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!

Dotted Circles

This mani took a bit of work because of the double stamping! And also because working with sheer polish makes me nervous so it takes a lot longer to get anything done.

The steps to this one were basically sheer polish, stamp with gold dots, then stamp with rainbow dots. The exciting part was that I got a liquid metallic polish from Sally Hansen (back when mirror nails were all the rage) to stamp! It is such a perfect shiny gold but it usually dries to fast for stamping. Which goes to show that this plate is well etched. And since I was stamping in colors over it, I didn’t care if every part of the design was 100% filled in. I’ll have to play with it some more in the near future!

Colors:
~ Sheer nude: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Liquid Gold
~ Blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Teal: OPI – Stay off the Lawn!!
~ Stamps: Moyra – 54 Matrix

That is a LOT of colors. Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Maybe I’ll actually have some seasonal nails up starting next week? I have a bunch of snowflake and dark color manis done, but I haven’t even put them on my computer much less edited them yet!

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 😀

Cascading Rainbow Dots

This was a lot of fun, and not nearly as time consuming as I had feared! I was searching for some inspiration to use for the 31 Day Challenge options for art, flag, or supernatural (since I only post one out of every three days), and was stumped on flag. Then I remember my day 5/blue nails and how much I loved the porcelain, so I went searching for vases or ceramic art. And I ended up somehow on teacups…and with this.

The inspiration for this design really is art, but its teacup glass art! I don’t know where I can buy this set but I WANT it. It is so pretty! Unfortunately, using this design meant I needed to have my nails mostly naked underneath to mimic the see-through glass, and that I had to double dot with gold and a color!

Despite that, the art only took maybe 1.5 hours, which is pretty good for lots of dots! I am very grateful that I have real dotting tools now…trying to get this mani sizes of dots out of my hairpins and paperclips would have been difficult.

Colors:
~ Sheer nude: Sephora X – Marvelous
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Liquid Gold
~ Blue: Zoya – Sia
~ Purple: Zoya – Landon
~ Pink: Zoya – Ciara
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Teal: OPI – Stay off the Lawn!!

This also gave me a chance to use Liquid Gold, which I bought back when metallic semi-foil polishes (that show every ridge and divot in the nail) were a huge craze. I only ever got a gold and a silver, and I seldom use them because top coat ruined the finish and they, as mentioned, show every nail problem! They work really well for dots though 😀

Hope you enjoyed! There is only one day left in the challenge for me, and it is inspired by others! Since something like 60% of all my nail art is inspired by SOMETHING, I think I might just grab one from the vault again.

EKG

EKG, also known as an ECG, is short for echocardiogram, and it is how we analyze heart rhythms in the hospital. Since I have been on some form of cardiology for MONTHS at this point, I though it was high time I did EKG nails!

The study also tends to be a very discernible pattern (in fact the heart rhythm is defined by the pattern we see on EKG) so I thought it would be pretty funny to use this design for my “pattern” day in the 31 day challenge!

Basically I am trying to be clever. Anyone in the medical field would hopefully ALSO think I was being clever, but otherwise these just look like pink boxed paper with some black squiggles.

Of note, real EKGs don’t actually have pink sparkly hearts in them :-p

Colors:
~ Pastel pink: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Light pink: Sinful Colors – Pink Forever
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Pink glitter: Zoya – Alegra
~ Stamps: BP – L002, BM – 620

I was super proud of these when I did them, because  I had to double stamp the black lines….my stamp had much wider spaced crosshatches and I wanted tiny narrow ones to match the spacing of the black EKG lines! Voila.

Gnarly Blossoms

I know it isn’t spring anymore, but I got the PERFECT base color and I just had to make this! I’ll likely do it again next year so it fits :-D. Also, flower day anyone? 😀

This awesome design was inspired by ruthsnailart which I have recently become obsessed with. If we are being honest, I added too many cherry blossoms (I like her slightly more minimalist design) but this still looks pretty epic!

