Mani Monday: Rhinestones and Cookies

Happy Monday all.  I hope you all had a lovely weekend.  I have a relatively easy mani for you all today.  I hope you like it.

On all of my fingers, except my pinkie, I am wearing two coats of Color Club's Mad Batter from their Cookies and Cream collection.  It is a off white crelly base with tons of small, matte, black glitters.  The first coat had very little actual color, but deposited a lot of glitter on the nails.  The second coat made it magically opaque.  As the name of the collection says, it looks like cookies and cream ice cream and I have a crazy craving for it right now.  I am sad to say that this is not the first nail polish to cause me to have a craving.  :-P  You can find this polish on Color Club's website, along with the rest of the polishes from the collection.

On my pinkie I painted one coat of my usual  Cult Nails Fetish, which I have mentioned a countless number of times already.  Once my nails had dried completely, I used Nail Vinyls Straights to split my ring and thumb nails.  Now, you can do this entirely with just striping tape or even normal scotch tape, but striping tape is too thin for me to now accidentally paint on the other side, and I could not find my scotch tape.  I painted half black and then used my trusty gel resin glue to adhere the rhinestones on the seam between both colors.

See, easy peasy.  :-)

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. ;)

Mani Monday: Glitter, Polka Dots, and Mint

Happy Monday everyone!  Did you all have a nice weekend?  I'm super excited right now because tomorrow I'm going to go pick up my wedding dress.  Whaaaaaaaat??  But LacquerVixen, you're not getting married for ten months!  Well yeah, but it wasn't supposed to be ready until January/February and then I got an email two weeks after ordering it that my dress had come in.  Apparently they happened to have my size in the warehouse.  Yeah, so here's hoping it looks all nice and new.   Cross your fingers for me y'all!

Today's mani was originally inspired by those Caboodles Nail Valets that are super nifty.  They have compartments to fit your polishes so that they do not wiggle around in travel and different areas for extras, including brushes and dotting tools.  And they look like this:

Now I love me some black with white polka dot, so I have been wanting this one for so long.  So my nails started out looking like the box, then I started adding extras.  What do you all think?

On my thumb and pinkie I have OPIs My Dogsled is a Hybrid from their Nordic 2014 collection.  It is a mint cream that was nearly opaque in one coat, I added a second to cover up a few bald spots.  Seriously, this is a great polish and it is still available in stores.  If you don't own it already, go out and buy it now.  I topped my thumb with Sephora Formula X in Chaotic which has black and white hexes and black bar glitter.  Now this Formula X is from Sephora's first and short lived launch of their store brand polishes.  I found this at Big Lot's for less than two dollars, so it's not particularly easy to find, but there are plenty of other brands that came out with the same kind of thing.  China Glaze and Hard Candy are the first ones that come to mind.  On my pinkie, I just have a coat of ORLY's Shine on Crazy Diamond which is a sparse holographic topper.  The glitters are slightly larger than China Glaze's Fairy Dust.

On my pointer finger I have two coats of Nails Inc in Noho which was from their Leather Effect polishes.  It is slightly textured and is probably my favorite black, glitterless texture polish.  I also added a silver square shaped stud on the base of my nail.  In the past, I have always just used a dot of top coat to glue studs on, but they would only really last about twelve hours before they popped off.  So today I used brush on Gel Resin.  So far it has lasted through a shower, sleep, and cooking, so it works pretty well for me.  

My middle finger is just two coats of Essie's Hors d'ouevers.  It is a dense gold glitter polish with silver hexes.  Finally, on my ring finger I painted one coat of my much beloved Cult Nails Fetish then made my dots with OPIs My Boyfriend Scales Walls.  

I am pretty happy with the over all result and I hope you guys like it too.  :-)

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. ;)

Mani Monday: FrankenGlitz

Happy October all!  Sure it's six days into the month, but that doesn't mean that it's still not exciting.  :-) October to me, like to so many other people, means Halloween and while I probably wouldn't have any exciting Halloween plans or wouldn't dress up, it doesn't mean that I can't start rocking all the cool Halloween manis.

