French Daisy

YOOO how are y'all doing? What a long hiatus that just was. My b, guys. I've been mondo busy with work and traveling again and life, and my nails have been super ugly for eons. But now today, since I'm about to repaint my room back to boring white (yuck) to prep for moving, I decided to paint my nails super cute, because that makes sense. I'm sure they'll make it just fine through the painting process. (A four part chorus of laughtracks can be heard in the distance at this point.)

Anyways, here are my super lazy summery sunday nails! I was inspired by a post on tumblr, as well as my favorite perfume, Daisy by Marc Jacobs. They have such cool lookin ads and bottles, right?? I started off with a base of Duri Rejuvacote to keep my talons strong n long, then added two coats of Essie Sugar Daddy, aka the most perfect crelly baby pink in the whole world. After a day of being too lazy to continue the mani, I pulled out Mabelline Porcelain Party, China Glaze Happy Go Lucky (wow what a fun name combo), and my dotting tool, and went to work. A coat of Gelish topped them off with a super fab shine, and in the rare event that I don't cover them in white paint within the next 3 hours, it'll keep them chip free for like 4 days. Go me!

Ok but really guys this mani was super easy. Try it! Try it right now!!

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!

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:

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.

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 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!!

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!!

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!!!

Day 4: Gluttony

Hello lovelies! For the second part of the Gluttony element of the seven deadly sins challenge, I decided to incorporate some summer fun and do watermelon nails!

For the inside of the watermelon, I started off with two coats of Estée Lauder Hot Coral, topped with a coat of OPI Thrills In Beverly Hills Top Coat to make it look wet and kissed by sunshine. For the rind I used Sinful Colors Envy and Wet n Wild Mint Fusion, with China Glaze White On White for the shiny bit and the inner rind, and Wet n Wild Black Creme for the seeds. I did the seeds with a dotting tool, and I'm kind of disappointed with how they turned out. Who knew making seed shapes would be so dang hard??

Day 3: Gluttony

Hello lovelies!! Last night I completed day 2 of the seven deadly sins challenge, Gluttony! The prompt was a gluttony-inspired sugar-spun mani, so I decided to go with a fudge-drizzled minty look. I had never done a sugar-spun mani before, so I was excited to try it out. My biggest surprise was just how much polish it uses!! But I think it was worth it, they came out adorable! I tried a number of ways to get the look right, from super thin streaks to big thick gobby streaks, and I think the thicker ones got across the "chocolate" look better, so I mainly went with those.

I used China Glaze Re-Fresh Mint for the mint, Love & Beauty by Forever 21 Coffee, and Wet n Wild Black. No topcoat because I wanted them to stand out!

 

More pics~

Bam! POW! Batman nails!!

Hello lovelies!! Today my friend Jenni is guest starring on my blog as a lovely hand model for a Batman Mani! (Or should I say Batmani?? No?) For this, I tried to go with the traditional comic-book feel, so I looked up some designs online for Batman nails and comic book nails in general, and went at it! I used China Glaze Happy Go Lucky for the yellow, Revlon Graceful for the gray (it ALWAYS looks beige in the bottle, but I've learned from enough mistakes that it is, in fact, actually gray), China Glaze White on White, and Wet N Wild Black. I really like the limited color palette, because I think it keeps everything very cohesive and consistent.

To get the designs, I used the nail art brushes that just arrived in the mail today (I'm so excited about them, you have no idea), along with my teeniest dotting tool to get the dot effect behind the speech bubbles.

More under the cut!