Okay, so even though I used a whole bunch of water decals back in October for the Halloween nail art challenge, the first time I actually used any decals was way back over the summer. I just found this post in my archives and figured I'd come back from my long, holiday hiatus with this bright spring-y look! Don't worry, I'll show you all of my Christmas and New Year's Eve looks soon - probably next week.
My cousin got me a whole bunch of nail art supplies for Christmas in 2014. For months, all of those awesome things sat around waiting to be used. I did play with the water decals a little bit a while back, but it was highly experimental and did not yield a blog-worthy mani. So I finally decided to put them on the blog!
I really enjoy picking out nail polishes that match a certain item - a particular dress, a pair of pajama pants, a tissue box, or a nail decal. In this case, I went with (from thumb to pinky) Zoya Demetria, Sinful Colors Why Not?, Pop-Arazzi Lime-ousine Ride, and Virago Varnish Faith Hope Courage. I have Zoya's Naked system on my ring finger to even out my nail tone and brighten my white tips.
I took this second photo on my phone at a really well-lit store just to show my Mom, but I was really impressed with how shiny the lights made my nails look!
This was a really simple and fun mani! In the future, I would totally take the time to use a decal on more than one nail - but this was actually kind of rushed because I started working on it a little bit too late for my schedule that day. Applying the decals was really easy, though, and I don't see myself losing patience while trying to use more than one!
I did learn two things about water decals: One, they are not like temporary tattoos. You don't place the design face down on your nail and then peel the paper off; you have to peel the design off of the paper and place it on your nail. Using it like a temporary tattoo will give you a solid white decal. And Two, decals are not like stickers. Once you peel a decal off of the paper, you either have to put it on your nail or throw it away. You can't stick it back on the paper, re-wet it later, and peel it off again. I hope you guys can learn from my mistakes so you don't end up wasting two decals! :) The brand for these decals is pretty vague - I tried Googling "Nail Accessory," which is on the packaging, and of course that mostly turned up thousands of different types of nail art tools and accessories. I usually like to give you a link to the products that I use, but in this case I just can't find it! The product code on this particular sheet of decals is BLE1518.
What do you think of this design? Have you ever used decals before? What is your favorite type of nail decal? Let me know in the comments!
Okay, I know I've only been blogging for a year and 3 months or so, and I've already gone on two or three hiatuses. That seems like a lot of breaks in such a short amount of time, I know. Most of those hiatuses (except for the one that I took this time last year, which was because I was on vacation for 9 days) have been because I burned out a little; keeping up with a regular schedule of doing my nails and blogging got too exhausting and I needed a break. But this time, I'm taking a break to avoid the burnout, and to make sure I'm only blogging when it's because I want to, not because I need to.
As you may know if you follow me on Facebook, I've started a crochet business. I started out selling to family and friends via a Facebook group, but I'm actually working on opening up a big-girl shop on Big Cartel! I absolutely adore crocheting, and I'm super excited to be able to make money off of such an enjoyable hobby. In the last week, I got four orders from friends - plus I've been neglecting a fifth order for my aunt, which she placed months ago. On top of that, I want to make a Christmas-themed table runner, which I'm hoping to finish before my boyfriend's parents fly in from China in mid-December. And, even though I was super productive and finished making ALL of the Christmas (and Christmastime birthday) presents for my family in Michigan, I still have three gifts to make for the people I'll be spending Christmas with. To be honest, with all of that on my to-do list, I'm a little scared to open up my shop before Christmas! I'm afraid that I simply won't have the time to make anything for anyone else in time, and I certainly don't want to start out my business with frustrated, giftless customers.
So, as you can see, I have a TON of crocheting to do. Some of it has a pre-Christmas deadline, which is fast approaching. With all of that going on, plus my normal life like looking for a full-time job and doing chores and not neglecting my boyfriend, and family staying with us for the entire second half of December, I fear that trying to keep up with blogging will absolutely break me. So in order to prevent that from happening, in order to remember that I do my nails and blog because I like to, I'm going to put a hold on the blog for a few weeks. I might do one or two posts in the coming weeks - I was hoping to do at least one Christmas nail art design like I did last year! - but I almost definitely won't be posting once a week. I might end up skipping December's Do I Need Them All post as well. We'll see.
As with my previous blogging breaks, I'll probably still be active on my various social media accounts! Since Twitter and Instagram are also my personal accounts, you might get to see some of my crochet updates and pics of holiday celebrations. And at the very least, I'll be around on Facebook to keep you in the loop for awesome nail polish sales and giveaways!
I just wanted to let you all know what's going on, because I know how sad it can be when a blogger just stops posting. I will be back some time in January, I'm sure. Hopefully I'll be able to stick to the same schedule that I've been doing since summer!
I want to wish you all Happy Holidays. Whether you celebrate any of them or not, I hope that the next month is filled with joy, happiness, and love.
PS If you're interested in seeing what I crochet, feel free to visit (or join!) my Facebook group. And check out my shop, http://katescrochets.bigcartel.com/! It's now open and I'm even running a giveaway!
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
This is my first KB Shimmer nail polish purchase, and I couldn't have chosen a better polish to start with!
I've never owned a true multichrome polish like this one. I seem to recall a weird rose-gold-to-snot-green shift that my Mom had when I was a kid, but the awkward green shift rendered it pretty much unwearable. I guess multichrome technology has gotten better since then - either that, or the color shift effects just work better when the different colors blend together well!
