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: Leather and Studs

Guys, I have some terrible news.  My ring finger had a gnarly tear that I've been managing to keep patched up and I've been nursing for about a week, but it finally broke all the way though.  If you're following me on Instagram, you would have seen the break when it first happened.  So now I'm back down to nubbins.  I'm going to try to grow them out and hopefully be back to swatching for you guys soon.  In the mean time, I do have a couple of back ups and older pictures I hadn't been able to post yet.  This is one of those!

I like to pretend that I'm a badass.  I really am the exact opposite.  I'm more of a fluffy, cute, pink princess, glitter and sparkles, unicorns and rainbows kind of girl.  Once in a while though, I do like to be cool.  This manicure did that for me.  

I am wearing Bliss Polish Jax with Nails Inc Noho as my accent nail.  Jax is from Bliss's Son's of Anarchy collection and it's awesome.  For the picture I used two coats, but a careful one coat would be enough.  I just had the odd bald patch, so the second coat was done one nail at a time so that I could press a stud at the base of each nail.  It dries to a matte finish and its a really nice gunmetal shimmer.  A layer of top coat would have made this a lot more shimmery, but I loved it just the way it was.  Noho is from Nails Inc's Leather Effect line that came out late last spring/early summer.  This is my go to black texture and I love it.  This painted on the same way as Jax, almost completely opaque in one coat.  I placed four studs on my accent nail in the shape of a diamond and called it a day.

I got the studs from Born Pretty Store a while ago and they are awesome.  I got a plastic zippered pouch full of them for about $3 and they are great to have around when a rhinestone isn't quite what I'm going for with my nails.  

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. ;)

Nails Inc Baker Street Swatch and Comparison

I have a friend adores BBC's Sherlock, like to the crazy fangirl status.  But then so do I, so who am I to judge? 

One day she was shopping and fell in love with this blue nail polish by Nails Inc.  When she noticed that it was called Baker Street, she had to have it.  She let me borrow it.  It was a pretty blue creme that I did two coats.  You can see that there is some balding on my pinkie, so that dissapointed me a little bit.  I also did two accent nails with Pixie's Gold Glimmer from the holiday pack.  Yeah, it really doesn't look gold, but actually silver. 

 

 

The more I looked at Baker Street, the more familiar it looked.  Finally, it hit me that it looked an aweful lot like Essie's Butler Please, which I used in my very first blog post!  

 

 

The only difference that I found was that Baker Street was patchy at two coats and Butler Please was not.  Also, Baker Street started chipping pretty quickly, so that was dissapointing.  But that just might have been me because polish never lasts very long with me.