Polished for Days Grey Opal

Hi everyone! Apparently I've been wearing a lot of Polished for Days polishes lately because here is another one that I wore a few weeks back. This is another one of the polishes I purchased from the January 2018 Polish Pickup. The theme that month had been Crystals & Gemstones.

This polish is described as a light grey base with orange to green flakes, orange to green micro shimmer flakes, scattered bright aqua flakes and holographic flakes. Jenna had obviously used a grey opal as her inspiration. 

This is one of those polishes that is really amazing in pictures, in the bottle and on a lot of other people. Just looking at these pictures I'm marveling at the complexity and beauty of the polish. I just didn't like it on me. It was the added coolness of the silver holographic flakes maybe but it seemed to fall a little flat to my eyes. Thankfully, I was able to destash it pretty quickly to someone who is sure to love it much more than I! I certainly do love the PFD formula though. This polish lasted several days on my nails with minimal tip wear and the only reason I changed it because I felt like a color change. I have many more Polished for Days colors to try out that I can already tell I'm going to love!

Again, thanks for looking and see you next time!

Stash Swatch: Barielle Gelt Me To The Party and Out-grey-geous

Hi everybody! I've got a few minutes to show you a couple more swatches. Barielle polishes again. 

This first one is Barielle Gelt me to the Party. Looking at this color now, it really makes me wonder how close it is to Essie Leggy Legend from this year's fall collection. I'm not sure how I feel about this color against my skin so I don't know if I'll ever own Leggy Legend to compare. It's very interesting though and so I don't think I'll let go of it just yet. It has to be one of the most unique polishes in my collection. 

This next color is a very interesting one as well. This is Barielle Out-grey-geous. At a quick glance, it very much looks like I took a graphite pencil and colored all over my nails like I used to do in middle school when I got really bored in class. Except, you know, topcoated. It amused me, it was interesting. I'm sure I'd get bored with it somewhat quickly. Grey is not so much my thing...even though I have several shades of it. This one is a little more unique because of all those little gold sparkles in it. 

Ok, see you next time. I just realized it will be my 200th post!! Gotta make it a good one. I need to think about it. 

Stash Swatch - a few Barielle polishes

Hi everybody.

The month of August pushed me around and knocked me down a bit. It started off great with my son celebrating his 2nd birthday (already?) in the first week of the month. But then....it's like he knew he had turned two and the tantrums just took off! He'd had his moments before but they've really intensified to the point where they've brought me to tears a couple of times. Then, there's all the getting sick. It's been one thing after another for all the members of the family recently. Needless to say, I've been not quite able to keep up with the blog as much as I would have liked. 

This post has been sitting in draft mode for a long time and I can't stand to have it lingering any more. Nothing exciting, just a couple of swatches of polishes I've already shown you in manicures before. The first is Barielle Snow Day. I've shown this to you before with a layer of holographic sparkles over the top. 

The second polish is Barielle Belly Dance. I showed this to you previously here with an accent of Barry M Rose Quartz Glitter. It's a really really nice pinky nude polish and I love it.

That's it! See you guys next time.

Review post - Lady Queen Nail Wraps

Hi everyone!

This post is coming a lot later than I wanted. Over the last week my entire household has been one by one falling like dominoes to the cold and trying to deal with that while being back at work has been...challenging. I finally had a little breather today so let me show you a quick review. Today I'm showing you one of the oldest polishes I have, Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Reflection Frost, with one of the newest nail art items I got, Lady Queen Nail Wraps.

I was contacted by the company, Lady Queen Beauty, to review a couple of nail art items for them. I had never heard of them before but after browsing their website, they seem very much like Born Pretty Store. One of the items I selected was this set of nail wraps.

I had been resisting using nail wraps for the longest time. I was always under the impression that they would be fussy, complicated. What it they didn't fit my nails very well? What if they peeled away too early? What if they were too hard to take off? Boy, was I wrong! When I saw this cute set of wraps on the Lady Queen website, I decided to go ahead and try them. What could I lose?

It was never my intention to wear these as a full set. I've seen others use nail wraps as quick accent nails and I wanted to do the same thing. The thing about these wraps is, those larger ones towards the left side of the pack, they are large enough to cover two nails when cut in half and laid on the side. So, I used ONE of the nails wraps, and got accents for two nails. My left hand, which you see here, had the I Heart NY portion of the sticker and my right hand had the picture of the government building. It too bad my right hand never looks as good as I'd like, otherwise you could see the other half of the nail sticker adorning my other hand.

I'm happy to report that the sticker lasted beautifully for the entire 6 days that I wore this manicure. The actual placement of the sticker was easy as pie. I cut the sticker in half, rounded the edges a bit to fit my nail, followed the instructions for placement and didn't have any trouble. I used a coat of Seche Vite on top to maintain the longevity of the sticker. I don't think you could really use it without some sort of topcoat on top.

