Glam Polish - 1500 Follower Giveaway!

Glam Polish is having a giveaway to celebrate hitting 1,500 followers, and what's she giving away?

Seriously? Seriously! China Glaze's soon-to-be-released collection, On Safari. You know you want it. Click here or on the picture to head over to Glam Polish's page and enter! :)

Scrapbooked Talons

A while back, V and I went wandering through Hobby Lobby thinking, "What can we put on our nails?" A previous post showed one result of that trip, with embroidery floss. For this manicure, I pulled out another item we purchased on that trip, from the scrapbooking section. These decals were intended to be placed on page corners, but I decided to trim them down to decorate my nails instead. ^_^

First, for a base, I did a gradient with two new polishes I just picked up at Walgreen's the other day: Sinful Colors Zeus and Neptune. Honestly, I could have kept this as a beautiful manicure all by itself! The two colors go sooo well together - I described it to one friend as the horizon just after the sun has gone down. You still have that pale purple color along the horizon, and the farther up you look, the darker blue it gets until you start to see the sparkle of the stars shining.

One thing I am annoyed by is my inability to clean up well at the moment. I'm out of pure acetone, and I just can't seem to clean up as well with polish remover. And while I can put on straight polish well enough to not need too much clean-up, I did this gradient by putting the two colors next to each other on a plastic palette, picking them both up with a fan brush, and then painting sideways across my nail. The sponging effect has its place, but when you want a smooth blending of colors, you can't get better than painting them together with a fan brush.

I actually did this manicure twice. My first attempt with the stickers didn't come out nearly this well. I had to figure out how best to trim them to fit my nails. Also, I need to buy some of The Best Glue Ever that Robin Moses is always touting, because these stickers just don't react well to top coat. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, they were! Came out looking gorgeous, though, and everybody who saw them thought they were awesome. :) This first picture was the best one I got for color accuracy, but I included a shot of my other hand as well.

Glitter Obsession's 1000-Follower Giveaway!

Wow, 1000 followers. I can't imagine. But I really like the blog, so it's not that surprising! :) She's having a four-prize giveaway, and the prizes are awesome! Click here or the picture below to check it out:

Week 19 - Floral Mani

This week's theme from the 52-Week Challenge is "floral". I glanced through my Pinterest nail art board for inspiration, and noticed that I've pinned a lot of french mani's with flowers on them. And thus today's nail art was born.

I started with one coat of China Glaze Fast Track, which would the perfect nude to match my skintone, if I put three coats on. With just one coat, it's very sheer, with that gorgeous sparkle shimmer throughout. Taped off my nail ends and added Tree Hugger across the tips. Once that was dry, I pulled out my handy dandy dotting tool (you know you have kids when whenever you hear the phrase, "Handy dandy," it's in Joe's voice in your head!) and first added white dots in Milani Whitest White (my go-to polish for one-coat solid whiteness), then yellow dots (China Glaze Solar Power) with my next-smaller dotting tool, and finally (with the larger dotter again) a single dot of white in the center of the flower. I added a few curving stripes in Sinful Colors All About You, added a nice layer of Seche Vite, and plunked a nice yellow rhinestone in the center dot of each flower. Add a second coat of SV once that's all dry, and you get this:

I just really loved the colors and how well they worked together in this manicure, and I've gotten a lot of compliments today. My husband said it had an Oriental feel, while one of my co-workers said it looked "modern". What do you think of it? I really like this next picture of it because it shows off that base shimmer of Fast Track.

I will indulge in some photo spam after the cut, so if you'd like to see a few different angles and shots of my phabulous phalanges, feel free to click through. :)

Gorgeous Giveaways - Varnished Valkyrie!

That's such an awesome name for a blog: Varnished Valkyrie. I really love it. ^_^ She started this giveaway when she had 62 followers, and she's up to 410 now! But time is running out! The giveaway is almost over, so if you want a chance to enter to win Mattese Elite Revolution, Warpaint Beauty Matte Top Coat, China Glaze Techno...

Oh, and this ol' thing:

Click on the picture or here to enter her giveaway! And of course you need to spend some time browsing her archives if you aren't already a follower, or you'll be missing out on a lot of pretty paint, cute nail art, and well-worded prose. But hurry, because you're almost out of time!

Out of order week 17: Earth Apprection

This is what happens when you ask your husband to go through your swatch sticks and pick one or two colors for you to make a manicure out of. He picked two magnetics and a matte green, leaving me to try and figure out how to make a coherent mani design out of that! At least I have three different magnet designs to choose from, which helps. I also decided that this would qualify for my skipped challenge of week 17 - Earth Appreciation. It's not only green and brown, both beautiful nature colors, it employs a magnetic field to create this design, part and parcel of the necessary balance of our Earth's ecosystem.

The colors Mr. IJAH chose were Nabi magnetics Cappucinno and Green, and Zoya Veruschuka (aka Veruschka, as my bottle label says one thing and their website says another.) I used Nabi Green on all my nails except my ring fingers, on which I used Cappucinno. I used an arrow design magnet, though as I occasionally get it off-center, it sometimes looks more like a wave, which is what prompted me to use an angled french tip for the Veruschuka.

