NailaDay: Barry M Coral and China Glaze Blonde Bombshell Skittlette

Another mani that's great for summertime. I know. It's almost Fourth of July and I'll have an appropriate manicure for you guys soon but this is one that I pulled out from the vault that I wore last year. It's with Barry M Coral again, what a great polish! I just love all the polishes I have from Barry M. 

The accent nail is China Glaze Blonde Bombshell and the stamped image is from a Pueen Encore plate. I use that set a lot, don't I? It's the only one handy enough for my lazy self to dig out because all of my other plates are currently stuck in boxes and I could use this set 50 more times and still not duplicate myself. It was a pretty good purchase. 

Here we are with Barry M Coral and CG Blonde Bombshell without the stamping. I tell you, I fell in love with Blonde Bombshell in this mani. I love the mix of small and medium gold glitters. It's a simple formulation but the density and sparkle is really nice! This here is about 2 1/2 to 3 coats.

Thanks again for looking!!

Barry M Blueberry with watermarble and holo skittlette

I'm back with another manicure from the vault! I wore this about a year ago, when I started going through all my Barry M polishes and swatching those. Just to warn you, you will be seeing a lot of Barry M polishes in the next several weeks. 

This manicure features Barry M Blueberry, a gorgeous effortless sky blue color that took three coats for opacity. I probably could have been fine with two but for a very stark nail line. 

The silvery holo on my middle finger is Orly Mirrorball. I did a watermarble accent on my ring finger with Barry M Blueberry, Plum and Prickly Pear. 

I have a bunch in this variation of blue. It's a favorite of mine.

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!!

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!

Born Pretty Review - water decals

Hi everyone!
I have another review post for you today.  I'm reviewing some water decals from the Born Pretty Store. Until this mani, I had never used any water decals or nail strips of any kind. I was a little apprehensive to say the least. I thought I was going to go through many tries and waste a bunch of this product before I got something I was happy with. Not the case!! I managed to "nail it" almost right away!

To create this nail art look I used these water decals below. They have strips of lace pattern in both white and black on the same sheet. You can't see the white colored pattern below because it blends in with the background paper. The black polish I used was Sally Hansen X-treme Wear Black Out and the white was Sally Hansen X-treme Wear White On. The silver was Zoya Trixie. I find all three polishes amazing for what they are and very easy to use.

Using the actual decals is very easy. Make sure your polish is dry before using the decals. 

     1. Measure and cut out of the portion of the decal that you will be using on your nail. 

     2. REMOVE the clear film on top of the design

     3. THEN place the design in a cup or bowl of water for several seconds, up to half a minute.

     4. Peel the design off the backing with a pair of tweezers and place over your nail.

     5. Align the design properly right away because it may be hard to adjust once it's already on the nail. I found it helped to dip my nail in the water as well and have a large drop of water under the design as I was aligning it. 

     6. Once the design is where you like it, press firmly to get rid of any bubbles of any kind (air/water)

     7. Cover with a coat of topcoat once the nail is dry.

The only flub I kept making was to forget to remove the clear protective film over the decal before putting it in the water. The first time, I remembered within a second of putting it in the water and I was able to fish it out, take off the film and put it back in the water. The second time, I completely forgot and ended up having to peel the design off the plastic film instead of the paper backing. Still salvaged it!!

A few more pictures for your enjoyment....

Here's a picture of the base before adding the decals.

Hope you liked this review and hopefully, if you've been like me, unsure of water decals, you'll be more encouraged to try them out after this post. If you're thinking of getting them from the Born Pretty Store, you can use my code "PRK31" for a 10% discount on your order at checkout. 

Thank you for looking!!

*items in this post were provided to me for honest review*

Salon Perfect Brown Sugar Zoo Skittlette

We had a fun weekend here this past weekend! We took the munchkins to the zoo. The little one is two months old and slept through the whole trip but my almost two year old toddler loved it! I had done my nails for the occasion so I'll show you that in this post.

This is one of my favorite manis I've done in a while. You can see all the polishes I've used below. The brown is Salon Perfect Brown Sugar, which I think is a dupe for China Glaze Midtown Magic. I have both, and I love it so much that I don't mind that I have both! The gold sparkly nail is done with Polished by KPT Triomphe-nt Night from the Paris collection. The animal print accent nail is done by randomly sponging the two above mentioned polishes along with OPI Rollin' in Cashmere and Sally Hansen Copperhead onto Orly Powder Puff, my favorite off white base for nail art. I really wasn't sure about OPI Rollin' in Cashmere in the bottle when I first got it. I got it in a package with Comet in the Sky and Snow Globetrotter. When I sponged it over the other colors though, it gave it a lovely satiny gold look and I can see myself using it in nail art quite a bit in the future! The image for the stamped accent nail is from the MASH plate m78. 

I posted a picture me wearing this mani and my two little boys in the background on my Instagram account. If you also have an Instagram account, look me up!

Again, thanks for looking!

NYX Girls Emerald Forest with black and gold skittlette

Hello everyone!

I can't believe how cold it has been in the Cleveland area in the past couple of weeks! This is only my second winter here and I don't remember the last one being so cold. Of course, I was privately miserable with my first trimester woes so last winter was bad in a different way. I am happy to hear the long time Clevelanders tell me this is unusual even for Clevelend. In other news, my son is slowly learning the art of putting himself to sleep while at the same time I am learning to allow him to cry a bit so he can go back to sleep without needing me around. In fact, I learned that he gets more sleep if I don't go to him every time he cries. Go figure!

