Orly Its Up to Blue update with flower accent

Hi! So as many of you might be aware, Google Reader is getting phased out. That's a bummer but I tend to use Blogger to catch up on all my blogs, anyway. Hopefully that doesn't get affected. For those of you looking for an alternate way to keep track of my posts, I have been on Bloglovin for some time now, as well as Hello Cotton. If you look over to the right, you will see the other ways in which you can follow me including Instagram and Tumblr. It doesn't matter how you choose to follow your blogs, just remember to add mine to your list if you are transferring out of Reader!!

Today, I'm going to show you one of my favorite manis ever!! This is the update to the mani I posted in my last post, where I showed you Orly It's Up to Blue mattified. That shiny ring finger was begging for some kind of detail so I ventured into the realm of freehand nail art. I took my inspiration from this pinterest photo. (Uh, a lot of inspiration) I just thought it looked so simple and pretty!

I think I could have used a little more practice to make the line and dots look better but I was pretty happy with the way it turned out!

What do you all think? Should I continue my exploration of freehand art? I think so! I love the results!

Orly It's Up to Blue

Happy weekend, everyone! I don't celebrate Easter, but for those who do, happy Easter! I guess what I would be really celebrating around this time of year if I still lived in India would be Holi, the festival of colors. I used to be deathly afraid of the entire holiday when I did live there, though. I hated seeing familiar faces all transformed into weird monsters with all the paints that were thrown on them. I used to have nightmares of the colors getting into my hair, my eyes, inside my ears and then never coming off. I literally hid in my bedroom all day and never came out. I was a weird child, I think.

Anyway, it's pretty funny to think about that because now I love colors!! Can't get enough of them. Here's one that took me a long time to get on my nails from when I first bought it but now that I've tried it, it has to be in my top ten. I used to wonder what a matted metallic blue green the color of the ocean would look like on my nails and then I finally just decided to find out.

The matte top coat I used here is the Hard Candy one. I tried using the Sinful Colors one first but I realized I wanted a much more mattified look. It looks like blue frosted glass to me. Much like this...

Image courtesy of One Rusty Nail (n/a) at http://www.etsy.com/listing/110325268/reserved-for-laura-satin-blue-glass

I left one nail shiny because my husband wanted it to be shiny and this was my compromise.

Here's how it looked without topcoat:

It really made me happy to look at my nails with this color on. What a vibrant color it is and it reminded me of my recent trip last summer to Mexico. These pictures were taken at Cozumel. Perfect color, right?

L'Oreal Notting Hills Blue mani update

Good morning! As previously mentioned, today I want to show you guys the update to last mani and the reason I fell in love with the Sinful Colors Matte Top Coat and why I bought two backups. This is the previous mani with the addition of glitter tips and Sinful Colors Matte Top Coat.

I freehanded the chevron tips using the brush from the bottle. I love how the matte top coat gives it such a satiny or rubberized finish to the mani.

This is how it was before the matte top coat.

With this particular mani, I much prefer it mattified. What do you guys think?

L'Oreal Notting Hill Blues with Sinful Colors Super Star Star

Hi everybody! Hope you all had a good weekend. I sure did! I even had energy this weekend and did some cooking and socializing. It was great! The mani I want to show you today uses as it's base, L'Oreal Notting Hill Blues. I picked this wonderful polish up at Rite Aid on sale a little while ago. I love digging through clearance bins, I've found some good gems this way! This one is from the British Shade Invasion collection and, of course, refers to the famous vibrant blue that can been seen in the Notting Hill district shading doors and store fronts.

For the accent nail, I chose to do a taped off star with Sinful Colors Super Star. It shows up pretty well in the picture but in real life, there was not enough of a contrast for the glitter to stand out against the blue background. They complement each other well, but maybe too well for this design.

In my next post, I will show you guys the update to this mani that made me love it so much more!!

And now, for a non nail picture. I decided to try making ratatouille for the first time. I had just washed the veggies and was getting ready to cut them and they looked so pretty I had to take a picture! Yummy!

Zoya Nyx

Hey guys! It's another Friday and that's a great thing! Today's post is a short one. I want to show you the other Zoya Pixie Dust polish I picked up, Zoya Nyx. This one is a periwinkle color, perfect color for spring.

Here are some pictures for your enjoyment.

Can you see the white dots in the mani? That's all the sparkle in the polish!! It's even blingier in real life. I love it!

Zoya Vespa with Sinful Colors Last Chance Gradient

Hi everyone! The other day I managed to pick up a couple of the Zoya Pixie Dust polishes, Vespa and Nyx. I tried Vespa on first and I'm glad this is the texture polish line I chose to start with because it was instant love! Before I go on, let me just clarify that I bought these polishes myself. No freebies here :-)

I haven't been able to compare these with any other texture polishes but what I love about these is the sugary  sparkle that they have even without any topcoat! I'm not sure if you can see it in my photos here but if you follow me on Instagram, I posted a couple of photos a few days ago of this polish under flash and you can see the sparkle a little better. I have not tried top coat because I've been enjoying it without too much!

