Week 2: Winter Nature (or: Have a Holly Jolly Christmas)

Howdy hey buddyo! I've been really excited to do these nails since the moment I ordered A Fresh Evergreen and Very Ornamental, both by I <3 NP, one of the most lovely of all pseudo-mainstream indie nail polish brands. (I also ordered Nostalgia and Princess Diaries in the same shipment. It was a really exciting package to receive, to say the least, and you'll be seeing those other shades pretty soon I'm sure.) Both of these colors are from the special seasonal collection, as indicated by their names, and so I knew that I had to incorporate them into this winter nail challenge.

Winter foliage? Plants? Red and green??? HOLLY. I love holly. It's so bright, it has weird effects on birds, and it's very festive.

Info and more pictures under the cut:

Week 1: Winter Challenge

After an incredibly long night of sleep last night, I spent most of today watching tv, biking, and planning what I wanted to do for today's mani. Aka the perfect weekend. So I sat down with a pot of peppermint tea and spent an ungodly amount of time bringing this mani to life.

Info and more pictures under the cut!

Hello Winter!

It's December! Here in Chicago, that means one big thing: it's cold. Really cold. But hey I love the cold so no biggie. This cold is just ushering in Eggnog And Hot Beverage Season, one of my favorite times of all. In an attempt to capture the warmth of this chilly season, I painted my nails using Sally Hansen Sugar Coat in Red Velvet.  I got this lovely shade from a clearance bin, and boy am I glad I picked it up!! It's a very rich burgundy berry shade, and it's quite festive. The sugar coat texture is really nice, and reminds me of the way that Zoya Pixie Dust polishes look in the way that it sparkles. It covered really well in one coat, but I did two for added depth. Although it was really pretty on its own, I couldn't resist stamping it with some of the winter stamps that I've been chomping at the bit to use for months!!

Pastel Space

So if you know me, you know I love space. Like, a lot. My background on both my personal and work computer is not just one picture of space, but like 10 different ones that just rotate every half hour. I usually have glow in the dark stars on my ceiling. I really really love space. So naturally, when I'm on vacation and I have a very limited number of colors but I still want to do something fun, my go-to design is space. Pastel space!!

I started off with two coats of OPI Can't Find My Czech-book, which is a super super gorgeous blue and I can't believe how long it took me to convince myself to get it. Next I skipped my usual next step of sponging on white and went straight to the colors. The pink I used was OPI Tutti Frutti Tonga, which is a really gorgeous iridescent pale pink. I'm excited to use it alone at some point because it's gonna look great. The yellow was China Glaze Happy Go Lucky, which is basically my go-to for a nice bright yellow color. The glitter was OPI When Monkeys Fly, which is part of the Oz the Great and Powerful collection. (Coincidentally, I just saw that movie, and I thought it was great except for the part where I couldn't take James Franco seriously. He has such an insincere smile and it was just really throwing me off the whole time.) Ahem, anyways. the white star designs I did with a Sally Hansen nail art pen in white. I love these pens and will never ever be able to sing my praises for them enough, even though I'm super bitter towards Sally Hansen due to the fact that they totally ignored my suggestion to bring back the Sally Hansen Magical line, aka the best holo line ever to exist ever.

I think I've rambled enough for one day, look at my nails:

Feathered

Yo! It's been a long time. Like, months. I'm super super sorry about that. In that time, I moved from California to Chicago, started working, and have barely had time to paint my nails. Fortunately, I've got a ton of photos to post in the backlog!! So woohoo get ready.

First up today we have a really rad combo that I absolutely loved the look of and will definitely do again. I started off with two coats of Two Fingered Salute by Butter, which is an amazing dusty turquoise color with flecks of copper in it. In the bottle it looks a little dingy, but once it's on the nail it looks INCREDIBLE. Super sparkly, and a great color. After that, I pulled out my feather nail decals from the Born Pretty store, aka my favorite online shop for nail art supplies, and picked the yellow ones because they contrasted great against the color of TFS. After topping it off with a coat of Seche Vite, I was good to go!

Colors used: Two Fingered Salute by Butter London

Ugh Space I Guess

I was really excited about the Estée Lauder polish that I got on sale. Like, really really excited. It's a super gorgeous shade of purple in the bottle, with flecks of rainbow and glitter and tons of depth. And then I put it on my nail, only to find that all that depth and those tons of colors in the glitter vanished into a flat silvery kind of color. Still not terrible looking, but definitely not what I was going for. So, I decided that it'd make a really nice base for my clear starry polish that I have.

And I love how it turned out!! These polishes are perfect together. Enough said.

Geometric Pastels

Hello lovelies!! Ok so I'm particularly proud of this design, because my goal was to test my skills. (What skills, you may ask? I weep a little.) I wanted to make this mani LOOK like a taped mani. BUT!! The catch was that I wasn't going to use tape!! I wanted to see how clean and neat I could make my lines just freehanding them. And dang I think I did a pretty rockin job. :3

Colors used were: China Glaze Refresh Mint, China Glaze Always A Lady, China Glaze White On White, and OPI Oy-Another Polish Joke.

