idea in mind ahead of time. With this one, I just went “i want to use that one sparkly blurple with teal flakie polish” and tried to find coordinating colors. Don’t ask me why coloring in some of the thinnest lines on one of my stamping plates was deemed a good idea, but the result is pretty cool!

I need to remember to buy more flakie polishes, they have wonderful color shifts and finishes but are not difficult to remove. Also they tend to have enough going on in them that even if you paint quickly enough to cause bubbles (because rushes are a real thing) you can’t see them!

Colors:
~ Blurple glitter: Polished For Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Teal: Opaque teal stamping
~ Light purple: Sally Hansen – Lacey Lilac
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Stamps: Moyra – 54 Matrix

That’s all for today. Hope you enjoyed!

Blooming Mauve

This mani is halfway between winter and spring: winter colors but with flowers and a butterfly! Given how cold (and snowy) it continues to be, I thought that was fitting.

This is a new-to-me polish, and I love it. For some reason I am super into shimmers right now, and this is subtle, elegant, and loaded with shimmer! What you see here is three thin coats of Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction. This polish is one of my only purchases from Hella Handmade Creations (I usually stick to Polish Pickup). The polish is is a beautiful dark grey-mauve swimming with pink shimmer, which also has a scattering of holo glitter. That said, while I love the color of the polish, it was a little thick and hard to work with.

I then made some stamping decals/advanced stamping (aka coloring the stamp in while it is on the stamper) using silver and purple. The color combo could have been a bit better, but it wasn’t terrible. I rather wish I had used black not silver! Or maybe simply white.

Colors:
~ Mauve: Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Purple: Essie – Full Steam Ahead
~ Stamps: Whats Up Nails – B005, BM – XL204

That’s all for today, happy Friday! Hope you enjoyed.

Silver Swirls on Burgundy

Simple mani today! One of my most opaque polishes (I do love A England) and two complimentary stamps. This whole manicure took 20 minutes and most of that was waiting for the burgundy polish to dry!

Honestly, I feel like I should start using white or black polish to stamp (or at least a creme finish) because in half the lights things like silver and gold look black! Oh well. It is shiny, and that makes me happy!

Colors:
~ Burgundy: A England – Let Me In
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Stamps: JQ – L20, Moyra – 50 Ornaments 3

Not much else to say today. I have officially started what I think will end up being the most boring and paper-work intensive month of my 4-year residency. If history holds true, I will paint my nails a LOT (I started painting my nails 6 or so years ago on a very similar rotation), so that at least is something to look forward to! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Dragon Scales

Dragons scales using Dragon! Because I had to. This also ended up rather chrome-y because I went for a silver metallic base. I kinda like it! The end effect a was a bit like nail foils.

This week is going to be a random mishmash of nail art that doesn’t fit well with anything else. At this point (in real time) I am working towards Valentine’s nail art because I know that I won’t get any edited if I wait for February! So these have nothing to do with really, anything, but they were shiny 🙂

Colors:
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Teal: A England – St George
~ Green: A England – Dragon
~ Moss: A England – Fotheringhay Castle
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B025

Hope you enjoyed! More utter randomness on Wednesday!

Orchid over Purple

More blurple! I don’t know…I haven’t had a chance to transfer a lot of my newer designs onto my computer yet and I am running out of options. These are from early fall. And, of course, feature a darker periwinkle.

I wanted to play with floral stamps because, in general, I either want to be playing with stamps that are flowers, swirls, or purely geometric. I have a LOT of similarly themed stamping plates!

Colors:
~ Purple glitter: Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: BP – L067, BM – XL472

This was fun just because the base is so SPARKLY and how often do you get to color in orchids? Not often! Anyway, hope you enjoyed, and hopefully I will get my life together enough that I can post something more winter-themed come Wednesday!

Subtle Periwinkle Swirls

More blurple! Other than nude, purple/blurple/periwinkle is probably my most used color this year (I don’t know why). It is also easily my most-bought polish family this year!

This particular color combination was REALLY tone-on-tone, and yet worked well! The scrubs I have to wear when I am on ICU blocks and in the emergency department are a pastel periwinkle-grey…which sounds pretty but lets be honest scrubs do not look good on ANYONE (and I am no exception). That said, when my nails match my scrubs I feel a tad bit classier than I have any right to when wearing scrubs! Hence all the blurple and periwinkle nails (never fear, there are more coming in the next few weeks :-p).

