Polish Haul!



Okay, so compared to other polish haul's I've seen online this is pretty tame, but it's the most polish I've ever bought at once and I think that's blog worthy!  I'm actually pretty proud of this polish haul because the whole thing cost me less than $30 and with all my new butterLONDON, that's quite a feat!  The China Glaze and OPI Katy Perry at the top cost me the most.  I'm not a big Wet 'N Wild fan but I was at KMart today and I've been eyeing the Teal of Fortune for awhile now.  When I went through the checklanes I found out that it was buy one get one free so of couse I went back and snagged two more!  The nail art polishes my dad found me at The Dollar Tree and guess what...$1 apiece (or nothing since my Daddy loves me!) I've been wanting some nail art brushes for awhile but I didn't want to pay the hefty price tag (the Orly ones are 5.99! Ouch!) so when my dad mentioned that he had them at the Dollar Tree I was wicked stoked.  This was every color they had...still hunting a black one!

Anyway...left to right top row is: China Glaze Crackle in BrokenHearted, OPI Katy Perry in Teenage Dream, Wet 'N Wild Fast Dry in Teal of Fortune and Blue Wants to Be a Millionare and Wet 'N Wild Megalast in Blackmail and Private Viewing.  Bottom row is all LA Color Art Deco Nail Art in: Bright Orange, Intense Pink, Silver Glitter, Gold Glitter, Yellow, White, Green Glitter, Blue Glitter, Silver and Red Glitter.

LOVING the Teal of Fortune!!  Also hoping the Private Viewing looks similar to butterLONDON Tea With the Queen (since it's $14 and I'm CRAVING it!).

It's a beautiful day for a Royal Wedding...



Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that today was the Royal Wedding in England.  I had a really great manicure planned for today and I'm super sad and also very frustrated that I wasn't able to do it.  I also don't think that in the future I will order polish from the butterLONDON website as it's been a very bad experience for me.  About two weeks ago, I placed an order for several polishes including the Royal Wedding exclusive polish, No More Waity, Katie.  At the time I placed the order there was no indication anywhere on the website or on my order that there was any problems with the polishes in my order.  I was even sent a confirmation that my order would ship within two business days. So you can imagine my surprise four days later when it still hadn't shipped.  I attempted to email the company and recieved no response and when I finally did get ahold of them a week later I was told that the No More Waity, Katie was out of stock but I was assured that it was arriving soon and my order would be shipped within the week.  Well that was last week. Cut to today and my order still hasn't shipped.  My frustration is less with the fact that the polish is out of stock and more with the fact that if I had known it was out of stock I would have tried to get it elsewhere.  There should be some indication that it's not shipping because it's out of stock when an order is placed.  Also, it would have been nice of them to offer to ship the other items on my order even though the one color was out.  Anyway...it's too late now as the wedding is over and I'm still waiting on a two week old order to ship.  But needless to say their customer service needs some work.  I had a busy day today what with hosting a Royal tea party complete with scones, clotted cream, shortbread and Buckingham Palace Royal Garden Party tea.  So I threw together these Union Jack nails in a hurry.  Hope you enjoy them :)

Base is: China Glaze Midnight Mission.  White stripes are Sally Hansen Xtreme Color in White On.  Red is Revlon All Fired Up.  Also used LA Nails Nail Art polish in Red Glitter for the small red stripes.

Can I per-suede you?



Another of my new butterLONDON colors!  I seriously love these.  This one is called Victoriana. It's a nice grey-blue with silvery glitter.  It's absolutely gorgeous in it's shiny glory but I'm loving it as a matte.  It really looks like it was meant to be a suede and it ranks right up there with Suzi Ski's in the Pyrenees (by OPI) for me.  Suedes are my favorite's anyway and I'm always excited when a polish looks great matte AND shiny.  Anyway I didn't want to do anything too flashy over it so I just did some cute little flowers across the middle.  Of course the problem with matte's is they don't last long. This one was no different. It was chipped (albeit a SMALL chip) after 48 hours.  Still, it was SO pretty it was worth the short life!


Base is: butterLONDON Victoriana.  Two coats of Essie Matte About You over that and then stamped on flowers from konad m74  in Nicole by OPI Give Me the First Dance.

