Petities CQ Solar skittlette with rhinestones

Hi everybody!

Before I get started with showing you today's mani, I want to share something very cool. Some time ago, I found Meghan from Will Paint Nails For Food on Instagram and I started following her blog because of her awesome manis. Recently though, she has been doing an awesome series of posts called Blogger Bootcamp in which she gives much needed and very useful advice to beauty bloggers. Even though I've been blogging for over a year now, I found many of her tips on point. The last post in the series invites bloggers to participate in a group critique. Although it's been less than a day, I've received so many great suggestions from other bloggers that I'm seriously considering making a few changes here in the near future. If you are one of those bloggers, thank you!

Ok, on to the mani. This is a brand that I've only found in Rite Aid. It's CQ Petites and this purple color is Solar. The black with the silver flecks is L'Oreal The Queen's Ambition.

I used rhinestones for the first time ever in this mani. I kept the mani on for four days and the two rhinestones on the right hand were both gone by the end of it. The left hand hung on though! I used tape to create the design on the ring finger.

CQ Deep Blue Sea Illusion Stripes

Hi Everyone!!  Happy Valentine's Day! I feel so much better today! I got over a nasty cold and overall, I think things are looking up. I have some big personal news coming up in a little while that I can't reveal yet but I'll entertain guesses!

In the meantime, I have a very un-Valentine mani for you. Not because I don't like the holiday or anything. My husband and I are just not making a very big deal of it this year. Which is fine with me because I am ready to go to sleep and we haven't even eaten dinner yet. Dinner that my husband made, though, so I guess that was rather sweet of him :-)

I think I saw something similar on Pinterest with different colors and I had always wanted to try the look myself. It's all done freehand with nothing more than the brush from the polish bottle itself. I started with the darkest color and then just painted the lighter colors in narrower and narrower bands ending with the lightest color, the white.

The colors I used are shown below. The darkest blue is CQ Deep Blue Sea. I love blues like this. So simple but with so much depth. The next two are Love & Beauty Blue and Aqua. The white is from Sinful Colors.

I love the look of the stripes because it gives such an illusion of reflecting a bright light from further away. 

This is Deep Blue Sea by itself:

CQ Slate Glitzy Camouflage Saran Wrap Mani

Hi all! As I thought I would, I had to modify the mani I posted in my last post with CQ Slate. I decided to again tackle a nail art technique that I had never tried before. This is the saran wrap or plastic film technique.

The polishes I used in this are Revlon Gold Coin and Funky Fingers Mrs. Mint. There are different ways of doing this technique. I opted to scrunch up a piece of plastic cling warp and dab some paint on the folds of the plastic. Then I dabbed the plastic on my nails with a light hand until I achieved the right density with that color. Then I repeated the process with the second color and then I was done! It is the easiest nail art I have attempted yet. I have some ideas on how to repeat it again.  The other way I've seen it being done is to paint the second color on the nail itself and then use the scrunched up plastic to take the wet color off revealing the first color underneath.

I remembered to include a further away picture for this one. Kinda has a blingy camouflage look, doesn't it?

CQ Slate and Finger Paints Art You Wondering Gradient

I don't have a lot of words for you today so I will just get to the post. The hubs and I are going out on a date night later tonight :-) Today's mani features CQ Slate, a brand found in Rite Aid, with Finger Paints Art You Wondering? as a glitter gradient on the tips. To get this look, I dabbed some of the glitter on a corner of a makeup sponge and carefully dabbed it on the tips, starting at the very edge and moving inwards. I did this a couple of times until I had the right amount of density of glitter and a satisfactory gradient. It's subtle but I like it. I might do something more to it tomorrow...

Here is slate by itself. This is at two coats without a top coat.