I put Veruschuka down the sides of my thumbs, which I think really accented the wavy stripes of the magnetic polish, and I did arrows on my ring fingers. The two pictures above didn't show how striking the Cappucinno came out (you can barely see the striping in those pictures, but it was very obvious and pretty in real life) but the picture below is a little blurry, which helps show the gorgeous sparkle of the Cappucinno and it also shows the striping a bit more clearly.

A bonus manicure! My son, J, is 5. He doesn't ask for his nails to be painted as often as his big sister does (she's 8, and B does her own nails more often than not), but he just came over and asked me to paint his nails the other day. I asked him what design he wanted, and he requested lightsabers. I was very sad to tell him that I didn't think I could draw those on his little bitty nails very well, but suggested we do a gradient from white to blue, instead, to indicate the lightsaber's colored blade. He thought that was an acceptable alternative, so we did some sponging with Sally Hansen's White On and Blue Me Away, which resulted in this:

J can sit still well enough to get his nails painted, but there will never be a time you can get him to hold still well enough for cleanup afterward, so he made do with the polish around his nails. (Also, it is impossible to paint a 5-year-old boy's nails neatly in the first place, even if we hadn't been doing sponging! :) He was very happy with the end result, though, and he wanted his picture taken just like Mommy does. Now, this is a nail art blog, not a social activism one, so if you don't want to hear my little segue into gender issues, feel free to skip the rest of this post, as you've already seen all the pretty pictures. But I've gotten comments from time to time, and I've seen a lot more comments to other people on the web, about allowing little boys to wear nail polish. I get a lot of comments about the fact that his hair is long, because people initially assume he's a girl, and they get embarrassed when they realize after the fact that he's got a boy's name, or they hear us refer to him as "him" rather than "her". (No, we don't bother pointing out the error to strangers, since we don't consider it that important that other people are well informed of his gender. He thinks it's funny when they think he's a girl, so there's no stress or trauma there.) Yes, my son has long hair. That's by his choice. He wanted his hair cut a few months ago, and I asked him whether he wanted short hair or just wanted the hair out of his eyes (he wouldn't let me cut it at all for a few years, and I had to reassure him I wouldn't be cutting it off each time I had to trim it *grin*), and he got all excited about the idea that he could get the hair out of his eyes and still have long hair! So yeah, he has long hair and bangs. Yes, in American culture, I'm not surprised when people assume he's a girl, because it's common in our culture for boys to have short hair and girls to have long - and at 5 years of age, he doesn't have any gender-specific characteristics for them to make a clear assessment other than hair. But while we're not on a righteous crusade against gender stereotypes in our household (I never got annoyed at my mother-in-law for consistently buying only pink and purple clothing for our daughter, because B likes pink and purple), what I am crusading for is for the kids to learn that it's okay to be themselves and to grow up being willing to stand up for their own ideas of what they like and control over their own bodies. I do argue over terminology in our house - having long hair or painting his nails does not make J "look like a girl". He's a boy, and therefore any way he chooses to look, still looks like a boy. I don't make my daughter play with cars or guns. I don't make my son play with dolls or nail polish. But I think it's just as okay that he loves Legos, lightsabers, and long hair and nail polish. It's fine for B to play with dolls, wear makeup on occasion, and like learning about guns. It's also perfectly okay in our house for B to be a cross between Princess Barbie and Wednesday Addams. We don't blink if she comes down in pink and lace on one day, and black and red the next. You never know if she's going to paint flowers, butterflies, or blood drops on her nails. And that's okay. She's our Princess Wednesday Barbie Addams, and we love her in all her gothy sparkles. And if J decides he wants to wear camo pants and painted nails, that's fine with me.

Candy Green

My husband likes to watch car and motorcycle shows. Building, remodeling, jazzing them up - he's very mechanically inclined and he likes learning new things. Plus it's just fun to watch other people doing things you wish you could. He even recorded a show he saw a listing for that he thought I might like to see because it was on painting. Well, painting a car and doing nail art are two very different things, but regardless, I did enjoy watching it. The topic was "candy" paint jobs, what exactly that was, and how it was done. It's more of a technique than a color, you see, and it involves putting down a layer of metallic flake paint or just a metallic color, and then layering multiple layers of a sheer color overtop of that. How many layers you put on determines how deep the color is, while still allowing the metallic shimmer to shine through. We both decided at the end of it that, while interesting, the technique really couldn't be applied to nails unless you were using an airbrush.

Until I was swatching Sinful Colors San Francisco on my swatching sticks. I showed it to him and he thought that would make a really good candy color, which got me to playing. I pulled out my practice rounds and we tried multiple different colors under it (two silvers, a gold, and several different glitters), and I decided that I'd come very close to the metal flake version by using two coats of Essie Set in Stones, which makes as near opaque of glitter as I care to go, under three coats of San Francisco. I prefer the candies with a solid metallic underneath, rather than the flake, but none of my metallic polishes did the job. I'd love to try this again with a Layla Mirror Effect polish!

I think if I ever try this one again, I'll be more careful about keeping the underlayer of glitter from going over the cuticle outline, because they're nearly impossible to get out of there when doing cleanup. But personally, I think it came out gorgeous. This was done on V's nails, and she had given me free reign that day, with no suggestions on what she wanted on her nails. She looked verrrrrry skeptical after that second layer of Set in Stones, though, because while she likes glitter, she's NOT a bling sort of woman, and that was very bling! I assured her it wouldn't be so bright when we were finished, but she didn't look like she was too sure about that. ^_^ She was pretty happy with the end result, though.