Quick and Easy Purple Spring Mani- 2 weeks of China Glaze

My nails are crap.  I'm so bad at nails.  I love nail polish, I love stamping, I love trying to freehand designs.  But I cannot break my nail biting habit.  I KNOW.  It's completely terrible.  Recently I was doing a great job.  They had grown to a very lovely length and I was happy with them!  Then I broke two of them on the toilet seat (of all things) and then another one when I was moving boxes (have I mentioned the part where we are moving/driving 3000+ miles across the country in a month?).  So I thought, what is the use of me trying to grow out my nails if every time I do, they are just so weak and fragile that they break?

Enter the idea of doing 2+ weeks of manicures using China Glaze.  I love CG, it's one of my top two favorite brands of nail polish.  A good friend heard my lament and said "don't you have China Glaze?  When I use that it makes my nails hard as rocks."  And a little lightbulb went off and I thought to myself, let's try this.

So here's the first!  A simple, quick paint job using what I had sitting on my desk (I'm lazy).

Products Used:

China Glaze Sweet Hook

Essie Pure Pearlfection

Also can I just say how fed up I am with Seche Vite?  Our love affair was pretty short lived.  I used it on a few really great manis last week that I was so excited to come home and photograph (I paint my nails at night, when I can't photo them, and then they have to last through my day at work until I get home) and by the time I got home from work, they had shrunk down and peeled or popped completely off.  Have you ever had one just pop off???  It has happened to me several times, I just look down and where the heck did my pointer finger go?  Then I look like I forgot to paint that finger.  Anybody have any solutions for that?  I've heard the Sally Hansen in the black bottle is a good replacement and doesn't do the crappy things that SV does.

Red and a Copper Penny

I needed something bright.  My internship is wrapping up and the weather is just... bleh.  So I needed something fun!  Here's China Glaze's Make Some Noise with a metallic copper stamping on top.  It came out kind of subtle but pretty awesome I think.

They cheered me up for a while!

Products Used:

China Glaze in Make Some Noise

Sally Hansen Complete Salon in Shiny Penny

Bundle Monster Plate BM205

Kleancolor Chunky Holo Purple (pic heavy, I was a little overzealous)

Oh man.  OH MAN.  I have been waiting for this day.  I have been drooling over the Kleancolor chunky holos for what feels like a million years, and when they finally came in the mail the other day I nearly had an aneurysm trying to decide just where to start!  Which one did I want to try?  What should my base color be?  Should I layer them or just stick with one?

I finally decided to use the Purple, and I dug through my boxes of polish to find what I thought might be an appropriate base color- Sally Hansen's Pronto Purple (which you can see here on the zebra maniand here).  It's a royal purple and kind of metallic, and I thought it would be great for the glitter.

Oh man.  I don't know where to start, really.  It's gorgeous!  It sparkles red, green, gold, copper, orange!  I'm obsessed.  I can't wait to try the rest of them.  

There's no way I bite my nails with a manicure this gorgeous!

Nail Mail!

I got some seeerious nail mail today.  I'm psyched.

My Ulta didn't have the Capitol Colors collection anymore, so I came home all defeated and started looking online.  Then I found them at beauty joint for 4 dollars!  Um, hello!  And so while I was there I scooped up four of the chunky holo Kleancolors I've been drooling over for months and months.  $1.75 each.  That site is heaven, and my order came super fast.  I've been trying to figure out what the catch is, so if you know that eventually they are going to come up to claim my firstborn kid or that I accidentally just signed my soul away... please don't tell me, I'm so happy with this store.  Now my only problem is trying to figure out what to do first.

Pictured:

Kleancolor Chunky Holo in Purple, Bluebell, Black and Fuchsia

China Glaze Capitol Colors: Mahogany Magic, Electrify, Luxe and Lush, Stone Cold and Dress Me Up.