Ellagee Jeweled Egg Hunt

Today I have for you yet another polish that I've had sitting around for over a year but never swatched.  This one did make a brief appearance around Christmas, when I made my nail polish Christmas ornaments, and I promised then that I would swatch it eventually.  I guess today is eventually! :)

Jeweled Egg Hunt by Ellagee is a truly stunning holographic glitter.  It's in a clear base, but the glitters are so dense that just two coats over bare nails yields full opacity!

I love the pink and gold color combination, and I love even more the teeny tiny holographic glitters!  Here's yet another polish that makes me feel like I'll need to wear gloves while driving so I don't sit through a green light staring at my nails.

The glitters apply beautifully - almost as smoothly as a creme polish!  I didn't really experience any spreading or wind up with any bare spots on my nails.  A glitter this dense is usually gloopy and difficult to work with, but not this one!  And that's really saying something considering that my bottle is over a year old.

The glitter density of Jeweled Egg Hunt is similar to Black Dahlia Lacquer's Woke Up On 6th Street, which I reviewed on the blog last summer.

For once, I actually got a sunny day while swatching a holo polish!  I was shocked.  Last month was way too cloudy and gloomy.

SHAZAM!!!  I think taking out-of-focus pictures of holo glitters is one of my favorite parts of blogging.  It's so pretty!!!

I took the above photo on my phone, but I'm wishing I'd gotten out my camera and tripod to get this in-focus sunlight shot.  Still, even with less pixels per inch, you can see how beautiful this polish is!

If you like the looks of this polish, I highly recommend you check out Ellagee's entire Bejewled line!  She makes some fabulous-looking holographic glitters (although this is the only one of the line that I own or have used).

What do you think of this polish?  What's your favorite holographic glitter polish?  Let me know in the comments!

St. Patrick's Day nail art

Happy St. Patrick's Day, all!

I have a bit of a smorgasbord of nail polish on my nails today.  Last year, I won a great six-piece collection of nail polish from Salon Perfect and Manicurator.  It arrived on St. Paddy's Day last year, and I was a bit too busy to do a themed mani and have it up on the blog before the day ended.  I've used some of the solid colors in various other manicures since then, but I haven't yet used the special glitter toppers that I got!  (The glitters were limited edition, and are no longer available, so I have not included links for them like I usually do.)

 

Also, a few weeks ago, I purchased some nail polish from Swatcher, Polish Ranger in her destash sale.  Courtney was kind enough to throw in a bonus polish - Fiona by Daily Hues Nail Lacquer.  The shade of green is perfect for today, so I added that to my mani, too!

I was really impressed with Luck of the Irish.  The glitter density on the brush matched the density in the bottle!  I have two coats on top of Loopy Lime on my pointer finger, and only one coat on top of Gold Leaf on my ring finger.

Sadly, the glitter application of Sham-Rock Your Socks Off was not as smooth as with Luck of the Irish.  I actually have three coats on my pinkie finger!  Based on how much glitter is in the bottle, I was expecting one coat to look like what I ended up with.  And I fished for the glitters quite a bit, too.

Fiona is holographic, but it's been an annoyingly cloudy week, so I wasn't able to get any sunlight shots of it.  I'm so tired of all of these clouds!  Sheesh!  I guess this week's weather is better than last week's freak heat wave, though.  (It was over 80 degrees last Thursday! eurgh!)

This was a pretty simple mani, only taking me about half an hour from base coat to top coat.  I like manicures like that!  Spending two hours or more on intricate nail art is only fun for me about once a month. :)

What are your nails sham-rocking for St. Patrick's Day?  Let me know in the comments!

Christmas Crafting: Nail Polish Ornaments

Got any nail polishes that you love the look of but never wear and don't want to get rid of?  Do you own any Mentality nail polish that you don't feel safe wearing?  Or are you like me, and have a ton of polish and want to actually use some of it up?  Then I've got a craft that I think you'll enjoy!

