Zoya Stevie

When the Zoya Pixie Dusts first came out, I was completely enamored! The sugary, confectionery look of them was incredible. And then the sparkle when you topcoat them! Just gorgeous! I wanted to own every single one. I haven't been able to quite keep up with that desire since I'm missing some of the ones from the latest release but one day....

For now, we will have to rely on this beauty, Zoya Stevie.

I absolutely love the color but I wasn't a hundred percent sure I loved the color on my nails. But, that's the way I feel about 90% of pastel type shades and I'll continue to wear them anyway so....
As most of their pixie dusts, this one went on beautifully. It had great coverage in two coats. The first coat dried almost instantly and the second coat took several minutes but that's not unusual either for this formula. The texture is finely rough and it looks like sugar crystals on the nails in the sun.

In these pictures below, I paired it with China Glaze Plur-ple, added stamping from a PUEEN plate and topcoated some of the nails. I liked the look overall but here in pictures it does look a little mish-mash-y.

And, that's it! Hope you guys liked that and I'll see you next time!

Sinful Colors Treasure Chest

Today I want to show you texture polish, Sinful Colors Treasure Chest. I have always been a fan of textures and when Sinful Colors came out with their own version of it, I was excited!! I picked up a few colors with Treasure Chest being one of them.

This is one of my favorite colors to wear. Something about that bright seafoam green color just gets to me. Add a little golden shimmer to it and I'm sold! The color just makes me so happy!

It is a texture polish and even though it's not very very textured, it would require more than one coat of topcoat to smooth it out. And then maybe another coat the next day. I wore it without any topcoat for a couple of days and then stamped over it, which I will show in the next post. 

I always think textured polishes look weird in pictures but in real life I think they look fantastic. I'm glad I gave them a chance starting with the Zoya Pixie Dusts because I do love them so! 

Ok, it's 10:30 pm and I'm completely dragging. Off to bed I go!

Thanks for looking!

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!

L'Oreal Sexy in Sequins with freehand stripes accent

Hi everybody,

I'm going to go against the grain today and do a non-Valentine's Day mani. Historically, anytime I try to do a Valentine's Day mani, it just blows up in my face. So this year, despite evidence of it all around me, I didn't do a Valentine's mani. I actually even forgot it was Valentine's Day until my husband came home with a bunch of roses after grocery shopping. It was so sweet of him!!

What am I going to show you instead? One of the L'Oreal textured polishes called Sexy in Sequins. I didn't take a photo of it in the textured state. I honestly forgot but I do remember that it took three coats of topcoat and still had a slight bumpiness to it.

 I was actually kind of disappointed because all that lovely gold shimmer in the bottle was hiding on the nail. It ended up looking darker and less shimmery than I thought it would be.

Anyway, happy Valentine's Day to you all and thanks for looking!

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.

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)

Icing Blow Pop and Sand in Sunset skittlette

Hi everyone!

A few weeks ago, I went to stay with my parents for a week. Ever since I got into polish, going to my parent's place has become the biggest tempation for nail polish buying, bar none. They live within minutes of...everything! All the pharmacies, Walmart, Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Ulta, Sally's, Meijers, Target...and Icing. I realized a while ago that Icing sometimes comes up with some really unique polishes that I can't get from drugstore brands. My parents' place is the only place with an Icing store nearby. Of course, I had to shop. Here I have two of my picks from my trip there. This is Blow Pop, a neon pastel pink, and Sand in Sunset, a textured gold polish. Top picture is in the sun and bottom picture is in the shade.

Although I don't usually care too much about formula if there are slight flaws and the color is nice, I had an incredibly hard time with Blow Pop. It was awful. Although the pictures don't show it, it was streaky beyond belief. Even with three coats, I could tell there were some thin patches. I needed large amounts of patience to work with this polish. Which meant that with a baby around, it took me three days to finally finish this mani to the point where I was somewhat happy with it. I couldn't just slap the polish on and go. Oh well, the color is unique to my collection so I will keep it for now. I would hate to even give away this polish, that's how bad I think it is.  The textured polish, however, was fine. It was really thick so it only took one coat to cover the nail. Also, it took a while to dry...but it's pretty so I'm willing to live with that. All in all, it was a frustrating mani but I liked the way it finally ended up looking.

Zoya Dahlia and Confetti Dance Party Pink skittlette

Hi folks! I've got another skittlette for you today! This time I mixed textures and I really liked the end result. I have become addicted to the skittlette ever since I saw Marta from ChitChatNails coin the term. I love every single skittlette she comes up with, which I can't say the same for mine. I do love this one though!

The polishes I used here are Zoya Dahlia which is the black texture polish and Confetti Dance Party Pink. Isn't that just the most yummy pale pink ever? I believe that was three coats. Two coats for Dahlia. Then for accents, I did a hand placed glitter accent on the ring finger with black hexes and hot pink iridescent hexes. On the middle finger, I stamped using an image from Gals Fairy Set plate GA30 again. I added those hand placed glitters on the stamped image as well. One thing I didn't like about this image is that I couldn't get it to stamp on my full nail. Otherwise, I'd have been 100% happy with this mani. What do you guys think? I'm on a roll with these hand placed glitters here.

Julie G Gumdrops Sugar Rush with triangles

Happy weekend everybody!

Hope everyone has been having a good weekend so far. I guess it's time for another post! For this one, I busted out another one of my many textured polishes that I seem to be collecting these days. This one is Julie G Gumdrop Sugar Rush. Apparently a dupe for Zoya Destiny (which I also have now) and OPI Jinx, which I resisted buying. I don't need to literally own ALL the textures, right?

Ahh, Sugar Rush. It's such a perfect name for this type of polish. I always think of sugar crystals when wearing these polishes. I had to take these pictures indoors with my lightbox since it was night time so the color may be a wee bit more orange than usual. I really should invest in a better lamp, I think.

For a little design, I taped off a couple of triangles and painted them with Julie G Hot Cinnamon and Tangerine Dream.

I did include a couple of sunlight pictures so the color can be seen better. This is also after a couple of layers of topcoat.