Let me tell you about this mani, real quick. This is NYX Girls Emerald Forest, which is the same as NYX Advanced Salon Formula Enchanted Forest. However, if you thought that had anything to do with NYX Girls Enchanted Forest, you would be wrong. Confused yet? I was. Which is why I own both NYX Girls Emerald Forest and NYX Advanced Salon Formula Enchanted Forest. Oh well, it's so pretty that I don't mind! This is a sheerish micro glitter polish with gold and green microglitter in a green tinted base. I wish it wasn't as sheer as it is because it took three goopy coats to get opacity. 

The sparkle is amazing though! If you follow me on Instagram, I had posted a video of this a long time ago. 

The stamping was done with China Glaze Passion and the image from a Red Angel plate, RA 10.

Originally I had it without the extra dots and pinky stamping. It felt sort of unfinished that way. What do you think? Less is more?

L'Oreal Rainy Piccadilly watermarble skittlette

Alright! Good morning, everyone!! It's Jan 7th and for the first time I feel like I can take a deep breath after the end of the year/beginning of the next year rush! 

It's also my son's 5 month anniversary today so here's the obligatory statement about oh my gosh, how time flies!! It's been flying so fast I've had barely any time to do my nails. At least not in a blog worth sense. The last mani was so shoddy I hated having it on my nails. The one before that was awesome but I didn't have time to take pictures!! I'll have to redo that one. So, lucky for us, we have a few manis in the files waiting for their time to be shown. Here is one of them!

I did these a long time ago and posted a not so great picture on Instagram, promising that I would show better pictures soon. Well, here it is weeks later. The main color for this is a wonderful teal by L'Oreal called Rainy Piccadilly. I had used it in the past in a different skittlette here.

My favorite parts about this mani are actually the accent nails of watermarble and the texture polish. This is the first time I did a horizontal stripey watermarble and I loved it! I have to credit My Simple Little Pleasures on YouTube for the first time I saw this method of creating a water marble design. She has so many different ways to create watermarble designs that I haven't even touched on yet! The colors I used for this one are L'Oreal Rainy Piccadilly and Club Prive.

Finally, the textured polish is one of the Gumdrops by Nicole by OPI. It was a teal color that I only found at Target. This one is called Emerald Green. I wore it without a topcoat as intended but the shimmer in there is so amazing that I have to wear it with topcoat at some point.

Savina Marine Life with loose glitter

Hi everyone!

Life is so so busy right now! I am still painting my nails but only about once a week. That's about as frequently as I can create a blog post as well. And that is with great effort! So, without much ado, here is Savina Marine Life. A very vibrant sea green color. In real life it is even more greenish that these pictures show it to be. 

For the "art" part of it, I did some glitter placement with some iridescent hex glitter from TJ Maxx. It was part of a set of various colored glitter by Martha Stewart. Believe it or not, it had both larger hexes and fine loose glitter in almost the exact shade of green as Marine Life. Of course, I had to use them :-) This was my first time using loose glitter. I just painted the color, then a coat of clear and sprinkled and patted the loose glitter on the nail while it was still wet. Then, once dry, I brushed off any glitter that didn't stick. Removal wasn't too much of a pain either! It was so sparkly!

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.

Sinful Colors Mercury Rising splatter skittlette

Hello lovelies!

How is everyone? Hope everyone had a good weekend! I can't believe how busy things have suddenly become for me! Between a baby that still wakes up multiple times a night, a full time job that's ramping up, THE exam of my career coming up in three months and the holidays, my plate is so full I'm surprised I'm still carrying it!! 

Anyways, I'm not going to say much here except that I loved this mani and I wish I'd worn this longer. This is my first splatter attempt and I finally got the hang of it with some trial and error. Aaannnd, I love the results!! I especially love it as an accent nail.

Polishes used in this mani:
             Orly Powder Puff (3 coats); this is my go to off white
             Wet n Wild Femme Trouper (texture, from Rite Aid)
             Sinful Colors Mercury Rising (brown with shimmer, 2 coats)
             Wet N Wild Fast Dry Ocean Grotto (lovely green foil shimmer but sheer on its own)

Sweet City Color MS07: Pink to Purple thermal Skittlette

Hello all!

         Well, somehow I got through my first week back at work after my baby boy got here. If I didn't know that I cared about leaving him to go to work a lot more than he did, this week would have been a lot lot harder. As it is, there were several times when I was at work and I'd be hit by how much I missed him or wondering what he was up to and start crying. I guess I'll just get used to it after a while.

          I've got another exciting polish to show you today. I have to apologize in advance because when I purchased these polishes, they were relatively easy to find on the internet. Then time went by and I never got a chance to post about them. Now, I am no longer able to find the seller that I bought them from. It was from China. If you do a diligent internet search, you may be able to find them from another seller. The good news is, thermal polishes are becoming more and more accessible through indie nail polish sellers so even if you don't find this exact one, you'll find others!

This polish is by a brand called Sweet City Color. This one changes from a bright barbie pink when warm to a bright purple when cool. It has a great formula. This is two easy coats.

I stamped the middle finger using an image from a Bundle Monster plate BM 314. Then I placed random dots in white and hand placed glitters from an Icing polish. For the ring finger, I combined a drop of the thermal polish with a drop of two Icing glitter polishes, Pop a Bottle and Glitterati. Pop a Bottle is a mix of tiny gold, blue and pink glitters. Glitterati has large pink metallic hex glitters with smaller silver holographic glitter. I wore this one for a few days.