Love me.

Easy Waves

Hello lovelies!! Wow I've been gone for a while, sorry about that! I haven't given up on nail blogging of course, I just graduated college and so I've been dealing with the craziness of moving back home for the summer. Also I got a dog, so he's been taking up most of my attention. Seriously, how can you not love this face??????!?!?

Ahem. So anyways I've been training him and neglecting my nails a bit. But! That doesn't mean I haven't been doing them at all!! Last week I did these lovely wave-style nails, and they were super fun and easy!! I'd suggest them to anyone who doesn't really have time to do something fancy but still wants some ass-kickin nails. 

Colors used were OPI Yoga-ta Get This Blue, OPI Can't Find My Czech-book, and OPI Fly.

Purple Holo Flowers

Hello lovelies!! So since I have the six pack of Color Club's Halo Hues, I'm gonna work on swatching them all! I can't really bear to paint my nails only to take the polish off six times in a row though, so I'll just be taking the pics, wearing the polish for a couple days, and repeating until I have all of them swatched. Then I'll make a big ol masterpost. Anyways! I started with CC Eternal Beauty, a super gorgeous purple holo, and then stamped on Orly Close Your Eyes, a really pretty, almost metallic looking, pinky purple, using BM-306.

I'm really happy with the result! Since CYE isn't super mega pigmented, it's almost transparent when looking at my nails in the sun, giving EB a chance to totally show off its holo. In the shade though, it totally gets a chance to shine and it stamped super well, giving me nice perfect flowers.

Outdoor: sun

Outdoor: sun 

Day 9: Wrath

Hellooooo everyone! So after taking my swatch pictures of Orly Rage, I stamped it with Orly Bus Stop Crimson. I decided to use it for my wrath challenge because I've always had a super rough time stamping really detailed designs. To my delight, BSC stamped beautifully using BM-315. The lace on my ring finger was done with BM-323, and then I added some of the rhinestones I got from Amazon! I'm really excited about them, I got a pack with a ton of different colors.

Rage Swatch

Hello lovelies! So I went to CVS the other day to pick up more nail polish remover, and I stumbled upon the HUGEST sale for Orly polishes!!! Boy oh boy was I excited! Heres what I picked up:

Included in this find is: Pink Chocolate, Shimmering Mauve, Star Spangled, Luxe, Rage, Liquid Vinyl, Close Your Eyes, Butterflies, Bus Stop Crimson, and Nicole by OPI's Love Your Life. Yeah, that's ten bottles of polish. Even on sale, it was still kind of a fortune, so I was super grateful that my mom bought it all for me. Shoutout to my mom, thank you!!

So since I fell especially in love with Rage, a beautiful champagne metallic, I decided to do swatches of it! The formula was incredible, it was a little slow drying and smeary, but it covered super well in two coats. I did three just to add depth, but it wasn't necessary. There are super light streak lines, but I think they add to the effect in a good way.

It also served as an awesome base for stamping!! I'll make a separate post for that later.

Perfect Peridot dupe!!

Hello lovelies!! So I'm here today with the exciting news that I've found a perfect dupe for that polish that I've been searching for for ages: Chanel Peridot!! Ever since it came out, nail bloggers have been going crazy over it. I remember the moment I fell in love with it myself. (I was putting on makeup and reading a magazine, and saw it in the fashion trends section. I still have that magazine in my bathroom bc I can't bear to get rid of it. (It's the only magazine there.)) I wasn't really willing to pop $25 on a bottle of nail polish, and even more so when the price increased to around $50. I've been looking for a good dupe by Sally Hansen or Essie or OPI, but I couldn't find one. I had almost given up hope when I discovered Iridescent Eye by Jessica, an exactly perfect dupe!! You can buy it here.

Unfortunately when I painted it on, I was doing it late at night and didn't really feel like taking pictures of just the polish on my fingers. So no swatches in this post. But it works great as a base for stamping, and I've heard that it stamps well too! It covered super well in 2 coats, and went on really easy. It had a super nice, smooth, non-gooey formula that I wish every polish I used had. This is definitely in my tippy top favorites of my nail polish collection :)

 I'm bummed that I couldn't better capture how gorgeous this polish is, but I tried to take a bunch of pictures to give some idea, so this is a super pic heavy post :P

Day 8: Sloth

Hello lovelies! So as you might have noticed, I skipped day 7 of the Seven Deadly Sins challenge. That's because I just finished college and I've been spending the past week moving back home and such! So you can have my super lazy (but still cute!) modifacation to my previous mani that I'll be using for this Sloth entry.

All I did to make this different from my last nails was stamp using Winstonia plate 112 with Julep Eloise, which stamped beautifully! This was especially exciting because it was my first time stamping on textured nail polish. I'm really really happy with this mani overall. :)

Textured brights!

Hello lovelies!! Ever since I heard about China Glaze's new textured line, I've been dying to pick up Of Coarse!, Itty, Bitty Gritty, and In The Rough. So far all I have is Of Coarse!, but I tried it out the other day (read: I painted my nails in the airport while I waited for my plane home), and fell in love!! I paired it with OPI Did It On Em (from the Nicki Minaj collection, which I'm in love with), and I'm so excited with the result!! The texture is just how I'd hope it would be, and it's the perfect amount of matte. It's bright in just the right way, and I can't stop touching it.

