31 Day Challenge

I've seen several bloggers participate in this challenge before. I've always wanted to participate in it myself, but I didn't want to do it alone.

Well, I won't be alone! A bunch of us got together and decided to do it together and formed a Facebook group to discuss the challenge and share ideas/photos.  Come join us if you'd like! We start tomorrow, and here's a list of days:

Hits Zeus and Dionisio

I meant to have this post up yesterday, but I have no idea where my whole day went! This is a really simple but cute mani that I did. I used Hits Zeus on my ring and thumb fingers (still is and always will be my favorite accent style) and Hits Dioniso.  I used 2 coats of each to get the full opacity that I needed. The weird thing about these polishes is that Zeus had a normal skinny-ish brush while Dionisio has a large wonky shaped brush. So strange.

After painting my nails, I decided to rummage through my nail art stickers and added a cute bow to my ring and thumb fingers (I forgot to get a picture of my thumb!) and tiny teal stars to the corners of my other nails.

Lynnderella Love, Lace, and Lilacs

Just a quick post today since I need to finish getting ready for a wedding we are going to tonight, but I did want to show you what I'm wearing.  I have on 2 coats of Sinful Colors Easy Going followed by 2 coats of Lynnderella Love, Lace, and Lilacs. I've have LLL for a while, but I was waiting for the right occasion to wear it. A wedding seemed like the perfect choice! LLL has 3 different sizes of white hexes, white bars, and tons of micro shimmer. This look isn't something I would normally wear because it's so soft and feminine, but it'll look great for tonight.

Onto some picture spam!

Green flower vines

I really love the way these nails turned out! I was craving some nail art on my nails, but I've been sorta of busy. I just made myself take the time out to do some nail art, and I'm so glad I did!

I started off with 2 coats of Barry M Emerald Green.  It's a metallic medium green.  In the picture, there is a lot of polish on my skin and that's because I tried sponging on the polish after the final coat to even out the streakiness.  It sort of worked, but I ended up with a small dent in my middle finger. No worries! I'll just cover that up later.

Next I added 2 coats of NYX Girls Emerald Forest. It's such a beautiful mixture of mostly emerald micro glitter suspended in a sheer emerald green base. It also looks like a bit of lighter green micro glitter was also used in this polish.

Finally for the nail art I used Rimmel French White Nail Tip Liner for the petals, ManGlaze Santorum for the vines (it's got a great shimmer that appears when topcoated, plus it flowed very nice for the tiny detail of the vines), and China Glaze Trendsetter for the flower centers and dots.

Nina Ultra Pro Purple-xing

I got Purple-xing quite a while ago but never used the polish despite how pretty it is.  The base of this glitter is purple. Then it's filled with a ton of different glitters: micro purple, micro silver, and the tiniest holographic hexes.  The polish goes on quite nicely and isn't a huge pain to remove despite being a glitter.  I used 2 coats in these pictures. I only used 1 coat of top coat, but I should have probably used another one.

Owl stamping

Just a quick post tonight. I used both OPI Suzi Loves Cowboys and Zoya Skylar for the base colors for this mani.  Then I stamped using Barry M Gold Foil.  I used Bundle Monster BM-309 for my pinkie, middle, and index fingers.  Sorry for the messed up owl on my middle finger. I redid him 3 times and finally gave up.  For the feathers on my ring finger and thumb, I used Mash-16.

I also apologize for my gross cuticles. I didn't realize they were so bad until I looked at these pictures.

Weird Indeed Troy & Abed

Look what happened to my poor nails! You may also have noticed in some previous pictures that my middle finger was a bit shorter too. It had a smaller break not that long ago. Between all these breaks plus a pretty bad one on my other hand, I decided to go down to nubbins and I am rockin them!

I got this polish a bit ago from an indie Facebook seller called Weird Indeed. She's got some pretty cool colors and awesome nails to go with them. She doesn't appear to have much in stock now, but I would contact her and try to get some. 

I choose Troy & Abed because it named after two characters who are best friends on mine and Andy's favorite TV show, Community. Community is an amazing show, and you should watch it if you aren't already. At the end of every episode, there is a bit extra (called an end cap apparently), and usually Troy and Abed are in it.  Here's one of my favorites:

Donut Cannibalism (sorry I can't embed it. It's from NBC.com and Blogger won't me embed from anywhere other than YouTube or my own videos).

Troy & Abed is a light blue polish with tons of shimmer and some multi-colored glitter. It goes on very nicely. I ended up using 3 coats in these pictures for full coverage. I do wish there was a bit more glitter though.

