Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Fishtail Nail Art

Not going to lie, I totally stole this nail art from Pearly Swirl.  The original blog post is here.  I saw her picture on Instagram and had to do it.  I pulled out my three favorite Sally Hansen polishes and got to work.



I started with two thin coats of Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Back to the Fuchsia.  It's a creamy bright pink polish with a slight blue shimmer that went on smoothly.  There was a little bit of visible nail line going on, but for what I was going for it was perfect.  If I was just painting my nails with this I would have added a third coat and been great.  You're going to want to make sure the polish dries completely between colors or else you'll mess everything up.  Believe me, I've messed up with tape A LOT.  

Next I took a piece of Scotch tape and placed it near my cuticles with a corner pointing towards the end of my nails.  Make sure that you press the tape against your skin to take away some of the stickiness or you could peel off your polish.  On the top part of my nail I used two coats of Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear polish in Celeb City.  It is my favorite silver polish ever.  After it dried completely I placed more tape the same way as before just a little higher up and painted two coats of blue polish.  For this one I used Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Calypso Blue.  It is the same consistency of Back to Fuchsia.  It even has the same slight blue shimmer!  

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Femme Fatale Lacquer- Mermaids in the Midst Swatches

UPDATE- I've worn this polish for four days and it was PERFECT until just now.  This is the longest lasting any polish has been on me in a very long time.

Not going to lie, looking at my nails right now while I type this I want to squee because I love this polish so much.  It's squishy and glittery and makes me so happy.



That is what Mermaids in the Midst looks like in the bottle.  It is described as a plum jelly base with holographic teal, gold, and purple glitters, the teal glitter being the biggest ones.  I've never owned a true jelly polish before and this one really caught my eye, to top it off the name has mermaids.  AND it was actually in stock.  Of course I had to get it.



For my picture I used four coats.  I know it sounds a bit excessive, but from my understanding it's not uncommon when it comes to jellies.  I would have been fine at three coats, but I had forgotten to put my top coat between coats two and three, so it ended up being four.  Even then, it wasn't as dark of a color as the swatches shown on the listing.  I am okay with that because I did really thin coats and I can only assume that thicker coats were used in for the picture.  Even with that my nail line was not visible, so even better.

In it's full dark plum, sparkly glory Mermaids in the Midst seems like a good color for the holidays.  I feel like I'll be using this color a lot during those cooler winter months.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

May Nail Art Part 2

Hey look! I'm finally continuing this nail art post!



In this third mani, all of the polishes except for the black one, which is Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Onyx, I got from my swap last month with Megan over at You've Got Mail!  Seriously, that girl decimated my wish list.  There is like next to nothing left.

The pink is Essie's Peach Daquiri, which in really life looks a little bit peachier and less hot pink.  It was still a pretty neon color, which is why I had to use it.  Generally, I can't do neons.  Something about them turns me off.  Whenever I have tried painting at my nails with various neon colors, I always end up just staring at them, not because they're super pretty but because they are distracting.  Almost in a bad way.  This one though, I LOVED.  Maybe it's why I went the extra mile, or four, of doing some full nail art.  I swiped two medium thickness coats of this color for full coverage on three nails.  Then I painted three coats of Color Club's Magic Attraction for full coverage.  It is a silver and holo glitter with specks of pink in it.

On my middle finger, I used one layer of Shopaholic from Pop Culture Cosmetics, just a fuchsia glitter. On the remaining two nails I used my trusty dotting tools and black polish to make big polka dots and filled in the empty space with little ones.  The whole thing was topped with my usual Sally Hansen Insta Dry (in the red bottle), which you can see smeared the dots a little bit.  

I got a lot of compliments on those nails.  I had my nails painted like that when I was sent to New Employee training and people kept commenting on them.  People kept being shocked when I said that I had done them myself while I was bored.  To top it off it was super easy!  

My last bit of nail art was inspired by one of the boytoy's coworkers.  She is obsessed with the Minions from Despicable Me and she was having a birthday party.  So what better way to get ready for a party then to draw some Minions?

For the three nails I started out with two coats of Nicole by OPIs Hit the Lights from the Selena Gomez line on my left hand and three on my right.  Does that happen to anyone else where it takes more coats to properly coat the nails on your off hand?  The color is a touch splotchy, but I really like it because it reminds me of macaroni and cheese.  The blue overalls are Essie's Butler Please.  I used the same black as always for these along with China Glaze White on White for the eyes and teeth.  The edges of the goggles are Sally Hansen's Celeb City, the best silver ever.  


My favorite part of Despicable Me is the part were Gru wins Agnes the stuffed unicorn at the carnival and she screams out "IT'S SO FLUFFY, I'M GOING TO DIE".  At the time, I felt this was my fluffiest unicorn polish.  As of yesterday though, I own Dollish Polish's It's So Fluffy, I'm Going to Die!, so not the case anymore.  

My two accent nails were done in JENsations Unicorns and Rainbows, which she no longer has up anymore.  My other lovely, nail mail buddy Candace over at CinnamonKandy sent me this in out last swap.  For some reason, people seem to think I love unicorns.  :-P  This was an awesome polish very similar to that ice cream sprinkles trend that is going on right now.  The reason why I love this one is that the glitter is all the colors of the rainbow.  I ended up doing three coats, not because it needed it, but because I couldn't stop using it, if that makes sense.

Hope you guys enjoy this!  Hopefully I have some more up soon!

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

May Nail Art Part 1

May was a good month for me when it came to nail art.  I was actually pretty proud of the stuff I managed to pull off.  If you follow me on Instagram, then you've seen these already, but here you get a more in depth description and mini review on some of the polishes.  


For this first mani I used Julep's Janel.  Janel is a really pretty raspberry color and it took me two coats for this level of opacity.  Julep.com describes it as a frost, but it just looks like a cream to me, which is good, because I just can't seem to find any frosts I particularly like.  Also, I adore raspberry polishes.  They're like the perfect combination of red and pink, which are my favorite polish colors.  For accent nails I drew a black, white, and silver glitter starburst in the corner.  On my other nails I just did a coat of ORLYs Shine on Crazy Diamond.


To top it all off, I pulled out my Julep Freedom Polymer Top Coat.  I hadn't used it in forever and I could not remember why.  The day after I did this mani, I remembered.  The top coat just PEELED OFF.  Not my polish, put the Freedom Polymer stuff.  I sat there and sheets of clear polish just chipped off my nails.  Does anyone else have this issue?  Also it was kind of gloopy and didn't smooth over my nails evenly at all.  So if you looked at them, it was really obvious which parts hadn't been able to get some.  And it wrinkled on the base of my nails too.  Maybe I just had a bad bottle, because it looks like most reviewers loved it.  

For this next look I have to show you guys starts out with two coats of Picture Polish's Majesty.  It is described as a taupe/pink/nude color with a holo shimmer and no glitter what so ever.  I love this polish so much that I was almost sad to paint a design on top.  But I do love the final look of these guys, so I don't really regret it.

For the petals on these flowers I used my nail art brushes for the first time.  How exciting!  The petals are done in Illamasqua's Load, which the very sweet boytoy got me.  I have discovered that I love off white polishes and Load is white with a tinge of yellow, so yay.  The brown polka dots and edging of the center of the flowers is Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Haute Chocolate and the yellow is Hit the Lights from Nicole by OPIs Selena Gomez line.  

So as I write this, I notice just how LONG this post has gotten.

Want to see the rest?  I will post a part two!