Nail Art: Sailor Moon!

Hi guys!  It's been a while since I did some real complicated nail art, so I'm a liiiittle rusty.  However, I just couldn't resist doing a celebratory manicure for the announcement that there will be another Sailor Moon anime released next year!  I'm a huge Sailor Moon fan.  In case you were wondering or had any doubts.  I think I mention how excited I am about this at least once a day to my family and friends.  I do wonder how long before they get tired of it, but until then, I'm going to keep fangirling and doing SM manicures =D

I forgot just how much it stinks to photograph nail art that may have gotten a little bit messy while I painted it.  I apologize for not completely cleaning it up!  The background was done with China Glaze Splish Splash from the recent summer neon collection.  I put down a coat of white, then blended in Splish Splash.  I added the pink with Zoya Lara and the mint is a blend of Zoya Tracie, Wednesday and a little white.  Unfortunately, I don't have a good picture of it on its own, but it was actually really lovely!

I based this manicure on this clip because I LOVED the transformation scene when I was a kid.  Sailor Moon meant so much to me.  I watched the first season when I was in third grade every morning before I went to school.  Yep, this was before Toonami aired it.  I cried my eyes out the morning that they stopped playing it and started playing Samurai Pizza Cats.  (A show I could never love after it robbed me of Sailor Moon.)  She is seriously the best super hero ever!  

I had to make a stencil for the moon on my index finger after trying and failing to make it look like a moon the first couple times.  Everything else was freehanded with nail art brushes.  I also forgot how tiny I needed my brushes to be to work with.  I ended up trimming a junky one down to about half its size and it was still hard to work with.  But now I'm in the mood for nail art again, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

Cover Band: Sticks and Stones

Hi there!  Today I'm working on finding my two winners from my Pop Tart Giveaway.  I'm verifying entries and hopefully I'll announce them before the end of the night!

In the meantime, I'm going to show you today's manicure.

I placed an order for Sticks & Stones from Ninja Polish almost as soon as it came out, but it's been sitting on my desk waiting to be worn until today.  It's very similar to Lynnderella's Connect the Dots, which I also have in my stash.  S&S has larger more scattered black and white glitter than my CtD, which made it work better in this manicure that I've wanted to do.

The base color is one of my favorite go-tos, Zoya Breezi.  I topped Breezi with a random, very scattered glitter top coat with purple hexagons and smaller purple and silver holographic glitter.  On top of that, I layered Sticks & Stones.

I wanted to do this on top of pink for Pink Wednesday, but once I picked up Breezi, it was all over, no contest.  I love this color too much!

And now that it's dry, time to go back to work!  Thanks for reading!

Zoya Promo Polishes: Why Free Stuff Is Always Good

Why, hello there, all you lovely people!  It's been a long day for me!  I wanted to get this post up earlier, but I had a lot to do.  First of all, thank you to everyone who has visited my Etsy shop in the last day.  Part of the reason I was so busy was getting orders filled and ready to ship tomorrow morning.  I managed to use up all my printer ink and it turned out my backup cartridge was in the printer already so I'm going to run to the store bright and early in the AM to replace it and finish the last few before this weekend.

Second of all, I'm sitting at an even 300 followers as I type this!  I want to thank all of you for hanging around and checking up with this blog!  This weekend, I'm going to put together another giveaway to help celebrate.  Expect it around Monday or Tuesday!

Finally, before I get to the swatches, I wanted to remind everyone that my current giveaway, two bottles of my Lacquer Convention shade Pop Tart is still open.  If you haven't told me about your ideal polish or posted a picture of yourself holding a pop tart, there's still time!  It ends on Saturday though, so hurry!  I'm having fun reading your comments and it has inspired me to compile a post about finding that dream polish, or rather, using all your resources to create it.  It's coming next week when I announce the winners.

Alright, are you tired of me talking yet?  Well, this is a long post with a lot of pictures, so buckle up!

