Day 20: WATER MARBLED

I scheduled this post because I'm off in Minnesota visiting my family for Christmas.  I didn't do much in the way of Christmas, or any other holiday, manicures this year but I thought it would be cute to do a red white a green water marble combination for Day 20 of the 31 Day Challenge.

I used two coats of Sally Hansen Insta-Dry Whirlwind White as a base for the marbling, then alternating drops of Zoya Sooki, Zoya Snow White, and Orly Lucky Duck for the swirls.  I used a white base because when I tried dipping naked nails Lucky Duck was very sheer and I had major VNL.  I topped everything with two coats of Wet'n'Wild Wild Shine Kaleidoscope, a color I received earlier this year as part of my Polish-aholics Anonymous Secret Santa (thank you Amanda!).  A final coat of Seche Vite holds everything in place and gives a nice shiny finish.

(If you'd like, you can now follow my blog with Bloglovin since Google has announced the end to Google Friend Connect.)

Day 7: BLACK AND WHITE nails

Day 7 is black and white nails day for the 31 Day Challenge and since Halloween is fast approaching, black and white to me screams ghosts.  It's also apparently monster day for the Polish-aholics Anonymous group on facebook and ghosts are considered monsters right? Eh, it's close.  :D

For this I used three coats of Zoya Snow White for the base, three coats of China Glaze Ghoulish Glow top coat (I'd heard thicker resulted in better glow...) and Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear Black Out for the eyes and mouth of my ghosties.

They are quite plain in the daylight:

Perhaps the scariest item here is the fact that my cuticles are in desperate need of moisturizer! ...and maybe the dents you see in the white polish.  But since the focus here is supposed to be their ability to glow in the dark the dents and dings don't really matter when the lights are out.

Once you turn out the lights they go wild:

Sorry I couldn't capture a better photo.  I took several and this was the best that I had.  I'll take any suggestions you have for capturing a better glow-in-the-dark photo with my Canon PowerShot.

Shawn

The Monday theme for the Polish-aholics Anonymous group on Facebook was Green for Depression Awareness. I did another single color, no nail art today. I got home late last night after driving for six hours, looked up what the theme was and took the easy route.

I have three green polishes and of those I picked Zoya Shawn to decorate my nails with. I don't like the formula on this one. It was very streaky and hard for me to get close to near-even coverage.

I love this color in the sun; it's a bright vivid green that reminds me of trees.  Indoors it is possible to mistake Shawn for black.

The camera I use is a pink Canon PowerShot...and I couldn't get a photo without getting the reflection of my camera on my nails!  This was the best photo with minimal pink camera reflection.

Innocence

The theme for the Monday Nail Art Challenge through Facebook's Polish-aholics Anonymous group this week was  PINK for Breast Cancer Awareness.  Since I've had to tone down my polish for work I just went with a simple soft pink creme.  


For this manicure I used China Glaze's Innocence.  This polish is quite sheer and it took three coats to get it to the color you see on my nails.  If I was going to wear this color for longer I'd like to take it to four or five coats because I still have a bit of visible nail line going on.

I like that this color is pale enough not to draw attention to the nails but still bright enough to notice.  A great wear to work polish.  

I've Got the Blues

This was my polish color from Monday.  The theme was "blue" from Facebook's Polish-aholics Anonymous group and I took the lazy route and simply painted my nails all one color.

This is China Glaze For Audrey.  

My apologies for the horrible photo.  I forgot to take one during the day and there is no good source of light in my apartment.  I'll be taking the polish off soon and wanted to snap a quick photo to at least document that I was wearing it.  

Party Like a Rockstar

Now that I know that manicures resembling cupcakes are to too "out there" for work, I must be careful in what I decide to create for Facebook's Polish-aholics Anonymous group nail art Mondays.  That patchwork manicure from last week?  Super glad I took that off Sunday night.  This week's theme is Rockstar; lots of opportunity to create something that is too extreme for work.  I quickly nixed ideas of guitars, drums, microphones off my ideas list, and finally settled on something I found via Pinterest.  

I used Sinful Colors All About You for the star color and Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Black Out as the sky color.  I used two different top coats also; Seche Vite over the gold and Essie Matte About You over the black.  I wanted the starts to really sparkle as compared to the sky.

Sadly, I had no star stickers anywhere in my apartment and wound up making all my stars by hand.  This made the manicure take a lot longer and I'm not an adept tape star maker.  I would also like to add that this manicure is really not worth creating if one doesn't have star stickers.