 

I got this idea from Elizabeth of My World Sparkles Lacquers.  At first I was a little weary to dump out significant amounts of polish at a time, but then I was like "oh please, look at how many bottles of nail polish you have! Do iiiit."  So I bought a 12-pack of small glass ornaments from JoAnn Fabrics (I assume you can find these at most craft stores and pretty much anywhere with a good selection of ornaments) and decked them out!

Elizabeth used much bigger ornaments, so she set hers up on top of open mason jars while they dried.  Since the ornaments that I bought are so small (probably about 1.5" in diameter), I propped mine up on top of opened lotion bottles and their caps.

The process was simple, though a bit lengthy:

1. Pour polish into bulb

2. Swirl polish around, coating entire interior

3. Pour out immediate excess (back into polish bottle - no need to waste yet!)

4. Set ornament tilted downwards, so that no polish will drip out, and allow excess to gather

5. Pour out excess polish (at this point, it's probably thickened enough that you won't want to put it back into the bottle.  I laid out paper towels and newspaper.)

6. Set ornament upright

7. Repeat steps 4-5 if necessary

8. Set ornament upside down and allow to drip out. (Keep an eye on it, though - I let too much polish drip out of one of them and it ended up less opaque than I wanted it!)  Elizabeth put paper towels into her mason jars for this step, but I didn't really want to clean out all of my lotion bottles.  What I ended up doing was only dripping out one ornament at a time into an empty water bottle.

9. Add a second coat if necessary, and repeat steps 1-8 (but don't pour the excess back into the bottle in step 3 if you're using a different color!)

When layering different polishes in these, be sure to do it in the opposite order of painting your nails!  Apply glitters/toppers first, then the base color.

Since I was doing so many of these, I usually started the next ornament after step 3 of the previous one.  It was so much fun!  My dining room was filled with lots of odd scents between the opened lotion bottles and all of the nail polish!  Not exactly the smell I'm used to when decorating for Christmas. :)

Here's a video tutorial of my process:

 

I'm so excited to hang these on our tree this year!  Since we don't have a tree yet (it's in the mail!), I used a bobby pin and my regular light box to take photos of my lovely new ornaments.  Pretty crafty, eh?

Sinful Colors Twilight Twinkles and Sally Hansen CSM Hi Ho Silver

I actually bought Twilight Twinkles specifically for this craft!  I'd hoped that I would use most of it up, but there's still plenty left.  These small ornaments probably only use about 1/4-1/3 of a full-sized bottle of polish.  If you really want to use up a whole bottle of polish, either get bigger ornaments or do multiple ornaments in the same color!

Twisted Colors Elf Vomit and China Glaze White on White

I was hesitant to use Twisted Colors polishes in these ornaments, because sadly Twisted Colors has closed their shop, possibly forever.  But the three Christmas polishes that I got last year are just so perfect for these that I decided to sacrifice some future manis.

Jior Couture Son of a Nutcracker

Nicole by OPI Heavenly Angel and Zoya Mosheen

I considered adding a white background to this one, but I rather like it clear!  Hopefully I can place it strategically in front of a light bulb on the tree so the light can sparkle through.

Ellagee Jeweled Egg Hunt

Okay, I'm going to need to swatch this one soon.  It's amAzing.  All that density is in only two coats!  I'm sure that on the nail, one coat would be almost completely opaque.

Wet n Wild Rockin' Rubies and Sally Hansen CSM Red My Lips

Youch, my phone really messed this one up.  It's nowhere near this neon red in person - and it's actually quite sparkly!  But cameras hate the color red, as I've learned quite well over the past year.

Twisted Colors All Spruced Up and Spoiled by Wet n Wild Green to be Heard

I mean, how could I NOT use this one for an ornament?!  It's so perfect!

Wet n Wild Back Alley Deals and Sally Hansen CSM Blue My Mind

This is the one that I accidentally let too much polish drip out of.  Oops!  I still like it.

