Destash Sale!

This has been inevitable for months now.  My nail polish stash has finally reached its breaking point, so I'm selling off some of my underappreciated stash!  Please note that there are no flaws with these polishes (save for some separation in a few of them, which can be fixed).  And I'm not hating on any of these polishes or brands.  In fact, I'm selling these off because I recognize that they're too pretty to be stuck in my Helmer, getting passed over for my other shades!  It's just that I either never reach for these shades, or I have another bottle or two of a very similar color by a different (or the same) brand, or some combination of the two.

Some are lightly used (LU) - one full manicure or 4-nail swatch; some are barely used (BU) - used in nail art or Do I Need Them All but never fully swatched; and some are like new never used (LNNU).  (I say "like new" instead of "brand new" because most of these have been sitting in my stash for a while and I feel weird saying that they're "brand new.")

Note to indie makers: if you feel that I am doing your business a disservice by reselling your polish at these prices, please contact me!  I don't want to offend any of you, because I truly love you all. 

$6 Polishes

Finger Lickin' Lacquer Rockin' Robin: LNNU
Philly Loves Lacquer Wooder Ice: LNNU

Zoya Sage: LNNU
China Glaze Don't Be Foiled: LNNU
Jamberry Ruby: LNNU

$5 Polishes

Sally Hansen Fuzzy Coat Fuzz-Sea: LU
Sally Hansen Big Smoky Top Coat Smoky: BU
Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Trouble Maker: LU

Zoya Frida: LU
Zoya Mikka: BU
Essie Style Cartel: LU

OPI Pineapples Have Peelings Too: LU
ORLY Saturated: BU
ORLY Hook Up: BU

Virago Varnish Faith Hope Courage: LU (some separation has occurred)
Firecracker Lacquer Purple Peep-le Eater: BU
Smoky Mtn Lacquers Eggstra Special: BU
6 Harts Polish Blue Eyed Bunny: BU

Finger Paints First Edition: BU
Finger Paints Monet Money: BU
Finger Paints Magritte's Masterpiece: BU

China Glaze Ingrid: BU
China Glaze Flying Dragon: LU
Julep Elle: LU

$4 Polishes

Sweet Heart Polish Peach Cobbler: LNNU
Zoya Anais: LNNU
Jior Couture Seeing Is Believing: LU

$3 Polishes

CDB Lacquer Passionate: LU
CDB Lacquer Everyone's a Star: LNNU
Gothic Gala Lacquers Pretty in Peep: LNNU
Live Life Polished (I'm not 100% sure if that's the right brand) Blue Moon: LNNU
ULTA Aubergine Queen: BNNU

Amelia Knight Color Couture Gold Glitter: LU
Amelia Knight Color Couture Coral Creme: BU
Amelia Knight Color Couture Silver Metallic: BU
Amelia Knight Color Couture Purple Metallic: LU
Pop-arazzi Lime-ousine Ride: LNNU

Covergirl Glosstini Pyro Pink: BU
Covergirl Glosstini Flamed Out: LU

As a special, I'm offering my nail polish cozies at a reduced price with every bottle of polish that you purchase!  Standard size cozies are regularly $5, Long cozies are regularly $6, and Mini cozies are regularly $4.  But if you're buying from my stash sale, then you can get Standard/Long cozies for $3 and Minis for only $2!  Polish cozies are a great way to help protect your pretties in the mail; they're also adorable when giving polish as a gift!  Colors will be random but I promise that they'll be pretty.  You can order up to one special-priced cozy per bottle of polish that you order; if you'd like to order extra cozies, they'll be regular priced.  (Large sized cozies are not applicable to the special pricing as none of the polishes that I am selling require a large cozy.)

Shipping charges & payment

Shipping costs $4 for up to 4 bottles.  Add one dollar per bottle above that.  So if you order 3 bottles, shipping will be $4; if you order 8 bottles, shipping will be $8.  Orders of $50 or higher will receive free shipping.  I will ship USPS First Class, which includes a tracking number.  If you wish to add insurance, signature confirmation, or any other USPS add-on, you will be responsible for the additional cost.  These prices are for United States postage ONLY.  If you are international, shipping charges are likely to be quite high but they can be arranged.

