Holo Glitter Top Coat

Friday's field trip was to the science center and I really didn't want to wear my picnic nails so I did a simple mani which I ended up falling in love with. These nails make me think of outer space. I found myself staring endlessly at my nails and moving them around in the light :)

Enlarge the pics to get a better look

I first put on two coats of Sinful Colors Black on Black. I then did one coat of the Cover Girl Sparkling Top Coat- Goddess. Simple but so pretty!! Believe me when I tell you that the pictures do not do these justice. In person they are so freaking sparkly!

The Picnic Nails Won!!!

Thanks everyone for voting!!!

The Balloon nails had 2 votes, the Picnic nails had 10 votes, and there was 1 vote for alternating.

Just a warning, my nails are now short :( You can see in the pictures that the ring finger nail is even shorter than the rest because that is the one that I broke. I couldn't bring myself to cut down the rest of my nails that short but it shouldn't take too long for the lengths to even out since my nails grow pretty fast. I am still getting used to the short nails and I don't really like them yet. It is kind of like when you get a whole bunch of hair cut off and you don't really like it until like a week later when you get used to it.

On to the Picnic theme... The picnic at work was lots of fun and I ate way too much. Since my nails are shorter I decided to put less of the fiilmo clay fruit pieces on my nails. I decided to just go with watermelon because I was too lazy to cut any of the other pieces.

For this mani I used WnW French White Creme as the base. Then I painted on the lines vertically and horizontally using a light pink art deco polish. Once those were dry I used a small brush and a red art deco polish to paint the red parts of the picnic pattern. Then Using two different sized dotting tools and Sinful Colors Black on Black, I dotted on the ants bodies. I used a striping brush to paint on the legs and antennas. I also added some silver details to the ants to make them look more 3d. I stuck the watermelon pieces on and coated the whole thing with SV which unfortunately bubbled on this design.

My giveaway will be ending at midnight tonight and I will be announcing the winner tomorrow so don't forget to enter!!!

Monday Nail Art Challenge: Polka Dots & a Little LGBT Support

So I am a member of Polish-aholics Anonymous on Facebook. As I have mentioned before, you should check it out if you love nail polish! The group had started a nail art challenge for Mondays. Polka dots was selected for the first challenge. I was very excited because I have never actually done polka dots before. Since June is LGBT   ( Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) pride month, I decided to show some support with my nails and went with rainbow polka dots! Hope you enjoy them:


Note* The pictures look better if you enlarge them. Just click to enlarge.

For this mani I used Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Whirlwind White as the base. I then applied rows of dots in rainbow colors using a dotting tool. The pink is Fresh Paint Pom-Pom. The Red is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Cherry Red. The Orange is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Sun Kissed. The yellow is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mellow Yellow. The Green is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Green With Envy. The blue is Funky Fingers 220 Volts. The purple is Funky Fingers Cheshire. I topped the whole thing with Sv and cleaned up the edges.

Costume Party nails

So a few weeks ago my boyfriends brother and his girlfriend Emily moved in with us. The boys are working on a project together and Emily and I are both working at the daycare. On Thursday we had a costume party for summer camp. Emily dressed up like Mario and I dressed up like Tinkerbell. I will try to get a picture of our costumes from one of our coworkers. The night before the costume party I decided to do both of our nails. I did the designs for the Mario nails on fake nails first to practice so I will post pics of those as well. Emily and I had fun cracking up trying to take pictures of her nails. I had to teach her how to model her hands... i dunno i guess you had to be there to think it was hysterical. Sadly I did not get very good pictures of my Tinkerbell nails because my camera died and by the time it was charged, I had to take my nail polish off for the surgery.

Super Mario:

My practice on fake nails:

 Tinkerbell:

So I used so many different colors for these two nail designs... so I am not going to list all of the colors. I am not sure I can even remember most of the colors now. Many of the colors for the Mario nails were actually art deco polishes. I did the Mario nails entirely free hand. The Tinkerbell nails were stamped with the fairy and the stars from some fauxnad plates. "Tink" on the thumb was done freehand. I hope you enjoyed these as much as I did!

