Rowdy Roses

Technically, I painted these around Valentine’s day. However, roses are good any time, so they are being posted now! In retrospect, I wish I had not made the backgrounds holographic, I think the art would have popped more against a creme background. Live and learn! Besides, I like making my backgrounds more sparkly than would otherwise be indicated :-p

Colors:
~ White holo: Emily de Molly – Crystal Crown
~ Red creme: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Red holo: A England – Rosebower
~ Green: Zoya – Josie
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: BP – L067, UC – Lovely Leaves 2

On a separate topic: things are going sideways in the US. At the moment, the city that I live in has a curfew, and honestly all but one of the 4 cities I have lived in at any point in my life are doing the same. The systemic racism and violence is (finally) being called out, which is (sadly) provoking violence. To all my readers in the USA: stay safe, stay strong, and do what you can to support your community. To my international readers: yes, all of this is exactly as terrible as it looks. If you feel so motivated, please encourage your leadership to sanction the USA; sadly I don’t think Trump listens to anything except his pride and his wallet, so if his income can be hurt we might actually see some change.

Chinoise Bridge

This was honestly a great idea and a very poor execution. The biggest issue I have with stamping is positioning the stamp on my nails. This got much MUCH easier with the advent of clear stamper heads (I look back at my first few years of blogging and am both horrified and impressed with the tools we had and how we made them work). That said, unlike a regular single color stamped image which can be easily wiped off with a bit of acetone, an advanced stamping design cannot. It lives forever. Which is to say I had a LOT of trouble positioning the stamps for this manicure and it shows!

Colors:
~ Red metallic: Zoya – Isla
~ Red creme: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Stamp: MoYou – Porcelain 01

Please don’t judge my stamping position too harshly, I did try! Anyway, hope you enjoyed all the red and gold, and how much my nails look like elegant slightly lopsided bridges :-p Happy friday!

Sienna Drapery

Maybe its because I am a doctor and love microscopy, but I see cells everywhere I look! These, to me, realllllly look like muscle cells. Spindle shaped, clusters of blue nuclei…anyway. They also might look like folds of cloth to more *ahem* normal folks so I decided to title this post after drapery and not immunofloresence staining.

The base polish her is a new-to-me polish called Sienna by Polished for Days. I have had my eyes on this polish (and others by PfD) for months just waiting for a sale! I maaaay have gone overboard 😀 but I can’t really regret it. PfD does the best flakie polishes! Anyway, Sienna is busy: dark blue base loaded with magenta/gold shimmer, scattered holo, and flakes that shift from a deep vibrant blue to gold. I may be obsessed. It is very pretty.

Colors:
~ Blue/red/gold shimmer: Polished for Days – Sienna
~ Silver: Nails Inc – South Kensington
~ Blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Stamp: Lina – @urbannailart collab

I seem to be using the urban nail art collaboration plate a lot, I had been on the fence about buying it initially but I ended up loving it! Go figure. Anyway, hope you all enjoyed!

Petrified Leaves

If I am honest, I do not like this manicure at all. I like the new polish I was trying, and the stamp itself isn’t half bad…but why in gods name did I add those red-orange glitter shards? What was past Eva thinking? Bleugh! So, you only get one photo of the art. If it helps, the sun was not cooperating so it would have just been two indoor photos anyway…and the polish alone is wayyyy prettier than the design I chose to put over it. Take it or leave it!

Colors:
~ Green shimmer: Pahlish – Petrichor
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Red glitter: Born Pretty – Raging Fire
~ Stamp: UC – Lovely Leaves 2

The polish here is two coats of Petrichor by Pahlish, a polish pickup shade. It is a lovely dark green-leaning teal jelly base simply full of pink-gold-green shimmer and silver holo flakie shards. It is a busy polishes but quite pretty, goes on smoothly, and removes easily (despite the glitter load). This is probably the third almost identical shade that I own (clearly I have a type) but it still makes me happy! So, look at the pretty polish and not the ugly nail art :-p

Vibrant Jelly Net

I just wanted rainbows, so I made rainbows! This is just a bunch of jelly polishes painted in a random pattern over a silver holographic base. I like using holo rather than just plain white because it hides the mistakes and bald patches a bit better…I can pretend they are intentional :-p

