Dark Laces

I have been sitting on this mani for months, but I figured fall was a good time to post it! I loved doing this one, but the laces took forever, so that I ran out of time to add enough top coat to smooth everything out. So, I am sorry for the slightly uneven finish!

The design was inspired by @banicured_ although her’s were all in white. The laces stand out more against the white, but there is nothing like a jewel-toned ombre to make me happy! Also, I wanted to see how OPI’s Stay Off the Lawn stacked up against some of my other darker colors.

It makes me a little sad how infrequently I can get away with doing manicures that show even a bit of my naked nail. I wear too much blue (and green, and even certain pinks) and my poor nails look like splatter paintings. I had to wait until they cleared up just to do this!

Colors:
~ Sheer: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Gold: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Teal: OPI – Stay Off the Lawn!!
~ Blue: Maybelline – Shocking Seas
~ Purple: L’Oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Pink: Zoya – Margo

That’s all for today! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Crossing Teal

I both love and hate this manicure. I love how the colors came together, and I really do like the pattern on my accent nail. But I hate the shimmery teal!

So, this is a polish I got as a gift from a friend of mine. It is called Jade Kat, by Sinful Colors. I can see why she bought it for me, it is the type of color I tend to love: jewel toned, bright, and shimmery. Also, teal! But the polish itself is a mess. This is four thin coats (I maybe could have done three but…). I let the first two dry for over an hour (as I ate dinner and played far too many rounds of Mariokart) and the polish wasn’t dry yet! I dinged it trying to cut the striping tape apart.

Then I added two more coats, only to realize that sometime during the whole process I had developed bubbles. Tens of tiny bubbles all over my nails. Now, I’ve been painting my nails long enough to know how to avoid bubbles unless I am in a rush (or my top coat is a thickened mess) but neither was true in this case. It just bubbled at random! As a result, I really cannot recommend this polish, even if the metallic/shimmer finish is nice.

The design came from @mypolishworld. I actually like the colors and layout better than what she did, but I wouldn’t have though of a gold nail without the reference photo!

Colors:
~ Gold: ILNP – Fame
~ Light teal: Maybelline – Green with Envy
~ Teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ Teal shimmer: Sinful Colors – Jade Kat

That’s all for today! Maybe I’ll try this again sometime with polish that doesn’t make me want to immediately change my mani

Glitter Flowers

For the past few years, I’ve tried to do my “honor nails you love” final day of the 31 Day Challenge after one of the manis actually entered into the challenge. This year was troublesome, because there were so many awesome designs! A few were amazing, but far too complicated. So, I settle on this!

The design is inspired by Glitterfingersss glitter day prompt. I did not want to use lose glitter, so I ended up grabbing my new-and-untried crazy silver holo glitter bomb polish, and painting on some flowers! All in all, I don’t know how much this resemble’s gliterfingerss’ original, but I still like it. It is suitably glitter and flowery, even if the base and colors are different!

The base itself is a magnificent (if overpriced) polish called 24 Karat Diamond by F.U.N. Lacquer. I recently bought three of their polishes when LiveLovePolish had a sale. They are honestly too expensive to be worth it for me, but darn do they make pretty polish! 24 Karat Diamond is small silver holographic hexes suspended in a clear base. This took four very thin coats for opacity, and honestly the coats dried surprisingly fast. I don’t love the four-coat problem, but I imagine that next time I will put it over a silver (or silver holo) base and use 2-3 coats. I also wanted to make it as opaque as I could, or I would have stopped at three coats. Despite that, this polish is MESMERIZING. I have not seen intense shifty glittery holo like this…maybe ever. Certainly not in my collection. It is as though someone took Harp On It by Color Club and broke it into individual tiny rainbows, that still somehow look truly silver. I cannot wait to play with this more!

All that said, this polish took a good 30 minutes to remove and there is STILL glitter around my nails (I just took it off). The polish itself is not particularly top coat hungry, and a single coat of Seche Vite was enough to smooth it out. I could not stop staring at my fingernails! I think this might be more of an accent nail type polish in the future, given the removal time, but we shall see!