I wanted to see what these would look like as part of nail art so I started with something that has become relatively easy for me....a gradient. To do this I knew I couldn't just slap regular polish on top of it so I mixed some Sinful Colors Last Chance, a dark green creme, with a little of Vespa on a piece of foil.

Then a dabbed a piece of makeup sponge into the mix and dabbed it on to the tips of my nails to create a gradient.

What I was very pleased to see is that that I didn't lose either the texture or the sparkle! I think the texture actually became a little more pronounced.

I love this because it screams spring to me. Looks like sparkly moss.... What do you guys think?

Sinful Colors Envy St. Paddy's Watermarble

So...I don't have a drop of Irish in me (I don't think). I am not even going to drink this weekend (it would be criminal if I did). So I am celebrating the way I can, with a manicure :-)

I used Sinful Colors Envy for the first time in this mani. It's a great green was an almost one coater for me. The other polishes used are Sinful Colors Innocent, Sinful Colors Olympia and China Glaze White Cap. On the ring fingers the base was painted with SC Innocent and and on the middle finger the base was SC Envy. you can see that White Cap is over different colors on each finger.

With this particular watermarble I was so proud of my right hand results that I had to show that too. So here the debut of my right hand on this blog. Ta da!!!!

The gold shamrock on my left index finger was done with these large glitters I got from a random dollar store near here last summer. I have yet to use the other colors!

One last look, this is under softer lighting.

What do you guys think? My husband thought the glequin shamrock was too abstract. I kinda like it :-) Better than attempting freehand nail art.

Orly Torrid Anniversary Mani

Hello folks. Last weekend my husband and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary. Can't believe it's been two years already! But a lot has happened in that time as well. Since it fell on a weekday, we didn't do any thing until Saturday when I we went out to a pretty sedate date night with a movie and dinner, in that order. We like to pretend we're old folks and catch matinee movies if possible. Plus with my pregnancy hunger pangs, it's better to have dinner earlier than later, anyway!

Of course, I had to have a mani for the occasion so I decided to borrow inspiration from our wedding invitations and try to recreate a portion of it. I used Orly Torrid for the look. For the accent nail, I used China Glaze Passion and one of the paisley images from the large Cheeky plate I. It had a few to choose from.

Here you can see the portion of the invitation that I wanted to mimic. I recently fell in love with the way the new Sinful Colors Matte top coat looks. It gives it a nice soft, glowy, satiny finish so I used that to mattify the finish of Torrid. This is not the first time I've used this top coat and I'll have to show you guys that look soon.

Below is the mani without any topcoat on it.

And here is Torrid, all by itself. 

I have so many reds like this now but I loved using Orly Torrid still. The formula was wonderful and this was two easy coats for full coverage. What do you guys think? Did I stick to the invitation look pretty well? I love the way it looks with the matte top coat.

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 :-)

Sinful Colors Athens Update

Hi everyone! So yesterday I showed you guys a mani with Sinful Colors Athens and a gradient tip with Zoya Ivanka. I said that I must have been channeling spring when I created it and you'll see why now.

I used China Glaze Passion for the stamping and the image came from the Cheeky plate CH33. Now, with the leaves, I really want spring to come already!!!

The first day I wore this mani out, I matched it with a pair of earrings that seemed to fit the color scheme perfectly. I tried to channel Marta's fabulous ability to create such gorgeous photos with jewelry on Chit Chat Nails but I feel like I just look awkward.

I don't know. What do you guys think? Maybe photographing with jewelry is not my thing or am I just being too critical?

Sinful Colors Athens with Zoya Ivanka Gradient

Good Monday morning everyone! Maybe it's not so good for everyone, in which case I hope the week only gets better. Also, I'd like to say a thank you to all my followers. I even managed to get a few new ones while I was somewhat MIA over the last couple of months. I started this blog and maintain it solely for distraction and enjoyment and as a way to do something completely different from my everyday life. It means a lot to me that you guys actually appreciate what I have on the blog to the point that you would want to come back another day! Someday soon, I'll have to thank you guys by doing some sort of giveaway.

Today's post shows part of one of my favorite manis from last month. I must have been channeling my need for spring when I created this because outside it looked like this:

I chose Sinful Colors Athens for the base of the mani and I sponged Zoya Ivanka on to the tips. I have not worn Ivanka on it's own yet but it was subtly gorgeous as the gradient on this mani.

Athens itself is a lovely polish. I loved it as much as I have loved all the recent Sinful Colors creams that they put out last year. This was two coats, minimal dragging, no pooling.

The spring time wish will be more evident in the next post when I show you what I added to this mani. What do you guys think of Ivanka as a gradient? On a lighter green or even blue, I think it would look even more fabulous!