For this mani, I started with two coats of SpaRitual's Sacred Ground.

 You've probably all seen this one before.  It's super popular and for a good reason!

 Sacred Ground is a beautiful gray shimmer polish that has the most enchanting multi-colors hiding in the shimmer.

 Mostly you'll notice bluish-purple, gold, and then silver.

 It's very lovely and I enjoyed the formula as well.

 I think this is my first time wearing a SpaRitual polish!

 Later in the same day, I added two coats of TiNS The Starlets.

 The Starlets is disco ball style silver holo hex glitter suspended in a clear base.

 I really love the effect as the glitter twinkles and nearly lights up!  It's so twinkly it looks like lights anyway.  :)

I realize that the TiNS glitter totally killed the subtlety of the shimmah in Sacred Ground...and I'm completely okay with that!

» Read More...

 I started with two coats of OPI Save Me.  Then I added a coat of Lynnderella Boy-Girl Party, because, why the heck not?!

 Well, let me go back...because after Save Me, I used a coat of Glitter Tamer and a coat of Poshe.

 Then, a coat of Boy-Girl Party, followed by another coat of Glitter Tamer and Poshe.  It was actually quite smooth!

 It reminds me of fireworks and New Year's, which is not very creative thinking on my part.  My friend at work told me that it reminded her of "unicorn-ness," or something like that.  I was thrilled and much prefer her idea!  We both reminisced about loving unicorns, Rainbow Brite, and Punky Brewster as little kids.

This last picture is probably my favorite.  I wore this for a just over two glorious days and I was sad to take it off last night (it started chipping).  And you know what else?  Removal with my beloved scrubby tub was shockingly NOT atrocious or hard!  Major win!

» Read More...

 This was the final mani I ended up with for Saturday night.

 These first two pictures are taken in early morning light and I also tried to "auto-enhance" them, which is why they look a bit kooky.  Sorry for that!

 What is it, you ask?  I used a coat of Illamasqua Boosh as underwear.  Then I used two coats of Lynnderella (click on her name to go to her blog) Thank Blue! followed by a coat of Piggy Polish Sunshine on Snowflakes, one of my favorite holo toppers.

 I used a coat of Gelous and then Seche Vite at the end.  Everything turned out super smooth and just lovely.

 I was a little worried about putting anything over top of a Lynnderella polish (somehow seems sacrilegious or like overkill), but I'm glad I took the chance with SoS.  I love how it looks!

 This mani reminds me of a way less cool blue glitter look I did about a year ago, here.

I also get the slightest bit of a Deborah Lippmann Across the Universe vibe...but I gotta say that this takes the win for me.

Thank Blue!, Lynnderella, for this amazing blue glitter polish!  And a Happy Blue Year to all!  :P

» Read More...

 This is the beginning of one of my New Year's Eve manis from yesterday.

 I used three coats of Estessimo TiNS Precious Diamond.

 Okay, why does my bottle look so frackin' empty in the photo above?!  I've only ever swatched this on a nail wheel before (just one "nail")!

 Anyway, no top coat here.  It's my underwear for things yet to come.

 Precious Diamond reminds me a lot of China Glaze Sexagon, which I've apparently never worn (or at least not in a really long time and I never took pictures wearing it), yet it's one of my favorites!

 Here I've layered a careful coat of Lynnderella Mercury's Rainbow on top.

Mercury's Rainbow is pretty dang awesome!

 It's like holo rainbow meets steely gray with a hint of blue.  Am I crazy?  I saw a hint of blue. 

The sad news here is that I experienced some majorly annoying tip shrink about ten minutes after I took these pictures (which was immediately after application was complete).  It was only on two of my nails, but the result was a big exposed looking chunk of my white tip!  I just couldn't stomach it.  So I took it straight off.  :(

» Read More...

 Here I started with one perfect, gorgeously opaque and creamy coat of a StrangeBeautiful polish.  It's a stunning tomato red creme.  I don't know which volume this was from.  Ugh.  Sorry!  I don't even care anymore.  But if you must know, I can probably figure it out.