This pic really shows how fab the texture is, and how cool it looks right next to regular smooth-textured polish. I always always put topcoat on my nails, but for this textured polish, I'm gonna skip it so I can keep the texture the way it is!

I stamped some designs on this polish already, so I'll be posting the stamped version tomorrow!!

ATLA nails!

Hello lovelies!! Two posts in a day because today was a big day in nail painting. I guess. Actually it just kind of happened that way. So anyways! My friend came over and asked me for Avatar: The Last Airbender nails, and as an avid fan of that show, how could I refuse!! I decided to do all of the nations' symbols on her fingers, and then the avatar arrow on her thumb. The base for this was China Glaze Kalahari Kiss, and I just used whatever I could find for the other fingers but I don't want to list them because they're spread out all over my bed.

Day 6: Greed

Hello lovelies! The theme for today was to go all out, so I did!! There's glitter galore on these deep blue mermaid-themed nails, and they look fab! Plus mermaids are known for collecting things, and thats somewhat greedy... right? (Goddamn it Ariel.)

For this mani, I used a base of two coats of OPI Yoga-Ta Get This Blue!, and topped that with Sally Hansen Mermaid's Tale. For my accent nail, I used a coat of I <3 NP's All Gold Everything, which I've been super stoked to use for AGES! (I got it from etsy so it's one of my extra-special babies.) On top of that, I used OPI Fly, and then China Glaze Four Leaf Clover, which I thought gave the nail something of a mermaid-scale look. However, the matte colors looked too plain to me, so I threw another coat of All Gold Everything onto it before topping everything off with two thick coats of SV. If you guys think it looks killer on here, imagine how great it is in person!!

Day 5: Greed

Hello lovelies!! After seeing Lovely in Laquer's beautiful jelly sandwich using Essie's Sugar Daddy, I just had to pick it up myself and try it out. Since I don't have Teenage Dream, I instead used Butter Rosie Lee, a super lovely pink glitter. I was actually also going to use a big flake pink glitter from Sally Beauty on top of it, but I couldn't get the bottle open no matter what I tried. I guess it wasn't in the cards for tonight.

While these aren't my most expensive polishes, they're both ones that I've either wanted for a long time or saving for just the perfect occasion. I really love the subtle shimmer that flashes when I move my hand, plus the color really looks nice with my skin. So basically I picked it for Greed because it's super sparkly and awesome looking. :)

My biggest complaint was that Sugar Daddy took forever to dry. As in, it is still not dry as I type this at least four hours after finishing with the mani. Now I could have waited longer between each coat so it didn't get all sealed in and smudgy by my coat of Seche Vite, but I didn't have that kind of time tonight. So instead I just have to be super careful to not make weird waves in the polish by bumping into basically anything. Regardless, I really love Sugar Daddy, and think that the color and opacity are just right for so many situations. I can tell already that this is going to be the star of a lot of future manis. I can't wait to see what it looks like over some stamping!

Liebster Award

Hello lovelies! So I'm super excited to say that I was nominated for the Liebster Award by Dagadelic! It's an award that bloggers nominate each other for to help people connect, and I feel lucky to be in on it. It also helps people get to know each other better by answering some fun questions! So without further ado, here I go!

Upon receiving this award one needs to do the following:

1. Write up 11 random facts about yourself.

2. Answer 11 questions from the person who nominated you.

3. Create 11 new questions for your nominees. 

4. Nominate 11 other bloggers who have under 200 followers.

11 Random Facts:

1. I have never been on a Slip N Slide.
2. I can wiggle my ears.
3. I am an only child.
4. I'll probably put plain yogurt on any food.
5. I'm a total sucker for action movies. Even if I know it's terrible, I'll watch it and enjoy it.
6. I can somersault really quickly and for somewhat long distances.
7. I draw people. A lot.
8. I love watching shows meant for kids. My personal favorites are Danny Phantom, Avatar, American Dragon, and Batman Beyond.
9. If you like Supernatural we should be pals.
10. I can name pretty much any dog breed, and just really love animals in general.
11. I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime.

Neon Houndstooth

Hello lovelies! So my friend got some fantastic neon polish, and she let me borrow it the other day! Appropriately named, Orly Glowstick made my nails pop so much!! I painted two coats of it on top of one coat of China Glaze White on White (the white helps the neon to be much much brighter), and then decided that it would be perfect as a base to stamp on some of OPI Fly (from the super fun Nicki Minaj collection), which ended up turning out more green than blue on top of the neon yellow, but I still think it looks fab. For my accent nails, I used Pure Ice Cheatin, a glitter polish I've had around for ages. The stamping plate I used was BM-322.

In the end, I wish I hadn't stamped on the accent nails and had just done the glitter right on top of the neon, but I'm still pretty satisfied with the result here.

Blacklight pics under the cut!!!