China Glaze Strawberry Fields with Born Pretty water decal

Hi everybody!
I actually have a nail art manicure to show you with this post! Whoo! I loved this one so so much! I loved the polish, I loved the accent art, I loved the water decal from the Born Pretty Store that I used. After my first experience with water transfer decals, I was much more confident going in with this one and it turned out great!

The polish I used for this is China Glaze Strawberry Fields. I adore this pink. On it's own, the base is probably a pretty hot pink but the generous amount of gold shimmer (not hidden) in this polish actually seems to warm it up and tone it down at the same time. You can't see it in my pictures but when I hold my hand at an angle and look at my nails with a sort of tangential view, the pink becomes brighter. I love shades that do that!

On my middle finger, I did a gradient from the tip with Sally Hansen X-treme Wear Golden-I over a quatrefoil stencil from Twinkled T. This was my first time using a stencil and my stencil work could have been a little bit better.

The ring finger decal is the other star of the show! This is a nail art product I received from the Born Pretty Store for review and I was not disappointed. The decal was really easy to apply. I just cut out the part of the design that I wanted on my nail, took the plastic film off, dipped it in water, slid the design off the paper backing and did away with the excess with a combination of cutting and using a brush with acetone. I covered it with a layer of Seche Vite and it held up for a whole week!

I still have enough of the sheet left for probably another four accent nails, which would be one or two more manicures for me. Let's take a look at the mani one more time.

You can grab this water decal pattern or others or any of the huge variety of nail art items from their website. If you use my code "PRK31" you can get 10% off your purchase. Right now, it looks like there's a sale going on for water decals too!

Thanks for visiting!!

Stash Swatch - 2true Glitterati Shade 3 and a comparison

Here is the last of my 2true polishes, a shade from the Glitterati collection, Shade 3. When I first got it, I couldn't figure out why it looked so familiar until with a sinking feeling I wondered if I had inadvertently bought a dupe for Deborah Lippman Across the Universe. This would be especially bad since I already had Icing Hey Sailor Boy, another ATU look-a-like. When I finally got a chance to swatch the 2true polish, I decided to do some comparisons, which you can see below.

I wore Shade 3 (what a boring name) with three coats. It's very jelly like so even with four coats, you can see some nail line. In the future, I'll have to layer it over something. Revlon Royal maybe?

Even just looking at the bottles, I could tell immediately that they were not dupes. The 2true polish is a much lighter blue and more sheer.

I only wore Icing Hey Sailor Boy and DL Across the Universe next to each other because the differences between those and the 2true polish were large enough that I didn't need side by side comparisons. These two on the other hand....

Well, no dupes here either. Even at one coat, you can see that the DL polish has a darker base. The glitter ratio and type seem to be about the same, though. 

At three coats, you can still tell they are different, although you probably don't need both. If I had to purge, I would probably get rid of the Icing polish since it seems to straddle a line between the other two in terms of the color of blue and sheerness. Lucky for me, I don't feel the urge to purge just yet!