Colors:
~ Silver holo: Darling Diva – Diamond
~ Red jelly: Zoya – Aphrodite
~ Pink jelly: Zoya – Paloma
~ Yellow jelly: Esmalta da Kelly – Yellow Soap Bubble
~ Blue jelly: Zoya – Frida
~ Stamps: Born Pretty – Texture L002

The stamp here is from another new born pretty plate, this one being better etched! It didn’t need any touch-ups and you can clearly see the design even around the rainbows. Honestly the reason the black here doesn’t look great is I had just opened a new bottle of polish, and since i don’t use stamping polish it was too thin (aka…new) to be excellent for stamping! Oops. You can find this stamping plate with all its weird leafy and bubble-like glory here for $3.99.

Tilt Marble Bloom

This was made using the tilt marble technique! There is very little actual pink in this so I have no idea why it looks so pink, but I do like it! I also don’t typically mix this many metallic polishes, but the finished sheen was quite fun. I almost wish I had covered this with a matte top coat, I think the depth of the metallic finish would have looked fantastic! Oh well :-p

Colors:
~ Pink: Revlon – Poppy
~ Orange: Essie – Ring in the Bling
~ Red: Zoya – Isla
~ Purple: Zoya – Isadora
~ Dark purple: Revlon – Wild Violets

Every time a tilt marble shows up in my i-should-post-this folder I am reminded that I really need to do another tilt marble with my spot it polish. Cells for the win! Anyway, that was unrelated. Hope you enjoyed this pink and red concoction!

Sunset Skittle

This was just me testing out stamping plate designs for nails to wear to a wedding! You will see what I picked (spoiler: I picked the wrong design) in a while :-p Looking back I honestly enjoy what was on my thumb the most, both because the design is elegant and because I really liked the underlying gradient. I picked something more…floral…and regretted it!

Colors:
~ Orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Dark orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Lael
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamps Moyra – 45 I Fill You, BM – S10, Whats Up Nails – B005, B025, UC – Lovely Leaves 2

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! If any of you are looking for some television to watch I strongly recommend the series Firefly! I don’t know why I decided I have the right to give out television recommendations but there you go.

Glowing Thai Patterns

It has been a while since I posted a glow-in-the-dark manicure! I actually painted this one some time ago, and it has been sitting in my unedited folder, oops! But here we are all the same. Instead of starting with a white base (as I usually would) I started with a glow in the dark polish (that has a yellow base to it, as far as I know Dayglow was the first true glow in the dark polish on the market, at this time there are many different ones including some with white bases but this is all I have!) that I did a stamping gradient over. I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to do yellow to red or yellow to blue…so I did both? And then that didn’t seem to be enough so I also added swirls 😀

The glow to this polish has remained incredibly strong despite being >5 years old. Most of my older thermal polishes have lost their color shift, and my solar-reactive polishes don’t shift at all anymore…but this polish still glows! Score 1 for Serum No 5.

Colors:
~ 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: BM – XL158, 314

That’s it for today! I recommended that all nail polish folks have at least one glow in the dark polish – it is a lot of fun to freak my husband out with my glowing nails in bed :-D. Hope you enjoyed!

Tarnished Silver over Shimmer

I am changing it up this week. Last week I had the prediction that I would not have enough time to get my Christmas manis ready for this year (i have worn them but not even gone so far as to transfer the photos to the computer yet) and I was right! Oops. So instead, I am doing a week of Hanukkah-inspired manicures! Some are more obvious than others, but most are just blue and silver :-p

Colors:
~ Blue with red shimmer: Blush – Not Your Average Seahorse
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur (Renaissance)
~ Red: A England – Rosebower
~ Stamp: MoYou – Steampunk 06

I honestly think the designs on my ring and middle fingers look like flames, so these are candle-like and that counts! I honestly am not sure where I was going when I made this manicure initially, the whole composition is odd but not terrible. Hope you enjoyed, and happy latke-and-chocolate time!

Blue Organic Blooms

I had been staring at this design by Urban Nail Art for months now, and finally decided to do my own take on it! Unfortunately I do not actually own much in the way of stamping polish, so I improvised with colors. Mine is a little bolder than hers, but not half bad!

