A quick haul post

Hello hello!  I just have a quick haul post for you today.  I'm hoping if I confess to the internet about my polish buying habits, It'll be easier for me to cut back!  I always want every pretty color I see.  Don't worry, I'll be back with more nails soon!

I found the Color Club Poptastic collection at Ross for $7.99 for the whole set, so of course I had to pick them up!  At Forever21 I picked up two colors, a green glitter and a holo glitter.  I also snagged 3 of Wet n Wild's On The Prowl collection at my local CVS.  It's right next to the grocery store, so I was popping in every time I went shopping to see if they'd put up the display yet!  I grabbed Behind Closed Doors (I've swatched this already, expect to see it soon!), Tangled in my Web, and Cougar Attack for $2 each.  I love them!  I also picked up one of the new Icing Mood Swing polishes.  The bottles are awkwardly tall, but the colors sure are pretty!  I picked up Stormy/Serene, which changes from the bottle color to a shimmery blue.   I also managed to pick up a couple Essence polishes after I took this picture... a nice neutral french base color and one of their new-ish "Holographics" line.

And in other shopping news... after class today I'm heading to the mall to see if the $50 Jessica McClintock dress I scoped out is still there!  If I get it, I'll be sure to show it to you.

What have you hauled lately?

NOTD: Facets of Fuchsia

 

More swatches today!  I once again (or perhaps still?) am sick, which is making it a bit hard for me to do my nails... it's very hard to blow your nose without smudging wet polish.  Thankfully, I have a bit of a backup of things on my computer already to show you, plus some more guest manicures.

Sunlight

So!  Today I have for you Revlon's Facets of Fuchsia, from their fall "Expressionists" collection.  The other colors in the collection didn't do much for me, despite my artistic geekery (Expressionsim-inspired nail polish!), but Facets of Fuchsia is supposed to be a dupe for Deborah Lippmann Bad Romance.  Now, I don't have Bad Romance to make the comparison... the Lippmann is too expensive for me!  But several other bloggers have comparisons up: Candy Coated Tips, Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, and ShaGLAM, to name a few.  I think it's close enough for me!

I thought the formula on this was pretty good.  This polish has fuchsia/purplish small glitter and hex glitter floating around in a black jelly base.  I found that three coats gave pretty good coverage for me, although the free edge was a little sheer... I always have this problem with jelly polishes.  Next time I might just do 2 coats over black and see if I like that better.   The glitter is also (as always!) a pain to clean up, so be extra careful with application!  Otherwise you will have glitter cuticles for days.

I found my bottle of Facets of Fuchsia at Target for about $3.50.  I've also seen these at Walgreens.  I say get it, if it's a color you like.  I think it's a great polish.

I will be returning soon with some nail art!  Meanwhile, back to my sniffling and my cup of tea.

NOTD: Rustic Dream

I've been warning you for a while that I would do a plain ol' boring swatch sometime soon, and here one is:  CQ Rustic Dream.  I picked it up at a RiteAid a few weeks ago when my not-buying-polish resolve was low, and I don't regret it.  This is a beautiful and multidimensional color!

CQ nail polishes are made by the same company that makes Chameleon and Petites polish.  Unfortunately, neither the bottle nor the website has any sort of ingredients list, so I don't know if their polish is Big 3 Free. I suspect not.  You can find CQ polishes at RiteAid and Walmart.
The formula on Rustic Dream is OK... it goes on very smoothly but it is a bit thin/runny.  The brush is pretty easy to work with, it's a basic round brush but it's very flexible and I didn't have any trouble with application. I used three very thin coats for the pictures, and I thought the opacity built up well.  The finish is very shiny and very smooth, so I had some difficulty with brushstrokes.  I also had some trouble with bubbling, as you can see in the pictures, but it isn't Rustic Dream's fault.  I applied polish before my basecoat was completely dry, and apparently the two didn't react well.
And now, the real point of all this blathering... the color!  The wonderful color!  Rustic Dream is a strong duochrome with a metallic-looking finish.  It shifts from a bright reddish pink to a bright orangey golden color.  It reminds me of a non-sparkly version of MAC's sought-after Bad Fairy from the Venomous Villains collection.  Anyway...  I'll leave you with a few more pictures to convey how much I adore this color.

