Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Zoya BOGO!

I just love Zoya! They have some of the most unique polishes, great customer service and are always having amazing sales! I just read on Xsparkage's blog about a BOGO Zoya is having for their new summer collections and had to take advantage of it. Basically, you can purchase up to 7 polishes from the 3 new collections, Summertime, Sunshine and ModMatte, and get 7 polishes for free! Plus, shipping is only $2! Xsparkage already has on her blog the info you need to take advantage of this so just go to her blog and read about it if you are interested. I purchased the entire Sunshine collection excluding the green polish, Apple. I just wasn't so much into that one, but I think the rest of the collection is super gorgeous. I hope you all take advantage of this, I believe the offer expires on 3/26/11.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

St. Patty's day mani's! (pic heavy)

Happy St. Patrick's day everyone! I have two St. Patrick's day inspired manicures for you today. My family is Irish so of course we get into the whole wearing green, eating potatoes and corn beef hash thing on today- So I had incorporate some green nails into all the fun. The first mani I did last week was extremely simple. I painted 2 coats of Sally Hansex Xtreme wear in "Green with Envy" and then took a cosmetic sponge and using Sinful Colors in "Show Me the Way" sponged a gradient on the tip of the nail to darken it up and add some dimension. Finally, using a gold glitter with large and smaller sized pieces of glitter I just added that over the darker green gradient. One layer of top coat and that's all! I just loved the gold glitter, I don't usually name my manicures but I called this one my "Pot of Gold mani" because it just made me think of gold coins. Here are the results!


Here is a photo of products used

This week I've been sporting a green, white and gold holo glitter mani and I am in love with this one! I had so much fun creating it too! I used the same to green polishes as I did with the previous mani but added Orly "Green with Envy" (that's two polishes with the same name...wondering if the polish company's ran out of steam trying to name polishes?) and Orly's French Tip white polish in "White Tips''. After I did the marble and let it dry a few minutes I put one layer of Claire's Gold holo glitter top coat over the design, top coat and that was all.







And below is another photo of products used

                    I zoomed in for a blurry shot so you could better see the holo effect of the glitter
And a video of the gold holo-glittery goodness! Hope you guys enjoyed! What did you all do far St. Patty's day? If you did anything special for your nails or makeup I'd love to see pics :)

Monday, March 14, 2011

winter mani



So, today I am posting a mani inspired by winter. I decided that since winter is pretty much out of the way I wanted to get in one more winter inspired look and this is what I came up with. This look just totally reminded me of ice! I loved this look and the pictures just do it absolutely no justice whatsoever. I do have to admit this was one major pain in the ass mani. Just before I started working on it I popped in a Harry Potter movie (because I knew this was going to take a while and wanted to watch something long to keep me entertained) and was still working on it for at least 30 minutes after the movie was over! So, that should give you guys a good idea of how long it took to create this look. With that being said, I will NEVER attempt to recreate this look again, lol.

I used a silver chrome polish for my base and then added one layer of silver glitter over top of the chrome. Then I took the Sally Hansen HD polish in "Laser" and a cosmetics sponge and dabbed the blue polish over the tip of the nail. After that dried I (painstakingly) fished out the individual holographic silver glitters out of a random glitter polish and placed the pieces over where I put the blue polish. I then used these transparent holographic flakies that I purchased from Sally's Beauty Supply, and placed on the silver parts of my nails. This was what really took the longest because they are so thick and have a plastic texture to them that they don't stay down to well. I ended up having to put some clear coat on them and press each piece down with tweezers until they laid flat enough for me to add a coat of Seche Vit top coat. As with my purple and silver holo flakey mani I did a while back it again took several layers of top coat to smooth out the texture of my nails. 

I feel like from now on when I do mani's where there are so many steps involved I will try and film a video tutorial instead of just trying to explain step by step what I am doing. Especially since I failed to take step by step photos, which may have made it easier to understand what I did (but then would have made this post more picture heavy that I feel it needs to be.) So, with that being said here are the photos of the outcome of my 2011 winter manicure!


I tried so hard to capture the holographic goodness of the flakies but alas, winter=lots and lots over cast days.


Here is a video of me trying to capture the holo

Saturday, March 5, 2011

tri-color zebra print mani


It's been awhile since I've posted, but as usual life just stays crazy for me. I have several new manicures to post but for today I am going to upload my last oldie manicure I did at least 6 months ago. It probably looks similar to my tiger striped mani, and it should because it's using the same konad plate image. But the good thing about this is it shows you that there is more than one way to play around with konad. Here I panted my nails white then used a turquoise, hot pink and bright purple polish at and angle on the konad image and just stamped it onto the white polish. It didn't turn out quite as nice as I was hoping but I think it is because I didn't have any konad special polish in the colors I wanted to use, so I had to use what I already had and it just came out way to sheer. But once my collection of konad special polishes grow I will try this mani again and hopefully will get the desired results.