The polish I used for this mani is Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Reflection Frost, a polish that I think I bought when I was in high school, which was...a while ago. This was two very easy coats. It's a faintly duochrome-y greyed out lilac taupe color. I'm not the greatest describer of colors so I hope that makes sense. Anyway, I've put plenty of pictures up so you guys can see for yourself what an interesting color this. It seemed to go well with the particular nail sticker I picked for this mani. If this post instills a burning desire in anyone to possess this polish, I think you can still find it on Ebay for a VERY reasonable price.

This last picture is something I hope to show you with most of my posts. I have realized that pictures taken in my car look very nice but also give you a flavor of what the mani looks like "in real life". So, here's the real life picture of this mani from my car! :-)

Thanks for sticking with me through this whole post. Again, check out the nail art items on the Lady Queen website. I have one other item that I need to review soon. Standard shipping took a few weeks so I wouldn't choose that if you're in a hurry to get anything. The specific nail art wraps can be found here. If you do decide to get anything, you can use the code "AQLC15" to get 15% off your items. Thanks for looking!!

Stash swatch - Andrea Fulerton Foxy Lady trio set

Hello hello readers!

Casa de Nailaday has been a little chaotic this past week. Toddler boy started daycare last week and it's been an adjustment for all of us. I'm glad I started it a couple of weeks before I will be going back to work because dealing with a newborn baby, a clingy moody toddler and work would have been difficult, to say the least. To top it all off, the poor kid got a bug from his first week at daycare and has been feverish and cranky all weekend. My parents were over to hang out with the babies this weekend and we all just felt so sorry for him!

Anyway, it's time for another post! Today I'd like to show you a swatch of a polish "trio". I picked up this Andrea Fulerton Trio during my trip to London in 2012. (Yup, another one! We're not going to run out of these for a while.) This Andrea Fulerton Trio is called Foxy Lady. There are two polishes, one somewhat more sheer than the other. They are both wearable on their own. The third polish comes in when you layer the polishes together. This is the only trio from this brand I picked up. Let's see the polishes!

The color above is the more opaque polish in the trio. It is not a color I would chose for myself if it came alone. It's a metallic copper peach color that has a weird tendency to look sometimes okay and sometimes dated on my nails. My nails were pretty short at this time so maybe that was in favor of the polish. I think if my nails had been longer the color may have looked more dated. This was two coats and showed more brushstrokes than I would have liked. It did have a nice sparkle in the sun though. That part I liked.

The second polish in this trio is a strange one, in a good way. Overall the color could be described as a dark grey but it had shimmer in it that took it to a whole different level. I loved this shade!! Being the more sheer polish in the set, it did take three coats for complete opacity but I have several stand alone polishes for which that is the case so that wasn't a deal breaker.

More pictures of the second polish above. The shimmer in this one is beautiful. Head on, the polish is an elephant grey color but the microscopic particles in it tease you with a color shifting palette that runs from a light blue color to a fushia purple at the edges. This takes an overall simple grey to one that has a hint of purple in it all the time, making it look like a very dusky lilac. I loved wearing this one.

Finally, I did what I was supposed to and wore them layered to get my third polish. I wore the grey polish over the copper. I hated it. It doesn't look too bad in the pictures but in person I thought it was a disaster. The formula of the grey color wasn't so good that it went on completely streak free at one coat, despite my best effort. This caused it to look patchy and uneven over the peach color, so that sucked. I realized I disliked the peach color even more when it was grayed out like that. Finally, the duochrome quality of the grey polish was completely lost when layered over the metallic peach. So yeah, this is not how I will be wearing it in the future.

When I saw this in the store, I picked it up because the grey polish in this trio looked very unique. I was right about that. I could have done without the coppery peach and I was right about that too. I'm sure I could use it in nail art at some point in the future so I'll have to work on that.

Once again, thanks for looking and see you next time! Wish us luck with daycare! 

Barielle Snow Day with holographic sparkle

I'm not usually a fan of silver or grey by itself on my nails but I've found out that if I add a little sparkle or nail art, I like it much better. Barielle Snow Day is a metallic silver color that is the base for this particular mani. I used three coats for complete coverage. It does tend to show brushstrokes which did put me off of it a little bit. I tried to sponge on the last layer to try to get rid of those brushstrokes but it ended up having a speckled look to it that I disliked as well. 

So, what did I do? Love and Beauty "Silver" to the rescue!! This iteration of "Silver" is actually fine holographic particles in a clear suspension base. Much like China Glaze Fairy Dust. Didn't keep me from getting Fairy Dust as well. I think the particles are just the tiniest bit larger in the Love and Beauty polish. It did the trick! I liked it much better all sparkly like this.