Colors:
~ Periwinkle pink shimmer: Emily de Molly – Traverse the Skies
~ Periwinkle creme: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ Stamp: Moyra – 50 Ornaments 3

I do need to remember that Regents stamps well over Traverse though, they are so close in color that I figured this wouldn’t work out well. Voila! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Flowers on the Diagonal

More flowers! And yes, these were supposed to go up on Friday after Thanksgiving, and instead I was distracted by buying too much polish. And too many stamping plates (who am I kidding, no such thing!). Regardless, this makes me feel better about not posting black nails for black friday :-p

More places that I love ended up having sales than I expected, but I wasn’t too terrible? I think I ended up with 9 new polishes and 7 stamping plates. Oh well!

Colors:
~ Purple glitter: Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: BP – L002, BM – 616

Hope you enjoyed these glowing blurple flowers and lines, and had fun picking up deals!

In Tron

The title of this amuses me…the design was loosely inspired by art from Tron Legacy (someday I will freehand some Tron lines and light cycles) with a dark background and bright blue with hints of orange. However, an intron is part of a gene that is coded to become a protein in biology, which just makes me smile!

Anyway, this was done for “movie” day of the 31 Day Challenge. I know today is book day, and I really wanted to honor one of my favorite authors, Marion Zimmer Bradley, but I just couldn’t work up the energy to freehand some awesome scenery. Sorry! So movie it is.

I also don’t know why I situated on Tron, it was just the first movie with a really cool aesthetic image that popped in my head.

Colors:
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Blake
~ Blue creme: Zoya – Ling
~ Light blue creme: Zoya – Rocky
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

Hope you enjoyed! And we are almost done with the 31 day challenge. This is very sad for me, because a lot of my favorite nail blogs/IGs only really post nail art daily during September, and otherwise I have to wait weeks to see new art!

Wispy Clouds by Moonlight

I have had this mani sitting in my to-try list for literally years. My sister-in-law visited and I asked her to pick a nail polish base color and she goes “dark royal blue, or purple” so I decided to do both and remembered that I had wanted to try this!

It just so happened that of course I ended up painting a moon! Now I know today’s challenge is a galaxy mani, and I actually HAVE  one of those, but I figured I would shake it up a bit and post this instead. You can’t see the galaxies because of the clouds :-D. Also YESTERDAYS challenge was half moon, which again I hate that type of design so I’ve been doing moon-themed manis for a few years and I just needed to get this out!

The design itself was inspired by @sketchpolish, although I ended up leaving my version shiny (both my husband and sister-in-law said they liked it better than matted)!

Colors:
~ Dark blurple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Dark blue: Zoya  – Sia
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light blurple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White glitter: Whim – Frosted Cupcake

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! This was a lot of fun to paint, and I will forever be grateful that I finally have stamps with perfect circles that I can use for things like moons. I hate free-handing circles!

Popping Teal Bubbles

See, no more magnets! Instead you get a multichrome topper over not black? I don’t know what I was thinking but here we go!

I wanted to try Aurora over a dark teal base. And then I decided that bubbles were appropriate? My nails under this are a DISASTER. I painted these just after I finished moving apartments, and my ring finger tore to the quick (and is heavily patched), AND my middle finger somehow shattered, but I was able to file the surface to somewhat smooth and apply 4 coats of base coat in a desperate attempt to hold it together, and my pointer folded down the middle. I won’t even mention my poor short thumb nail…I lost both corners on subsequent days! Suffice to say my nails are a disaster and this is one of the last right-handed manis you guys will be seeing for a while!

Despite all the devastation, I think the mani looks surprisingly cool? The teal base blunted a bit of the color shift in Aurora but you can still see both the green and certainly the purple shift. Also, I like this stamp!

Colors:
~ Teal: OPI – Get Off the Lawn!
~ Multichrome: piCture pOlish – Aurora
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B015

That’s all for today! Next week we move on to less…experimental…manis (even if they will mostly be left-handed). Enjoy!