Splatter Nail Art Tutorial

Here is the tutorial for the splatter nail art that I posted the other day.

Finished product looked like this:

How I did it: 

What you will need:

• 1 Straw. A normal sized straw will work and possibly a smaller straw from a juice box. Large straws will not work for this.
• Piece of paper to practice on and work over top of.
• Base Color
• Splatter colors
• Foil
• Tape
• Cleanup brush
• Acetone

Step 1: Pick your base color and paint your nails with the base color. I used WnW French White Creme. Allow the base color to dry before moving to step 2.

Step 2: Pick your colors, for this I used 5 colors as pictured below.

Step 3: This step is optional and could be done several ways. I used scotch tape to tape off my fingers to limit the mess. I really hate taping off my fingers so I only did this for left hand and it honestly wasn't that bad cleaning up my right hand without taping it. I have also heard that you can use vaseline or chapstick to keep the polish from getting on your skin. Sine I was using pure acetone to clean up my mani, the cleanup didn't take very long. 

Step 4: I use foil for this but you can use what every you want. Take one of the colors and put a drop or two of polish on the foil.

Step 5: Take your straw and dip it in the polish.

The polish should form a film on the tip of the straw and look like this:

Step 6: Take the straw and blow through the straw. I practiced on a piece of paper first to get a feel for how close the straw should be to the nail and how hard to blow. It really just takes a little practice to get a feel for it. After doing it a few times then move to your nails. I did one or two splatters of the first color on each nail and then did the rest of the colors in the same way.

Step 7: Using acetone, cleanup the edges where the polish spattered on your skin and cuticles. I have a tutorial on cleanup here. Top two are cleaned up and bottom two are not cleaned up:

                                           

If you have any questions about this tutorial please feel free to ask :) 

I Call These Barbie Puke :)

Any ideas why I call these Barbie puke?? lol. I was feeling a little lazy last week so I decided to just go with something simple and glittery. I got a couple of new polishes that I will swatch eventually and so I decided to use one of the new polishes. The pink polish that I used is from LA Colors and is part of one of the Intense collection that I ordered from CherryCulture. You get four nail polishes for $3!!! Can't beat that! These pictures do not do this mani justice. It looked so much better in person. The pink looks a little dull in the pictures but in person it was super bright neon pink and the glitter was so shiny! I really with you all could have seen these in person since my camera refused to capture them properly :(

Barbie puked on my nails:

This is two coats of the L.A. Colors neon pink (no names on the bottles). This polish is very nice for how cheap it is. It covered well in two coats and the brush didn't suck. I put one coat of NYX Dynamic Glitter over top which has holo chunky glitter and fine pink and silver glitter. I love glitter so much but it is such a pain in the butt to get off... I guess it is a love hate kind of thing.

Sunflowers In The Sky

I have seen so many cute sunflower manis and they just look so cute and summery so I decided to try a sunflower nail design of my own. This mani was done freehand and I feel like I am getting better at doing freehand. The possibilities are endless when doing freehand nail designs! I am going to let the pictures do the talking for this mani:

For this mani I did 2 coats of this mini Sally Girl polish which does not have a name on it... Two coats of this stuff was not fun. After putting on my base coat and the first coat of this I went back to do the second coat and the brush started taking off the first coat as I tried to gently stroke it on... it was useless, I had to let the first coat dry most of the way before putting on the second coat. Maybe it had something to do with the base coat but it was a pain in the butt.

Anyways, for the petals I used a striping brush from an art deco polish with Sally Hansen Insta-dri Lightening. The petals are not perfect but I feel like it makes it look more like a sunflower. Then using the same brush and WnW Sunny Side Up, I added some extra detail to the petals. For the centers of the sunflowers, I used Sinful Colors Nirvana and applied it with rounded brush. I coated the whole thing with SV as usual! The first 3 pictures are a more accurate representation of the true color of this polish.