Wet n Wild Diamond in the Rough and Hi Ho Silver

The Wet n Wild polish is actually pretty black, but even two coats of it was super sheer in the ornament.  I chose to use a silver background because I figured black would be a bit too dark for a Christmas ornament!  (As in, literally too dark.  Not that I think black is too depressing or whatever.)

Twisted Colors Star of Wonder and Essie Style Cartel

Unghhh. So pretty!  It's much darker and more sparkly in person, but as always, dark colors + camera = bleh.

 

Jior Couture Means a Little Bit More and 

Creative Cuticles Nail Polish Please Have Snow and Mistletoe

I couldn't decide which of these glitters I'd prefer to use, so I mixed them!  I really like the glitter ornaments that I didn't add a background color to.  They look like snowglobes!

Wet n Wild 24 Carats

The little flakes don't show up so well in this shot, but this polish has some gorgeous red flakies in it!  It's super gorgeous and very Christmasy.

Have you ever done anything like this?  What are your favorite Christmas/holiday decorations?  Let me know in the comments!

Zoya Flair: Estelle and Aggie

When Zoya first released photos of their Fall 2015 collections Focus and Flair, I was a bit unimpressed.  I felt like I'd already seen most of the colors before, some of them even by Zoya themselves.  Then the first few blog posts on the collections came out, and to be honest, I still felt the same way about most of the colors.  They all look quite pretty, but they just didn't seem as original as most of the Zoya polishes have since I first started buying from them in spring 2014.  Maybe that just happens after you own 273 bottles of nail polish - it takes a heck of a lot more flair in a nail polish to make me say, "I need that!" than it did when I only owned 13 bottles.

But of course, I wanted the blue metallic, Estelle.  Do I ever not want the blue metallic polish in any given collection?  And Aggie, an intriguing colorshift metallic, looked so different and interesting that I had to have it.

Zoya Flair: Estelle

Estelle is an absolutely gorgeous shade of blue.  Let's face it, to me, every shade of blue is gorgeous, and I think I say that about every shade of blue polish I ever review.  Estelle is probably the closest imitator of sapphire that I've seen - many have imitated the color pretty well, but few have gotten the brilliant sparkle of the stone.  The way the polish sparkles on my nail kind of brings out their curvature - but not in a weird, "her nails are really bendy" way.  It's more of a "this polish has tons of depth and really reflects the light" kind of curvature.

The first coat of Estelle is quite sheer, but the second coat yields perfect opacity.  A lot of Zoya's darker metallics are almost one-coaters, but not this one.  I almost always use two coats anyway, just to make sure the line bordering my cuticles looks good, so that's not a big deal for me.

I really love the texture of the metallic.  It's incredible how many different types of metallic nail polish there are!  I've actually been meaning to create a guide to the different types of metallics, but now I kind of feel like there are just too many to document.  But definitely let me know in the comments if you would like to see a guide to the different textures!

Zoya Flair: Aggie

Aggie is definitely the most unique polish in this collection.  Its colorshift looks very striking in the bottle, with hints of blue-green at the edges, but on the nail it isn't quite so shifty.

In different types of light, it looks very different.  It's a warm gold, almost leaning copper, under my yellowish lamps, but as I was washing my hands in my white-lit bathroom, it almost looked like a chocolate brown.  The blue-green shift that I see in the bottle doesn't really show up at all on the nail, nor did it show up in my pictures.

The photos on Zoya's website are actually very accurate.  You can see the greenish hues in the bottle shot, but not on the swatch photo or the pool of polish.

Aggie's formula is very nice.  It's thin, but not watery, and opaque at two coats.  Very nice application, which is no surprise with Zoya.

Even though this polish wasn't exactly what I expected, I still really like this color!  It reminds me of the changing autumn leaves.

Zoya describes the texture of both of these polishes as "liquid metal," and I totally agree with that.  They're both so sparkly and smooth!

