Berryeed Treasure

I'm not normally one for glitter topping nail polishes, I do prefer my cremes, but every now and then one comes along that I simply cannot live without.  Nalld'It Unique Polishes' Berryeed Treasure was one of those polishes that upon seeing I immediately needed to get my hands one it.  This polish came my way via the lovely Candice from Mommy Does her Nails (and Mommy does Design if you're in the market for a design solution).

I paired Berryeed Treasure up with Zoya Caitlin and Sinful Colors Savage in order to show it off for you today.  I'm using two coats each of Caitlin and Savage, and a mix of one to two coats of Berryeed Treasure on top.

Berryeed Treasure consists of large white hex glitter, medium teal, purple, and white hex glitter, medium square black glitter, tiny white hex glitter, white and purple bar glitter all suspended in a deep purple and magenta base.  I will say that every time I google "Berryeed Treasure" I find formulas that vary from mine.  For example I don't think my bottle has the same quantity of small white hex glitters that Let The Have Polish has, and as far as I can tell mine doesn't contain the large square black glitter that Hooked On Varnish has.  That's okay though, of the different formulas I've seen I like mine the best!

Blue Holo and Dots

I've been trying to use more of my untired polishes lately.  This manicure uses three polishes from my untried collection :)

I started off with three coats of Sinful Colors Cinderella which was disappointingly streaky.  I really just wanted to use Cinderella as a base color but it was so streaky I kept piling on coat after coat.  I wanted to use a light blue as my base because I had KleanColor Holo Blue burning a hole in my untried box. KleanColor Holo Blue (my first KleanColor!) definitely did not disappoint in the stinkiness department - it smelled awful.  Haha.  I've always heard that KleanColors smelled bad but I still wasn't prepared for how terrible it was.  The formula on Holo Blue wasn't bad but it was pretty sheer so I used three coats to get to the level you see on my nails.  Finally, because I couldn't leave a good manicure alone, I stamped the dot design from Konad plate m60 on top using Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Brisk Blue.

St. Patrick's Day Recap

Happy Belated St. Patrick's Day!

I have two St. Patrick's Day manicures to show you.  The first one I had high hopes for but it ended up just not looking like I wanted.  It was a good in theory, poor in execution manicure.

For this I used two coats of OPI Stranger Tides, then alternating rows of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Lickety-Split Lime and Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Mint Sprint.  Mint Sprint looks more like teal than a true deep green but I think the colors compliment each well.

Cha Cha Cha was a polish I loved from a couple of days ago so when my dotting manicure chipped I turned back to it plus a nail polish that I seriously wore all of March 2011.  I wanted a bit more bling for the actual St. Patrick's Day so these dots came off and glitter went on.  I didn't get a picture until after the festivities were over so some of the nails suffered causalities.

I loved how sparkly this was!  It was two coats of China Glaze Cha Cha Cha and three coats of Sinful Colors Call You Later.  Call You Later isn't a hungry glitter, one coat of Seche Vite and it was smooth.

Week 6: Half-Moon Manicure

The challenge for week six of the 52 Week Challenge was to create a half-moon manicure.  I've done a couple of half-moon designs before but this time I wanted to spice it up.  I originally saw this style of half-moon from Colores de Carol and thought it would be perfect for me to try.  Then I ran across this funky design from the Daily Nail and fell in love.  You see, I'd stopped stamping because I was bored of using just black, white, and silver.  I want to start doing more stamping but with colors!  Lots and lots of colors!

For this manicure I used Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Choco-Latte as the base, then I stamped plate m57 on top using Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Black Out.  I mixed a drop of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Whirlwind White with two drops of Sinful Colors Nirvana to make the light brown spots.  This I topped with a light coat of Out the Door.  Next up came the hole reinforcement tape and four coats of Zoya America.  My word, I didn't realize how much the spots would still show through with that many coats of America.  And you can still seem them (from the distance the photos were taken, not from normal viewing distance).  A final topping of Seche Vite and everything was beautiful!  This was much more involved than my previous half-moon designs but a good way for me to unwind after a very stressful week.

Speaking of stress...you think you have gotten rid of a terrible habit and then eight hours of testing later you discover that no, that habit is still there.  Le sigh.  I've got short nails now but I'm hoping they'll grow fast.