Milani Holo With Some Stampage

I have completed an entire set of polish for the very first time!!! I now have all of the Milani 3D polishes! In honor of completing the set I decided to do a mani using one of the polishes. Are you shocked to find out that it is green? No me neither... I have a thing for green polishes! These are not the greatest holo polishes but they are still holo and I still love them! I also got to try out my first konad stamping polish that I won in a giveaway!

You probably can't tell but the polish I am holding is not the same polish my nails are painted with... Didn't even realize it was gold and not green until after the pictures. Then I realized that I left the green one at my parents house... oh well close enough.

I probably should have taken pictures of Hi-Tech before putting the pink over top... I think I soaked up a little too much sun this week lol.

For this mani I used  2 coats of Milani Hi-Tech and then using Konad Special Princess polish in pink (no name on the bottle) I stamped on the design from plate BM-205. I covered the whole thing with SV :)

I am not crazy about how this turned out... I don't think there was enough contrast between colors for this design to work well. Maybe it also had to do with both polishes being shimmery. I also am not crazy about the Konad stamping polish because it did not cover as well as I would have liked and it left a lot of polish on the stamper every time. Maybe I will try the Konad polish over some other colors and post a review.

Another Butterfly Mani

I loved my blue monarch butterfly mani so much that I had to do it again in a different color. I am going to keep this short and sweet today because it is going to be ein the 90's today and I will be spending the day outside in the sun! Here it is:

I used 2 coats of WnW Fast Dry in Ocean Grotto which is a new polish from their Mermaid Cove collection. I then used my two-way nail art pens in black and white to create the lines and dots. Those pens work so well for dotting! Then as usual I layered a nice coat of SV over the whole thing. This green is so pretty, if you are a sucker for green polish like I am then you must have this one. It has very fine gold shimmer in it. Happy Memorial day to everyone :)

My first Crackle Nail Polish...

I went to Sally's for the first time... yeah I know what is wrong with me for never going into that store until now?? I picked up a few things like a glass file (which I love) a giant thing of pure acetone, some mini polishes (will post pics soon) and China Glaze Crackle in Broken Hearted. I have seen the crackle polishes everywhere and felt like I had to have just one... even though I am not a huge fan of the crackle look. They only had the pink and the white... so I went with the pink because I can't resist pink. I really wish I would have gotten the white now because it would go with more colors. I might have to go back and get it.  Ok enough talking here is the mani:

Note: Click to enlarge to see the holo goodness even better!

So for this mani I used 1 coat of Sally Hansen Xtreme wear Celeb City which is super shiny metallic silver and then 2coats of Cover Girl Goddess which is a holo glitter. Once that was dry I put on 1 fairly thin coat of the crackle. I think I could have even done a thinner coat cause it didn't crackle as much as I wanted it to. I played with it a little more after this mani and it seems like the thinner the coat the more it crackles. I am still deciding on whether or not I like the crackle. At first I really didn't like it but after wearing it for a couple days it is starting to grow on me. Also I apologize for the shrinkage on the tips... I forgot to wrap the tips :(

White, Blue, and Yellowe Flower mani

Ok before you even look at the pictures please read this: These pictures were taken 3 days after doing the mani :( Somehow I completely forgot to take pictures of these until 3 days later and after scrubbing my entire bathroom. Ok now that you know that you can look at the pictures with terrible tip wear. Even though they look like crap I still wanted to share these with you.

When I fist did this mani I only stamped on the white flowers... I found them to be so incredibly boring, probably because I did this mani right after my filled in butterfly mani. I had to add something more to the mani so I used one of my small brushes to add in some yellow to the flowers.

For this mani I used two coats of NXY Ink Heart which is a very pretty blue jelly. Then using Sally Hansen Insta Dri in Whirlwind White, I stamped on the flowers from BM-221. After being incredibly bored by the mani I added in the yellow using acrylic paint. The acrylic paint is very easy to work with when you use it over SV. If you mess up at all you can just wipe it off without ruining the mani. I topped the whole thing with SV.