Colors:
~ Blue holo: Color Club – Over the Moon
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Purple: Zoya – Danielle
~ Blue: Zoya – Ryan
~ Gold: CbL – Frohe Feiertage!
~ Stamp: BP – L008

Luckily, she had posted a list of polishes she used, so I knew to start with a blue holo base – my instinct would have been silver and I feel like in retrospect that would have looked quite odd! I also don’t own her stamping plates, and when trying to decide between very thin lines and thicker lines, I ended up going with thicker so you could see the pattern. Voila! Of course I only realized after I took my photos that for all but maybe 5 pictures the camera was on the wrong light setting…so they are unusable. Sorry!

Beglittered Swirl Vines

I really like how this one came out! It helps that I used a very pretty polish as the base, but somehow the red/gold with the blue and gold metallic just work! I also love vines (I am wearing this particular stamp right now, with a different manicure).

Colors:
~ Red/Gold multichrome holo: Enchanted – I am the Walrus
~ Blue: Zoya – Blake
~ Gold: Salon Perfect – Gold Leaf
~ Stamp: BPX Floral – L018

I have a whole bunch of actual holiday nail art…lets hope I get a chance to transfer them onto my computer and get them edited up by next week! Honestly I have my doubts, I have to many outside obligations at the moment. :-p Hope you all enjoyed!

Negating the Flowers

I never do negative space. NEVER. But I saw these nails by UrbanNailArt and I knew that I had to recreate them. Unfortunately, I don’t have even close to the same stamps for either the flowers or the gold, so I winged it! I wish the lines of my flowers were a little thicker and those of my vines were a bit thinner, but overall I’m pretty happy! The gold is Born Pretty Store gold powder (serious I am obsessed with stamping with this stuff) over black, but you can’t see the black! I think in the end the flowers looked like poinsettias, and red and gold are seasonally-appropriate; regardless these were fun to do and fun to wear!

Colors:
~ Red: OPI – All I Want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamps: UC – Lovely Leaves 2, BP – L067, BP – 19

Hope you enjoyed! Be prepared to see a LOT more stamps involving this gold powder (which can be found here for $1.47 for a 0.1g pot) including this Friday’s post. I may be a tiny bit obsessed with it 😀

Vampy Red Fade

Somehow I managed to not get a single perfect picture of this manicure? It looked quite pretty while I was wearing it, but all of the photos do not come close to doing it justice! Oh well. The design was incredibly simple, just black polish, striping tape, and a red metallic gradient.

Colors:
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Bright red: City color – Masquerade
~ Dark red: Confetti – Masquerade Ball

Anyway, I am sorry about the poor photos, I did try! Or at least I’m fairly sure I did. It just didn’t pan out this time around. We can’t win them all, and this one at least being red with some gold so it is totally fitting for peri-christmas :-p

Shimmer Leaves

Happy almost Thanksgiving! You guys almost didn’t get a post today because I almost ran out out of to edit my nails! As it stands this is going to be a bit less polished than usual (hah, nail polish puns) because there just wasn’t time! It’s pretty anyway, and hopefully you will all be too distracted by the epic color shift to notice anything else :-p

Colors:
~ Red/gold multichrome: ILNP – Greatness
~ Red/orange/green glitter: POP Polish – Slick Days of Summer
~ Blue: Zoya – Blake
~ Stamp: BM – XL209

The colors for this were just perfect for fall! I don’t know why I never thought to stamp in dark blue over red/orange before, but it is one of my new favorite color combinations. Somehow it just contrasts a bit better than black! Anyway. By the time I get out of the hospital it will be tomorrow, and then there will be Friendsgiving time! My husband is abandoning me this year (he gets time off to go home) so I get to eat with all the other wonderful people in my life who want to potluck with me! Hope you guys enjoyed the nails, and have great meals wherever you are!

Rainforest at Dusk

This might be simple stamping, but the end result was really cool looking! That is 90% up to the base color (Nerida Singer is stunning), and 10% the stamp working nicely. This makes me think of someplace humid and swampy as the sun goes down. Don’t ask me why it makes me think of Thanksgiving as well (green/brown/red?) but it does!