Stamped French manicure

This is a mani that was a fail at first and later turned out pretty cool. The lighting looks a bit different here because I was trying to take these pictures inside at night. I don't think I'll take them like this again.

I started off with a base coat of Zoya Loretta. It's a super sheer pink that is perfect for a French manicure. I only have it on my middle and ring fingers in this picture, and I can see a very subtle difference.  Loretta seems to have smoothed out my nails more than just the plain base coat which is on my index and pinkie fingers.

Next, I freehanded some French tips using Pure Ice Twinkle. I added a coat of Loretta on top to smooth out Twinkle and tone it down a bit.  I wasn't a super big fan of this so I decided to add some stamping.

I added the stamping using Sinful Colors Black on Black and BM 318. This looks so much better to me! I couldn't stop staring on my nails the whole time I had this on. Simple yet elegant and can be done with any colors.

Frosty nails

I wish I had some sun with I took these pictures :( Then you could see the prettiness. It was cloudy the day I took pictures, but unfortunately no rain. We're having a serious drought here in Wisconsin.  I did manage to get some sunny pictures later on phone which I posted on the bottom.

Here's how I got this awesome look.

The base is 2 coats of China Glaze Sea Spray.

Next I added on a layer of crackle using Sally Hansen Fractured Foil.  It's a silver crackle, and the crackle effect isn't super obvious. Instead, it creates this nice silver color that still lets some of the base color seep through.

Finally I put on a thin coat of Wet N Wild Blue Wants To Be A Millionaire.  I love the name of this polish as well as the song it is inspired from :)  Blue Wants To Be A Millionaire is a blue micro glitter that has a bit of a holographic effect.

See the holo-ness? I really wish I had sunlight to show you better.

The next two pictures were the ones I managed to take in the sunlight.  The second one really shows the holo effect from Blue Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Hits Hera

Hits Hera is such a beautiful holo. I love turquoise green color that is it (if you all don't know, I'm a sucker for green polish).  I didn't have to do any cleanup when I applied this polish despite the wacky brush.  This picture is also taken after 2 days of wear. I used top coat to make it last longer, and it didn't affect the holo at all.

Aubrie's Nails

Tons of you are probably wondering, who is Aubrie? She's one of the little girls I babysit. She 3 1/2 and loves to have her mom paint her nails. Well, I decided that I would do it one day since I have tons of colors and ideas for her to pick from. To make it easier for Aubrie to choose, I only brought over a few colors.


Here's what she decided for her nails.

The base color is Pure Ice Peony, and Aubrie choose several stickers for me to add on. You can't see them, but she has butterflies on her thumbs. I got a bunch of stickers on eBay for about $1.

I also did Aubrie's toes.

For her toes, I did Zoya Sookie with Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty on top for the glitter. We added some heart stickers to her toes.

Candeo Colors Orchid

Orchid is the final Candeo Colors that I bought. I got this one in a mini when she did a huge restock of minis only.  I also used my final Disney Villain polish as a base coat to preserve Orchid.

This is Disney Villains #16. The ring and pinkie fingers are what the color looks like, while the middle and index fingers show off the shimmer that is present.  I need 2 coats of this.

Orchid lightened up the Villain polish quite a bit, and I like the effect they have together.  They larger glitters in Orchid had to be dug out of the bottle, but I'm going to guess it's because of the mini bottle.  I needed 2 coats on most nails, but did do some dabbing/glitter placement on some of them for a 3 coat.  Onto some swatch spam!

Wet N Wild Grey's Anatomy

In earlier posts, I had shown you 2 other polish colors that needed to be layered in order to make the color shine. Grey's Anatomy is the same way. This is my least favorite though. The brush sucks. It's so stiff that the color is almost impossible to put on, and it leaves messy streaks.

Here's Grey's Anatomy looking absolutely gorgeous in the bottle. Look at all the color shifting.

Then it's boring looking on the nail by itself.

And here it is on the nail over black. The color shift is still nice, but look at all those damn streaks! Ugh. I didn't even more topcoating this mess and took it off right away.

China Glaze Motown Magic

Just a quick post for you today before I head off to school.

I got this color a while ago, and it's sat in my storage system until I finally decided to use it as I work through my untrieds.  Motown Magic is a beautiful dark brown almost black with auburn and gold micro glitter throughout.  These pictures are without topcoat, and you can see that it dries fairly shinny and smooth.