The base is a stunning periwinkle blue/purple polish with copious pink-gold shimmer and silver flakies called Traverse the Skies by Emily de Molly. I have had my eyes on this polish ever since it came out, and it does not disappoint! I love it. It is super interesting (both in terms of color and finish), and is just close enough to purple that I’ve also already worn it to the hospital. This is three thin coats, although I probably could have gotten away with two if I was more careful.

What you probably can’t tell is that there are THREE colors of brown in the tree branches (and an additional three colors of pink in the blossoms) and putting this all together took longer than I thought it would. That said, it was worth it! I am impressed.

Colors:
~ Periwinkle: Emily de Molly – Traverse the Skies
~ Dark brown: Zoya – Louise
~ Brown: Zoya – Dea
~ Light brown: Zoya – Flynn
~ Dark pink: Clinique – Pinkini
~ Pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Light pink: ULTA – Baby Doll

That’s about it for this one! I’ve never made cherry blossoms this way before (usually I try to make little flowers rather than dots) but I really like this. Hope you enjoyed it, happy flowers day!

Iridescent Dots and Roses

Happy Monday! No really, I mean it. Today is a good day because I start on an elective block tomorrow which means I get such things like WEEKENDS and NOT WORKING 30 HOUR CALL SHIFTS. It’s amazing. Anyway, on to nail art! In celebration of my new found freedom, this week I’m going to be posting some recent favorites that I’ve saved up, starting with this sparkly floral piece!

The base polish here is two thin coats of Holidazed Over You by OPI. This polish is a very very dark blue creme…so dark it is basically black. That said, the polish is almost a one coater! I always need more super opaque blacks (even if this IS blue), and having one in a tiny mini bottle will be useful, even if I’m just going to pretend it’s black. Oh well!

I then went and covered the polish with holographic iridescent foil from the Born Pretty Store. Most of my foil is single sheets, but this particular pattern is an entire roll! This is great because the design is fairly awesome: an array of dots with a rainbow shifting wave running through! As I tilt my nails the swirl shifts up, down, left, and right. The rainbows are incredible! I got 98% dot transfer which is really impressive. I did add a few of the missing dots using a silver metallic polish, but I think across all 5 nails I only had to add maybe 10 dots total? So win for both the foil and the foil glue!

In my continuing need to test all things related to using foil on my nails, I went hunting for a way to make foil manis last longer. The last time I used foil, I only covered it with aqua base (water-based base coat intended for some persnickety holographic polishes…and the only water-based anything that I own, unfortunately) and in the shower the whole thing started to crack and flake off! Which means it worked great for about 5 hours and then became kinda really ugly. So, this time I covered with Seche Vite after the aqua base…. and it totally worked! The aqua base seems to protect the finish and shimmer of the foil, while Seche Vite does its job and protects the mani from such hazards as water and daily life.

I kinda wish I had taken a video (not that I actually know how to get them onto the blog, but still) just so you guys could see the shifty wave pattern. It was fun! But then I decided it wasn’t enough.

I for some reason really wanted to throw on some roses over the dots! I was initially going to use layered stamping, but all the rose plates that I have contain flowers that were larger than I wanted to go with…so freehand roses it was! It’s been a while since I last freehanded flowers (yet somehow the posts I’ve put together for the next few weeks have a lot of flowers? I don’t know, I guess I lump them together thematically. Anyway), and these came out pretty good for all that I am out of practice!

Colors:
~ Dark blue: OPI – Holidazed Over You
~ Pastel pink: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Pink: Revlon – Bubbly
~ Dark pink: Zoya – Kelsey
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Dark green: Zoya – Shawn

That’s all for today! You can pick up the roll of shifty holographic dot foil for 99 cents at the Born Pretty Store. I am super a fan! Then all you need is some freehand roses and voila! Super fun mani, if I do say so myself. Hope you enjoyed!

