Nature Nails!

This was my entry for Polish Hoarder Disorder's "nature" challenge.  My favorite season is winter--I love when everything is frosty and cool and I love to see the trees covered in snow!

This is three coats of Sally Hansen Complete Manicure in Silver Lining.  I then sponged on Wet n Wild French White Creme and used a Sally Hansen chrome in Aqua Chrome along with bundlemonster plate bm19 for the leaves.  My nails really felt icy!

Urban Outfitters Grey 1 + Konad!

Urban Outfitters currently has a bunch of their in-house polishes on sale.  Though they are regularly 2 for $8, I saw a bunch for only 99 cents and so I had to pick up a few colors.  They also had a bunch of their "sparkle" colors on sale, which looked like flakies, but I decided not to get those.  Does anyone have the UO sparkles?  I was intrigued...

One of the shades I picked up was Grey 1.  Though it's not the most creative name, I kind of like how they maybe decided to choose simplicity over cheesiness.  Grey 1 is a very dark green-tinged grey in the bottle.  On the nails it's a dark charcoal.  I really like the darkness of it.  The cap/brush are a bit difficult to polish with, but the color was smooth and opaque after two coats.  I then used the geometric pattern from konad plate m64 with white stamping polish.  I topped the whole thing off with a coat of China Glaze matte magic--this looks soooo much better matte.

Thanks for reading!

American Apparel Berry Konadicure

I was in the mood for a tone on tone konadicure today.  This is two coats of American Apparel Berry--a perfect berry red-violet.  All of my AA polishes go on smooth and glossy.  I used this pattern from the bm10 plate and stamped it with Sally Hansen Chrome in Burmese Ruby.  SH Chromes are the best for stamping!

I'm happy with how this turned out, but I still have trouble keeping these full nail plates completely straight!

Indoors

In the sunshine!

Just the berry...indoors at night.

And here's the design I added to my Zoya Robyn mani the other day.  This peacock on bm15 is my favorite design on all of the bundle monster plates.  I just wish my nails were long enough for the entire design to fit!  Look at how pretty the tail is--I'm going to work on this one.  This was stamped with SH Copper Chrome:

For Audrey--animal style!

Animal style...a phrase I know to be associated with Californians who enjoy their In-N-Out burgers while I only hear tales of their mythological existence here on the East Coast.  However, today's "animal style" manicure actually refers to my favorite of animal prints--the leopard.  Leopard nails are my favorite.  I used to do them freehand all of the time before I was spoiled by my konad stamper.  Perhaps one day I will go back to my simpler ways.

This leopard mani is two coats of China Glaze For Audrey with the full nail leopard stamp from konad plate m57 (stamped with Wet N Wild Black Creme).  I then used a dotting tool and Essie Exposure for the pink accents, all with a coat of Seche Vite to make them shiny.

Outdoors

Indoors

Fierce!  I'm thinking about adding some glitter to it--what do you think?

Thanks for reading!

Crop circle nails!

Crop circles have always cracked me up and when I saw this image on the bundle monster plates, I needed to do crop circle nails asap!  Since I have been wanting to try the Claire's Mood polishes, two of which have been sitting around in my stash for a while now.  I decided to go for the more subtle of the two, mostly because I was feeling the need for some teal in my life.  Claire's Peaceful/Confident hovers between a blue green and a green blue (the lighter of the two shades) depending on your temperature.

I then decided to Konad over the subtle color shift (which you can only see at the top of my nail, where it hangs over my finger) in Orly La Playa, from the Summer 2010 Viva! Collection.  I am in love with this super dark indigo, and think it looks great over teal.

I used bundle monster plate bm19--it looks like there are crop circles on my nails!

out in bright sunlight

indoors the polish looks mostly green

indirect sun

 

Sorry for the wet fingers--here I'm trying to show the difference in color.  

The left is the cold color and the right is the warm temperature tone.

I really liked the consistency of this polish, it dried quickly and matte (as neons tend to do), but one coat of Seche Vite glossed it up.  The orly was also very good for konading and the dark blue shade was nice and opaque.  

Thanks for reading!

LA Splash Abyss

I love LA Splash nail polish.  They're only $4 a pop, come in great skinny bottles and they have tons of GLITTERS!!!  I guess I was feeling a bit goth when I got home this afternoon because I went straight for my bottle of Abyss, a black creme with silver microglitter.

The glitter in this polish was perfect: nice and smooth with even spacing.  It looked like the milky way!  Tiny glitter is my favorite kind of glitter, but I might add a larger glitter as a topcoat tomorrow.  The formula was nice and smooth--this was two coats and I had complete coverage.  And then I added a fauxnad star on my thumb for good measure, in konad silver special polish:

LA Splash has some great polishes (and mascaras!).  Sparkling gold and sparkling lavender are two more of my favorites; they're on sale this week (buy one get one 50% off) at Ulta.  


Anyone else love LA Splash?  Any other great (and cheap!) glitters?

Welcome!

As a longtime lover of lacquer, and a fairly new reader of nail polish blogs, I have finally decided to start a blog of my own. At first I will just be posting swatches of new polish and photos of my daily manicures, but I soon hope to find my niche in this huge and awesome world of nail bloggers. For now, a post inspired by my plans this past weekend--an 80s concert in Baltimore. The Legwarmers are a killer 80s cover band, and we try to see them whenever they're in town. They happened to be playing at Ram's Head Live! on Saturday night. The occasion clearly called for a neon yellow and purple zebra print manicure!!

This is two coats of Essie Funky Limelight over a coat of white--I stamped the zebra print using Essie Funky Purple and Konad plate m57. And it's all topped off with a coat of Seche Vite!

I can't wait to see where this goes--thanks for reading!