Monday, January 12, 2015

Mani Monday: Zoo Nails!

Happy Monday!  I hope everyone had a lovely weekend, I know that I enjoyed mine.  Mr. LacquerVixen and I spent Sunday morning at the San Diego Zoo.  We got a year membership to the Zoo and Wild Animal Park, so we decided to take advantage of it, considering there were some football games going on and a pretty heavy drizzle going on in San Diego.  Not only was no one at the Zoo, but the animals were out and about.  We had a blast, but now I'm at home, cold and with a headache.  In honor of our little day trip, I themed my nail art and tried my hand at stamping again.  You can check out my last attempt, that I was not happy with at all here.


On my index and middle fingers I am wearing two coats of Zoya Jules.  It is a champagne taupe with gold shimmer.  The formula was smooth and easy to work with, if not a touch sheer.  The second coat did make it completely opaque.  Apparently, Jules is a warmer dupe of Sinful Shine's Prosecco that so many nail polish junkies had been in desperate search of at the end of last year.  I never bought it, but I am perfectly happy with Jules.  

On my ring finger I am wearing OPIs What Wizardry is This? from the Oz, the Great and Powerful collection that they released in 2013.  I have already done a full swatch of it here, just ignore how red my fingers looked.  It is a brown Liquid Sand with gold shimmer that was opaque in one coat, but a second coat darkens the color.  

Finally on my thumb I am wearing Zoya Tomoko and on my pinkie I have China Glaze I'm Not Lion.  I had chosen both of these expecting I'm Not Lion to be a stronger gold color, but it ended up being pretty much a dead on dupe for Tomoko, just with a touch of holographic glitter sprinkled in.  Both were opaque in two coats.  I don't think that you necessarily need both of these polishes.  I will be holding on to both though, because I adore Tomoko and since Zoya retired their Pixie Dust line (yes retired, not discontinued.  They did say that the Pixies may be popping up again in the future.), I will keep I'm Not Lion around to replace Tomoko, when I finally finish it.  


This is the final result of my new stamping attempt.  A lot better this time I think!  To prepare for the stamping, I did alternate Gelous top coat and HK Girl on top of the texture and glitter polishes to create a smooth surface.  All three of them are top coat hungry polishes, so I ended up having to go over them twice with the top coats.  On my pointer and middle fingers I just painted on two coats of HK Girl, in case I messed up a stamping and had to swipe some acetone on my nails to start over.  This way the colored polishes wouldn't be cleaned away.

For all of my nails I used the Wistonia W101 plate from the first generation collection.  I used the giraffe print on top of Jules with Revlon Perfumerie in Autumn Spice.  It was a bit sheer, but I like the effect it gave.  Oddly enough I do not have very many other brown polishes, I guess I'll have to remedy that later.  ;-)  The sides of my finger are a bit puffy, so I had to make sure to pull them back to be able to stamp my full nail.  But this time the image transferred over  very well.

On my thumb and pinkie I used the small paw print on the same Wistonia plate along with Cult Nail Fetish, which we all know is my go to black polish.  In case you had not heard, Cult Nails is going out of business and had been selling out the last of their stock.  Unfortunately they had already sold out of it by the time I made my way to the storefront.

Over all, I am happy with my stamping.  This success makes me want to stamp all the time!


As the usual kind reminder, these products were purchased with my own money.  I am not cool enough to have companies send me free stuff to review them. ;)

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