Funky Dotted Pink

I don’t know what I was thinking with this. I wanted to use my pale pink swatch test nails to make something….and it got out of hand. This would actually have been a really cool mani if I just stuck to one of the paler pinks as my base! As it is with the weird background dotted gradient…nope.

So I started by making a dotted gradient from lightest to darkest color, interspersing the creme polishes with the shimmers. That looked ok. Then I stamped with a neon teal, which still looked ok. Then I added black. I just wish my nail tips weren’t so much darker! I love the pink/teal/black idea. Oh well.

Colors:
~ Teal: Emily de Molly – Glee Ridden
~ Pastel pink creme: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Pastel pink shimmer: OPI – The Color that Keeps on Giving
~ Nude creme: KBShimmer – Caught on Tape
~ Nude shimmer: ULTA – Freshwater Pearl
~ Dark nude creme: Wet n’ Wild – Private Viewing
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Stamp: Whats Up Nails – B015

In other news, this is my first Whats Up Nails stamping plate, and I love it!! It is wonderfully etched and I wish I had done this mani better service. It is one of the only plates I own where I can really see myself using every single damn image. I am impressed! Despite how awful these look, you will be seeing a lot more of these designs. Anyway, happy Friday, and I promise next weeks manis are better!

Daffodil Garden

I have no excuse for this going up in the afternoon…I finished editing last night and just forgot that today is a Wednesday! Anyway. I painted these in early April, as the daffodils were finally emerging from the (very late) snow! I also rather like that I found a way to use this stamp that doesn’t make all my fingers look the same 🙂

Since this was painted on top of a swatch test post, I started with a different color blue polish on each nail. To make them uniform, I basically dry-brushed each color over the others so the end result was a medium light blue with shimmer in it. I wanted there to be a faint wispy cloud background, and I think it looks rather cool! You can see that best on my pinky and thumb.

After the blue cloudy background had dried, I used advanced stamping (aka coloring in the stamp while it is on the stamper) and applied it to my nails. One of my last minute decisions with this was to use a dark orange in the very center of the flowers and then a lighter yellow-leaning peach for the rest of the middle. I love how it came out! I ended up goggle image searching daffodils to make sure I had the right shade of orange (all the daffodils near my apartment are yellow-on-yellow which is not nearly as much fun), and it also gave me a chance to use Freedom of Peach again! I don’t like this color on my nails as a base but it clearly works as flower centers :-p

Colors:
~ Pastel blue: Sally Hansen – Breezy Blue
~ Light blue: Essie – Rock the Boat
~ Pink shimmer: Sinful Colors – Cinderella
~ Medium blue: KBShimmer – I’d Rather be with Blue
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Peach: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment
~ Green: Zoya – Shawn
~ Stamp: BP – L067

I know the daffodils have all died, but I wanted to make sure that this got posted SOMETIME in the spring! Hope you enjoyed!

Swatch Test: Mauve Nudes and Pastel Pinks

Mauve Nudes: I don’t know why I compared these exact colors. I guess I wanted to get a sense of how purple/grey each was? No dupes here!

From pinky to thumb:
~ Pinky: Zoya – Chantal
~ Ringe: Essense – I Nude It
~ Middle: CND – Cashmere Wrap
~ Pointer: KBShimmer – Caught on Tape
~ Thumb: Zoya – Rue

Every single polish took three thin coats, but all applied well. In terms of colors, Chantal is the most yellow-leaning, while Nude is the palest by far but also leans a bit yellow-pink. Cashmere, Tape, and Rue are almost a gradient of pastel mauve to true mauve. I mostly wanted to reassure myself that Tape and Cashmere weren’t dupes for each other or anything else, and they aren’t! I also quite like both of them, even if they are boring colors!

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Pastel Pinks: So, I wanted to compare my pale pinks and my pale pink shimmer/frosts. Mostly the frosts if I’m being honest! No dupes here, but some of the colors are downright ugly! I also re-used Tape (from above) to compare a pale mauve to a pale pink.

