Golden Rays and Lubu Heels

I came home the other day to a package in the mail. New polish! Woot! I love getting packages from my exchange group, and I love using new polishes in manicures! I received three Joe Fresh polishes (my first!) and three China Glazes, and the first one I put on my nails is my brand new China Glaze Lubu Heels. Soo pretty but so hard to photograph the rich red shimmer! You can expect to see all my new polishes over the next few weeks, as I don't put polishes into my polish shelf until after I've used them once. :)

On my thumbs and ring fingers I started with one coat of Sinful Colors Unicorn, topped by a coat of Sinful Colors This Is It. The rest of the fingers got two coats of Lubu Heels, and a coat of Seche Vite topped them all off. Then I used striping tape on the accent fingers and added a thick coat of Lubu Heels before removing the tape to reveal crisp gold rays. Some rhinestone accents in contrasting colors and it was ready to go.

Lubu Heels has been on my wishlist for a while now. I love the rich deep color. This is one of those manicures where I keep stopping what I'm doing and wiggling my fingers around just to look at the beautiful shimmer and sparkle on my nails!

MSMD - White Roses on Green and Black

It's Monkey See, Monkey Do Monday and I chose to copy this absolutely gorgeous manicure from Raggio di Luna.

I love all of her nail art, I really do. Even this manicure shows how much better she is than me at leaving empty space, and it makes all of her designs look so much more elegant than mine. She shows up on my Pinterest board a lot for inspiration.

To copy her amazing design, I managed to make an all-Sinful Colors manicure. I started with a base of Mint Apple, and my black curve was done with Secret Admirer. The roses are Snow Me White, and I painted the leaves in white as well, then covered the white with San Francisco and added a swoop of Call You Later to each leaf.

Raggio di Luna is also much better than me at photographing her nails. :)

Check out these other blogs to see what they came up with for Monkey See Monkey Do Monday!

April Tri-Polish Challenge: Day 4

I was so sad. I love it when my nails get long enough that I have to type with my nails rather than my finger pads. My best friend V trims her nails when they threaten to get that long, but I actually enjoy the click-clack. I'm easily amused! So I was very very sad when my index fingernail decide to peel off right at the quick this past weekend. I trimmed the rest down drastically so the difference in length isn't so pitifully obvious, but there's no helping that index finger. It looks so poor and downtrodden you just feel bad for it!

Anyway, my final entry for the Tri-Polish Challenge for the month of April brings to you the only manicure of the four in which I did not use all three of the colors! I did a plastic wrap marble with China Glaze For Audrey and Sinful Colors Orange Cream. I did try it with my Wet N Wild Sunny Side Up on a few accent nails, but it just looked...ugh. It was seriously icky. You don't even wanna know.

After that I used my largest dotting tool to make white scallops along the edges with my standard Milani Whitest White, then used the smallest and second-smallest dotting tips to make an attempt at lacework. My off-hand looks more like random splotches on the white, but at least two people in my office nail-art-admirers recognized it as lace, so I don't feel too bad about it. :)

My 9-year-old daughter said it looks like Easter Eggs, and if you turn it the other way I think it looks like a cupcake, but whatever you want to call it, at least everyone agrees that it's pretty. :)

As much as I loved doing this, I'm glad it's over for the month. It's hard coming up with four different manicures with the same three polishes! I think I'll make sure next month there's more contrast between my three choices. Having them all be sheer pastels was awkward. Well, For Audrey wasn't sheer, but it was pastel...and the other two were very sheer which made for layering difficulties.

Next month's colors for this challenge will be blue, grey, and red. I'm looking forward to it! In the meantime, check out everybody else's fourth entry to this month's colors:

April Tri-Polish Challenge: Day 3

Here is my third entry for April's Tri-Polish Challenge, brought to us by Crumpet's Nail Tarts. We're given three colors at the start of the month, and we have to choose one polish for each color, and then create four manicures that each use at least two of those three, and at least one of the four has to use all three. We're also allowed to use white, black, gold, silver, and clear-based glitter in our creations.

April's colors are pink, turquoise, and orange, for which I chose Sinful Colors Orange Cream, China Glaze For Audrey, and Wet n Wild Sunny Side Up. For today's mani I also used Milani Whitest White and Color Club Antiquated. I'm not sure if Antiquated counts as silver or gold, as in some lights it looks one, and sometimes it looks the other. But I figure that it's close enough that I won't get a slap on the wrist for it, right? ;)

My inspiration for today's nail art came from this amazing manicure by the delightful Kathleen:

Isn't is GORGEOUS? I can't do it justice, but it certainly inspired me. I hope you enjoy my rendition of it as much as I enjoyed having it on my nails!

Now let's see all the other pretties my fellow Nail Tarts have created!

MSMD -AND- Weekly Challenge Theme

As the subject line suggests, I'm doing double duty with today's post. This is both a Monkey See, Monkey Do Monday, and it also follows this week's theme for the 52-week challenge I'm following.

I got the idea when I saw this post from Marie's Manicure Madhouse, which in her case was inspired by clothing, but I saw both cobblestones and scaly skin in it, as well. Whichever way you look at it, it's a gorgeous manicure:

This week's 52-week challenge theme is "animal print", so I combined that mani inspiration with this snakeskin print...

...and this is the manicure that came out of it!

The base color is Maybelline Color Show Twilight Rays, and the snakeskin print used OPI Wooden Shoe Like to Know? and China Glaze Kalahari Kiss.

Let me know what you think of my monkey-see-monkey-do snakeskin, and check out these other entries into today's MSMD Monday!

52-Week Challenge: 4/15 - Flowers

I've never been any good at french tips. I love the way they look on other people - very classy and sophisticated. But even if I use a tip guide to get a good line, I'll get one finger too far down or up compared to the other fingers, or something else will go wrong. It's never quite the way I want it to come out. But with this manicure, I was able to cover the worst of the issues!

The two base colors for this manicure are both brand new untried polishes for me. I've been picking up nudes here and there for the last couple of times I was polish shopping, and I've finally found one that actually looks nude on me! NYC Carrie'd Away is the underlying color of these nails, and then I used China Glaze Midtown Magic for the french tips.

After that, I drew the flowers with a detail brush and Milani Whitest White. Then I painted over the white with Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau on some flowers and China Glaze Sugar High on the others. I used more Whitest White to draw little lines for detail on the flowers, then added some Primark Beauty neon yellow for the centers.

April Tri-Polish Challenge: Day 2 - Watercolor

Here we are at my second installment for my newest challenge addition - the Tri-Polish Challenge from Crumpet's Nail Tarts! As I mentioned last post, April's colors are pink, turquoise, and orange, and the polishes I chose to use for these colors are Sinful Colors Orange Cream, China Glaze For Audrey, and Wet n Wild Sunny Side Up. I chose to use the watercolor technique for this manicure, and it came out even better than I had hoped!

If you're not familiar with the technique, what you do is start with a base of white nails (I used my normal Milani Whitest White) and seal it in with a topcoat. Then you take your polish and put tiny dots, spaced out, on your nails, then dip a brush in acetone and blot it on the polish dot. This thins out the polish and lets it spread out like watercolor paint. The end result, with this combination of polishes, is this lovely pastel fusion which reminds me of a close-up of flowers in a Monet painting. :)

As is usual for me, being the night owl that I am and working office hours, I tend to do my nails late in the evening. Imagine my surprise when I got up the next morning and realized...I'd skipped over one nail when painting one of the colors! Check out this right hand - one of these nails is not like the other! :)

Let's see what everyone else did with their three colors today...