NOTD: Black & Silver Skittles

Open shade

 Good morning, lovely readers!  I hope today finds you well.  As I type this, I am waiting (ever so patiently) for my tea water to boil so that I may have my morning dose of caffeine.  Anyway. I did these nails a few days ago (I'm still getting through my un-posted backlog) when I was playing with crackle/shatter nail polish.  I have OPI's Black Shatter and Silver Shatter, so I decided to come up with a manicure to incorporate both.

Open shade

 I was inspired by Trincess at Emerald Sparkled, she always the most tasteful and coordinated skittles manicures.  For the most part, I think my attempt turned out pretty well.  You can see that my left middle finger got kind of dented because the very thick coat of glitter I put on took forever to dry.  I'm also not totally happy with the stamp I used for my pinkies... and, in the future, I think I might mix up the order on the two different hands to make things look a little more uniform.
Anyways, live paint and learn!

Materials:

• Sinful Colors Basecoat (not pictured)
• Sinful Colors Black on Black 
• OPI Silver Shatter
• OPI Black Shatter
• Sinful Colors Secret Admirer (Black full of silver microglitter)
• Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Silver Sweep
• Nicole by OPI Make U Smile (Silver hex glitter & icy blue microglitter)
• Sinful Colors Queen Of Beauty (very dense silver glitter, I apparently forgot to grab it and put it in the picture!  So it isn't there.  But I used it.)
• Bundle Monster Image Plate BM213 (& other stamping necessities)
• Heart-shaped rhinestones (from Sally Beauty Supply, not pictured)
• Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat (not pictured) and Seche Vite (also not pictured.  I used Revlon for the thumb, index, and pinky, and Seche Vite for the middle and ring, which had the most polish and things to stick on.)

Open shade

Thumb: 2 coats of Black On Black, one thickish coat of Make U Smile.
Index: 2 coats of Silver Sweep, one thin coat of Black Shatter.
Middle: 2 coats of Secret Admirer, then I used Queen of Beauty to make a gradient, getting thicker at the tip.  I should have let this dry more between coats to avoid denting.  Even the layer of Seche Vite I added wasn't enough to totally dry the glob of glitter quickly.
Ring: 2 coats of Black on Black, one thin-ish coat of Silver Shatter, dabbed on, while the second coat of black was still wet.  After that dried, I used a bit of Seche Vite to stick a heart-shaped rhinestone near the cuticle.  I also sealed over the rhinestone with Seche Vite when I added topcoat to the nail.
Pinky 2 coats of Silver Sweep stamped with Secret Admirer and the concentric-oval-pebble type design from BM213.

Phew!  that was a lot.  Some plain ol' boring single color swatches up next.  I hope you have a lovely day!  I think I will, now that I have my tea :)

Guest Nails: Giants colors

(Open shade)

I did a photoshoot last week with my colleague Christine who is in the same voice studio as I am.  Of course, we ended up talking about & looking at nail polish.  She was wearing a hot pink when she came over, but after looking through my collection decided she needed to switch to neon orange with black shatter.  Orange and black, coincidentally, are the colors of her Favorite Sports Team Ever, the San Francisco Giants.

(Open shade)

You've seen this color here before... I think it looks more accurate in these photographs than in my earlier ones.  The bottle picture definitely isn't quite accurate.  My camera just does not like neons.  Rest assured, it's much more eye-searing than this.
Also, despite my efforts to clean up the excess polish, this one stained around the cuticles a bit.  Gr.

For this manicure, Christine started with a layer of Sinful Colors Basecoat, followed by 3 very thin coats (I was seriously impressed by the thin-ness of the polish layers she used.  My thin coats are much thicker.) of Sinful Colors Summer Peach.  Once that was dry, I painted a very thin layer of OPI Black Shatter on all her nails, followed by a layer of Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat for shine, since both Summer Peach and Black Shatter dry matte.