 Then I added two coats of China Glaze Love Marilyn.  Pardon my cuticle oil!

 I had so much fun wearing this.  It was like having jewels on my nails.

 I took some weird pictures indoors with early morning golden sun.  Behold!

 Blingtastic!  But everything is looking too golden.

 If you don't already have Love Marilyn, I highly recommend that you get it.

 Application was easy and the wear was pretty good, too.

Sorry I didn't get better pictures in natural light.  I think, I hope, you get the idea, though!

» Read More...

 This is three coats of Dior's limited edition Silver Lake polish.

 I honestly only needed two coats, but did the third because I was feeling worried about one potential bald spot on a pinky nail.

 Silver Lake has really great multi-colored shimmer buried in it, not unlike Chanel's Graphite.  It's pretty hard to see in my pictures, though, and also in real life (you can see it a bit in the bottle below).  I like knowing that it's there, though!  Graphite is more golden toned, in case you were wondering.  I'm going to try and do a comparison before I change this mani.

 I kind of hate Dior's newer big, bushy, uneven brush.  It does work freakishly well on my ring fingers, though, which have more of a curve along the cuticle.

I like how it's kind of salt and peppered looking!  As far as I know, you can only get this one through Dior's website here.

» Read More...

 This post is full of many, many pictures, just so you know.

 I started my manicure journey yesterday with two coats of the ever lovely Milani Dot Com.

 Can I just state the obvious here?  This polish is STUNNING!

 It was very sheer and almost runny on the first coat, so I was quite surprised and pleased that everything pulled together so well with the second coat.

 No top coat here because I had plans to put Lynnderella Mercurial on top.

 Okay, so I don't even want to post these sad pictures because this combination gave me grief, Nation.

 But we're all here to live and learn, right?  Right.  Here I had added two coats of Lynnderella Mercurial (learn more about Lynnderella at her blog here), a coat of Lynnderella Glitter Tamer, and then a coat of Poshe.

 The problem, the thing that drove me nearly crazy yesterday, was that the Glitter Tamer gave me a meeeellion tiny bubbles.  I'm just not having great luck with it yet, for various boring reasons.

 You can't see the bubbles too much in the above picture, thankfully, but UGH, they are there.  Trust me if you can't see them in any of the pictures.  All eleventy billion of them were there mocking me.

 Also, I just wasn't happy with how the pictures turned out anyway.  Mercurial is maybe a bit hard to photograph!

 Okay, now here we are today.  The picture above is under my little Ikea lamp on my polish painting desk, thus the extreme gold tone of the lighting.  I was trying to show off the awesome and complicated shimmer in Mercurial.

 Here I have used two coats of OPI Lincoln Park After Dark, one well-worked coat of Lynnderella Mercurial, a coat of Gelous, a coat of Cult Nails' top coat, and finally a coat of Seche Vite.  (I used a base coat, too, of course).

 I love LPAD, and this is weirdly my first time ever wearing it.  It does remind me a lot of a-england Lancelot in the final effect, though, so maybe I could have just used that and saved a coat in the process!  LPAD leans ever so slightly more purple, though, where Lancelot looks mostly just black and has a teeny bit of red to it.

 I digress!  At any rate, this mani is a major success for me.  Hooray!

 Mercurial is still hard to capture in photographs, but hopefully you have an idea of its extreme and moody awesomeness.

 My favorite part?  On the thumb nail here.  It's really hard, if not impossible to see, but there is a ginormous black hex glitter near the middle, a little to the right, and a little toward the top.  LOVE IT!

 I love me some surprise crazy glittah.

 Oh!  And if you hadn't noticed, my nails are shorter today, yes.  I had a little break starting on one, so I just took them all back to nubs.

 I'm fine with the nubs.  I've actually come to really like them short now.

Thanks for reading all of this, if you have, and even if you have not, I thank you for taking a look!

» Read More...