Colors:
~ Green: Blush – Nerida Singer
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: BM – XL204

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! I am a litttttle behind on my nail art editing at the moment, but hopefully I catch up and you will see posts later this week as well! If not…then you know why :-p

Dark Indian Corn

I made two styles of indian corn, this is the darker version! You saw the lighter version a week ago. I started with a yellow base and dry-brushed on a lighter shade of yellow. Then I stamped with white, and vaguely colored in some corn bits with grey and red. Then I stamped again in brown. Sadly my brown stamp was not nearly as opaque as I would have liked!

Colors:
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Momen
~ Light yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Red: OPI – Vision of Love
~ Grey: WOW – #333
~ Brown: Zoya – Flynn
~ Dark brown: Zoya – Dea
~ Stamp: Moyra – 32 Nature

The husk is hand-painted, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that neither the white nor the brown were dark enough to work. Maybe if I had actually colored in the corn kernels on the stamper this would have worked better, but as it stands it just looks messy. Oh well, other corn for the win! What are your thoughts?

Light Indian Corn

I made two styles of indian corn and this is the lighter one! The other one will likely be posted in the next two weeks. This one was made using a light brown base, over which I stamped the corn image in white. When that was dry, I then smushed a bunch of colors (yellow, light yellow, red, and grey) onto the stamping plate and stamped over the white with the colors. The end result is less identifiably corn, but still cool! However, it looked too pastel, so I used a yellow jelly polish over the top to deepen the colors.

Colors:
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Momen
~ Light yellow: Maybelline – Citrus Collide
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Red: OPI – Vision of Love
~ Grey: WOW – #333
~ Brown: Zoya – Flynn
~ Dark brown: Zoya – Dea
~ Pale nude: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Yellow jelly: Esmalta da Kelly – Yellow Soap Bubble
~ Stamp: Moyra – 32 Nature

Of course, one cannot just have kernels, so I added some hand-painted husks. Overall this was quite fun to make and wear, and I enjoyed comparing the two manicures! You guys will have to let me know (after you see the other one) which one you prefer! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Fall-themed Roses

I went to a wedding where the bridesmaids were all dressed in different fall colors, and it was stunning! My assigned color was red, but the colors ranged from coral and orange through a deep plum. Of course, I painted my nails to match :-). Oddly enough, the only roses in the actual bouquets (which I helped make) were orange! Go figure.

Colors:
~ Red holo: A England – Rosebower
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light orange: Maybelline – Bleached in Peach
~ Orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Dark orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Light purple: Zoya – Malia
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Lael
~ Red: OPI – All I want for Christmas (is OPI)
~ Dark red: OPI – Visions of Love
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Stamp: BM – 209

Hope you enjoyed! It feels like I should be moving on to winter manicures…its been below 40 for the past few days even though Thanksgiving hasn’t happened yet!

Twisted Red Mesh

This was inspired by @nailsandtowel. However, I used see-through flakes, and the original nail artist used more opaque flakes. In retrospect, I wish I had done the same! I own a few, I just felt like using loose flakes and that was a mistake.

Colors:
~ Red: OPI – All I Want For Christmas (is OPI)
~ Glitter: Born Pretty – Aqua Flakies
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Lina – Make Your Mark 02

In the end I was less happy with this than I expected to be, and it is all down to flakie choice! The art was otherwise fun and my nails were actually long enough to try and mimic the inspiration. Oh well, next time! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Red Forest Leaves

Halloween is over…so it is back to standard fall manis! This is one of my recent favorites. I honestly don’t even remember if I showed you guys this polish yet (I don’t think I have…) but I used this crazy glittery multichrome over a dark green and voila, magic! I really should post my nail art in order at some point. Basically it is a green/gold mutlichrome on its own, but over a dark polish it turns into red/gold/green and its fall magic in a bottle 😀

Colors:
~ Dark green: ILNP – Ski Lodge
~ Red/gold/green shimmer: Ethereal – Rainforest
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Stamp: UC – Lovely Leaves 2

I am not usually brave enough to stamp negative space designs, because I don’t have true stamping polish (i just use mostly dried up bottles of black and white standard polish)…but uber chic plates are just so perfectly etched that they work anyway. That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed!!