Payment will be done through PayPal.  After you fill out the form below, I will calculate your total and send you a PayPal Friends and Family request.  There is no fee for this if you use your bank account directly (rather than a credit/debit card)!  Please allow up to 24 hours for a request to be sent as I am a human who can't just hit refresh all day. :)  If your total is not what you expected, feel free to contact me before paying and we'll figure it out.

I will do my best to check the form responses quickly and make sure to update this post with the polishes that have been sold.  In the event that multiple people request the same polish before I get a chance to update the post, I will solely go on a first-come, first-serve basis according to the time stamps on the Google Forms response.  I will NOT allow bidding on any of the polishes, nor will I play favorites to anybody.

If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at katenailingit@gmail.com.

Okay, I think that covers everything.  Fill out the form below, and share this post with anyone you think might be interested in buying off some of my stash!

Comic book nail art

I've been dying to give this nail art look a try for a while now, and recently I finally decided to dive in!  I was a little bit incensed to do it when I found some awesome comic book nail art stickers in a set by KISS Nails at Target.

So... this turned out to be a LOT harder than I'd imagined.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised - the entire concept of the comic nails are centered around freehand lines, after all.  And freehand lines are hard.  A word of advice if you're gonna try this out: don't bother getting your main color all the way to your cuticles like you normally would.  That way, you'll have an easier time of covering it all up with your black liner brush!

But look at me dominate this tiny Hulk figurine! :D I picked up several Marvel Mystery Minis from Target at Derek's request a few months ago.

The polishes that I used for this look are Zoya Ling, Finger Paints Ch-ART-coal Black (a striping polish), and Zoya's matte top coat (because comic book nails can't be glossy!).

 

Then I decided to have a bit of fun with Photoshop...

I borrowed some comic book skin from this source and laid it over my own skin; the background is borrowed from this source and laid over my own background.  And the lines around my hands and nails were painstakingly drawn by my own hand (made more difficult by the fact that my sister was telling me a funny story over the phone about my nephew while I was doing this!).  I'm very proud of this.

What do you think of this look?  Have you ever tried out comic book nails?  Let me know in the comments!

Do I Need Them All? Black Dahlia Lacquer & Polish Me Royalty strawberry polishes

Hey, it's been a while since I published a post in this series!  I'm not really sure why I dropped the ball on that one.  I'm clumsy. ;)

Anyway, today I'm going to compare the polish that you saw on the blog this past week with another strawberry-inspired polish.  Because I'm obsessed with strawberry polish, it was inevitable that I wound up with two similar ones!

Today we'll be looking at Polish Me Royalty's Strawberry Shortcake and Black Dahlia Lacquer's Strawberry Fields.  (I did a full swatch of Strawberry Fields at the beginning of last year, and you can find that post here.)

I have Strawberry Shortcake on my pointer and ring fingers, and Strawberry Fields on my middle and pinky fingers.

They're definitely very similar, but also noticeably different.  Strawberry Fields is a brighter, more true pink than Strawberry Shortcake, which is a bit more muted and on the berry-purple side.  (Is "pinurple" a thing? "purnk"?  I'm calling purple-leaning pinks purnk from now on.)

Both polishes have a subtle shimmer that my regular camera can barely pick up.  And the flash on my camera is so unbelievably bright that it completely washes everything out this up close - so I have to take any flash photos on my phone.  You can kinda-sorta see the shimmers in the flash photo:

You can see that Strawberry Fields' shimmer is more golden-pink, while the shimmer in Strawberry Shortcake is more silvery-pink.  They're both very subtle and very pretty.

As I mentioned in this week's post, Strawberry Shortcake is very nearly a OCW.  If my nails were shorter and/or I had this in a full-sized bottle, I would probably only need one coat of it.  It's a much more highly pigmented formula that Strawberry Fields, which definitely requires two coats, even using a full-sized brush.  And as I also mentioned earlier this week Strawberry Shortcake is SCENTED which is awesome!  Strawberry Fields is not scented.

So, do I need them all?  Well, I do, because strawberries.  Although, funnily enough, I don't usually reach for pink when I want to throw on a quick coat of polish.  Under normal, non-strawberry-inspired circumstances, I would probably not want to bother owning such similar shades of pink polish (sorry, pink).  Buuut they're definitely not dupes, so for a pink lover or a fellow strawberry lover, I'd say that yes, you DO need them all!

