Illamasqua Nomad

Hi happy Friday! Any weekend plans? I'm just hangin with some friends tonight, then really doing nothing over the weekend. Today's post is of one my favorite colors Illamasqua-Nomad. I got this, along with another Illamasqua, from Sephora around Christmas with a coupon, I basically got it for free. I haven't tried it really since then, and I don't know why, because the color is gorgeous! 

These pics are in sunlight. I bumped my index finger so it's just not in these pics. The formula on this was perfect:nice and creamy,(which is expected of a polish that costs $15!) I'm wearing two coats in these pictures. They also dried to sort of a matte/satiny finish, so these pics have one coat of Seche Vite on top.

 I have lot's of photos of this, it's just so pretty! It's a perfect spring green, in my opinion. 

Ack my hands look really red in these picture :/

These are in the shade. I think the shade pictures are a little more color accurate.

I can't wait to do some nail art or water marble or something with this color it's BEAUTIFUL! I think it might be my favorite green in my collection!

Illamasqua polishes cost I think $15 at Sephora, so not cheap!

Thanks for reading all, have a good weekend!

Essie Cascade Cool

Hi how's everybody's week going? I am loving this while short week thing. It's been really hot here it's in the 90's I mean wtf it's still May and it's not like I live in California! Anyway I had nice bright sunshine over the weekend so I managed to take some photos outside. We've been goin through "Cicadapocalypse" so I was kinda scared to leave the house there's a bunch of dead ones on the fence and on my driveway it's disgusting. My friend ate a chocolate covered cicada for extra credit in bio how nasty is that!
So today I have pictures of a nice pink polish Essie-Cascade Cool.

This is a really pretty pink polish. It's pretty basic so there are lot's of pinks like this but I think every collection needs one! It's a bit darker than a bubblegum pink and it's very creamy and smooth. This photo's in the shade:

The formula on this was thin and a tad streaky and sheer on the first coat, but nothing horrible. I used 3 coats for these photos, if your nails are small 2 coats would probably work out fine!

Thanks for reading hope you enjoy the rest of your day!

Sunday Nail Art Square Spiral Things

Hello how is everybody's weekend going? I haven't been doing much of anything really, it's been fun. I had some sunlight today so I took some swatches for later this week. Today I have some nail art of these weird I'm gonna call them square spiral things:

They were inspired by this:

I get inspired by really weird things!

I'm not really sure if I like these or not. I don't have much experience with striping brushes, I honestly prefer dotting tools and stuff, so I thought it would be good if I got some practice with a striper. Maybe i should have started out with something simpler?

I started with a base of OPI-My Boyfriend Scales Walls then did the design on top with a striping brush. From pinkie to thumb the colors are: Zoya-Arizona, Essie-Playdate, A black polish from China, Illamasqua-Nomad, and Essie-Butler Please.

When the design was done I did a coat of Seche Vite and added the glitter. Then I used Essie-Matte About You matte top coat on top. I wasn't sure if the matte would work on top of the Seche, but it did! It even mattified the glitter! I'm not sure if I really like this matte thing though. I've never been one for matte nails. Anyway here's my left hand:

 Same thing as the right. So that was my nail art experience for today. I'm thinking maybe stay away from the striper brushes for a while. I'll stick to my all reliable dotting tools. I'll probably end up removing this design early, as in before the end of the week. My experience with Matte About You is that it chips kinda fast. But that's ok, I think these nails are sorta fugly anyway.

Also guess what I found out the other day in french class. Seche Vite literally means "dry quickly". Secher means to dry in french, and vite is quickly or fast. Lol applying my limited 4 years of french knowledge to real life!  

Hope everyone has a good Memorial Day! Extra day off yay!

L'Oreal Now You Sea Me

Hello happy Friday everyone! Anyone doing stuff for Memorial Day weekend? I'm in the marching band so I get to march in my town's Memorial Day parade on Monday yay! My weekend's probably going to be me watching a billion episodes of Firefly, Buffy, Sherlock, and all the other shows I am geeking about these days.
Today's polish is L'Oreal Now You Sea Me and it's a sort of greyish dusty blue. The polish is darker in real like than in the pictures. It's dustier and more teal-y.  Kind of like the sea. Imma take a stab and say that's what L'Oreal was goin for

And the formula on this was kind of horrible. Streaky and sheer and kind of uneven. This is 3 coats and it doesn't look too bad, but below maybe you can see it better, how the polish sort of has ridges and isn't smooth especially on my ring finger and pinky. Usually if a polish isn't good by 3 coats (maybe 4 if the color is really nice:P) then I just give up on it. I'm really impatient.

OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls

Good afternoon everyone! Today I have another polish favorite:OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls. This is a pretty popular shade for being that sort of white that is barrrely grey, and I totally agree! Plain out white always looked too stark for me, so this color is just perfect. I had been looking for it for a while, because one the nail polish retailers where I shop for some reason never got the OPI Amazing Spiderman collection, so I was really upset. Then one day I was there just lookin round and I saw it sitting on the shelf! I practically jumped for joy lol! So here it is My Boyfriend Scales Walls:

I know I know the lighting is all dark horrible. I'm still working on finding the ideal place to photograph good sunlight pictures. Hopefully you can see the color well enough to tell that it's basically white. But not quite:P It's like sneaky, there's just a hint of darker grey that sort of got all mixed with the white. It's awesome! The formula was great I only needed 2 coats to get this nice and creamy and opaque. I love using it as a base for nail art and glitter and stuff like that. OPI really nailed the color with this one. Thanks for reading guys I'll see you next time!

Sunday Nail Art (On Tuesday) Gold X's

Hey guys happy Tuesday! Lot's of freshmen in my school took a standardized bio exam this morning, but I took bio last year so I was basically the only one in all my morning classes haha. I had a lot of free time it was fun. I kind of wish I could just bring my nail polish and swatch, so I wouldn't be wasting so much time! Anyway... I did these nails on Sunday but then I didn't have enough sunlight to take the pictures until Monday, and then I was having uploading issues. I'm still working on all this uploading pictures thing, I've never really done it before! But I think I'm getting the hang of it.

So I did these on Sunday, while watching reruns of Psych on Netflix :P They were pretty easy, but to anyone whose not a nail artist I guess they look pretty hard. I love that.  

I used Revlon Gold Coin, a lovely gold foil, as the base. Then I applied striping tape in the X's pattern and painted over it. The accent nails are Butter London Royal Navy(my favorite blue ever!) and the other nails are Zoya Wednesday. You can also see some shrinkage on like my index finger and thumb because I didn't apply my Seche Vite carefully enough. Usually when I'm careful and wrap the tips of my nail well I can get away without shrinkage. I also use a coat of Essie Good To Go top coat on top, which prevents shrinkage. I know, it's wasteful. But it makes my manicures last nice and long without chipping and stay shiny.

Afterwards I got to play around with loose glitter. This was my FIRST ever time using loose glitter, and I have to say I really like it! It wasn't nearly as hard or painstaking as I thought it would be. But maybe that's just because my design is pretty simple. I'll have to play around with glitter some more. I applied some clear polish then immediately after licked a toothpick and used it to pick up the glitter and place it on the intersections of the gold X's. Easy!

I did this manicure on both my hands. It really annoys me when people have like different manicures on both hands because they can't paint their non dominant hands. When I do a nail design I make sure to choose one that I can do on BOTH my hands! I just think it looks better and more uniform that way.

I don't know if you can tell but my middle finger is different from the rest of the nails. It's sort of squashed in flat and less curved than the rest of my nails because I got it jammed in a door a while back and it's still messed up. Bugs the hell out of me.

That's it for my Sunday nail art. Tell me what you think!

   

My first blog post! OPI MY Vampire is Buff

Hello everyone! This is my first time blogging...it's pretty exciting! I've been painting my nails for about a year now, and since I now consider myself a "capable" nail artist, I thought it would be a loss if I didn't share my creations with other people. There probably isn't anyone reading this now...but hopefully there will be one day! I also have a bunch of nail polish that I bought but haven't really tried yet, and this blog gives me the excellent opportunity to finally swatch all of my polish. So for my first blog post EVER I thought I would keep it simple. No fancy nail art or anything. I'm just gonna show you one of my favorite nail polishes:
OPI-My Vampire is Buff:

My Vampire is Buff is a great creamy yellow-y creme. I love this color, I really like nudes and tans like this. They also look really good with my skin tone. The formula was great, I used 2 coats for this picture. The first coat was pretty streaky but coat 2 made it perfect! I use this alot for glitter layering and things like that, colors like this just tend to go with every color! 

Also sorry for the bad lighting. I know the captions say sunlight but it's been sort of grey and rainy all weekend, not really sunny. Hopefully I'll have some tomorrow though...

I also don't get the name of this polish is it like a Buffy the vampire slayer thing?