From pinky to thumb:
~ Pinky: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Ring: KBShimmer – Caught on Tape
~ Middle: OPI – The Color that Keeps on Giving
~ Ring: ULTA – Freshwater Pearl
~ Thumb: Wet n’ Wild – Private Viewing

All the polishes took 3 coats except Tape, which took two (I guess I used thicker coats). For the cremes, Doll is more of a true pastel pink than Tape, and is also a bit paler. Private is its own thing and I should have known I didn’t own any dupes! I hate how it looks of me, but it is a useful skin tone color for nail art. For the shimmers, Pearl is more of a nude frost and Giving is a true pink frost. They are actually quite different…and unsurprisingly I like Peal a lot better! I can see Giving coming in useful….if and only if (hah I just tried to write iff which means the same thing but in python, whoops) someone tells me I need to wear a baby pink shimmer to a wedding. I don’t think that will happen, so away it goes!

Simply Swirled

This mani was done super last minute because I had forgotten that I had an interview the next day (I never forget about flights, but if its only a bus ride away…well, that can be a problem). I mostly wanted something fast!

I don’t know that I love the combo of a frosty shimmer with a metallic polish, I think a creme stamp might have worked better. I do love this stamp though, it is pretty much my go-to when I need something fast, swirly, and pretty!

The colors here are Freshwater Pearl by ULTA for the pink base, and Penny Talk for the rose gold stamp. The stamp itself is from Bundle Monster plate 314.

Of course, there was also no sun while I wore this, so you only get to see indoor lighting, sorry!

I promise that the designs going up next week are a tad more colorful! Happy Friday!

Darkened Desert

This mani isn’t quite winter-themed, but I think the dark colors work regardless. Also, I really couldn’t think of what to call this mani but the colors remind me of the Southwest so desert it is!

What you see here are two coats of O R’YLEH (which, how do I correctly uncapitolize? O R’yleh? O R’Yleh?) by Great Lakes Lacquer. This polish really could have been opaque in one coat but I didn’t know that, so my application was uneven. That said, the polish is a bit thicker than I expected and you need to work fast or it will dry and drag.

The polish itself is beautiful, with a dark green base with lots of holo shimmer. It also has a multichrome shimmer to it that shifts from bright fuchsia pink through copper and to gold. It’s a chameleon! Unfortunately, it was also a Polish Pickup Pack October exclusive, so as far as I know there is no way to buy it. But if you like the concept, think about joining the PPP before this month’s offers are gone too!

Colors:
~ Green: Great Lakes Lacquer – O R’YLEH
~ Rose gold: Essie – Penny Talk
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Yellow: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana?
~ Teal: Zoya – Wednesday
~ Stamp: BM – XL205

I don’t know exactly how I ended up with this color scheme, but it doesn’t look half bad. I wouldn’t typically mix orange, teal, and yellow (ewwww yellow) with something like a deep green. Or a rose gold!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed, and happy almost New Years! I don’t plan at this moment to have a special New Years post, but maybe I can find something I haven’t had time to post that I sufficiently glittery. If not, I’ll just kick off my “top 10 of 2017” posts with regards to my favorite polishes and nail art.

Harvest Floral

This is somewhat fall-colored? Oranges and burgundies? Regardless, this was very easy and ended up looking nice!

I wanted a fast mani, and nothing is faster than water decals! Except no polish, but that isn’t a mani at all :-p

I used the images from BP W15 for the flowers, over a white creme base. The orange nails were painted using Sun of a Gun by ULTA, a pretty burnt orange.

There really isn’t much else to say about this mani! I did not use the polish I am holding in the photo, but it matched the flowers and ULTA polishes are cylindrical which I find difficult to pose with.

Hope you enjoyed!

Growing Flowers

Orange day in the 31 Day Challenge! I actually have other orange manis, but this used the MOST shades of orange so I think it goes here!

Unfortunately, this mani had a lot of problems. Neither plate I tried to use (the zig-zags and the flowers) actually stamps well at ALL, and I don’t know why I wanted to make the flowers appear to be growing when having them all the same height on my nail would have looked better! Moreover, the peachy-orange base looked super strange on my nails.