NOTD: Baroque Pink

 (Indoor Compact Florescent lighting)

Good morning, lovely readers!  Today I have a manicure that I like in concept, but am not totally satisfied with in execution.  I think the grey and the pink I used are just slightly too close, and one needs to be darker and the other lighter for this design to really stand out.  But hey.

 (Indoor Compact Florescent lighting)

I'm messing around with new possibilities for watermarks for my pictures.  What do you think?  What's the most artistic/least distracting way to watermark?
I'm also playing blog catch up... I've been painting my nails, photographing them, and not sitting down to edit and write because I have other photos to edit (ahem) and other things to write (I'm looking at you, Fall Semester).  Anyway, I have some guest nails, a skittles manicure, and some straight-up swatches of new acquisitions coming up for you just as soon as I can sit down and get some blogging done.

The technical stuff:  For this design, I used my standard Sinful Colors Basecoat, followed by 2 coats of Pure Ice Kiss Me Here.  Looking at the pictures, I guess that wasn't quite opaque, but in person it looked fine.  I stamped it with Milani Hot Orchid, a great pink metallic, and BM214 from the second generation set of Bundle Monster Image Plates.  I placed the first stamp randomly and tried to make a tiled pattern on each nail, which was easier in theory than in application.  I topped it off with a layer of Revlon's Quick Dry Top Coat.  I think I'll have to try this design again with other colors... for me, these two added up to a resounding "meh."

NOTD: Limited success

I always feel like such an irresponsible blogger when life prevents me from posting regularly... I'm trying to avoid starting every blog post with an apology, so... maybe I just won't?  School is in full swing now, so maybe I'll just tell you some of the busy things I'm doing while not nail blogging.
Speaking of school... I discovered there are more people in my voice studio who love nail polish than I thought, and none of them have stampy plates... so we may have more guest nails to post soon if they come over to play with the sparkly things.  Which is fun.

Anyway.  This manicure was really inspired by this beautiful green duochrome stamping at The Polished Perfectionist.  I do not have that duochrome (but shoot dang, now I want to order it!) so I tried to replicate the effect by using two colors of stamping polish.

Materials:

• Sinful Colors Basecoat
• Pixel Humdinger (these bitty little bottles are a new thing at ULTA.  They're about $2.50, and there's a wide range of colors.  The brushes are pretty easy to work with for their small size.  I picked up a couple, I'll show you the others later.)
• ULTA unlabeled blue metallic mini
• Icing Chrome Bright Green (Icing's chrome polishes are great for stamping!)
• Bundle Monster Image Plate BM210, stamper, scraper, etc.
• Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat 

(Indoor Light)

Method:
After applying the basecoat/letting it dry, I applied 2 layers of Humdinger.  It took a little longer to dry than I thought it should.  To stamp, I applied the ULTA blue polish to the top end of the image on BM201 and Chrome Bright Green to the bottom half.  I scraped sideways to avoid pulling one color over the other.  In retrospect, I wish I'd gotten more green in each stamp, it's hardly visible on the finished nail.  I finished the design with Quick Dry Top Coat.

What do you think of two-color stamping?  Is it worth the effort?

NOTD: Blue on Blue

For today's manicure, I wanted to play with another one of the new Bundle Monster plates.  I picked two of my blue polishes and a simple geometric design.  I've been a bit under the weather lately, so I haven't had much brain power for nail painting and blogging, but I'm finally recovering, so hopefully I'll be back to normal soon!

As usual, I am plagued with the thumb texting chip.  Boo.

For this design, I used my normal Sinful Colors Basecoat, China Glaze Midnight Mission, a blue metallic ULTA mini that has no name, Bundle Monster Image Plate BM203, and Revlon Quick Dry Top Coat.

See you again soon, hopefully with more words... looking at the computer for too long is making my head hurt!