Highlighted in Orange

Oooooh another neon orange manicure! I had to stop myself from overdoing this one. I knew I wanted to use End of Silence, but I also knew I didn’t want it on every nail. Instead of my go-to plan (aka use white as a base for all nail art) I decided to pair End of Silence with a light lilac with pink/gold shimmer, because the swatch sticks happen to be lying next to each other. I thought the color of Little Oysters perfectly matched the shade of the glitters in End of Silence. So, unusual pairing but I really like the result!

The white was stamped, however the orange and gold were added by hand. I initially tried to use End of Silence as the orange highlights, but it is both a jelly and full of largish glitter…so that ended quickly. I ended up grabbing my neon orange cream and using that instead. It is just a hair darker, but that works well for something that I don’t want many coats of to be opaque!

Colors:
~ Orange glitter: Cadillacquer – End of Silence
~ Lilac: Ethereal Lacquer – Little Oysters
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Orange: Julep – Natasha
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B015

I don’t know why I have stopped doing geometric manicures, this one was both fun and pretty! I suppose I will have to start up again :-p. Hope you enjoyed!

Bright Quadrants

Rainbow(ish) bright colors! I just wanted to play with some pastel and darker cremes in the same color family. My nails were quite short so I went for a stamp that I can only use with short nails, and voila!

In the end this is more colorful than really, anything else. But it mad me happy to wear it, and it summer, so be it! It also really proves to me that I own a truly ridiculous number of Zoya creme polishes. To be fair, I purposely buy most of my cremes from Zoya, but this is next level!

Colors:
~ Light mint: Zoya – Tiana
~ Mint: Zoya – Cecilia
~ Light blue: Zoya – Blu
~ Blue: Zoya – Ling
~ Light purple: Zoya – Abby
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Light pink: Zoya – Jordan
~ Pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Light orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Stamp: MoYou – Pro 02

Hope you enjoyed! Happy Friday 😀

Failure Fire

I tried to make an “easy” water marble by making only one marble…and taking it off the water. The resulting decal was so thin that it fragmented into pieces as soon as I tried to apply it! I ended up using it as a water decal (including dunking my nails in water so I could reposition the super thin layer of polish) and it was still a disaster. I don’t know how those other people do it…maybe they use more polish so it isn’t as thin? Regardless, this took much longer than a normal water marble although, the one shining point, the cleanup was easier :-p

Of course the end result after all that toil was also boring…so I added dots. I wish I had made the dots white or black in retrospect, the orange doesn’t add much!

Colors:
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Red: Zoya – Sookie

Despite this failure of a fire-themed mani I hope you got a little enjoyment. Stay tuned on Wednesday for something slightly less pathetic!

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!

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

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!

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!

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!

Cracked Garnet

I couldn’t decide if this mani reminded me more of golden tree branches (which was the intention) or a broken gemstone (which is equally cool), so I went with gemstone! Either way, these nails ended up beautifully sparkly.

I seldom reach for my pure flakie top coats. Honestly, I feel like they overwhelm the color under them (which I suppose is the point) but I feel bad covering up my base color! In this case I used a purple I don’t like much, which made me feel overall better for the focus being on the flakies :-p

Colors:
~ Dark purple: Station – Happy Wine-y People
~ Orange glitter: Born Pretty – Raging Fire
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: BM – XL472

Happy Friday, and I hope you enjoyed! Its >90 degrees in St Louis right now, and absolutely miserable with humidity. I don’t understand this weather, it was in the 40s less than a week ago!

Blue Diving Through

I just really wanted to use this stamp! I had blue with orange on my other hand, so that is how I ended up with orange dots. Not a color combo I would usually reach for, but I think it works!