The Born Pretty Store sent me the floral plate, BP-L067 to use. And I LOVE the designs on it. That said, the first copy they sent me (the one I used here) was etched so subtly that almost no polish would work with it. I had to try with every black polish I own. I ended up contacting the store and they sent me a replacement (which obviously I did not have a chance to use with this mani) which is perfectly etched and makes me very happy. I don’t know that I’ll get around to posting it in the 31 Day Challenge, but if I do I’ll let you all know. The plate has some spectacular floral images, perfect for advanced stamping (aka coloring the designs in).

When the OPI Washington DC collection came out, there were a few polishes I really wanted, and Freedom of Peach was one of them. I didn’t own anything like it! Unfortunately, there was a reason for that. This is three thin coats of Freedom of Peach. The polish did not self-level very well at all, and the color looks quite strange on my nails! Almost a nude, but with orange in it. I don’t like it. I imagine on other skin tones it would looks better, but with mine it is completely meh.

Colors:
~ Peach: OPI – Freedom of Peach
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Lightest orange: KBShimmer – Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana?
~ Bright orange: Zoya – Thandie
~ Medium orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Dark orange: Essie – Playing Koi
~ Green: Zoya – Tilda
~ Stamps: BP – L067 and X06

So, even though these are ridiculously complicated nails, I don’t love them! They are orange though, so here you go. If you want to buy the stamping plate (which again, watch for etching issues but the images are amazing) you can find it at the Born Pretty Store for $2.59. Enjoy!

Grey Trimmed Lace

Ok, so this is super boring. Like really really painfully boring. That said, it came out nicely and no one noticed any of the art in the hospital so I’ll cal it a win. It also gave me a chance to use that darn stamp…its been staring at me for years and I never figured out why someone would need some angled lace pattern!

I don’t have much to say about this. Pink. White. Grey. Some lace. I sound like a broken record…I really hope my current stint in the outpatient clinics is more forgiving of manis! I think it will be (I am barely getting graded for this, it is for my own edification).

Colors:

~ Pink: ULTA – Baby Doll

~ Grey: Zoya – Dove

~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

~ Stamp: BM – 323

I hate posing for bottle photos with anything but Zoya or rectangular bottles. I don’t know why, but the shape fits well in my hand. This awkward straight-edged bottle? Not so much. So, thank you brands like Zoya and Emily de Molly for making easy-to-hold bottles :-p

Thats it for boring pink manis! There is one more subtle mani but at it least it isn’t pink or nude. Oy.

Sunlight

Remember how I mentioned on Monday that I finally had time for bright manis? Well, here is one of them!

Sometime over the last few months I went hunting for the OPI Washington DC collection because there where a whole bunch of polishes that I wanted from it (which is honestly rare). I ended up getting 5 (plus a random red). In retrospect, only two of those 5 were ones I’m actually going to get much use out of! Silly past-Eva.

One of the ones I am really glad I got is this, Never a Dulles Moment. There are a few reasons I like this polish…even though I hate the color yellow. I have fewer yellow polishes in my collection than anything else by a substantial margin…but every now and then one is unique enough that I want it. This polish is a nice darker yellow, almost a mustard color (not quite fugly), and I figured i was time. Anyway, Never a Dulles Moment is a bit finicky…it does not self-level (but it is a yellow, so that’s just what happens with them). That said, it did try very fast. It took three thin coats to be opaque, but dried speedily enough that I didn’t mind.

Colors

~ Yellow: OPI – Never a Dulles Moment

~ Light orange: OPI – Freedom of Peach

~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun

~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black

~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White

~ Stamp: BP – L008

There are only a few reasonable way to wear yellow on your nails (rather than as a highlight color) and since I had already done flames recently…I had to make a gradient with orange and then watermarble. The gradient actually features another of the OPI DC polishes, but it will get its own post in the future. Hope you enjoyed!