Colors:
~ Silver holo: F.U.N. Lacquer – 24 Karat Diamond
~ Pink jelly: Zoya – Paloma
~ Purple jelly: Zoya – Katherine
~ Teal jelly: Zoya – Freida
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

I am glad that I did not end up stamping on either the roses or the leaves, as I was initially planning. Something about this being fully free-handed makes me happy! And this is it for the 31 Day Challenge. I am so glad that I kept up! I am proud, even if this is my last year. I’ll do a re-cap tomorrow, and then on to new nail art!

Ripple Down

Raindrops are totally a pattern, right? So droplets must be! I was going to create a nautilus shell, but I didn’t want to spend hours painting each nail…I settled on this and I rather love it.

The design was actually inspired by a previous design of my own, Pond Ripples. Since I obviously still have the same colors, and I recently bought a new copy of the stamping plate I used (that now picks up much MUCH better), I was planning to exactly copy the design…but THEN I tested my teal flakies over a bunch of other polishes and picked a different base!

If nothing else, this mani is insanely glittery. Not in a holographic way, but just…a lot of layers of shimmer. You cannot tell in the photos but when I shift my nails its mesmerizing. I am also glad I bought a new copy of this plate, I really love this stamp!

Colors:
~ Teal glitter: Julie G – Mermaid’s Tale
~ Teal flakies: Zoya – Maisie
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ Stamp: EdM – 06

I actually added matte top coat to one finger just to see if I liked it better (because I have to do that whenever I add flakies) and although it was pretty, I liked the depth of shimmer better with shiny top coat. Shiny it is! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

The Rainbow Fish

I love painting nails inspired by children’s books…and I’ve been wanting to try The Rainbow Fish for a while! I just haven’t had the time (until now).

The inspiration came from Adventures in Acetone, although I decided to stay true to the book and use only creme polishes for the scales other than the rainbow silver scales. I do wish, in retrospect, that I had used a lighter pink (even though I don’t actually have a good one)!

The story is about the joy that one person can get from sharing. Its quite a nice message! It also was one of my favorite books growing up (not that I wanted to be taught to share with my sisters) but because the shiny fish scales were just so pretty. This mani is a bit darker than I imagine the fish being, but still pretty and suitably colorful! Who wants to play with silver holo? 🙂

Colors:
~ Light blue: Zoya – Yummy
~ Blue: Maybelline – Shocking Seas
~ Dark blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Teal: Salon Perfect – Escape to Neverland
~ Purple: L’oreal – Paparazzi Pleaser
~ Pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Holo: Color Club – Harp On It
~ Yellow: WOW – #301

These took FOREVER to paint because I had to do one scale at a time, and couldn’t put two wet dots next to each other or they’d run! I still love the end result though 😀 Hope you enjoyed! It looks like I wasn’t the only one to do Rainbow Fish this year!

Pool Floating

I know it is getting just a bit cold to go swimming, but I painted these back in August so it was appropriate then! Besides, there are totally indoor pools, right?

The design was inspired by pricelessnails. Unfortunately, I did not quite figure out the spacing for my inner tube (the pink thing) so it is a bit…squished…compared to hers.

This is another new polish for me! What you see here is two thin coats of Glee Ridden by Emily de Molly. I have so many manis that I want to do that need a neon teal, and this looked perfect! It is, as expected, a very nice opaque neon teal creme. The color is slightly greener than turquoise, but very very bright! I am a fan.

I think I maybe should have done a bit more of a subtle gradient (that blue is darker than I expected, the polish used to be a semi-jelly and I think its congealed a bit), but this still came out well! I love how the waterspotting worked. I got a new white polish not too long ago so it actually spread on the water!

Colors:
~ Blue: Maybelline – Shocking Seas
~ Teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ Pastel teal: Zoya – Tiana
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Dark blue: Sinful Colors – Endless Blue
~ Pink: Clinique – Pinkini
~ Dark pink: OPI – Malaga Wine

That’s all for today. If it is warm near you, go swimming! And if not…I dunno. Dream about Hawaii?

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!