I also wanted to post something at least Hanukkah-adjacent. I am actually wearing menorahs on my nails right now, but I doubt (unless I somehow magic up some time) that I will get a chance to edit them and post them in the next week! Unfortunately I am currently on a 12 day stretch without a day off from the hospital, so I will likely not get around to it 😦

Colors:
~ Dark blue metallic: Zoya – Ibiza
~ Dark blue creme: Zoya – Sia
~ Blue creme: Zoya – Ling
~ Light blue creme: Zoya – Rocky
~ Pastel blue creme: Zoya – Blu
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

That was a lot of blues! And all of them Zoya. I likely own more blue Zoyas than any other single color, but dark purples do come close. Anyway, hope you enjoyed and have fun lighting candles and eating chocolate and latkes!

Pumpkins and Webs

Happy almost-halloween! This year my husband and I ended up at two different pumpkin carving events, so now we have four pumpkins. Which is double our previous yearly count of pumpkins. I carved a set: a dragon and a castle. My husband carved a pokemon (because of course he did)…and a pumpkin. Into his pumpkin. He is an absolute dork!

Anyway, I have a bunch of fall manis lined up, but I only did one halloween manicure this year! I kinda forgot that October meant Halloween. Oops. I’ll do better next year! This year’s halloween mani is decided to stamping jack-o-lanterns. I received another plate to review from the Born Pretty Store (which was thankfully well-etched) and went to town! Unfortunately, the dark orange I used for the pumpkins is more a jelly than a cream, but I still got away with single-pass stamping on some nails (thumb and ring finger). That said, I am not surprised I had to double stamp, I need to stop using glitter polish bases! But when trying to pick a base color my head just went ‘GOOOOLD’ so here we are!

Colors:
~ Gold: ILNP – Fame
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Bright orange: Nubar – Hot Orange
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BP – Halloween – L004

Hope you enjoyed! And I hope everyone gets lots of candy and tasty treats. If you want to pick up this pumpkin and web-decked plate, head over to the Born Pretty Store where you can find it on sale for $2.99.

Oranged Lines

Honestly, I was aiming for a completely different manicure when I started this, but my gradient came out all wrong so I ended up with this instead!

I was going for a light orange-orange-red-purple style, and as you can see it is 95% orange an 5% red with no purple at all! I tried. I really did. In retrospect, I should have known it wasn’t going to work since the purple I was trying to use is currently a dried up blobby mess. Live and learn!

I ended up deciding that all gradients (as long as the colors aren’t terrible and need to be flat-out started over) look good with some geometric patterns. I wanted something a bit more delicate so I went with this design, and of course added colors to the dots and diamonds. I think this is the third time I have done this same thing with different colors.

Colors:
~ Pastel orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Neon purple: Sinful Colors – Dream On
~ Dark purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: EdM – 03

That’s all for today! There is a similar gradient floating around on the blog too, since I was on night float and thus was able to do slightly different nails (and keep this poor blog running)! Hope you enjoy!

Orange Passing Purple

This mani stirs some mixed feelings: on the one hand, it is pretty cool looking! On the other hand, the gradient isn’t what I was going for and the lines, as the are freehanded, are not even close to perfect.

I was inspired by @aissandra. Somehow, despite her nails being shorter than mine, she managed to get more gradient going! I have to wonder if that is because she was using higher quality or more opaque polish. I happen to know that the neon purple I tried to use is a dried up mess and need to be thinned dramatically or thrown out!

The real moral is that I need a better neon pastel (wow) orange, and despite having a truly staggering number of purple polishes, I need something that is a bright indigo-leaning creme! In case the swatching extravaganza earlier this year didn’t clue anyone in, I own far too many jewel tone purple metallics. Specifically. Anyway.

Colors:
~ Pastel orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Neon purple: Sinful Colors – Dream On
~ Dark purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser

That’s all for today! Hope you enjoyed, and wish me luck acquiring more purple polish 😀

Phoenix

I have done phoenix nails before, but possibly never this insanely bright! I got lucky that one of my stamping plates already had all these images, or I would have been painting flames for years :-p

The design itself was inspired by @nails4cocktails, although I didn’t have holo polish in the right colors, so I just added some shimmer on top. I really need to get Fairy Dust by China Glaze, I keep winging it with my glitter toppers!

