Easter Manicure

It sure has been awhile, so let's get right to it. I'm calling this my Easter manicure. 3 coats of China Glaze Sunshine Pop (this was a bit streaky and hard to work with, but not as difficult as most yellows I've used) and a coat of New York Summer Glitter in Angel Dream. I really love this glitter polish; I believe I picked it up at one of the e-tailers, and I've used it several times which says a lot considering all of the polish I own. I've never seen this brand in stores, though.

Hope everyone has a great Easter. Until next time!

Sparkle!

I know, I've been gone forever. I've really got no excuse other than life in general. I really have a lot of respect for bloggers who keep up with their blogs consistently. It's not easy! But anyway, let's get to the polish. This is Color Club Sugarplum Fairy from their new Christmas collection. I love love love this polish. It is so beautiful in the sunlight, it sparkles like crazy.

If you were at all considering any polishes from this collection, get this one! The others are pretty, too, but this one is the best in my opinion. Until next time...hope you all are doing well!

OPI Silver Shatter!

I got OPI Silver Shatter in the mail today and had to try it right away, so here it is over Revlon Royal. My nails aren't that pretty right now, but I love it!

Essence Humpty Dumpty

Hi everyone! Hope you had a great Easter...hopefully better than mine as I've been so sick for the last four days. I'm finally starting to feel better now, so I decided to take some quick pictures of my nails.

I have never seen any of the limited edition Essence collections at any Ulta stores near me before, but the last time I was there, I spotted the Fairy Tale collection. This is Humpty Dumpty, a sort of slate-gray foil that's pretty shimmery in the light. It's nothing too special, but I do like it. Also, I cut my nails down again. I can grow them fairly long, then one always breaks on me. :(

China Glaze Sea Spray & 2030

Finally decided to stamp my nails. Haven't done this in awhile! I used China Glaze Sea Spray as the base and stamped using Konad plate m83 with China Glaze 2030, which is one of my favorite stamping polishes. I like how it turned out! But please ignore my broken pinkie nail...it's slowly growing back.

Thank you!

Hi everyone! I just wanted to drop by and say thank you and welcome to my new followers! My nails have been in quite a state lately, hence no new posts. I actually just cut them all down, and I'm starting over. And honestly I've been so busy lately that my nail polish often stays on all week and gets all chipped and ugly before I get around to changing it. Sad, I know. Also, the nail on my index finger has developed this mysterious ridge in it that wasn't there before. I assume it will grow out but it's kind of weird.

Anyway! Thank you all and welcome and I will be posting soon!

Addicted to Crackle

I know, more crackle. You can't turn around without seeing it somewhere lately. I really love these, though. They usually turn out pretty cool looking and it's so easy! This one is China Glaze Broken Hearted, the pink crackle, over Orly Shine. I got this idea for the pink over the silver from xsparkage on youtube, and I love how it turned out.

Konad with Holographic Polish

I have two designs today. The first one is from last month using Essence Just Rock It! and China Glaze DV8 with a design from Konad plate m63. I really like this design and find myself using it often.

The next one, which I'm wearing now, started with a base of L.A. Girl Vinyl Record from the Disco Brights collection. I decided it looked perfect for stamping, so I used plate m57 with China Glaze LOL.

I love this leopard print design for some reason. This one and the one above are designs I just keep coming back too. Blue is my favorite polish color if you couldn't tell, and holographic polishes are great for stamping; they work beautifully. I also love how bright this is. I'm tired of winter and snow - I'm ready for spring!

ELF Konad & Nail Stickers

Hope everyone had a great new year! I have been pretty lazy about polishing my nails lately, but with all the new spring collections coming out I think I'll have to get back on it. I can't wait for the new China Glaze collections and the Zoya spring collection looks awesome, too.

A couple of new Konad plates came out this month. I ordered them from wowsocool.com earlier this week and they showed up today (so fast!). I also got the Konad stamping polish in yellow. So I decided to use it with plate m82 over ELF Royal Purple. This is actually my first time using an ELF polish. I got this one in a set of three at Big Lots of $2.50 and it's pretty nice. Then I used a couple of small gems to accent the flowers.