Do you have any of the polishes from this collection?  Which is your favorite?  Do any of them feel like dupes to you?  Let me know in the comments!

October nail art challenge Day 1: Gold

This is probably going to be an annual thing for me.  Remember last year when I did the LPLGlamhouls Halloween nail art challenge?  Well, this year I found another challenge for Halloween!  I'm super excited for a reason to play with so many different nail art designs.  And I'm also glad that I found another challenge that doesn't have something different for all 31 days of October - I don't think I could keep that up for a whole month.

The theme for today was gold.  I've never really associated the color gold with Halloween, so I did a pretty eclectic manicure.

I used Sally Hansen Big Smoky Topcoat as a base (I'm such a rebel), and then painted Salon Perfect Gold Leaf on top.  The bats vinyls that I used are from last month's Mani of the Month box by a few different indie brands; the vinyls themselves are by Nails Redesigned.  The swirl and chevron vinyls that I used come from KBShimmer.  

This theme was definitely not the most exciting Halloween-wise for me, but it forced me to think outside the box just a little bit more than I usually do, so I enjoyed it!  I absolutely can't wait for the next theme, especially since I had to skip the candy corn design last year.

Here's the image for the challenge!  Does anybody want to participate in this with me?  Let me know in the comments, and if you share your manis on Instagram, be sure to use the hashtag #nailartoct!

OPI Pineapples Have Peel-ings Too

Remember back when I swatched two colors from OPI's summer 2015 collection, I said that Pineapples Have Peel-ings Too looked kind of awkwardly awesome and that I might get it eventually?  Well, I got it.  Let's take a look!

My first assessment that Pineapples Have Peel-ings, Too was awkwardly awesome turned out to be pretty accurate.  The yellow-gold metallic base is really great, but the glitters are a bit awkward.  They get kind of drowned out by the base, and oh my goodness they smear so easily.  That tends to happen with large glitters, but these are a pretty medium size.  Most of the indie glitter polishes that I've used with glitters of this size are a bit more cooperative.  But the base is thin and forgiving enough that dabbing the glitters around didn't make it super lumpy and gross-looking, so that's a plus.

The setting sun streams beautifully into my living room this time of year.  Unfortunately I was a dolt and didn't reset the white balance on my camera, so the color is a little bit extra yellow in this picture.  But it shows off the sparkle in this polish so well that I wanted to show it to you anyway!  The sparkle is almost holographic in the brightest of lighting - you can really see the rainbow shimmer in the bottle between the letters P and I.

I'd really love to have this base color on its own!  It's an absolutely flawless metallic, very up to OPI's formula standards.  It's thin, but not watery; opaque at two coats; and it dries quickly, but not so quickly that it gets goopy while you're applying it.  It dried to an almost-semi matte finish, but barely.  A matte top coat would probably suit this polish really well - and you know how rarely I say that!  I like the matte look on cremes and for some nail art, but on top of metallics and glitters I almost always feel that matte flattens them out too much.

What do you think of this polish?  Are you totally done with summer polishes and want to start seeing fall colors?  Let me know in the comments!

Two colors from OPI's Hawaii collection

I absolutely love these colors.  I bought them at ULTA a while back, when almost every brand of nail polish was either on sale or offered a free gift with purchase except for OPI, but no other polishes really struck my fancy.  (Okay, many of them sort of did, but I have so much nail polish now that I have to really be blown away by one in order to justify making a purchase.)  You all know how much I love blue-green-sometimes-gold polishes, right?  Well, add This Color's Making Waves to my list.  (I may have to do another post showing off all of the other blue-green-gold polishes I've acquired since writing that first one.)   And My Gecko Does Tricks is such a brilliant shade of green that I couldn't pass it up!

This Color's Making Waves

 

This Color's Making Waves is a blue-green metallic polish with just a little bit of the occasional purple - and yet the purple doesn't blend into something awful with the green.  That's probably because of the tiny little purple flakies in this polish.  It's nothing short of incredible.