I decided to start with my least favorite of the bunch, Pippa.  Now, just because she's my least favorite doesn't mean much because I am really, madly, deeply in love with Zoya right now.  Their formula is spot on and their shades are gorgeous.  Pippa is only my least favorite because her formula is the worst of the bunch.  However, I'm pretty sure it's because she's yellow.

As you can see in these photos, yellow nail polish is hard to get right.  It's almost as bad as white nail polish, which we all know I HATE working with but NEED in my life/nail art.  Pippa is a paler shade of yellow, which I have been subconsciously craving (I bought two other bottles from different brands this week in two separate Walgreens runs...without realizing it until Pippa came in the mail!).  

I had streaking and goopy issues with Pippa, as well as leveling issues.  I'm going to take some thinner to her because I am pretty sure that's all she needs to shape up.  These pictures show a difficult three coats, no top coat.  I do rather love this shade, because it's spring and I need something bright and cheerful like this to help chase away the snow I'm still occasionally seeing.  (Mostly in the woods around my house and not actually where I live!)

My next choice was Kieko, which has been one of my biggest lemmings.  When I did the swatches, my nails looked like they were opaque and had full coverage, but the macro blew out any patchiness that I couldn't see.  The pictures show two coats, so in the future I'll do three because I like to know my nails don't look patchy at all.

This type of bright purple is one of my favorite cream shades.  I have an Essence mini that I pulled out and compared to Kieko and it's really close, a hair more purple and already half empty because I've used it a bit.  Kieko is its better, brighter replacement.

The formula on Kieko was sooooo creamy and smooth.  It's the best cream I've tried in a while actually.  She really wants me to come up with a fun and funky way to wear her this weekend.  Hopefully I have a little time tomorrow to sit down with Kieko!

Next I have the first of two greens, Yara.  I absolutely love Zoya's greens.  They capture the best shades with the best blends of shimmers and glitters in their greens.  I mean, it could be because I love green nail polish, but I think it's Zoya being awesome.

Yara is an olive green base filled with gold glitter.  The formula? Dreamy!  Smooth and very easy to apply.  These pictures show three coats.  I could have gotten away with two though.

Oh, Yara, look at all that sparkle in your bottle.  How did you get so pretty?

The second green I picked this time was Edyta.  I had passed her up the last time I went to Ulta because my hands were too full to carry anymore polish and getting a basket is just ASKING to spend too much money =P  I don't regret waiting, though I do really like her.

Edyta just doesn't fit my mood right now, with her dark green.  She is from a fall collection, so I'm not really that surprised.  I'm going to banish her to the cabinet to wait for a more appropriate time to wear her.  Still, it's a beautiful green with a wonderful metallic finish.  I'm definitely going to wear it!

I am, however, going to wear her with extra base coat.  From doing these swatches, I started to get a little bit of staining on my nails.  I definitely don't want that!

Edit: Random piece of glitter on my finger, how did you go unnoticed THIS WHOLE TIME??

This next polish is Jules, one of my other hardcore lemmings.  It's basically everything that I had hoped for China Glaze Fast Track from the Hunger Games collection to be.  It's a nude shade that's packed full of gold shimmer.  I don't really do nude, so even when I'm in the mood for a neutral color, I want it to have dimension.  Jules has all of that!

I'm actually wearing Jules right now as I type this.  I needed to cleanse my palette after My Little Pony.  I have a feeling that I'm going to be wearing Jules a lot, until I get over this weird "neutral" craving that I'm having.  Fast Track is out of here, it's all about Jules now!  I love applying this color too.  The formula is amazingly smooth and silky, like it almost applies itself.

Seriously, check out that gorgeous shimmer.  

No really, look at it.  It gets an extra picture.

The final polish (tired yet?) is actually my nickname-sake, Jo.  Yes, my name is Yvonne and has nothing to do with Jo.  It's a long story!  But!  It is the reason why I picked Jo.  It was my random, unplanned pick for this promo.  I like to keep a wishlist, but I also like to keep my eye out for something I didn't think I'd want.  I decided to give Jo a shot and I'm glad that I did!  Zoya doesn't have an Yvonne, though I'll hold my breath a little longer and hope!

