Good morning! I hope the sun is shining for you wherever you today. It's rather gloomy here and I think we're gonna get more rain. Yay xD
I bring to you today my very first product review! I was so excited to be picked for one, and hope it's a precursor to more in the future! Today's review is made possible by Jody Alu, owner and proprietess of soflajo.com, a site that deals in handmade home and bath products. Jody sent to me for a review one of her original nail lacquer creations, Grasshopper. Grasshopper is part of her current collection and is available to purchase here on her site and here on Etsy.
Grasshopper is a sheer, shimmery golden green polish with different shapes and sizes of holo glitter in it. Looking at it, I see bar glitter, hex glitter, round, and diamond shaped. It's not densely packed, and this polish was definitely made to be layered. For the purpose of this review, I swatched it over three different colors: China Glaze's Gaga for Green and Zoya's Suvi and Raven. I did two coats of each color with two coats of Grasshopper layered over that.
The first pics are Grasshopper over Gaga for Green.
You can see the shimmer a little bit, and you can tell the glitter is holo, but it doesn't really pop over this shade of green. I did find that Grasshopper is very manageable and easy to work with, though.
Here it is over Suvi:
Now, let me tell you, I love Suvi. I love that fact that it's a gorgeous emerald green without any yellow tones in it. However, it's pretty dark and fallish. Grasshopper turned it into something more springlike without being too yellow for me to enjoy. I like it how Grasshopped looks layered over Suvi.
And now for Raven:
This is what I would picture Suvi to look like with just the glitter and not the base, lol. This came out pretty dark and vampy, but I think it's my favorite look of the three. Depending on the angle, I could almost see the silver shimmer of Raven coming through and that gave it a pretty effect.
Here are close ups of each, in order:
Good Friday morning!
Some time ago, I stepped out of my buying norm, and gave into the urge of buying my first Indie polish. I'd seen so many wonderful combos with the one I bought, that I just couldn't resist. Now, I didn't buy mine directly from the maker, I got it from a friend on FaceBook, but I do want to give props to the maker for her wonderful polishes.
What I bought was Cosmic Ocean from Pam's Girly Bits. You can find all the ordering info and such here on Pam's site. Cosmic Ocean is one that you will definitely want to layer over other colors, since it's rather sheer on its own. For this mani, I layered CO over 2 coats of OPI's DS Fantasy, which is just amazing. I really could have gotten away with just one coat of Fantasy, it was that opaque, but I did two anyways. I topped it all off with a coat of SV and done! My first two pics are inside with a flash; I know the first one is blurry, but it shows CO very well. The others are outside without a flash.
Good evening!
As promised, here is today's pink mani! Today, I'm featuring a polish that I truly did buy just for the name; Orly's Butterflies. Why, you may ask. Well, I absolutely love butterflies. They represent the transformation that we, as women, go through. There's nothing more graceful than watching a butterfly in flight. So, when I saw a fellow blogger featuring this polish, I knew I had to have, even if I never wore it.
For today's mani, I decided to create a candy mani, since Butterflies is a jelly polish. I started with one coat of OPI's DC Cherry Blossom, then layered two coats of Sally Hansen's Strobelight over DCCB. Strobelight it, by the way, a dead on dupe for OPI's Teenage Dream. The glitter may be a teeny bit smaller, but that's it. On top of all that, I layered a single coat of Butterflies and topped it all with SV. I am not looking forward to taking this off, lol.
Good morning!
Let me just say, the mani I'm about to post is not the one I had planned, lol. I was all set to do my first splatter mani Monday evening......... I have come to the conclusion that this is a mani that requires a little more time than I had, so I started over and came up with this one.
This mani started with 3 coats of Zoya Pippa, which isn't too terrible for a yellow. I have a few of yellows, from other brands, that require 4 or more >.< Pippa is what I would call banana yellow. It's not as bright as lemon yellow, but softer and more mellow. I topped it off with 2 coats of FingerPaints Asylum, then made it all matte with Hard Candy's Matte-ly in Love. It held up surprisingly well yesterday, without any chips or tip wear by the time I got from work yesterday.
I will be posting today's Pink Wednesday mani later tonight. I'm actually rather excited about this one! 'Til tonight!
Good morning! I hope it's nice and sunny wherever you're at today. Doesn't look like that will happening here much at all in "Sunshine" State, lol, at least not this weekend!
Ok, so have you ever had a mani idea that just didn't turn out how you thought it would? That maybe you should have used something other than what you did? Yeah, that's this mani here. I've been wanting to do a green candy mani for ages, but just never got to it. I finally, finally did for Friday. I started with 2 coats of Gaga for Green from China Glaze and let that dry. For the glitter, I used 2 coats of Servin' Up Sparkle from OPI. My jelly was one coat of Go on Green!, the green version. I definitely think I should have used a different glitter, because this didn't turn out well......
I may have to give this another shot in the future with, say, Simmer and Shimmer. Also, I've been slowing working my way through my swatch pics and getting those editted and posted. I still have more to swatch, but I'm working my way through that too.
Good evening! So, here it is, the middle of another week lol. I hope all is well for my lovely readers. I was reflecting earlier today about how last horrible last year was for me and my husband, and I realized things were so much better this year compared to last. So, I guess today, and every day really, I'm thankful that things are finally going in the right direction.
On to today's mani! It's Pink Wednesday, so of course I needed something pink to wear. It was one of those times that I just couldn't pick a color to do lol, but I did want to try something new- a watercolor mani. This is a fairly easy nail art technique that just about anyone with plenty of polish, a paintbrush, and acetone can do. So obviously I decided to do a pink watercolor mani.
