Do I Need Them All? Zoya, Nails Inc London, and China Glaze nudes

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!

Happy Movember!

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!

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!

Zoya Penny

Back in the beginning of the year, I placed a rather large order of polish with Zoya.  They'd just announced the end of the Pixie Dust line, so I picked out a bunch of my favorite shades, and then decided to clear out my wish list and spend enough money to get free shipping.  When my order arrived, I was super excited to find that three full-sized bottles of polish had been thrown in as a complete bonus!  They weren't even listed as a gift on my packing slip.  The polishes were Penny, Demi, and Shivon.  I think all three of them have been discontinued by Zoya, as they're quite old - Penny and Demi are from the Fall 2009 collections, and Shivon is from Winter 2008.  I have no idea why I got them all for free, but it makes me super happy!

Zoya Penny (which you can still apparently find on Amazon) is, naturally, a beautiful copper metallic.  It's a classic metallic texture, with no flakies or colorshift or large glitters - just sparkly.  But that doesn't make it any less beautiful!

 

The formula on Penny is very interesting.  It's quite thin, so cuticle flooding is definitely a concern with it, yet somehow it is almost 100% opaque after one coat.  Honestly, I think that if I just had bare nail under it and not painted white tips using Zoya's Naked system, I could have been happy with one coat!  But because my tips were so bright, there was a little bit of VNL, so I used two coats.  I've never seen such a thin polish be so opaque!  Why isn't every nail polish like this??

I did end up with a lot of air bubbles in this manicure, and they're pretty visible in the above photo.  I'm not really sure if they're from Penny itself or if they came from my top coat (which is, as always, two coats of Out The Door).

For as long as I can remember, I've been collecting pressed pennies on trips.  While I was in Michigan this summer, I was telling my aunt about Penny and my pennies, and she suggested that I model my hands with my penny collection!  I can't believe I didn't think to do that the moment I got Penny! ;)

I could go into detail about almost every penny here, but that would be pretty off topic.  That's how special my pennies are to me, though - aside from 3 or 4 which I've had for almost my entire life (from attractions that I went to several times throughout my childhood), I can narrow each penny down to the trip, even the month and year, that I got it from.

I got my souvenir collecting book from the Detroit Zoo, thus the animals on the cover.  I grew up less than 2 miles away from the zoo and it is one of my favorite places in the whole world.  They don't have a pressed penny machine there (if anybody from the Zoo reads this, please consider getting one!), and even though the book doesn't say "Detroit Zoo" on it anywhere, I'm pretty happy knowing that my collection is in a book that came from my hometown zoo.

Does anybody else collect pressed pennies?  Are there any other perfectly penny-copper nail polishes out there that I should get my hands on (for Do I Need Them All, perhaps?)  Let me know in the comments!

Zoya Pixie Dust Halloween nail art

Remember a few months ago when I shared my collection of Zoya Pixie Dusts, and I said that three of the colors would be perfect for a Halloween manicure?  Well, right before I discovered the nail art challenge that I've been doing all month, I combined those three colors for a fun stripey mani.

Zoya Beatrix, Carter, and Dahlia turned out to be absolutely perfect together for Halloween!  I used a makeup sponge to put them on for a gradient look.

I realize that I could have used this for the challenge theme on the 7th, when the theme was patterns, but that felt a little like cheating since I had painted this design over a week before.  So you guys get a bonus mani this month!  October is fun. :)

What is your absolute favorite manicure design for Halloween?  Let me know in the comments!

October nail art challenge day 28: Monsters

Well, here we are.  The second to last theme of this year's Halloween nail art challenge.  Today's theme is monsters, and I cooked up a lot of them on my nails!

 

Once again, I had to use the dreaded flash because the deep green of Frankenstein's monster wouldn't show up without it.

My nails house a mummy, Frankenstein's monster, a witch, and a vampire.

On the opposite hand, I painted something that abstractly represents each creature - except for the mummy, for which I couldn't think of anything else to represent.  So I painted the Bride of Frankenstein['s mosnter], some stitches to represent the monster himself, witch-y colored stripes, and dripping blood.  (Sadly, the purple that I used didn't show up very well at the top of my ring finger - nor did the drips show up very well on top of the purple metallic background.  Oh well!)

On my thumbs, I painted a werewolf on the left and a full moon (sort of) on the right.

I used a whole bunch of different polishes for this look, and once again it's much easier if I just list them rather than describe which polish I used where.

Salon Perfect: Sugar Cube, Oil Slick, Loopy Lime, Escape to Neverland, A Royal Affair, and Traffic Cone
Zoya: Ziv, Nyssa, and Ana
Finger Paints: Monet Money and Ch-art-coal Black
OPI My Dogsled is a Hybrid
China Glaze Intelligence, Integrity & Courage
Heather's Hues Vampirette
Creative Cuticles Nail Polish O Negative Please
Sally Hansen Big Smoky Topcoat

I want to point out the awesomeness that is the vampire's skin color.  I applied a coat of Vampirette, thinking that I would do a smaller vampire face on a purple background, but then decided against that.  And I didn't want to bother with removing the polish and starting over from basecoat, so I put a coat of Ana on top of the purple.  It turned out to be a sort of grayish-purple skin color, perfect for the skin of the undead!

Other than the witch-y stripes and the dripping blood, which I made using vinyls from KB Shimmer and Nails Redesigned, respectively, all of these monsters were made totally freehand.  It took forever but it was a lot of fun!

All that's left in this month's challenge is nails to match my costume.  My options are limited because of limited nail polish technology in the 1920s, but I'm pretty excited for my costume!  We're going to be having some relatives over for the weekend of Halloween, so I might not have that blog post ready until the Monday after Halloween, but you'll definitely get to see my design for my flapper costume!

What are you dressing up as for Halloween this year?  Do you plan on painting your nails to match?  Let me know in the comments!

October nail art challenge Day 25: Blood

Warning: this one's a bit gory!  If you're grossed out by gore, you might want to skip this post.

I'll throw the challenge image up top this time, to buffer the gore and make it easier to avoid seeing:

I TORE UP MY THUMB NAILS CLAWING MY WAY OUT OF MY OWN GRAVE.

Just kidding.

Actually, I did decide at the last minute to cut my left thumb nail up to make it look torn.  I keep my right thumb nail super short because otherwise I scratch my eyeball when I take my contacts out, so inspired by YouTuber Klairdelys, I used a fake nail to give the appearance of a truly torn up nail.

The rest of my fingers are a bit less gory, though I did decide to pool the red polish at my cuticles rather than keep them clean.  And I kind of messed up when placing some of my vinyls (which are from Nails Redesigned), so the drips ended upside down on half of my nails.  Oh well!  It was an intentional design element.  Yeah.

The blood with the white background ended up upside down because of how I placed the vinyls. 

I actually used a different black polish than usual this time!  I recently won a polish giveaway from Nail It! magazine and received 8 different Salon Perfect shades for Halloween.  Their black polish is called Oil Slick, and that's the one I used for this design.  The white is Salon Perfect Sugar Cube.  My blood red colors are Nails Inc, London Kensington High Street (the darker red pooled at my cuticles) and Sally Hansen CSM Red My Lips (the brighter red all over my thumbs).

I usually hate using flash for nail photos, but it helped let the red-on-black nails show up a bit better.

What do you think about this rather gory nail art?  I hope it didn't gross you out too much!  Tell me what you think of this one!

There are only two designs left in this challenge - which is exciting because that means Halloween is fast approaching, but it's also sad because that means October is almost over.  How will you be doing your nails on the 31st?  Let me know in the comments!