When I took it out of the box, I was a little bit disappointed that it looked similar to Skylar from Zoya's last collection, the only polish from that collection that I had to have.  It's not the same at all though.  Jo is darker and has a fine shimmer versus Skylar's gold glitter, and I actually like the shade of blue better in Jo.  

Need you ask about the application?  The only one that applied better was Yara.  Jo is so nice and smooth.  This is three coats without top coat, except for my middle finger.  I accidentally bumped the tip and had to even it out with a fourth.

Zoya made this haul possible (/too tempting to pass up) with their promos.  I always wait for them and always take advantage of them, usually buying more than I should!  I was a good girl this time and stuck to the buy three, get three, but only because I had done a bit of shopping just the day before.  I had a pair of colors in my cart that I was loathe to pass up, but I told myself I'd go back for them!  And I will, once I recover from this one...and the Walgreens trips...and probably what I am going to do if I can convince my hubby to take a "detour" to Seattle this weekend!  (It's for science!  The last white on my list before I give up on finding a good white formula is American Apparel!)

Are you still with me?  I hope so, even if you just looked at the pictures =) Have a great day!

More Dots! More Dots!

Hey folks!  How's it going?

Firstly, before I jump into the manicure for today, I wanted to mention that I was asked to be featured on a great fashion blog, Thoughts of a Fashion Junkiiee.  She asked me a few questions and told me about her mission to revamp her blog to focus on independent and small businesses in the fashion industry.  You can find the feature here.

And now, on to the nail polish!  I've been having a little bit of wrist pain in my dominant wrist the last few days (nothing serious) so after painting my nails white and creating a blank canvas, I didn't want to do something really intricate with a shaky hand.  (Trust me, the clean up was already enough of a disaster today!)  Instead, I thought I'd get out the dotting tool and do my entry for Chalkboard Nails's nail art contest.  Nail art brushes aren't allowed, just dots!

I got my order from Zoya's Valentine's Day promo where I ordered Purity in my ongoing search for the perfect white cream.  It is a really good option, though I still had to baby it a little and did end up adding a couple drops of thinner.  It evened out pretty well at the third coat.  

The red in this manicure was my free polish, Moxie, and it is fabulous in color and formula.  I spent a bit of time trying to decide what red I wanted.  The promo offered free shipping as well, which was what had me excited because the first time I ordered from Zoya, shipping was almost as much as one of their bottles of polish and I can't get Zoya locally anymore.  In any case, I'm really happy with Moxie and Purity isn't perfect but it's workable, so it was an all around good deal.

The blue is also a Zoya, Breezi, one of my favorite polishes in my stash for both its lovely color and its flawless application.  I got it in another promo where it was free.  I think this post is probably the biggest plug for following Zoya on the FB or Twitter machines for their promos because honestly, two out of three were free polishes and that isn't bad!  

But enough with the pitches!

Since nail art brushes were prohibited for the contest, I used the brushes in the bottles, which were very easy to use for this design, for one thing because Zoya has smaller brushes.  Then I used different sized dotting tools and voila!  That's about all there was to it!

Thanks for reading!

Swatches and Promises: Zoya Ivy

Ugh.  That is how I feel today about my planned manicure.  Ugh, ugh, ugh.  I've been trying to make it work, but I honestly dislike how it's turned out so much that I can't show it to you right now.  So instead of sitting and sulking, I'm going to take it off for the second time and try something different, but in the meantime, I wanted to post something!  

This is Zoya Ivy, the second polish that I received in the promotion for two free Zoya polishes at the beginning of the year.

Ivy is a really beautiful rusty red with gold micro glitter.  It kept photographing a little bit redder and more orange than it is in person, the little devil, but on the nail, it's a really gorgeous shade.

I actually was so overwhelmed by the Zoya website and the prospect of two free polishes that I picked this randomly from things that I thought looked amazing.  The day after I ordered it I thought, "Gosh, I don't know why I picked that over one of the shimmery greens I've been lusting over!"  