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Lately I've been seeing nail sticker wraps everywhere from all sorts of brands and I wanted to try them out.

I found the Broadway Nails and the Art Club Glam Nails at Meijer. I think the Art Club ones were under $5 and the Broadway ones maybe $5 or $6. Both had a fairly good selection. I found the Sally Hansen ones at CVS and there was a huge selection of really cool designs, however, these were $10! I had some CVS extra care bucks which made these only $5, but I don't think I would have paid $10. We'll see how they work out; I will post when I use them! The bottle is something I also found at CVS and decided to try - Sally Hansen Vita Surge Cuticle Gel. My cuticles are so dry lately and this stuff looks promising. I really like that the applicator isn't a brush but more of a felt tip like a lip gloss applicator that makes it easier to massage the oil into the cuticles. I just got it today so I'll update when I have a verdict on how well it works.

Zoya Nova

I have been so busy lately with the holidays, work, and classes that I have barely been changing my polish! I've been wearing OPI Lucky Lucky Lavender since Saturday (and it's holding up really well). But this post is about a polish I wore last week, Zoya Nova. It's a glitter polish, pink, and very pretty but it's not my favorite. This is three coats, dried really quickly as glitter polishes usually do. I only had to use one coat of Seche Vite over this polish. It wasn't very gritty at all. Nice.

Milani Gold Glitz

I'm back! I think my broken nail has finally gotten to the point where I can start posting again. In the time since my last post, I went through almost two packages of band-aids keeping that nail covered up. It looked awful and it was pretty painful, too.

Anyway! In my last post I showed two of the new Milani glitters. Since then, I went back and bought all of the rest of the line except for the red one...and I will probably pick that one up the next time I'm at the drugstore because I love these so much. They claim to be "one coat" glitters, and let me tell you - they are! The one I'm wearing today is called Gold Glitz. I have two coats on, but I could have easily gotten away with one. The only thing I don't like about these is that they are gritty. I used two coats of Seche Vite over this to smooth it out, and it seemed to do the trick.

So pretty and sparkly. If you can find these (I found the display at CVS), and you like glitter, you have to take a look at these. I'm dreading removing this...but I think it's worth it!

Party Hearty Dupe

I wanted to share this dupe for China Glaze's Party Hearty in case anyone is still on the lookout for that one. When I went to order it online, it was sold out and I couldn't find it anywhere in stores, so I just decided to pass on it. But today, shopping at CVS, I saw what appears to be an exact dupe by Milani called Gems. The one on the left, obviously:

The one on the right is just a chunky gold glitter called Gold. These are from some glitter collection that must be new - I think it was called Rock Star Glitter or something to that effect. They had a few other nice glitters, too, but nothing really unique besides the Party Hearty dupe. Here's a close up of that one; click the picture to see it more detail.

And here is the reason I haven't been posting:

Yeah. My nails are currently in a disastrous condition. It started Wednesday when I pretty much ripped the nail on my index finger clean off after hooking it on the washer lid. Then my middle nail snapped. Then the index nail on my right hand broke, too. It's probably going to take a month or more for the bandaged index finger nail to grow back, which is so frustrating. In the meantime, I'll try to keep posting...maybe nail wheel swatches or posts like this about polish dupes. Of course this would happen right after I get this nice light box. But hey, they will grow back eventually and my nails usually grow pretty quickly so I'm lucky for that. Oh, the polish I have on in this is Ulta Spice Drop. It came in one of those little kits that are usually five mini polishes for $9.99. This one was Too Faced Loves Ulta, I think. It's a nice pink foil, really sparkles in the sunlight.

Sally Hansen + Zoya + light box!

Okay, since the daylight savings time change, it gets dark around here by 5:30. Since I don't even get home from work before then, I basically never see the light. Therefore, most of my pictures get taken inside in low lighting and they don't look very nice. Pretty frustrating. Luckily, my brother made me an awesome light box for my birthday so from here on out pictures should be much better!

Today I used Sally Hansen Plum Burst (from the Xtreme Wear line) and then stamped over it with Zoya Penny using Konad plate m78. Plum Burst is three coats. The formula on this was pretty hard to work with; thick and gloopy, but it evened out after I put on Seche Vite top coat. Penny is a great polish for stamping and I like the purple/copper combination.