Fading Purple Curls

Ok, so I might have messed up. When I was moving I put together a few manicures (one of which is frankly not even worth putting on the blog, so you guys will never see it), and I typed up which polishes I used and the basics of the manicure and emailed it to myself. The problem is that at the time I didn’t have internet…so when I finally got the documents on my computer and it connected to the internet, they appear to have deleted themselves!

What this means is that for this a and a few other manis, I am guessing what I did. Luckily for this particular manicure I only own one purple magnetic polish, and it easy to identify a particular stamp. But still, sorry in advance!

Colors:
~ Purple magnetic: Nails Inc – Houses of Parliment
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BP – L050

Also, I promise this is the last magnetic post in a while! I don’t know why I lumped them all back-to-back in my editing folder but somehow I did! Luckily I think they all look different enough that you guys aren’t ready to behead me yet :-p. So, no more magnets! Even if I love how this mani came out. Enjoy!

Teal Magnetic Swirls

Magnets! I love magnetics. They make my nails look cool with little-to-no effort on my part other than holding still for a few seconds. Stamping over them just looks so cool!

Anyway, this was basically just having fun with straight magnets and some silver stamps. The magnetic polish is a teal-to-black called Whitehall by Nails Inc. The silver is Excalibur by A England and the stamp is from Moyra plate 50 – Ornaments 3.

To make this, I applied the straight line magnet on a diagonal on all the nails except my thumb. The magnet is super strong the raised teal line was incredibly sharp…until it wasn’t. As always happens, the magnetic turning point blurred as the polish dried, so I went from a super sharp line to a smudge, but it still looks cool. Honestly, maybe I need thinner coats of polish! On my thumb I tried to create a curved pattern using the small circular end of the magnetic stick. I love it. I think making this nail was more fun than using the straight line!

The double-headed magnet that I used is from the Born Pretty Store, and it is both cheap and works well. You can find it for $2.99.

Enjoy!

Silver Arabesques on Purple

Eeep! Sorry for the extended absence…after moving a WEEK ago, AT&T failed to install our internet and we didn’t get wifi until today! So this really is the first time I could have posted :-p

Anyway, this mani is wayyy too complicated! A stamp this complicated needs a creme-on-creme finish, none of this playing with 5 colors of holographic glittery purple and stamping in silver. I love the stamps but this is too much!

I also likely should not have added dots. Oops! Live and learn. It’s still kinda fun!

Colors:
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Dark glitter purple: LA Girl – Purple Effect
~ Bright glitter purple: ILNP – Zoe
~ Blurple holo: A England – Crown of Thistles
~ Fuchsia holo: Cupcake Polish – Berry Good Looking
~ Purple holo: Gothic Gala – Vallis Sanguine
~ Stamp: Moyra – 50 – Ornaments 3

Hope you enjoyed! And if I’m lucky, I should be able to get back to my semi-regular monday/wednesday/friday posting schedule.

Curled Explosions

The final purple mani this week! Although there may be more next week. I really like working with purple in the Spring.

So, I absolutely love this mani. I love it so much I split it into two parts. Last week I showed the base of this mani, Blurple Smush Stars. I actually almost left it like that, but I decided to see if partially stamping over the background would highlight just how cool it looked. I consider this a success!

I also, of course, wanted to show of a new plate from the Born Pretty Store. This is probably the plate I was most excited to get my hands on, I love swirly designs! Seriously…the two things I love most on my nails are swirls, and then geometric patterns. Its like I was made to stamp.

This plate is a smaller square plate, called BP – X43. Despite its smaller size, it has 9 full designs, all of which are well-etched and absolutely stunning. I used a different design on each nail, just to test them out. They go so well together!

Colors:
~ Dark periwinkle: Zoya – Danielle
~ Periwinkle: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ Stamp: Floral BP – X43

Great stamp, great base. If you want to pick up this stamping plate for yourself, Born Pretty Store has if for $2.19. Enjoy!

Magnetic Teal Flowers

Readers, I am sorry about this. I tried so hard to make it pretty for you, and I only partly succeeded! But it wasn’t my fault…

So, I received two magnets (to go with magnetic polish) from the Born Pretty Store to review, and this is the second. It is N03, a star pattern. I have seen other people try and use star patterns online, and usually it doesn’t work well. I was hopefully with this one. When I tested it on my mat it worked well, but I forgot about the curvature of my nails! Ugh. Suffice to say the center of this magnet is useless (as it appears all star magnets are) and the side that works best is still iffy. Compared to the diagonal lines magnet (which I showed almost a month ago), this one is far less useful.