Be sure to check out what others have done for this challenge by visiting their blogs:

LizMarie at I'm Simply Complex • Jenna at I'm Still Thinking... • Caitlin at Addicted 2 Nails • Sarah at PrncessSarah02 • Charlotte at Charlotte's Nails :) • Shally at Polished & Not Quite Put Together • Rachel-Karina at Polished Criminails • Liz at Nothing But Nail Polish • Fun With My Nail Polish • Operation: Nail It! • Lauriestrodes Fun With Nails • Square Polish • Only Always Soccermom  • Hurr Did, Nails Did • Olivia Writes • The Dragon Lady • Kaki at Glitter Obsession • Isa at IsaBella's World • Gypsy at Gypsy's Glitter • Jackie at MeMa's Mani's  • Lissa at Lissa's Nail Blog

Day 21: Inspired by a COLOR

Welcome to the most ambiguous day of the Longest 31 Day Challenge (stretches over two years now!).  I arrived at this design in a very round about way. I had my significant other pick a color (he chose blue), then I started wanting to do a gradient sponging of different blues and maybe stamp something on top.  What I ended up doing was using three coats of Sinful Colors Gorgeous as my base, then stamping Bundle Monster plate BM-212 on top with Konad Special Polish in Black, followed by alternating diagonal rows of dots of Zoya Charla and Zoya Ivanka.

How does this fit with the theme of "Inspired by a Color"?  Let's just say that I was inspired by the aqua-green-teal colors in Gorgeous to add Charla and Ivanka.  I'm glad I was - the colors compliment each other so well and this design turned out much better than I had originally hoped for.

One of the perks of photographing my right hand instead of my left is that I can experiment with my final design on my left before coming up with a design I like.  For example, my pinkie and ring finger on my left hand just have Zoya Charla dots.  My index finger has alternating straight rows of dots, and my middle finger has diagonal rows of dots.  Since everything is in the same color family, the differences aren't noticeable from a distance and don't bother me.

And once more!

Day 1: RED nails

I'm biting the bullet and starting the 31 Day Nail Challenge.  I've put it off for two months now and it would probably keep putting it off until absolutely no one was still participating.  I know there are still a few stragglers making their way through the challenge still so I'm not alone :)

Day One is red nails and when I see red I think of apples.  For my manicure I used Zoya America as my primary color red.  For the apple accents I used Sinful Colors Nirvana for the stem, Zoya Shawn for the leaf, and Zoya Snow White as the apple's "shine."

I think it's pretty cute, what do you think?

Mint Apple adorned with Argyle

I recently picked up Sinful Colors Mint Apple.  It's a sheer turquoise duochrome color with silver flecks...or are they gold?  Either way it's amazing.  Beautiful color and at $1.99 (or less on sale!) at Walgreens it's quite the steal.  Still sheer at one coat, solidly opaque at two coats.

It's lovely on its own but I couldn't resist dressing it up with the argyle shape on Konad plate m60 using Konad Special Polish in white.  You can see there is a couple of spots (ring finger, pointer finger) where I dragged the white polish while applying the top coat but it's not noticeable from a distance.

I don't have many colors I would call a favorite, but this is definitely a new favorite of mine.

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.

An Updated Look

There is no better way to extend the life of a manicure than to stamp a pretty design over it.  That's what I did to my Sinful Colors Savage manicure - stamped M.A.S.H. plate m64 on top of it using Konad Special Polish in Black.

Yeesh, I thought I put on plenty of cuticle moisturizer before I took this photo, apparently not.  Sorry about that.

Love

I'm in love with the color Savage from Sinful Colors! I'm also totally bummed that I can't capture the true color of it with my camera.  I've taken a picture outdoors, indoors (in every room of my apartment) and still nothing comes close to truly capturing the dark teal color.

A quick internet search revealed that I'm not the only one with troubles, there are plenty of Google image results that look just like the blue my camera thinks this polish is.  I'm surprised that most of the people out there say that this color is matte - mine is definitely not.  Perhaps the label on my bottle is wrong.

Thats SO Fresh's picture of Savage isn't as dark as mine:

Creative and Polished's picture is probably the closest to how mine appears:

I didn't realize it till after I'd done my nails that I've used Savage before as a base for a paisley manicure.  That however, was before I became acquainted with the art of cleaning up (or moisturizing) after a manicure so please ignore the polish everywhere.  The color here isn't accurate either.

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.

More Paisley

Painted my nails to match my shirt today.

The base is Sinful Colors Savage with Konad white stamped over it, design from plate m-60.

Dotting

Tonight I attempted my first ever non-simply nail polish job: dotting. I copied this design from The Daily Nail, called What's the Mod-der?, and while it doesn't look as perfect as I'd have liked I didn't have that large of a pallet to work with. 

I used Avon French White Tip as the base, Wet 'n' Wild Black Creme for the "flowers," Zoya Robyn, Zoya Mira, Avon Abstract Emerald, and Sinful Colors Cream Pink for the centers of the flowers, and Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat for the top.