I started with two coats of Pink Friday from OPI, topped it with SV, and let that dry completely. Just about every tutorial I watched recommended using a topcoat so you don't ruin your base color. Once that was dry, I added little blobs of my others, one at a time, and sort of smeared them with my brush dipped with acetone. The other colors I used were Dim Sum Plum, Kiss me on my Tulips, and In my Back Pocket from OPI, and Zoya Dita. Considering this is my first time trying this, I don't think I did too bad. Please excuse the dry cuticles; I literally took these pics 5 minutes after clean up.
Now I'd like to talk about what I had on my nails yesterday and Monday. I was faced with a dilemma Monday: I was called into work that and had naked nails. I refuse to go to work with naked nails but I was short on time. So, I thought to myself, what will dry quick and look nice? Answer: matte polish! It so happened that I picked up two matte polishes from Zoya in the last month or so, Phoebe and Loredana. Phoebe happens to be more on trend and spring like so I grabbed her and went to work.
Mind you, my only base were one coat of Nail Envy and one coat of Orly Bonder. Three coats of Phoebe later and I was off to work! I was surprised at how fast it dried, even for matte. It did take some careful applying so it didn't look too streaky, but overall I was happy with how Phoebe looked. Now, I had read some reviews that complained of horrible staining........... The only staining I had was on my right hand, around the nails but not really the nails themselves, and what little staining I had was remedied in my shower.
My other surprise was how well Phoebe well, considering I had no topcoat. My job is rough on my polished tips, and by the time I went home Monday, I had little to no wear and no chips. Even when I took it off yesterday, I still had no chips and very little wear. So yeah, I think I may get more mattes from Zoya xD Here's how Phoebe looks on me:
Happy Sunday!
This mani was what I wore on Friday actually; I just didn't get the opportunity to post it until today. It's nothing special, really, just a simple manicure, no nail art. It is, however, one of my favorite polishes, Catch me in Your Net! from OPI. I really don't wear it enough :P This is 3 thin coats.
Good evening and happy hump day!
I bring to you tonight another new polish I wanted to show off. I got this on my trip to Ulta this past weekend, and I was lucky to have gotten it, as it was the last bottle. I am talking about China Glaze's Fanatic Fuschia. I had finally decided that I needed it and went looking for it at Sally's >.> Nope, all sold out of the collection it was in. Glad I found it at Ulta, though, since my other Sally's didn't have it either when I went today.
I can't say how much I love this color. Nothing screams pink more than fuschia, and this is definitely fuschia. I think this is prolly the only one I own too; I can't see I've seen any other brands release a fuschia recently. This applied so nicely and only need two coats for opacity. I dropped it off with two coats of I Lily Love You from OPI; I can't seem to remember how much of a pain in the ass ILLY is. It does not like to lay nice, even with two coats of SV. I have to take cuticle nippers and clip and pieces that may snag =\ But here is the final mani.
First off, good morning! Here it is, Tuesday morning and another blog post! Yay me lol!
Ok, so before I joined a few nail polish groups on FaceBook, there were so many brands that I had never heard of and was missing out on, like Zoya, Essie, and Color Club to name a few. In fact, my collection consists of mostly OPI with a few China Glaze. I had no idea what I was missing; in fact, before last month, I had never been to an Ulta. Imagine how it felt for me to walk into the one located RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM MY SCHOOL for the first time. I didn't get to see everything in there in the short I shopped. My second trip last weekend was longer and just as productive.
So among the brands I mentioned missing out on, I've seen lots of people talk about butter London. Me? I'd never heard of it, but the names crack me up. There's Slapper, Disco Biscuit, Knackered, The Black Knight, and Queen Vic, to name a few. Upon my second Ulta trip, I was determined to come with at least one BL. It was hard to chose, but I eventually settled on Big Smoke because it's such a unique color and there's nothing close to it in my stash.
Big Smoke is a gorgeous dark, shimmery,smoky blue with just the little hint of green in it. I ended up needing 3 coats for it, it went on much sheerer than I expected. My camera wanted to make it greener than it really it is.
Hello and good Monday afternoon to you! I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday weekend, I know I did. I've been a little busy since my last post, what with work, getting ready for family, and enrolling in school for a nail tech class. That's right, as of August 14th, I will begin class to begin a nail tech!!! I'm so excited, I really can't wait!
On to today's post! I will be showing several manis I've had since my last post. Let's start with last Thursday. I received my package from a secret Easter swap I had joined was just ecstatic about what I had gotten. I truly am happy with each and every polish, but I think most especially this one.
When I saw promo pics for the Capitol collection from China Glaze, only a couple of the colors really stood out to me. Then, seeing in them in person really narrowed it down, one of them being Riveting. I can't say how much I wanted this color and how much I just loved. It killed me to wait, because I wanted to get it so badly, but I wanted my secret Bunny to have plenty of choices on what to send to me. Now, I'm glad I waited. Here is Riveting, two coats.
The mani I wore last Friday were also colors I had gotten from my secret Bunny. My base for it was 2 coats of Zoya Breezi, which is very similiar to or the same as OPI Suzy Says Feng Shui. It's very close, but I was happy to welcome her to my collection. Over top, I layered one coat of Golden Rose Scale Effects, which is a flakie.
Saturday was all about orange again, this time with Zoya Lianne and FingerPaints Twisted. Two coats of each for this look.
I'm so proud of my Easter mani, which I just took off a little bit ago. I decided to forego the usual Easter cuteness that everyone seemed to be doing and went with something a little a different. I pulled colors that I could see in the dress I would be wearing and ended up with 7; one for a base color, the other 6 for water marbling. My colors were: What's With the Catt-itude, Fly, Funky Dunkey, Just Groovy, Dating a Royal, and French Quarter for Your Thoughts, all from OPI, and Aqua-delic from China Glaze. Catt-itude was my base at 2 coats.