I flipped this picture, that's why the text is backwards. Also, please ignore my cuticles...I don't know what to with them. I use cuticle creams and oils all the time but they still look awful. Does anyone have an suggestions for awesome cuticle creams besides Burt's Bees and Lush Lemony Flutter?

NOX Twilight and Sinful Colors

Long time no blog! I hate that I've neglected this so much over the past couple of weeks. I'll just forgo the usual excuses and get right to the polish (and hopefully back to a normal posting schedule).

I was surprised when I found this NOX Twilight polish in Poseidon at Meijer. I couldn't find a display, just this one polish stuck in amongst the Sinful Colors. I looked everywhere, but to no avail. I had wanted to try this brand, so I picked it up. I'm not a Twilight fan, but the polishes looked interesting and I liked the bottle. This particular one is okay; the application was so-so. I used three coats, but probably should have done four. Dry time was decent. I decided it was missing something, so I layered Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty over it.

Overall, it's alright, but I definitely want to try some of the other shades so I think I might hit up another Meijer next weekend and see if I can find the display! And, as you can see, I cut my nails down. They were getting super long. I swear by Nail Tek Foundation II for long healthy nails and plan to do a post about it soon!

China Glaze Ick-A-Body

Happy Halloween! For my Halloween manicure, I used China Glaze Ick-A-Body. Probably a pretty popular choice this year. It's a glittery orange in a really dark murky green almost black base. Perfect Halloween color! This is three coats with a top coat.

Color Club Jewel of a Girl

I kind of didn't want to post this one because the color is so hard to capture but I have nothing else at the moment so here it is. This is Color Club Jewel of a Girl and it looks like it might be brown in these photos but it's actually several colors depending on the light. I had no natural light for this, but under natural light this color reminds me of black cherries or black plums. See - it looks nothing like that in the pic. Really hard color to photograph! But if you enlarge the pic, you can get a better idea of the color in the bottle.

So yeah. I don't love this polish, but the color is work appropriate so I thought I'd try it. Probably won't wear it again, though.

China Glaze Endurance

This polish if from China Glaze's most recent collection for Breast cancer. This is three coats. Applied great, dried fast - good color for a good cause.

Sinful Colors Daddy's Girl

This is one of those much talked about polishes that I didn't get around to buying until recently. It's Sinful Colors Daddy's Girl. This one is a purple with pink sparkles at one angle, but if you look closer it almost looks like it has a coat of a much milder version of Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure over the top. Sort of a flake effect. It's a pretty unique color, but I wasn't too happy with the formula. It was really runny and flooded my cuticles. This is three coats and a bit of a VNL shows in the light, but it's not so bad in person.

I put this on Tuesday night and it's holding up well; only one small chip. I usually tend to change my nail polish every other day, but I haven't had time recently, so I'm definitely keeping a mental note of polishes that hold up longer than others.

Also, I wanted to add that I had planned on doing Halloween themed nails all week next week, but I just found out that we will be hosting the FDA for an audit of some of our clinical studies at work all week, so now I'm going to have to make sure to keep my polish work appropriate. I work in an office and we can generally wear whatever we want no problem, but this totally would be the one time of the year we have to keep it conservative, of course. Anyway, I will still have Halloween nails next weekend regardless, it just won't be the week of fun nails I had hoped for.

Nina Ultra Pro Hey Sailor

This is the first time I've tried one of these Nina Ultra Pro polishes from Sally's. This one is a navy blue called Hey Sailor. Really nice color (I love blues - probably my number one favorite polish color), and I was pleased with how nicely it applied in two coats. It took awhile to dry, though. Still, a decent polish for only $2.99 and I'll probably try some other colors the next time I go to Sally's.

Zoya Charla

When I ordered the Fire & Ice collection from Zoya, I also picked up this beautiful polish - Charla. It has several dupes (the one from the new Orly collection and OPI Catch Me In Your Net) but I don't have either of those so I can't compare. This one, however, is lovely.

It is late and I'm too exhausted to say much else. I began school this week and full time school plus full time work equals a very tired Sara. So glad it's the weekend...goodnight!