Flame

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to use this plate, which was sent to me for review from the Born Pretty Store. Fire-colored gradient with black stamping? Gradient stamping? I tried doing yellow and orange and red…but they didn’t pop against black! So I had the brilliant idea of layering them over GOLD. Because that just sounded like fun.

I ended up using a gold glitter rather than a metallic, so the fire looks a little more granular. I think if I were to do this again, I’d try it with a metallic and see what happens! I do like this quite a bit though.

In the end, each nail got stamped 4 times: twice in gold with the two overlaid designs, once with a yellow-orange blotted mix, and finally with a purple-red mix. Surprisingly, this didn’t take that long! Mostly because the plate was so well-etched that transferring the designs was a piece of cake. Even the solid body of the bird on my thumb!

Colors
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Gold: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Yellow: WOW – #301
~ Orange: ULTA – Sun of a Gun
~ Red: Pure Ice – Siren
~ Purple: Zoya – Margo
~ Dark purple: Zoya – Monica
~ Stamp: BP – X012 (Exoticism)

That’s it for today…awesome fire! I’ve honestly had my eyes on this stamp forever because I love flames but I HATE hand-painting them! And this stamp has SO MANY FLAMES. You can pick it up for yourself at the Born Pretty Store on sale for $1.99. Don’t forget to use my 15% off coded, LY5X31!

Silver Leaves and Pink Berries

I really like how this mani came out, but it took forever to plan! I knew I wanted something with white, grey, and pink…and trying to figure out what to use for the stamp vs the background took forever. I think I used all 5 nail demos on my silicone mat! Worth it 😀

The stamping plate I used here was sent for review from the Born Pretty Store, but it is full of fun leaves and flowers…both of which are a pain to free-hand. So, I am really glad this plate works as well as it does! It’ll be VERY useful come fall. The geometric pattern is from an Emily de Molly plate though.

You also cannot tell, but I actually used both a white and a silver to stamp, just to see how the variation looked! It’s most noticeable in the non-sunlight photos.

Colors
~ Grey: Zoya – Dove
~ Silver: A England – Excalibur
~ White: Sinful Colors – Snow me White
~ Light pink: ULTA – Baby Doll
~ Pink: Wet n’ Wild – Tickled Pink
~ Stamps: Floral BPX-L018, EDM 03

If you want the floral stamping plate, head over to the Born Pretty store, it is currently on sale for $2.99! Don’t forget to use my code, LY5X31…although I don’t think it can be applied to things already on sale, sorry!

Vines Through the Swamp

Don’t ask me about the title. I thought that as lovely as the base is, it looks like a swamp. And then I got stuck into thinking about Shrek and now “I’m a Believer” is stuck in my head on repeat.

Anyway. This is one of the A England polishes that I picked up a few months ago during the color4nails sale (because I couldn’t resist) and it is LOVELY. Now, at least part of that is because I simply love this type of murky green-brown, but a lot of it has to do with the polish itself! (Actually, I have a post that I’m working on that compares the three green-brown polishes I own. Yes, I own three of them. Because this color is magnificent).

Shown here is two thin coats of Fotheringhay Castle by A England. I almost could have gotten away with one! Adina’s version of this particular color is a deep murky green-gold with scattered fine holo shimmer. The holo is less noticeable than most other A England holos, but the finish is stunning and you can certainly see the shimmer! I’m quite happy with this 😀

Colors:
~ Green: A England – Fotheringhay Castle
~ Gold shimmer: Sally Hansen – Go for Gold
~ Gold metallic: Essie – Good as Gold
~ Black: Sinful Colors – Black on Black
~ Light pink: ULTA – Babydoll
~ Pink: Essie – Eternal Optimist

I ended up triple stamping with two Bundle Monster plates: once with a gold shimmer that ended up very faint because the plate was not etched well, once with gold metallic swirls, and then over that using black polish and the same swirls. It came out pretty well for all that stamping madness!

Hope you enjoyed!