Thanks for checking out this month's edition of Do I Need Them All!  Which of these shades do you prefer?  Let me know in the comments!

And don't forget to enter my blogiversary giveaway, which can be found here!  There are only a few days left to enter!

Polish Me Royalty: Strawberry Shortcake

A little while ago, I played a fun game on Instagram, started by one of the crocheters that I follow.  She promised to buy something from the winner's shop, and then the winner would start the next round and buy something from the next winner's shop.  I won the first round, so I got to host the second round!  Even though I posted the game on my crochet shop account and used hashtags to lure in fellow crocheters, most of the people who played wound up being indie polish makers.  I wasn't exactly complaining about that, though!  I ended up randomly selecting Polish Me Royalty, a UK-based polish company.  I briefly contemplated cheating and picking someone else, because of international shipping fees, but I'm really glad that I stayed honorable!  PMR only charges $9.51 (that's USD) in shipping to the US, and to be honest, I've paid close to that amount in shipping with domestic orders before.  So I picked out two mini polishes for myself.

I think we're past the point of me needing to introduce my obsession with strawberries.  It's a well-known fact that Kate's Nailing It loves strawberries by now, right?  So when I saw that Polish Me Royalty made a polish called Strawberry Shortcake, I knew I had to have it and that made me all the more glad that I'd drawn this shop as my winner in the Indie Shop Game.

Strawberry Shortcake is super highly pigmented.  Even with a mini bottle, and even with my super-long nails, it was very nearly a one-coater!  Incredible.  I'd be willing to bet that a full-sized bottle would be a OCW every time.

The color is exactly what you'd expect from a strawberry-inspired polish: bright, berry pink.  It's a creme formula, and there's a bit of a subtle shimmer to it.  Sadly, my camera could barely pick it up except in the bottle.  The shimmer is very pretty though, being pinkish-silver in tone.  I think that's why it's so subtle - because the shimmer color is so similar to the base color.  You can also see the shimmer pretty decently in the picture with flash:

Oh, and as it turns out, this polish is scented!  I noticed a scent on my nails the whole time I was wearing this one (I wore it for a few days on both hands), but I kept thinking that the raspberry scented cuticle oil I'd just started using had simply soaked in to my skin and made me smell like berries.  But I talked to Sarah, PMR's maker, on Facebook and it turns out that this polish has a strawberry scent to it.  Strawberry Shortcake is part of her Just Desserts trio, and each polish is scented like the fruity dessert that it's inspired by!  It is a fairly faint scent, though - I barely noticed it unless I was actively sniffing my nails.  But Sarah said that she's working on making the scent stronger, so future batches may be more noticeable than mine!

I really like PMR's little heart-shaped bottles.  They're so cute and delicate!

All in all, I'm very glad that I had an excuse to try out a new indie brand.  I also bought Space Wizzard, which I'll swatch on the blog somewhere down the line.  And Sarah was kind enough to throw in a mini bottle of Hollow, which was super nice of her!  I'll probably put those two in a post together since they're both incredible holographic glitters.

In the meantime, be sure to enter my blogiversary giveaway!  It's ending in just under a week and there are still VERY few individual entrants!

UPDATE: This post was initially posted with the wrong polish name!  I fixed it.  shhhhh

Some more recreation nail art

I didn't really have a good name for this nail art design, but I definitely wanted to share it with you!

The original design was by reddit user veryrelevantactually, although she said that she copied the look from an image on Google.  Here is her design: (permalink)

Check out those matching toes!  Super cute.  More effort than I prefer to go to on my own feet, because my tummy tends to get smooshed in the way.

And here's my recreation, though I used a different color scheme:

I painted this a few weeks ago, before my pinky nail had begun recovering from the break.  

 

I decided to show my right hand to show that I had, in fact, kept to the same pattern on my pinky nail.  Also, I think that somehow I ended up making prettier, straighter lines on my right ring finger than on my left.

I looove this bright blue and copper color combo!  The blue is Essie Strut Your Stuff, and the copper is Zoya Penny.  None of my nail studs matched the copper polish, so I dotted on some more copper at the bottom of my nails.

What do you think of this look?  Let me know in the comments!

Don't forget to enter my blogiversary giveaway!  If you're seeing the desktop version, it's the featured post on the right.  But because I know tons of you read the blog on mobile, here's a link to the giveaway post for ya!