I chalked it up to a weird mood, resolved to buy Yara in person later.  And then, terrible story, the only store in town that sold Zoya burned down.  I'm not kidding!  A tanning bed in the same building started a fire and POOF!  All those nail polish babies!  (No people were hurt either, so I will grieve for those little bottles of color instead!)  

 In any case, I didn't get Yara and I probably won't for a while because Zoya's shipping is pretty high and I am also not supposed to be buying anything.  Instead, I have Ivy, who is actually surprisingly satisfying after my Zoya drama.  When I swatched for these photos, I was prepared to be underwhelmed by Ivy.  That wasn't the case.

 I tried to capture the way that the gold flecks seem to make the color in this shift a little, but I think I failed.  It's still super pretty though.  I think it would be a beautiful and mature Valentine's Day pick!

 The formula is a little on the sheer side, which I didn't count on.  This is three coats and at a few of the angles, you can see it didn't completely even out.  I want to try layering it over black one day.

Hopefully, I'll get my act together and put together a decent Valentine's manicure before the day is over!  Thanks for reading!

Busy Bees Bring You Swatches!

Hey there!  I'm having a bit of a busy weekend, so I'm going to bring you some swatches while I run around, just to tie you over until I break out the big guns on Tuesday and show you the Super Secret Nail Present I made myself for my birthday!  I'm super excited about that, but for the mean time, I'm wearing more Connect the Dots and doing a short wear test.

I painted it over alternating fingers of Julep's Leah and Pure Ice's Free Spirit.  I put them through a round of dishes today before my husband smashed his wedding ring into my knuckle really really hard (he was flailing around like a moron!  Lucky he missed my nails, but I can't bend my middle finger without some pain now).  In any case, if either of them chip before Tuesday, I will let you know.  For my purposes, three days of wear is all I can stand from a polish, fickle creature that I am.

But enough about that!  On to a little bit of swatch spam!  I decided to pull some colors that I consider staples that I use frequently.  Three of the four are new to my stash, but they fill a niche that I've been making do with other polishes.  They won't be going anywhere, except all over my nails!

This is another one of the new Wet n Wild Megalast colors, I Need a Refresh-Mint, that I went back for after loving On A Trip, which I wore under Connect the Dots for the first time.  I honestly wasn't going to buy this one because it is a color dupe for Color Club's New Bohemian, which I already owned, but I wanted to see if it was more opaque.  It is, which I like better for nail art.  

I wish I had taken I picture of the brush, because it's another reason why I bought this and why I went back for more of them.  I'll do my best to describe it for you, because my camera is charging right now.  These have what they refer to as a "ManiCurve Pro Brush" and it's my favorite shape for polish application.  If you're familiar with Sally Hansen's Complete Salon Manicure line, they have this type of brush too.  It is wide, like an OPI brush, but the corners are rounded, like the shape of my cuticles.  I find it really easy to use this to get a clean line.  I did have more trouble with the individual brushes in this bottle and the next polish.  They were a little more distressed than the one in On A Trip and held a little too much polish.  I'll probably trim them at some point.

This is clearly from the same line as the previous one.  It's a re-release of Through the Grapevine, which was a shade available from the Megalast line before this revamp.  I picked it up because it was pretty and that was about it.  

Everything about these two polishes is the same for me, application, feelings about the color, brushes.  I like them and they're inexpensive.  Need to trim the brush!

I haven't praised American Apparel polishes for a little while, so I think it's time I remind you of my glowing love for them!  These pictures are a bit older and I've been wanting to post them somewhere.  This is Gold Flash by American Apparel.  It's part of their Metallic line and is my go-to gold.  I'm not a huge fan of gold polish for some reason.  Standard gold is too yellow, but while I was at an AA store browsing, I decided I had to at least have one gold and this is what I ended up with.  

It's a very opaque polish like my other AAs and if I am ambitious, I can get good coverage with one coat.  I use it more as a base for other colors, like holos and glitters, where it will get covered up, so a thin not quit opaque coat is good enough to do its job.  It has a fabulous, smooth consistency, which is why it will always have my affection!