Just look at those flakies!

The formula on this was was very smooth, as usual for OPI.  The first coat is so sheer that your heart sinks a little, but the second coat makes it 100% opaque.  It is a little bit streaky, but I found that the streaks self-leveled pretty well, especially when I applied my top coat.  I actually have three coats on my nails, because I forgot to wrap my tips on the second coat (season five of Buffy was a bit too much of a distraction, I guess).  The third coat sort of intensifies the color, but it definitely isn't necessary in order for the polish to look good.

This photo is in direct, but slightly cloudy, sunlight.

I tried taking this outside, but there was a big cloud over the sun.  And there were two very large bees having a fight all over my back yard - a fight which I did not want to get in the middle of.  So I snapped a few indirect sunlight photos and got the heck back in the house!

Of all of my blue-green shifty polishes, I'd say that This Color's Making Waves is most similar to Nicole by OPI Candid Cameron - except that Candid Cameron doesn't have any traces of purple in it, and it also doesn't have any flakies.

This macro shot really captures the purple-green color shift, as well as the pink-gold of the flakies.

My Gecko Does Tricks

Ohhh my gosh.  Normally I wouldn't expect such a bright green to look good with my skin tone - especially since this is a yellow-toned green, rather than blue-toned.  Anything with too much yellow tends to just look like sick next to my skin.

BUT THIS LOOKS AWESOME.

My Gecko Does Tricks has this great purple color shift to it.  Purple-green?  That sounds ghastly!  But it somehow totally manages to work.  This one doesn't even have flakies in it - just the flat microshimmer that you expect from a metallic polish.

*excessive drooling* 

The purple-y shift didn't really get picked up in my camera, except for on the edge of the bottle in a macro shot.  Isn't that incredible?  OPI, I don't know how you got a rosy-purple to work well inside a bright green polish, but my hat's off to you.

It's like a sunset, only with green instead of blue.

As far as application goes, Gecko is very similar to Waves.  The first coat is disappointingly sheer, and you think to yourself, "welp, there goes my afternoon, this one's a three-coater," but then the second coat comes in and makes it completely opaque!  It's pretty streaky, too, but the streaks do level out on the second coat, and even moreso with top coat.  I found that the best way to avoid streaks was to use as few brush strokes as possible - the more strokes, the more streaks.  So if you try this polish out and have too many streaks, just let that coat dry and apply one more thin, wide coat.

Here's a macro of the center of the bottle, with much less of the color shift showing.

I recently did some nail art using this color, which you can find in this post here!

Hawaii is OPI's summer 2015 collection.  These two are really the only colors that I see myself getting - although Pineapples Have Peelings Too looks kind of awkwardly awesome and I think I might need it eventually.

Have you picked up any colors from the Hawaii collection?  What are your favorite blue-green-gold-purple shifty polishes?  Or do you prefer other shades of shifties?  Let me know in the comments!

Holy Late Posts, Batman: New Year's Eve 2014

I have been SO lazy when it comes to editing photos and writing blog posts!  Boo!

For New Year's Eve this (last?) year, I decided to go with the classic black and gold, and add a touch of silver.  I also decided to pick up on the 3D trend and use some little studs on my nails!

The black I used is Nina Ultra Pro "Black," and the silver and gold are Zoya "Trixie" and "Ziv," respectively.

The design ended up looking a little more stripe-y than I'd hoped; what I wanted was a half-moon-and-French mani.  But my half-moons ended up a lot thicker than I wanted.  Eh... oh well!

I'm not very happy with the quality of these pictures.  I took them hurriedly on my phone, without setting up my usual lamp and white pillowcase background.  Believe me when I say that I will not allow such sub-par photos on my blog any more. :)

What was your NYE style?  Did you go glitzy or chic?  Let me know (or show me) in the comments!

