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!

Spring Polka

Hello lovelies! I went to an event with some friends yesterday, and after one of them was shocked to find that I hadn't redone my nails in around three days, I jumped right on that and popped out a new design! I gathered up a rainbow of springy pastels, along with my brand new (and super cheap) dotting tools that I ordered on Amazon, and set to work! The dotting tools are super cute, although they took a while to get here (around 3 weeks, as they're from China), but with how adorable the set is, and for how cheap they were, the wait was well worth it!

For this mani, I used Butter London Trout Pout, China Glaze Peachy Keen, CG Lemon Fizz, CG Re-Fresh Mint, and CG For Audrey for the base colors, with CG White On White for the dots. The dotting tool was super duper easy to use, much better than the toothpicks and other makeshift tools I've been using!

More pics under the cut! <3

First Water Marble!

So after watching about a billion youtube tutorials and looking it up online a whole bunch, I decided to try water marbling!! I think for my first time it came out pretty decently, although I learned a lot of things that will help me next time. The first is that all my blue colors seem to be weirdly transparent? All the places you see white on my nails, I actually used Secret Peri-Wink-Le by China Glaze, but once it hit the water, it went completely clear. I also tried using Minted by Revlon on one nail, but it was clear too. Oh well!! Had to get something wrong on my first try. The other colors I used were White on White by China Glaze, Trout Pout by Butter, and Peachy Keen by China Glaze. I topped it off with Gelish and now it looks fab!!

For the other hand I decided to do a simple tape-design mani, and since I had already painted my nails white, I used the same colors that I used for the marbling, with some periwinkle dots to make it more fun. This is my first time doing a tape mani, and I'm really excited about it!! My only advice is: make sure you wait until your nail is COMPLETELY DRY before putting tape on it because otherwise you'll completely rip off like half the polish when you try to pull it off (this happened on my thumb, which is why it's a diff color).

Update: even though I love the way the water marble turned out, I'm disappointed because the polish is cracking on pretty much all of my nails. I think that's less the fault of the polish and more the top coat, though. I'm currently out of Seche Vite, so I had to fall back on Gelish and Sally Hansen Insta-Dry, which I think made it a bit more brittle.

Happy Easter!

I did some easter nails!! I ordered a pink jelly glitter nail polish called Deluxe Model Pink from Sneaky Laquer on etsy a few days ago, and within minutes of it arriving I knew I had to incorporate it into my super cute easter nail design :) I know it says on the site that their pictures show only two coats of DMP, but I had to apply 4 before I could get the effect I wanted. Regardless, it’s been holding up beautifully!!

For the green I used Wet n Wild Mint Fusion, the white was White on White by China Glaze, and the solid pink was Trout Pout by Butter London!! I’m really happy with these nails, they look so great!!

My only complaint is that the two coats of Seche Vite topcoat I used caused a bit of shrinkage at the tips of all my nails, but the glitter was thirsty enough that it definitely needed it. I might go back to Gelish, because I don’t get shrinkage when I use that.

Electric candy

I wanted something cheerful and happy for this week, so I used some nice bright colors!! The pink is Butter London Trout Pout, the yellow is a super duper old bottle of Sally Hansen HD Lite (I’ll probably be throwing this away soon bc it didn’t dry well at all, but I’ll miss that bright electric yellow!!), and the white is of course China Glaze White on White, my favorite opaque creme white I’ve ever used. The candy print is from the Bundle Monster pack for 2012, and it’s on plate BM-306. I wanted to just do single white candies on all the pink nails, but the plate with that particular imprint just didn’t pick up well. I think I’m going to send this pack of plates back and ask for a replacement; I love them a lot but a ton of them are duds. :(

I used a topcoat of Gelish and then Sally Hansen Insta-Dry to make sure it was all sealed away, and I’m really happy with the result!