Purple and black holo nail art

The only nail art I've had the energy to do lately is using nail vinyls.  In fact, I've had such low energy lately that for this look, I didn't do the vinyls part until a few days after painting on the purple!

These gorgeous polishes are both by Gothic Gala Lacquers, who has sadly just closed their polish-selling doors. :'(  The purple is Sinfully Stephanie, and the black is The Search for Spock.

I adore the long handles of Gothic Gala Lacquers, but I've never been completely satisfied with my hand pose for them.  I can never seem to get it just right - the long, elegant shape of the handle demands a more elegant hand pose in my opinion, and that's hard to do with a tabletop tripod!

I actually pulled out my floor tripod for this one!  What do you think of the pose?  I think I would like it better if my pinky finger were a bit longer. ;)

Either I didn't get a sunny day while I was donning this manicure, or more likely, I simply failed to take a sunlight picture.  Both of these polishes definitely show off their holo flashes the best in direct sunlight, but direct light shows it off pretty well too!

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

Reverie Nail Lacuqer Hot Chocolate + nail art

This polish has been sitting around in my stash for far too long without being shown off!  I won it in an Instagram giveaway from Reverie Nail Lacquer quite some time ago.  I think it's from the winter/holiday 2014 collection.  I actually did swatch it back then, but I never wrote up a blog post about it and forgot how many coats I used and everything, so it never got published.

Anyway, I decided to don this beauty again this week because it's the first week of autumn!  Huzzah!

Hot Chocolate is a truly gorgeous chocolate brown holo.  It's a bit sheer, so I have one coat of Hot Chocolate over one coat of Zoya Nyssa (which is a beautiful chocolate-milk brown creme).  Talk about chocolatey goodness!

This polish definitely makes me crave a steaming mug of hot cocoa.  You haven't lived until you've tried my Mom's instant hot cocoa mix!  Although hers is a lighter shade of brown than this polish. ;)

This first week of autumn has been infuriatingly cloudy and rainy, so I didn't get any sunlight pictures; but here's a direct light shot for you!  I absolutely adore the holo flashes in this.

I won this set of vinyls from mrspoole1128 on Instagram - aren't they great?  The red polish is Zoya India.  She's not holographic, but she's absolutely stunning!

This is the first of many autumn manicures that will be headed your way this year - but I do still have a couple of leftover neon manis to show you as well!  Since it's September 30, though, I'm thinking that the next month's worth of posts will be all Halloween-themed.  So stay tuned, because I have some great ones planned!

Distressed blue nail art

A few days before I started my new internship with The Advocacy Project, I thought about what my nails should look like.  Should I maybe do some muted nail art using nude tones for the first day in an office?  And then I was like, wait, my hair is electric blue right now, I'm already not what you'd call "office standard."  So I decided to just do whatever nail art I felt like doing.

As it turned out, I felt like doing a good old fashioned dry brush mani, with a vinyl design on top of it for good measure.  I was tempted to do another neon rainbow because I've really been on a neon rainbow kick this summer, but decided to tone it down just a little bit for the first day in the office.  After all, if my hair is blue, why not paint my nails in the same color scheme?

I started out with a white base, and then I dry-brushed on four different shades of blue: Essie Bikini So Teeny, Essie Strut Your Stuff, Nails Inc London Baker Street, and Zoya Ryan.  By the time I got to my third blue I was wishing I'd started off with a base of Bikini So Teeny (the lightest blue), but oh well.  (Also when I was halfway through the dry brushing, I kicked myself for not setting up my camera in order to do a video tutorial! d'oh!  I guess I'll just have to do some more dry brushing soon.)

After all of that dry brushing was dry (which predictably didn't take very long), I slapped on some nail stencils and painted Zoya Remy on top of all of that.  I kiiiiind of wish I'd used a contrasting color instead of more blue, or at perhaps left Ryan out of the dry brushing, but oh well!  It still looks pretty awesome.  At least Remy sparkles while the rest of the polish doesn't!

As it turned out, my office is incredibly laid back and doesn't really care about the whole "office standard boring colors that don't make you stand out as an individual" thing, which is wonderful!  At this point I still haven't met our director - it's just been me, another intern, and my supervisor in the office so far.  Nobody said anything about my blue hair, but my supervisor did complement this nail art!  She'd seen my blog, because my job is running the social media pages for The Advocacy Project and my blog was a large part of my resume, and she said that she likes what I do with my nails. 

I also got the world's best nail polish compliment while I was on the subway on my way to work one morning - the woman behind me asked me where I got my nails done!  She was very surprised when I told her that I did them myself.  I gave her the name of my blog, so subway lady, if you're reading this, I hope you know how much you made my day! 

What do you think of this look?  I promise I'll make a video tutorial for dry brushing soon - when I do, what color scheme would you like to see?  Let me know in the comments!

Blingy mermaid scale nail art

I can't even with these nails!

Almost literally!

This is the first time I decided to use a makeup sponge to apply a glitter polish.  Using a sponge gives you craaaaazy glitter coverage as the sponge absorbs the jelly base, so you end up dabbing on tons of glitter at a time!  It's awesome and probably how I'm always going to apply glitter from now on.

The glitter that I used is Zoya Vega - from the Ulta Pixie Dust line.  Which means it's suuuuuper sparkly with bunches of different sized holo glitters.  Because of how textured Ultra Pixie Dust is, and how densely the sponge allowed me to apply the glitter, I had to use about four coats of top coat.  As much as I love the look of Pixie Dust, I kind of hate the feeling of sandpaper-glitter nails so I prefer to smooth it out!

You've seen my background color, Nicole by OPI Candid Cameron, a zillion years ago in my Fifty Shades of Blue post.  It's one of my favorite pre-polish obsession polishes!

What do you think of this look?  Are you secretly a mermaid?  Let me know in the comments!