First off, these are the base polishes I wore for my mani.  On my thumb, middle, and pinkie fingers I am wearing Revlon Parfumerie Lime Basil.  It is a kelly green cream that is opaque in two coats, though the formula was a touch thick, but I could probably chalk that up to owning it for almost a year and using it quite a few times.  Also it is scented!  I think that's pretty neat.  G at Nouveau Cheap described the smell of this polish the best, saying that it smells like 7 Up and effervesce.  Actually, her review of this polish last year made me run out and buy this even though I'm not really a green person.  I keep saying that I'm not a green person, but if I had to pick my top ten polishes, at least a third of them would be green.

On my index finger I have my usual one coat of Cult Nails Fetish.  I didn't top coat any of these polishes for this picture, so you can see the waxy finish that Fetish dries to.  On my ring finger I painted three coats of OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls.  The formula is a little bit finicky, sometimes it is opaque in two coats and sometimes it takes three.  The only reason I put up with the formula is that it is not a true pure white.  It has a touch of gray going on and I like that.

What do you guys think of my final product?  It's a simplistic version of Frankenstein and his Bride, but I like it.

On my index finger, I topped Fetish with KB Shimmer's Jack which is a black jelly with orange hexes in various sizes and a few black hexes scattered in there.  It had been released last year as Limited Edition and has returned this year.  So if you're interested, pick it up soon before she pulls it again!  It is the only obviously Halloween polish I own, so I like to use it a lot in October.

For my green nails, I did a few things.  First off I topped them with ORLY's Sparkling Garbage which is a green holo glitter in a green tinted base from ORLY's Summer 2013 Mash Up collection .  Once that dried, I used a small dotting tool to draw on Frank's hair with Fetish at the base of my nail and then two lines as his eyes.  On my two other nails, I used the same dotting tool to draw sets of lines to look like a wound and stitches.  Looking back, I probably used have used a thin brush for it, but I am happy with it for a first try.

On my ring finger, I began with topping MBSW with ORLY Shine On Crazy Diamond then using a large dotting tool to paint most of my nail with Fetish for the Bride's tall hair.  I then drew a wavy line with MBSW for the trademark white stripe of hair and finally dotted two large eyes with Fetish.

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. ;)

Mani Monday: Minty Polka Dots

I love trolling Pinterest.  I think most people do.  One of the things I search the most is nail art, you know other than wedding stuff, and today I have decided to recreate one of the first ones I have pinned.

First off, forgive my terrible edge clean up.  I've been using the well known ELF concealer brush that everyone knows, but it's always been a bit of a pain.  I got a new one that I've started using and getting the hang of.  Maybe I'll eventually do a comparison post later.

Now, let's start with my base color.  This is Morgan Taylor Mint Chocolate Chip.  It is a mint cream polish that is actually not as bright as it shows up in the picture.  I don't know if it's my lighting or my camera was just freaking out, but it would not capture correctly.  My next picture does have the proper shade, so maybe the camera needed the contrasting colors.  I've heard before that the Morgan Taylor cream polishes stunk and to only invest in the glitter polishes.  Using this polish as my reference point, I would have to agree.  It took three coats for this polish to be opaque, some nails needed four.  It was streaky and patchy.  I keep trying to find a good solid mint polish, and I have yet to find one.

This is actually what Mint Chocolate Chip looks like.  Yeah, I don't know what is up with my phone.  

So on to how I actually did this.  As soon as nails were dry, I took a piece of scotch tape and placed it diagonally across my nails.  You want to be sure that your nails are really dry before you place down the tape.  If not the polish will lift and it's a huge mess.  I swiped a quick coat of Cult Nails Fetish (black) across the top of my nails, and quickly removed the tape.  If you let the polish dry with the tape still on, then THAT polish will lift.  Really, using tape is difficult and stressful and I have no idea why I do it.  :-P  

Once that was all dry, I used a dotting tool to stamp white dots over the black and swiped a line of silver glitter with a random striping polish where the mint and black met.  This manicure was not particularly difficult, just took some time.  

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