I ended up decided to stamp a floral star pattern over the magnetic art, centering the flower over the “center” of the star. The only finger that REALLY picked up the magnet (aka the one where I have the flattest nail bed) was my middle finger, and there the stamp looks great. Otherwise? Meh.

Colors:
~ Teal magnetic: Nails Inc – Whitehall
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: EdM – 09

I did end up loving the N02 magnet, so I can happily recommend picking it up! However, I have yet to see a star magnet that works, and this one is no exception. The magnets can be found here. Enjoy!

Shifting Silver Cracks

Another new polish! This one is super shifty and cool :-). I could hardly bear to cover it, so I did a truly minimal design!

What you see here is two thin coats of State of Mind by Emily de Molly. When I first saw this polish online I knew I had to have it…precisely because I had absolutely no idea what the actual color of the polish was! It looked very different in various photos, but all of them looked awesome. As it turns out, the polish is a multichrome that shifts from a dusty pink, through copper, and to olive green. It is a deeper color than most that I own. On top of that, it has a bright pink-fuschia shimmer, as well as copper multichrome shards (you can see them in indirect light). It ALSO has an intense linear holo finish that glows bright purple (I don’t know how Hayley made the holo a different color than the polish, but its magical). Basically, this polish is confusing and super pretty.

The design, such as it is, was inspired by MarnieLP but I might have to try this again with better tape placement now that I know how the spacing goes. I love the idea! Maybe the next crazy weird polish I get 😀

Colors:
~ Purple holo multichrome: Emily de Molly – State of Mind
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington

I wish my camera was better at capturing purples…the polish is a bit brighter and quite a bit more pink-toned than it looks under indirect light in my photos. I tried to color correct, but my fingers looked like zombies so I left it this way.

Hope you enjoyed!

Marble-ous

Really, I just wanted to play with some fun colors for “watermarble” day! I actually tried 4 combos before settling on this one…the right mix of bright, dark, and glitter.

I’ve been trying to marble with glitter polishes more frequently, since I rather love the effect they leave. This particular set of colors didn’t end up with the glitter mixed into the creme polishes as much as I would have hoped, but I still like it! For some reason, none of the purple or blues I used wanted to play along…and I wasn’t willing to risk my really expensive polishes just to see if they would marble.

I ended up using a bunch of polishes for this, and lets be honest, you probably cannot tell which is which in the photos! I named them all regardless :-p

Colors:
~ Neon teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ Teal: Zoya – Rocky
~ Teal glitter: Julie G – Mermaid’s Tale
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Periwinkle: Nails Inc – Regent’s Place
~ Purple: Formula X – Ignition
~ Purple glitter: LA Girl – Purple Effect

Day 20….we are almost 2/3 through the 31 Day Challenge! And at this point I have completed all by the last day’s nail art. I like to pick from within the challenge for the honors nails you love prompt…I have a few ideas, but I am waiting around to see if someone does something that blows me away (and that I can imitate, cause lets be honest I would love to do ANYTHING Coewless has done for this challenge but I am simply not skilled enough). Hope you enjoyed!

Bright Patterns

This was intended to be easter eggs (it went with my explicitely-easter-themed other hand for an easter mani) but i’m posting it separately just because (well, mostly cause they didn’t match that well)!

More or less, this is what happens when I play with stamps. Ta-da! I don’t even know what I ended up thinking about this, but it was entertaining to put together. I hadn’t done gradient stamping in a while.

I am also not going to go hunting for the list of stamps that I used, sorry! I don’t know that it matters (but if you REALLY want to know I can find them).

Colors:
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Purple: Nails Inc – Regents Place
~ Teal: L’oreal – Not a Cloud in Sight
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly

In other news, I am really glad I bought Regents Place all those months ago…I wasn’t sure I would ever want a periwinkle purple-blue, and I’ve probably used it 5+ times (which is more than I’ve used almost anything that wasn’t black/white/silver/gold). Go figure!