Colors:
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Shimmer: Sally Hansen – Diamond
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Exoticism BPX – L012

Hope you enjoyed! I do love flames 😀 even if I often can’t wear them on my nails because they are too disruptive at work. Maybe next year I can have more fun with my nails NOT on weekends!

Astral Shifts

Ok, so, I love this mani. I love how it looks, I love the colors, and I LOVE the magnet! I got a new magnetic polish from the Born Pretty Store to review…and somehow, unlike every other magnetic polish I own, this one works like a charm. Maybe I am just getting better, but the design on my pointer finger stayed looking perfect for three days. Most magnetic polishes just can’t do that!

Anyway, this is two coats of Astral Realm over black. The first coat was thin and the second coat was thick; I magnetized both times (and again when I put top coat on, although the magnetic particles didn’t actually move). Astral Realm is a multichrome magnetic. I was doubtful at first, but its actually true! The shift is a bit more subtle than pure multichromes of the same color range, but it is definitely there. This polish shifts from a bright fuchsia to pink (the primary colors) and then to orange and gold. I even saw hints of green at sharp angles!

I got a whole bunch of compliments on this at work. People were stopping me as I was typing on the computer to ask me how I got my nails to look like this :-D. I also love the stamps! When Whats Up Nails had their stamping sale, this is one of the 6 plates (oops!) that I picked up! I bought it on a whim but it has turned out to possibly be my favorite of the bunch. Stars! Moons! A super fancy sun! Anyway.

It is rare that I only use three colors in a mani, especially when only two of them are visible! But the magnetic polish was cool enough that I thought adding anything else to this would be a waste.

Colors:
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Magnetic multichrome: Born Pretty (Magnetic Aurora Series) – Astral Realm
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: BM – XL213

That’s all for today! I hope you enjoyed! In case anyone was curious…my pinky I just magnetized the very edge of my cuticle, for the ring and middle I used one of those strong magnetics to make a line (diagonal vs horizontal), my pointer I used a repeating diagonal line full-nail magnet, and my thumb I pushed around the polish using the rounded head of a strong double-sided magnetic wand. You can pick up Astral Realm at the Born Pretty Store for $5.39, which is a lot for a tiny 6ml bottle, but it does work!

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!

Mountain Sunset

Happy 31 Day Challenge! It isn’t quite the same without Cathy (from More Nail Polish) but she is on vacation so we shall have to try without her guidance! Anyway. I am, as I mentioned last week, obviously not participating daily. However, I have lined up my M-W-F posts for the next month with that day’s theme to the best of my ability! Since today is day 3 and thus the ‘yellow’ them and I HATE the color yellow, I went ahead and combined orange and yellow together. Ta-da!

When putting this mani together I went ahead and grabbed most of my orange polishes. And some yellows. And then I realized that I think I only own two polish colors with ‘?’ in the name. They are apparently both orange and both involve puns/jokes. Go figure!

The design itself was inspired by @lieve91, and for once I sort of think I did it justice? Regardless I really like how this came out! It isn’t entirely orange or yellow but it fits the theme ENOUGH.

Colors:
~Pastel yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~Orange-yellow: KBShimmer – Orange you Glad I Didnt say Bananna?
~Bright red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~Dark purple: Zoya – Monica
~Dark blue: Maybelline – Midnight Swim
~Pastel orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~Pink-orange: Maybelline – Orange you Jealous?
~Dark pink: OPI – Malaga Wine
~Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~Gold glitter: Sephora – I Found a Pot of Gold!

Hope you enjoyed! On Wednesday I will post to the day 5 prompt of ‘blue’ and it might be my favorite mani of the year. I’ll let you guys decide! :-p