Another Gradient

Man, I know.  I do a lot of gradients.  It's because I'm lazy, and they look good, and there's an absolutely endless amount of color combinations that you can use.  They're wonderful.  Hugs and rainbow sherbet to  the person who invented sponge gradient manis. 

For this one, I chose the boldest colors I could find at the time.  It ended up being royal blue, purple, and neon pink.  I think they look really great together- kind of cohesive- and are super bold, which is what I wanted at the time.  Awesome for summer.

Boom.  Brights.

Products Used:
Revlon Royal
China Glaze Gothic Lolita
Venique I'm a Sucker for Wedges
Zoya (as base coat) Purity

Rainbow Dot Nails

I've seen this style floating around the Internet lately, and seeing as how I can't let a rainbow pass me by, I decided to give it a shot.  I received a set of dotting tools for Christmas- yay!- so this was my first shot at using them!  Very cool!

Not too shabby!  There's a few things I would do differently next time, but overall I think it was fun and bright and cute for the end of 2012!

Products Used:

LA Girl Matte Black

Zoya America

Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Sun Kissed

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Lightening

China Glaze Gaga for Green

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Brisk Blue

China Glaze Gothic Lolita

Summer Pastel Arrow/Chevron Manicure

I got tired of doing dots, so I decided to go with the latest trend- chevron stripes!  Except that this one doesn't repeat the pattern, so does that just make it a pointy stripe?  Or an arrow?  Can a chevron stripe be singular?

Yea I freehanded this and it's pretty obvious, huh?

Products Used:

China Glaze Peachy Keen

China Glaze Sweet Hook

Revlon Minted

Rainbow Dots!

This one was super simple but still one of my favorite looks when finished!  UNFORTUNATELY.  The color I chose to use as my base- Stone Cold from China Glaze's Capitol Colors collection- purely exists to make me SO MAD.  It is a gorgeous, gorgeous color.  It's all metallic and glimmery and gorgeous when matte and even moreso with a top coat.  But the formula is so bad!  I mentioned it briefly before. but it seriously chips within literal minutes of drying!  It doesn't seem to matter what I do- basecoat, no basecoat, top coat, no topcoat, whatever.  I look down and then realize that my nails are all chipped up and I just painted then an hour ago.  Talk about frustrating!  In order to take these photos I had to completely redo my thumb and pointer finger, got back to my computer and realized that the pinky finger was all chipped to hell also!  So I just covered up the chips and went to redo the pictures.  Bah!  China Glaze is probably my favorite brand.  But this particular color is just a pain in my side.

Anyway, wow, what a long-winded rant.  Onto the photos!

                       

Products Used:
China Glaze Stone Cold
Zoya America
Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Sun Kissed
China Glaze Sunshine Pop
China Glaze Gaga for Green
Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Brisk Blue
China Glaze Gothic Lolita

Movin Mani- Metallic Purple Vintage Plate

Maybe I mentioned this before... I can't quite remember... but fiance and I are moving!  We are heading across the country from lovely Oregon where I've been going to school for the past 3.5 years to my hometown in Maryland.  We head off on Saturday morning to drive across with our dog. It's going to be an adventure for sure, and while I packed the majority of my nail polish a few weeks ago, I kept my favorites until the very end... and just packed them today.  But have no fear, I kept out a select few bottles... and my stamping plates... for the drive!  

We packed the computers today, so please bear with me and my iPhone pics that will simply have to do for the next ~1.5 weeks.  Also I packed these bottles... doh.... so once again we have me making my very best Claw hand.  And I also don't remember the name of one of the polishes or which plate number I used.  Useless, I know, but I thought this design was cute so I just had to share anyway.

This design reminds me of vintage china plates that my grandmother has.  I think my mom might have them in blue... but I used metallic purple and I think it looks lovely!  

icky dry cuticles, yuck yuck yuck!!

Products Used:

OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls

China Glaze (ack I forgot!!!)

Grey and Chunky Purple- 2 Weeks of China Glaze

This one was spur of the moment.  My friend came over so I did her nails, and then I decided to do mine too.  I had to remove my turquoise one, and then I grabbed Stone Cold because the last time I tried it, it chipped by the next day and I didn't even get to enjoy it.  I seem to have that problem with matte-type polishes.  So I put on Stone Cold, which I love in theory, and then threw on yet another Milani glitter.  I really like the effect- it's shimmery, and I love the dark grey with the purple.  Yum!

Products Used:

China Glaze Stone Cold

Milani #581 Lavender

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.

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!

Way way way late Valentine's Mani

Well, better late than never I guess.  

Products Used:

China Glaze Sweet Hook

China Glaze Dance Baby

China Glaze Fuchsia Fanatic

Konad Plate m57

Bundle Monster Plate BM14

I've never had a manicure that was more "me"- ELF Royal Purple swatch, and Ulta Pinata-Yada-Yada (pic heavy)

Maybe if I were to paint some flamingos or something, we'd get pretty close, but till probably not as close as this!  I needed something quick, so I just chose a polish that was sitting on my desk- an ELF polish that was part of this TJ Maxx haul way back in August.  I set the polishes I have yet to swatch near my desk, and this one had been sitting there for AGES.  So I popped it on because I was in a purple kind of a mood (when am I not, though, really?)  And I was so pleased!  I couldn't really capture the color in some of these pictures.  It's November in Oregon, which means rain rain rain, and not adequate amount of sunlight to really get the good photos.

This is all the sunlight I could manage

This is a bit more accurate

Anyway, It's this really lovely shimmery sort of royal/jewel purple.  I think it would be GREAT for a peacock theme, which is now on my mind.  So I wore Royal Purple by itself for one day, and then decided I would try out another polish from another haul (from like September when I got those Butter Londons)- Ulta's Pinata-Yada-Yada.  Here's the final look:

This is a way more accurate picture of what ELF's Royal Purple looks like

Purple polish, multi-colored glitter- this manicure screams my name!  Hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.

Products Used:
ELF Royal Purple
Ulta Pinata-Yada-Yada
Seche Vite