A few random manis from various points over the past year or so!
Pretty and Polished Phoenix over Joe Fresh Mustard:
China Glaze Trendsetter with foily gradient accent – the green is Nicole by OPI My Favourite Gold over Brilliant Idea, and the gold is either Orly Glitz & Glamour or OPI Goldeneye, I don’t remember…
Soulstice Spa Crete… I still don’t like silver on me!
This is Gosh Holographic Hero, the much-anticipated re-release of the original Gosh Holographic from a few years back! Apparently the holographic effect isn’t as strong as the original, but it’s still pretty strong!
The photos show three coats of this silver holo, no base or top coats.
It’s a little trickier to apply than polishes like the OPI DS holos, but I found that it wasn’t too difficult if you use generous coats with a light touch, don’t go over the same spot more than once, and wait a couple minutes between coats to prevent dragging the previous layer of polish.
The first photo was taken with flash, and the others under an Ott Lite, as there was no sunlight at the time.
This polish is available in certain countries in Europe, and Canada, as far as I know. I was lucky as a Canadian to be able to just pick it up at the drugstore. 🙂
Today I have a rock-like mani to show you: Gosh Fossil Grey with an accent nail of Sparitual Conglomerate.
This is two coats of Fossil Grey, which had a slightly thick but good formula. It’s a warm/yellow leaning grey pearl base with silvery shimmer that gives an almost speckled effect.
On the ring finger I applied one generous coat of Sparitual Conglomerate, from their recent fall collection, over Fossil Grey. It also had a nice formula, and it wasn’t too difficult to get a good density of the black and white hex glitters on the nail.
I love Conglomerate; it’s quite unique with its deep charcoal grey base, its dense, fine gold shimmer throughout, and its scattered black and white hexes!
On its own, Conglomerate is opaque in two coats. Glad I picked this one up, it’s really interesting and the gold shimmer makes it very wearable for me!
China Glaze Fast Track is a taupey-beige nude with heavy golden shimmer flakes. It was released last spring in the Hunger Games collection.
Shown are two thick coats. In the sun photos, there’s also a layer of topcoat. As evidenced by the sideways watermark, these pics were also taken using my phone, haha!
I found the formula a little thick but didn’t have any problems with application.
The sun photos didn’t quite catch all the tiny sparks of different colours, little flashes of orange and green, that are often reflected in the sparkle of this awesome polish!
Here it is in the shade:
As a bonus here is what I ended up doing to this mani after a couple of days, mainly because I didn’t want to take the time to remove Fast Track first, and then I just kept adding things, haha…
Over Fast Track is a coat of Orly Nite Owl, an opaque taupe with silver shimmer, then two layers of Glitter Gal Buckled Bronze, Nubar Petunia glitter on the tips, and Spoiled by Wet n Wild’s Trust Fund Baby over it all!
I was recently asked by Nail Polish Canada if I’d like to review one of the new Konad stamping plates they’ve added to their selection of image plates. The three new ones, M86, M87, and M88 are all French tip designs of various types.
This is the plate I received, M86, plain French tips with a pronounced inner curve, and an across-the-nail band that resembles a frilly lace garter.
I decided to use two Color Club holographic polishes, Revvvolution and Worth the Risqué, since these are very pigmented one-coat polishes, and so, good for stamping.
As you can see in the pics, my metal scraper already left some scratches on the surface of the plate, but this is normal when using a metal scraper and it doesn’t affect the results at all.
If you’ve never used French tip Konad designs before, I will say that there is a learning curve to it. I had never used Konad French tips and I had to practise at least a half-dozen times before I got something that I felt was decent enough to photograph. What helped me a lot in the end was watching this French mani tutorial by blogger The Polished Mommy. She goes through two different methods for French tips, one of them being Konad, and part-way through the tutorial when she demonstrates rolling the stamper onto the nail tip starting at one side, I had an “aha” moment, as I’d previously been trying to stamp head-on and the tips would almost always turn out crooked. I’d definitely recommend watching it if you’re like me and trying this type of stamping design for the first time!
The base polish is two coats of Revvvolution, by the way (the second one wasn’t all that necessary but I added it just in case, since I was photographing it), and there is no top coat on these first photos.
Another thing I learned in practising was to choose the right size of design for each nail. The plate has five tip sizes, and although it seems kind of silly to me now, at first I tried to use all five of them largest to smallest from thumb to pinkie. I ended up realizing that was a mistake, and to choose the correct design for each nail based on which one’s width seemed to best match the width of the nail.
I ended up using the second-largest tip on my thumb, the second-smallest on my index, middle and ring fingers, and then the smallest on my pinkie. I was actually kind of relieved that I wasn’t using the largest one in the end, since the greater width of that one makes it a bit trickier to avoid scraping right down to the plate in the center of the design and ending up with a bald spot and having to start over. Not sure if this would be less of an issue when using an old credit card to scrape, like many people do, instead of the metal Konad scraper. The four smaller nail tips didn’t give me any trouble like that, though!
I then decided to add the lace-garter design across my nails, but of course the first one I did went on kind of crooked and with bald spots (some day I’ll get better at stamping, I swear! haha); I then applied the others haphazardly on purpose so that at least they’d all be similar! I still like the way it turned out. I also added topcoat before taking the rest of these photos.
I was really happy that Worth the Risqué works so well for stamping. These two holos are gorgeous in the sunlight!
Although at first I was getting a little frustrated when I couldn’t get the tips stamped on straight, once I watched the tutorial and practised a little more it became a lot of fun to play around with this plate! Previously I’d only ever used French tip guide stickers (well, and tried freehand once, but that didn’t turn out well enough for me to be satisfied with it) but the thing with those is that you have to make sure that the base is completely dry before applying the stickers or else removing them will remove some of the base too. So, I’m really glad to have this plate; I’ll surely be doing French tips on my manis a lot more often now!!
If you’re in Canada like me you can find this plate and others here at Nail Polish Canada. (edit: I just noticed on their site that they also ship to the US.) You can probably also find them wherever you normally get your Konad plates; I’m not sure how widely available the newly released ones are at this point. 🙂
Disclosure: the stamping plate in this post was provided to me for review. Opinions expressed are my honest opinions.
Today I have for you China Glaze’s CG in the City from the fall 2011 Metro collection. This is a really interesting and unique glitter with lavender, silver, copper and opaque black very fine glitter.
These photos show 4 coats with Poshe top coat. Since the glitter is fine, one coat of top coat is enough to make it pretty smooth. The first two photos are taken directly under my Ott light, look cooler than in real life, and if you click on the full-size versions, the second one also seems to show more colours in the flashes of glitter than are generally seen in real life.
The next two photos are not the greatest pics but are taken under warm indoor light and I think they give a better representation of how the polish looks in everyday life.
Although this polish is fascinating and has a nice formula, for some reason it just doesn’t do much for me. I guess I just don’t really care for the lavender/silver on my skintone. I like how it looks in the first two photos better than how it really looks. Actually, I like how it looks in all these photos better than I liked it as a mani. Maybe the glitter is just too fine for my tastes and I’d prefer it if there were bigger pieces of the individual colours to distinguish them better at a glance. I’ll have to try it again using only a couple of coats layered over top of another polish (I’m thinking something bronze or coppery) to see if I can make it work for me…
This is a unique and kind of weird polish, so needless to say I like it a lot! It’s a muddy cool brown with silver shimmer particles and sparse opaque black hex glitter. Formula is good; this was two coats and easy to apply. Be prepared for silver shimmer particles that get everywhere during removal though! These pictures are lit by overcast natural light plus my Ott light.
Vegan Claws 
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