Independence day with Zoya and OPI

Hi everybody! I'm taking a break from my swatch posts to show you what I did for the Fourth of July this year. It's a simple mani but one I'd been thinking about for a while. Ever since I bought my Zoya Pixie Dust polishes, I had always thought that Chyna and Liberty would be great colors for the Fourth of July, and they are!

The red texture is Zoya Chyna and the blue texture is Zoya Liberty. I also created an accent with OPI Don't Touch my Tutu sandwiched with Icing Blue Ice. Blue ice has small silver glitter, larger shiny blue hex glitter and holo stars. The holo stars in that polish definitely needed to be fished out. 

Isn't that sparkle lovely? I just love the Pixie Dusts. Every time I put one on, I feel the need to buy immediate backups! I'm so sad they are discontinued. They could have come out with textures in every shade on earth as far as I'm concerned! What are your guys' thoughts on textures? Are they here to stay. Do you still have a love for them?

Here is a bonus pic of me modeling this mani in front of my older little man, who is playing at his newly assembled water table this weekend.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

OPI Congeniality is my Middle Name with leopard print accent

Here we go! Another week, another mani. Ok, more like a couple of weeks! I was in sunny AZ last week, getting my study on at a board review course. I took my son and husband with me and I think both of us came away from that trip feeling more pooped than usual! My son turned out to be a decent traveler though. As long as he could nurse, he was fine. He slept on all of the plane trips there and back. What a relief!

On to the mani. This is OPI Congeniality is my Middle Name. I love love this color. The brightness of this fuschia is just right. Jewel toned and vibrant. The only weird thing about this polish is that all the shimmer seems to want to settle in the bottle. I always have to give it a good shake prior to application. This is two coats, easy application. 

I jazzed this one up with my first ever freehand leopard spots. I loved it!! It felt just right.

Barry M Prickly Pear and OPI Rally Pretty Pink Dots update

Hey guys!!

I loved yesterday's mani so much, but in typical me fashion, I could not leave it alone. I liked the dots on the accent nail so much I wanted to keep going on all the other fingers.

I don't have much more to say about this mani, but that I love it. The color is just want I want right now. So, for now, I'll just give you guys a lot of pictures.

I happened to be wearing a necklace to work that seemed to go really well with the colors of this mani. So, it needed to be in the photo shoot as well.

So, what do you think? Do you like yesterday's simpler mani better or it is better with all the nails with the design?

Barry M Prickly Pear with OPI Rally Pretty Pink

Hi all!

For today's mani, I have one of my newest polishes, Barry M Prickly Pear, paired with one of my oldest polishes, OPI Rally Pretty Pink. At first, I put Rally Pretty Pink on all my nails but I thought it was too sparkly for what I wanted so I added the Barry M, a polish I had just picked up on a recent trip to London.

I used Rally Pretty Pink as the accent nail and then tried my hand at a dot gradient. I think it turned out pretty well. I love the color combination of these two paired together. Prickly Pear is pretty much my definition of the perfect bright lavender I have been looking for this spring.

OPI Too Hot Pink to Hold'Em and China Glaze Techno sandwich

Hey all! A simple post with a simple mani for you guys today. This is one from the sorbet collection that OPI put out a summer or two ago. This one is called Too Hot Pink to Hold'Em. Which is funny because in most lights, it's looks kinda red. I was sort of disappointed with the non-pinkishness of it all.

To create this sandwich, I layered China Glaze Techno in between a couple of layers of the OPI. Techno is a mix of small and large holographic hexagons. As you can see, when sandwiched inside the jelly polish, it gave off all sorts of different colored hues depending on the way the light hit it. People loved the subtlety of this glitter mani. So many compliments on this simple mani!

I tried to color correct this above picture because it did have a little tinge of pink to it in real life, after all. 

OPI Houston We Have a Purple franken

Hey guys! Here is another one from the vault! This is with OPI Houston We Have a Purple. This was part of their sorbet collection released last year.

The glitter in here is again Love and Beauty glitters Purple and Green. For this mani, I painted a coat of Houston We Have a Purple and then I mixed a few drops of each glitter with the color in a little foil cup. I painted my nails with two coats of this mix.

Here it is in the shade.

Borghese Sonata Berry with ZigZag

Hi everyone! Today's post features some quick and dirty phone pictures. It is actually the last iteration of a mani that's been on my nails for a few days now. I've been keeping it going by changing an accent here, layering a polish there. This is the final look before it gets removed altogether.

The base of the polish is an amazing oxblood color called Borghese Sonata Berry. I bought it a while ago at RiteAid on sale and I wish I had grabbed a couple more. In these pictures, it's three coats of Sonata Berry over which I have layered a coat of OPI Thoroughly Modern Millie. It's a really subtle polish that glimmers and has a faint purple/green duochrome to it. It was probably overshadowed by OPI Movin' Out which was part of the same collection, if I have my facts correct. That is an amazing polish that I currently own and need to feature on this blog sometime.

The accent was done by starting with a couple of coats of Revlon Gold Coin. Then I painstakingly cut a couple of thin strips of painters tape with craft scissors, being careful to keep the zigzags going in the same direction. I applied two of those strips on my nails and painted two coats of Sonata Berry over it before removing the strips of tape with tweezers.

I'm trying out some different hand positions cause I get bored easily. What do you think?

I finally got sick of not having good enough light (ie. no sunlight) to show off the shimmer so I had to resort to flash.