Coach Patchwork

This week's nail art theme from Facebook's Polish-aholics Anonymous group was patchwork nails.  Ehhh, originally I was not too thrilled for this topic but I love the way the design looks on my nails.

The inspiration for this design comes from a Coach patchwork handbag.  I love the way the colors for this purse go together.  It's bright, cheerful, and makes me smile whenever I look at it.

For this manicure I started by painting my nails with a basecoat (Sally Hansen Continuous Treatment Base & Top Coat), followed by one coat of Zoya Snow White and then one coat of Finger Paints Art Nouv-Yellow.  I used a layer of white below the yellow because it makes this color 'pop' more than if I'd just painted the yellow over my basecoat.

Using tape to section off the area I wanted to keep yellow, I painted Zoya Jancyn over the rest of the nail.  Following the same procedure, I next used Zoya Areej and finally Zoya America.  I wanted to use Zoya Tamsen (one of my untrieds) instead of America but the color difference wasn't noticeable over Areej.  


Since these colors are all so...warm I wanted to distinguish them from one another.  To do this I added black "stitching" with a Kiss Nail Artist Fine Art Pen in Black.  Here's a before and after:

Before "Stitching"

After "Stitching"

My boyfriend said that my nails reminded him of the movie A Nightmare Before Christmas but I think my nails are much too colorful to be compared to such a dark film. 

I swear I moisturize more than it looks like in this photo!

I'm pretty bummed that I have to take it off after only a day and a half of wear but I must look "business professional" for a big meeting and these nails don't fit that look.

I want candy!

This week's theme from the Polish-aholics Anonymous group on Facebook is candy inspired nails.  I'm not big on candy right now; I'm supposed to be on a diet!  Who am I kidding, I'm always big on candy yum yum yum.

When I looked for inspiration for this manicure I looked on Google, where I got many hits for candy corn.  Candy corn, while delicious, I think is better suited for a manicure in October.

I next looked for inspiration on the lovely website Pinterest.  While browsing through Pinterest I ran across these two gems: M&M manicure and M&M nails.M&Ms! - Perfect.

By painting M&Ms on my nails it gave me an opportunity to use some polishes in my collection that I haven't used before, such as Zoya Jancyn, Zoya Sookie, and the Finger Paints polishes.  I've never used Finger Paint polishes before but they applied very nicely.

The colors I used for this were (base) Zoya Snow White, (blue) Zoya Robyn, (red) Zoya Sooki, (green) Finger Paints Chrysanthe-Mum's the Word, (orange) Zoya Jancyn, (brown) Sinful Colors Nirvana, (yellow) Finger Paints Art Nouv-Yellow, (iconic M) Stripe Rite White.

Wild for You Pt. 2

This is a scheduled post because I'm in China!

In keeping with the nail polish theme of the week, as determined by the Polish-aholics Anonymous group on Facebook, and since today is Wednesday, and On Wednesdays We Wear Pink, this is a pink zebra manicure.  My cuticles look especially horrible in these photos.  I spent the day cleaning before I painted my nails and they're terribly dried out.  :(

I used Sally Hanson Complete Salon Manicure I Pink I Can as the base with Konad Special Polish in White stamped on top using M.A.S.H. plate m57.

Wild for You Pt. 1

This is a scheduled post because I'm in China!

The nail polish theme of the week, as determined by the Polish-aholics Anonymous group on Facebook, is Animal Print/Animals.  Not normally my thing but that's the reason I joined this group - to try nail polish designs outside of my comfort zone.  This manicure did just that and helped me to get better at stamping.

These pictures are of my right hand because it wasn't until the time I'd done 4/5ths of my left hand I had stamping with this pattern and color under control.  I started with Bundle Monster plate BM-221 but the leopard image wasn't transferring well to the stamp.  I switched to M.A.S.H. plate m57 with much better results.  Now the image that was transferring to the stamp and my nail was showing up clearly but there was a lot of nail polish on the stamp itself.  This caused several of the spots to become closed circles and smudge when I rolled the stamp across my nail.  If I gently rolled (little pressure) the stamp across the design and my nail it was able to transfer beautifully.  Too much pressure and it was smudged and dark and ugly.

I'm guessing this is a function of the engraved plate and of the Konad Special Polish in Black that I was using. I usually stamp with white, black is just too dark for me plus it's a pain to clean up!

The bad hand - my spots all smudged.

Successful Fauxnaud - I have spots!

The base color is Zoya Crystal with Konad Special Polish in Black stamped on top using M.A.S.H. plate m57.