September 20, 2014

Zoya Pixie Dust: Liberty plus Some Other Stuff

I mentioned Zoya's Pixie Dust in my post on the eight blue-green-golds, so I figured I'd do a swatch of it!  I, of course, have my Pixie Dust in the brightest blue possible, "Liberty."

Zoya Liberty



Pixie Dust is the most sparkly polish I've seen yet.  It's like having tiny crushed blue diamonds on my nails!  It actually doesn't work well with a top coat, even a shiny one like Out The Door.  A top coat flattens out the texture of the glitters, which mutes the sparkle.


Application is, as always with Zoya, really nice.  Two coats is perfect.

Taken in feeble evening sunlight.

A cool thing about Pixie Dust is how dark the color is, but with the sparkles it's incredibly bright.  I love it and I can't stop staring at my nails!

Taken on my cell phone in the car - don't worry, I was parked!  Direct sunlight.

The best part about the texture of Pixie Dust is that it's very forgiving.  If you miss a spot, if you smear it while it's still wet, or if it chips when dry and you go over it with a few little dabs, you can barely tell!  That makes me really happy because I used my glue basecoat for this, and it chipped a lot sooner than I would have liked.  I dabbed a tiny bit over the chipped spots and you have to really be looking closely at my nails to be able to tell that I patched any chips!

Nail Stains


Liberty stained the CRAP out of my nails.  Really, really blue.  I used this color when I first got it with my usual basecoat, and I don't recall it staining; I think that the glue basecoat is just really porous and allows staining.  Maybe in the future I'll try using a coat or two of my usual basecoat on top of the glue and see how that goes.  In any case, I wanted to take this opportunity to share my solution to stained nails, and it's really simple: toothpaste!

"*gasp* I'm naked!!" - My nails

I can't remember where online I read or heard this, but somewhere out there somebody recommended using normal toothpaste to get rid of polish stains on nails.  I wanted to try it out, but I don't own a nail brush.  I DO, however, have like 5 extra toothbrushes laying around, so I grabbed a fresh one and used that to scrub away my nail stains.  And it totally worked!  These stains were really bad, and they were on all ten nails, so it took a good 10-15 minutes to work the stains away.  But that's a heck of a lot better than waiting two months for the stains to grow out, feeling sad and embarrassed about my naked nails in the mean time!

I trimmed and filed my nails a bit before taking this after photo.  Toothpaste didn't make my nails shorter!

The glue basecoat didn't work very well with Liberty, anyway.  Rather than pop off in one big piece, it flaked off only with the use of an orangewood stick dipped in acetone.  I ended up removing it the usual way - the Deborah Lippman method - and it was still a struggle, but it worked better and faster than scraping it all off.

I painted my toe nails!



Sandal season is coming to an end, and I wanted to send it off with a bang by painting my toe nails to match my favorite pair of sandals ever.

When I saw these gladiator-style sandals in the store with my mom, I was like "Haha, those are CRAZY, I just have to try them on!"  The moment I zipped them up (the zippers have little tassels on them!), Mom and I were totally baffled at how awesome they were.  Isn't it awesome how sometimes you can think something is way outside your style comfort zone, only to turn around and completely adore it within moments?

Anyway, five years later, I'm looking for a gold metallic nail polish and I find "Gladiator" by Nina Ultra Pro.  It's a great brassy-gold, and since it's called Gladiator, I wanted to wear it to match my gladiator sandals.  It's also a really nice way to transition into fall, since it's not super bright but not quite as deep as most fall colors.

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