I almost have to wear gloves when I drive with this polish on. It is so hard to take my eyes off of!
Above you can see it has a reddish shift at this angle, and next up it becomes a bit more goldish-red-purple:
See that streak of very very gold near the edges of the bottle? Usually a shift like that doesn't show up on my camera. But this one absolutely does!
WHAT. HOW IS THIS THE SAME POLISH. I promise I didn't get my photos mixed up! This incredible red-copper color is indeed still Pigment of My Imagination. The first three photos were taken under my yellowish lamps and inside my light box (which softens the light and helps reduce glare.) The photo above is directly under the same lamp, without the light box. I found that the more direct the light, the more pronounced the colorshift is.
Direct sunlight makes Pigment of My Imagination lean more blue-purple. But indirect sunlight...
... makes the color lean more towards that reddish-coppery tone, though it's still very purple at the right angle.
This one was taken in the whitest light I have - my bathroom, haha. In whiter light, this polish continues to lean towards the blue end of the purple spectrum, still with a flash of the coppery tones.
I swear, this polish is at least half magic potion! This is another picture taken under my yellowish lamps, without the soft box. It's a completely new shade of purple that we haven't really seen in the other pictures! I seriously couldn't stop taking pictures of this polish. It just shifts so much! I love it!
Formula-wise, Pigment of My Imagination is quite lovely. It's thin, but not watery. The first coat is pretty sheer, but the second coat makes it perfectly opaque.
Although I think my pictures have captured at least most of the different colors in this polish, I think a video does it much better! Feast your eyes (or click here to watch the video on YouTube):
What do you think of this polish? Do you own any multichromes? Did you own any of the unfortunate snot-green multichromes of the late 90s/early 2000s? Let me know in the comments!
By the way - Happy Thanksgiving weekend to my American followers! My birthday is on Thanksgiving this year so I'm going to have an amazing weekend :D What are you doing for the holiday weekend? Let me know in the comments!
Welcome to November's edition of Do I Need Them All! This month, we'll be taking a look at four nude nail polishes.
From left to right, we have: Zoya Ana, Zoya Chantal, Nails Inc London Radnor Walk, and China Glaze Sunset Sail. I have the polishes in the same order on my nails in the photos below.
These polishes are pretty surprisingly different once you get them on the nail! Ana is a Satin finish - somewhere between glossy and matte - which comes as no surprise since that's right on the bottle. Radnor Walk actually dries to a matte finish, which is a bit of a surprise since it's not written on the bottle at all. And Sunset Sail has a bit of a shimmer to it, but its shimmer is much more subtle than that of Radnor Walk.
Angled more towards the light to purposefully get a glare - to demonstrate the different finishes.
Colorwise, these polishes kind of pair up: Sunset Sail is almost the same shade as Chantal, though SS leans perhaps a touch more peachy; and Ana and Radnor Walk are very similar shades, though the pinkish sparkle in RW does make it look a bit pinker overall.
I found that using flash was the best way to show the differences in finish - and to actually show off the shimmers in Radnor Walk and Sunset Sail. My camera wasn't really picking up the shimmers at all - and the flash on my camera is ridiculously bright at its lowest setting, so I took this picture on my phone.
These colors are altogether much more different on the nail than they are in the bottle! There are definitely no dupes here.
So, Do I Need Them All? Sure! These babies are definitely all different from each other. The sparkles in two of them, the matte and satin finishes, and the two different main color tones make them very different nail polishes. Until I really got in to collecting nail polish, I probably would have picked only one of these four, because I wasn't really in to nude polish. Which one, I'm not sure, but I use to wear nude colors so rarely that I didn't care to own similar shades! However, for someone who loves doing nail art but works a job where nail polish can't be too colorful, I would say that you definitely need all of these! Just be sure to grab a Satin and a matte top coat if you want to secure your manicure and retain the different finishes featured in this post.
Was this post helpful to you? Are there any specific polishes that you'd like to see compared in this series? Let me know in the comments!
November has been lovingly known as Movember for a few years now, thanks to the "No-Shave November" trend. (Is it a trend? a lifestyle? a challenge? I honestly don't know at this point.) So I decided to do a quick and easy Jamberry manicure to celebrate!
I mixed things up because I have a TON of sample sheets of different wraps - my Jamberry representative loves sending out samples to her customers! So I had a lot of fun with the accent nails.
Sadly, most of the wraps in this mani have been discontinued - Almond Ombre, which is on my left pinky finger, the mustache French tips, which are adorably called Uno Momo, and the plaid on my right pinky have all been discontinued. The flowery wrap on my left middle finger is called Flapper and it's still around in Jamberry's shop, woohoo! The animal print on my left pinky is Hear Me Roar.
A lot of people around the internet dislike Jamberry, for a variety of
reasons. The biggest one is that they're a lot harder to apply than
the company makes it look - and that's definitely true. I still need
some practice - you can see the wrinkles on some of my nails. But my
favorite thing about Jamberry is that once I've finished applying them,
I'm done. This manicure may have taken me 45 minutes, but when I
was done, I was able to whip up dinner immediately without having to
worry about smudging, chipping, or denting my nails. And honestly, 45
minutes for this many nail art designs is nothing! (At least the way I
paint my nails, ha.) For a solid color nail, I definitely prefer
polish, but I really like using Jamberry for nail art.
Have you ever tried Jamberry, or any other of the different kinds of nail wraps out there? What did you think of them? Let me know in the comments!
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!