Here's the last swatch of the day, Zoya Breezi.  She's new to my stash but is already pretty much one of my new babies.  I am definitely going to need a backup bottle sometime because I can't get enough of her.  She's a blue, which I have many bottles of, but she's a bit different from her siblings.  She's dusty and has a little darkness to her and just seems a bit feisty but fun .

I'm sure I'm starting to creep someone out with all that personification!  Sorry!  Breezi just deserves our admiration!  These pictures show three coats with no top coat and you can see how beautifully shiny this color is on its own.  

Well, there you have it.  A mini-swatchathon.  I'm going to take a break from the blog until Tuesday, but I hope to see you all back then.  I'm hoping to get a blog sale page up then, as well as show you some really fun things I've had sitting around!  Take care and thanks for reading!

Orchids!

I've kind of been sliding into a funk lately and I can't really tell why.  I know that things are starting to get odd when I start getting into weird sleep schedules.  Yesterday I slept way too much and today I can't sleep at all.  It's really hard for me to buckle down and write a blog post right now, but I have a cute bit of nail art to show you.

I honestly don't know why I painted orchids.  I have some weird fascination with them that has nothing to do with how pretty they are but more to do with how easy they are to kill.  My parents tried very hard for a while to keep potted orchids, but they all died in the end.  I guess it's that idea that you can't squish beautiful things into your control, but damn it if you won't try.  I do all the time.

In any case, this is my little attempt to capture them, in some way.  I ordered Zoya's Breezi from their new year promo for two polishes.  I am kind of in love with it, like fully and completely hooked on this shade of blue.  It's just so creamy and bold without being super bright.  However, I am totally on a search for the perfect shade of bright blue, which I am thinking Zoya Robyn might be for me, but suffice to say, I love Breezi today!  

Trying not to ramble is really difficult right now!  In any case, I put down two coats of Breezi and on my thumb and ring finger one coat of Milani Cyberspace.  Then I painted the leaves with Avon Olive Green and Icing Free Spirit.  Finally came the orchid flowers with the bottom of my China Glaze White on White bottle (Almost gone!!), Wet n Wild Through the Grapevine, Finger Paint's Black Expressionism and a bit of blending between the three.  

It was fun and I was almost ambitious enough to try my non-dominant hand...but then I decided not.  It got polka dots instead, but my nails are kind of ugly on that hand right now so I don't have a picture.

Thanks for reading!

Zoya Gemma + Some Dots!

Remember my nail mail from the other day and how I warned you that the Zoya greens were definitely going to show up soon?  Well here's the first one, Zoya Gemma.  It's from the Spring 2011 Collection, before my life became completely devoted to nail polish, but I saw a swatch and wanted it like crazy!  I'm such a sucker for green.

Gemma is an olive green shade with a surprise inside.  It has flecks of purple that flash in the light.  I really love the color on its own, but the sparkle inside makes it really interesting.

It was hard to get a really awesome picture of the purple on the nail.  You can kind of see it in the other pictures, but I got one of the bottle that shows it.  It is subtle but there and definitely pretty.

I forgot to take pictures before I applied top coat.  I was in robot-zombie mode after an hour and a half of curling my hair, but I remembered that I wanted to take some pictures of this on its own after I had SVed my right hand. 

This is the finished mani that I went for.  I didn't want to stamp this, though I prepped it and let it dry in case I changed my mind.  Instead I went for polka dots again.

I didn't want to hide Gemma too much either, so I only went for a few.  I used China Glaze White on White (because I have a tiny tiny bit at the bottle of a bottle and it sucks to try to suck it up with a brush but works fine with a dotting tool), Finger Paints Black Expressionism, and Zoya Shawn.

I love these overlapping dots.  They're just so cute!  I threw on a layer of DS Top Coat then and called it good.  I had to go take my hair out of the pins and finish getting ready!

Thanks for reading!