Happy Memorial Day!

I hope everyone had a safe and fun Memorial Day. The hubs and I stayed home and didn't do much, but that didn't stop me from making a patriotic mani. I started off with two coats of OPI's Manicurist of Seville. This is a beautiful creme red that is completely opaque in two coats. Since I was going to do a bit of scotch tape mani, I used Seche Vite to get it to dry faster.

I then taped off each nail, one at a time, at a diagonal and applied OPI's Light my Sapphire.

I topcoated that, then used China Glaze's Crackle Glaze in Lightning. Now, I'll be honest, I fully expected it to look like crap. This is the third time I've used this partitcular color of Crackle, the first two times looking awful. I had read that people had had better results if they had topcoated before using it, and I had starting doing this with other Crackles/Shatters simply because I'm too impatient to wait for my base/s to dry. I pleasantly surprised on how the white turned out this time, but I'm still glad I have OPI's White Shatter coming to me since it's supposed to be better than China Glaze.

Now, lately the texture of Shatter/Crackle has been making me a little OCD, so I used two coats of SV after the Crackle.

Ok, now I have to talk about my previous mani. I got a little lax this last week and didn't post it, and went au naturale over the weekend. I absolutely love the color I used as a base for this; it reminds me very much of a gemstone called Alexandrite. Alexandrite is a color changing gem that will look like an emerald in daylight and ruby at night. It's beautiful and horribly expensive xD

OPI's Not Like the Movies is, I believe, a duochrome. This amazing color will look like a few different colors, depending on the light. I think I had read that there a slightly different formula for this color, but I believe mine is the original since I had gotten when it was first released.

The first pic is inside with a flash.

You can see even the color looks different from the bottle to the nails, as if it were two polishes. This is 3 coats, by the way. Second pic is inside without a flash.

Third is outside.

And since I hadn't done it before, I used Black Shatter over it and topped it with 2 coats of SV.