Holo plus snowflakes

This manicure, or at least the process of creating it, inspired me to go looking for a better silver nail polish. I already posted about the result of my shopping, but I still wanted to post about this mani anyway. It's not too bad, but I had something else in mind originally.

 I originally wanted to stamp those snow flakes on a silver metallic polish and I chose this silver polish by [b]asic, but it turned out to be one streaky mess. Hence, I decided to cover it up using Milani HD. I really like HD. I think I might like scattered holos better than linear ones... but I don't own too many linear holos yet!

Anyway, I stamped the snowflakes using p2 scandal. I messed up one finger - the image didn't transfer properly. To fill in some spots, I added some dots.

Here's what I used:

I might try this again using my new silver polish. It looks nice with the holo, but due to the holo effect the snow flakes are somewhat unimpressive. I want them to be the star of the mani though.

Hm, my next mani will be snow flakes too. I really love them. Sadly, we only had snow once this season yet. And only for about 3 days too. I want more snooooow! :D

Halloween-Mani #2 - playing around with Zombie Zest

Okay, another late Halloween-Mani. I won China Glaze Zombie Zest in a giveaway this summer and had been waiting for fall/halloween so it would finally be an appropriate color. This is my very first China Glaze polish and I love the color!

I was a bit surprised though how sheer it was. And since it is my first China Glaze I was a bit greedy and decided that I need to layer Zombie Zest to preserve it ^^; I swatched it over every green and brown polish I own and finally decided to layer it over a metallic green polish from the drugstore brand basic. This is my second time wearing this green.

This is the basic polish on its own. It doesn't have a name or a number like most of basic's polishes. Annoying. It's a dark green metallic polish with slightly blue hue. It looks bluer in the picture than it really is. It's pretty streaky, but since I wanted to layer anyway, it didn't bother me much.

Two thin coats of Zombie Zest on top and it looks completely different. I needed two coats because the pretty glitter didn't spread completely evenly... which I didn't like.

The last picture was taken in daylight on a cloudy day. The pictures don't do the polish justice though. It seemed to have an inner glow somehow. Soooo pretty! I was staring at my nails a lot and because I liked it so much on its own, I didn't even add nailart until the very last day.

On the last day of wear, I was going through my nailart stuff and found out that I had a halloween themed stamping plate all along. Duh. I completely forgot about it. So right before taking this pretty green off my nails, I decided to play with the plate.

Hm. I even used my special white stamping polish by Konad, but on most nails the image didn't transfer well. A lot of the polish would still be on the stamper too, even if the image transfered properly. Maybe the plate's engraving is a little bit to "deep"? No idea. The spider from the same plate didn't transfer at all. In the end, I quickly painted some with the stamping polish and added some red rhinestones for contrast.


I wore this for like half a day. I still like Zombie Zest a lot better on its own, but I got to play around with a forgotten stamping plate, so it's okay. One thing I noticed again while looking through my photos of this mani... my camera really doesn't like greens. It failed before and this time once again! If my other camera weren't so bitchy with her batteries, I would use it more... :(

How do you like my Zombie Zest-layering? I yet have to wear Zombie Zest on its own... buuuut, so greeeeedy... can't waist it!!! ^^;

Fail: Silver polish stamped... and shattered...

Okay, I consider this mani a huge fail. It didn't turn out right at all. I had this idea, but it just didn't turn out the way I wanted. Meh.

I have these metallic polishes by drugstore brand "basic". They are very cheap and actually aren't too bad. I chose the silver one. My idea was to try essence - Style me love for stamping and I thought that silver would make a nice base for that. Style me love actually works for stamping, but the stamping design I chose is too weak for a silver background. I'll try again some other time.

I didn't like the result enough, so I added one coat of Flormar 392 to give it something extra. Well, failed. I didn't like it better at all. But I still like 392 a lot.

After wearing this for 2 days, I felt like I had to add something else. I had seen several blogposts painting crackle polishes diagonally, so I tried that.

 

I think it looks a lot more cracked that way than when you paint it straight. I like that. But I still didn't like the manicure... ^^;

Well, there have to be fails to appreciate a nice mani. ^^;

First nail art in a while

I was quite surprised when I felt like doing some nail art a while ago. I had just bought a new white polish and wanted to see if this finally is the kind of white I was looking for.

It's a very simple design, but I liked it. I just completely failed at painting stars that day. I never wanted to add the rhinestones, but looking at the ugly black things I had painted, I just felt like I had to to make it look somewhat ok.

It is not the kind of white I was looking for - a warm white. This one, too, is a cold white and super sheer. This is 4 coats! And it took forever to dry. I'm surprised that I was patient enough to not smudge it in the meantime... It's a discontinued MNY polish I got discounted.

So the search for my perfect white will continue... :D

Blood Oranges!

So this is kind of out of order... I'm soooo behind doing my blog posts... :S

Anyway, I was in a pretty bad mood yesterday and secluded myself to my room. This is one of the situations when I pretty much always end up doing nail art. The facebook group Polish-aholic Anonymous is doing themed Mondays every week and I have been looking at pictures of other member's work for the past few weeks. So I decided to do my first Monday Nail Art Challenge yesterday. This week's theme is fruits... I'm very much obsessed with blood orange tea right now, which is why I decided my mani was to be blood orange themed.

I love how the background of yellow and white turned out. It looked very pretty on its own. I can't really say what polishes I used for this mani, because I mixed them to get the kind of shade I was looking for. Let's say, I used a lot ^^; Especially for the oranges and reds. And I used some polishes for tthe very first time. :P

I didn't know where I put my dark brown polish, which I needed to do the twig, so I used brown eyeshadow pigment and clear polish to draw it. Not perfect, but it worked.

This mani is by far perfect. I still can't color round shapes, so they look 3-dimensional. I wonder if I will ever be able to. But the worst thing that happened was my impatience. I just couldn't wait for the colors to dry and applied top coat way to early. So some of the polishes got dragged. Oh well.