ALL the Christmas Nail Arts!!!

I spent a lot of time this month NOT painting my nails.  But there were TONS of Christmas-themed nail art designs that I wanted to try out, so I decided to do ALL of them on my nails at once! :D

I used ALL the colors for this, and rather than describe them in order of appearance, I'll just list them all at the bottom of this post (which is going to be pretty photo-heavy).

Here's my left hand:

And my left thumb, because I was too proud of it to only show it at the horrible angle above:

 

I took inspiration from a few different sources for this nail art.  The Christmas tree and Santa coat are from this awesome nail art compliation off of FabArtDIY.com.  The Santa corset was inspired by Instagram user arita888.

On my right hand:

Okay, this did not go as I had planned.  The Santa hat (also inspired by the FabArtDIY list) turned out awesome, but my cable knit sweaters... Not so much.  I got the idea from this image, and found this YouTube tutorial on how to do it with gel polish.  What I actually used was 3D fabric paint on top of one coat of normal polish, then one coat of polish on top of that.  I think the technique was good, but the execution was ah... less than good.  It ended up looking far less delicate and much more messy than I'd been hoping.

And then, since I used my glue basecoat, my pointer finger design ended up falling off very quickly.  So I redid it with a different pattern:

This one turned out messy too, because I'm not so great at stamping.  It was perfect in my head: red, green, and silver snowflakes stamped over white and then matte-d for wrapping paper, and then a very sparkly purple ribbon.  The overall design was inspired by Instagram user anas_manis.

By the way - do you recognize the pattern on my left ring finger?  Like, REALLY recognize it?  I did that same design on my nails last Christmas!  Here's the original, complete with my super-short, pre-Biotin nails:

I loved this design so much that I decided to redo it this year.  It's a simple enough design that there isn't too much obvious skill improvement between the years, but it's always nice to have a visual reminder of how much nicer my nails are now. :)

Aaaand I absolutely adore my tiny little Christmas tree, so I decided to show off my nails in front of it. :D

 

This nail art took me a whomping three and a half hours and 18 nail polishes.  WOW.  But it was tons of fun, and I watched such Christmas classics as The Muppets Christmas Carol and American Horror Story while doing this! ;) 

Sigh.  My right thumb, middle, AND ring finger nail designs all fell off too, so I had to redo them!  I liked the Santa hat so much that I kept that design, but I decided against redoing the sweater designs and instead chose two more Christmasy patterns: a Santa face and a penguin!

 

 The Santa face turned out pretty nicely, though his eyes smeared a little when I put on my top coat.  And sorry about my messy cuticles - I was too excited to take these last two pictures to bother waiting until my cuticles were clean!

This penguin...  Poor little guy.  His right eye was a little bit lopsided, so I tried to even it out by making it a little bigger.  But instead, my hand slipped and now he's a mutant penguin with two and a half eyes.  I can't stop laughing every time I look at him. :) :(

Which design is your favorite?  Is there another Christmas/winter design that you love doing?  Let me know in the comments!  And Merry Christmas Eve :D 

As promised, here's a list of everything that I used for this:
Zoya Trixie
China Glaze Innocence
China Glaze White on White
Sally Hansen CSM Red My Lips
Sally Hansen White striper
Twisted Colors All Spruced Up
Zoya Nyssa
Zoya Ziv
OPI How Great Is Your Dane
OPI An Affair In Red Square
Essie Bikini So Teeny
Nicole by OPI Heavenly Angel
Heather's Hues Santa Baby
Finger Paints Ch-Art-Coal Black
China Glaze Fairy Dust
Spoiled by Wet n Wild Green to be Heard
Julep Bunny
Zoya Haven

Zoya Posh

Nina Ultra Pro Black

Finger Paints Master Muse
Cheeky Beauty Jumbo Plate 10
Scribbles 3D Fabric Paint in White
ULTA Sweet&Shimmer studs