I bought the Barielle as part of a set of six from TJ Maxx. You can find them online as well. In future posts I'll show you the swatches of all the Barielle polishes I own so far. The Love and Beauty polishes can be found in Forever 21 stores or on their website.
Again thanks for looking!!

Sinful Colors Winter Wonder with dots

Hey all.

I'm back with a winter polish mani. This is a Sinful Colors polish from a couple of years ago. This, I believe, is a dupe for Zoya FeiFei. It is such a beautiful polish! Took me three coats to get opaque and I added some dots on the side for a little interest.

Thanks for looking and hope you have a nice day!!

My last snowflake mani

Hi everyone!

So, I think, I hope, last week was the last of the snow we are going to see around these parts. Spring is stumbling in and summer is around the corner and I can't wait!! I figured I better put up my last snowflake mani for this year. This has been sitting around for a while. Obviously, I haven't really been keeping up with this blog much lately. I hope to keep it going enough that when I finally get time in my life to get back to it, I still can.

The base for this mani is a sparkly grey concoction that I came up with a long long time ago. I'm not even sure of all the polishes that are in there but off the top of my head I can think of Revlon Carbonite, Wet n Wild The Gold and the Beautiful, Milani Silver Dazzle and Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty. It's sparkly!

I stamped it with snowflakes from Bundle Monster BM 323 plate again, just like I did with Orly Stone Cold. Basically, I had that stamp sitting out, I was feeling to rushed to find another design and I went for it.

I tried to do some sort of double stamp initially. I started with the ring finger. Then I decided I didn't have time for all that, so I left it as an accent nail. It sort of works....maybe. 

Sally Hansen Wet Cement Stamped with flowers

Good Saturday, everybody! I just love weekends. Most of my weekends these days have consisted of sleeping in (which for me is like 8am), slow breakfast, TV or movies, doing my nails and catching up on some work from the week. The cold weather and snow has kept us both indoors for the most part all winter. We're just not winter people. I don't see any benefit to snow after the first pretty quiet peaceful snowfall of the year. All that follows afterwards is grey, grey, grey and I can do without that!

That's not to say that I can't work with grey on my nails :-) This is an update to my last post with Sally Hansen Wet Cement. This grey was begging to be stamped and I really wanted to try some tone on tone stamping. I had come across China Glaze Awaken at Ulta and bought it that day because I saw some great stamping potential in this charcoal grey chrome polish. I was right! It was perfect for this job!

The plate I used was BM 211. To add a little punch of color, I added dots with China Glaze Harvest Moon that I had also picked up on sale at Sally's.

I just love how the tone on tone stamping behaves in different light. From one angle, you can hardly tell anything is there. Then you just angle your hand a little bit......

And Bam! An intricate design. I love it! I know people get tired of nail fads like crackle, magnetics, etc but will people ever get tired of stamping? I don't think so. I know I won't. Along with gradients and watermarble, this is one of my favorite nail art tricks! What do you guys think? Will stamping ever go out of style?

Sally Hansen Wet Cement

Hi folks! Today's post is short. I just want to show you a beautiful drugstore polish that I didn't think much of until I put it on my nails. This is Sally Hansen X-treme Wear Wet Cement. My husband just saw this picture and said, "Are those your nails??" in a wondering voice. It was flattering :-)

Love and Beauty Gunmetal with CG Make a Spectacle. or what I was wearing to the most fantastic concert!!

Hello folks! It has been a bit longer than usual since my last post but I have a very good reason. Last night, I was at the Pentatonix concert, an amazing acapella group made famous when they won the third season of Sing Off. Being a choir nerd and having been in an acapella group in college and med school myself, this was an amazing experience. The venue was small but packed and the crowd was about as enthusiastic as it got and we all knew every song!! I haven't been part of anything with that much combined energy and talent in a long time. I was grinning from ear to ear for about three hours straight, I'm sure! I'm going to plug them by adding a You Tube video of one my favorite arrangements they have done at the bottom. They have so many it is really hard to pick though.

Anyway, on to the polish. Needless to say, I haven't found as much time to edit and post pictures until today.  During my recent adventures, I was wearing another untried Love and Beauty polish called Gunmetal. I was impressed that this one actually had a somewhat unique name in that at least it wasn't called Grey. I then dabbed the tips with China Glaze Make a Spectacle for a glitter gradient.  I love this glitter!

Here is it by itself. I'm not a huge grey wearer, although I seem to have a few. I'm sure how it really looks on me. I'll wear any color though and I do happen to think it's a pretty grey.

And now for a treat: here is Pentatonix singing their version of We Are Young by Fun. I don't know if it is possible to grin, scream and have my jaw dropped in appreciation all at the same time but I did :-)