Rosie Regatta



Okay, I'm officially a butterLONDON fan.  This stuff is amazing and the colors are so beautiful.  I'm also loving that it's a 3 Free polish AND totally vegan. Awesome.  I got Rosie Lee and Henley Regatta for Easter and I thought they were going to be quite similar so I originally intended to do an accent nail with one.  Once I got it on my fingers though, it was apparent that I was wrong. While both are glitter polishes, Rosie Lee has larger flakes of glitter which creates almost a pink disco ball effect on the nails. It's VERY sparkly.  Henley Regatta has much finer glitter and in blue and green.  While the Henley Regatta still sparkles quite a bit I was bothered by the difference in glitter sizes and opted instead to do some smaller accents with it.  To cut down on the coats of glitter (and make removal easier) I used a base coat of a similar pink color before putting two coats of Rosie Lee on. I think it turned out rather nice.


Base color is: Three coats of Maybelline Express Finish in Berry Boucle followed by two coats of butterLONDON Rosie Lee.  Flower is butterLONDON Henley Regatta and flower center is Nicole by OPI in Prized Posession Purple.  There are two "swirls" of pink done with LA Colors Art Deco Nail Art paint in Intense Pink. Two coats of Seche Vite on top!

Cabin Fever


It's been so rainy this past week.  And it's kept me indoors! :(  I wanted to do something Easter-y and spring-y but I really wasn't feeling it with the pouring rain and thunder outside.  I started out with a totally different plan for these nails but ended up with dots.  :) Enjoy.

Base is Revlon Minted. Spots are NYC Taxi Cab, Orly Lollipop and OPI Rumple's Wiggin.

butterLONDON Dosh


Okay so this is my first polish swatch so you'll have to bear with me while I improve my technique!  I got two butterLONDON polishes at my local Ulta the other night and I. LOVED. THEM.  They are all SO beautiful and they coat well and have so much sparkle.  One thing  I really like about the two I picked up is that they both have shimmer in them and unlike your standard shimmer polishes, these seem to really light up in the sun.  The other great thing about the shimmer in these is that it sort of changes color in the light so it doesn't seem as one dimensional as shimmers sometimes can.  No matter how you turn your hand or what light you're in this polish always looks great!  It also looks amazing matte though I didn't get a picture of that. :( 

The swatch today is Dosh.  I've been salivating over this polish online for WEEKS now and I've been wanting to order it but $14 PLUS $8 shipping PLUS waiting for it to come in the mail seems a little not worth it.  Especially as I'd never tried butterLONDON before and some of the other salon brands which get rave reviews, I'm not such a fan of (OPI for example).  When I finally saw it in person I was a little worried.  The website shows the picture above and lists it as "A molten apple green shot through with gold. DEEEELICIOUS!" Under the lights of my Ulta it was looking more like a limey-green with silvery shimmer.  But it really does look like a green apple on your fingers!  I used three coats (you could do two but I always do three on darker colors) and Seche Vite over the top.


This picture is with flash and the other is without. Both in artificial light.  As usual, click on the pictures to see them larger :)

Easter Babies


So I ordered the konad s10 plate about a month and a half ago.  I'm not really sure why I wanted it other than that I have another plate which has kitty paw prints on it and I thought I might do something with that and the kitty heads.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that it A: came from China and B: was sent incorrectly twice,  I just got it last week. And by then my desire for a kitty manicure was long since faded.  But...I thought the baby animals might make for a quick and easy Easter manicure.  Honestly I had planned out a much more intricate Easter design but then butterLONDON came to Ulta and, well, I just don't feel like removing my Dosh right now! (Swatch to come, this green is AMAZING.).  So here is a simple Easter mani for you all!

Base coat on thumb, middle, and pinky is Orly Lollipop.  Base on remaining fingers is OPI Rumple's Wiggin (from the Shrek collection).  Stamped on bunnies, chicks, and lambs with konad s10 using the konad white paint.  A coat of Seche Vite to finish! Voila! 10 minute nails :)

butterLONDON at Ulta!



Just a heads up to those readers who are interested. butterLONDON has made a deal to be sold in Ulta stores nationwide.  If you're looking to get some now is a great time to do it becuase if you buy one (they retail for $14) you get a free butterLONDON polish remover.  You can also take advantage of the buy 2 get one free deal they have going on and if you use the coupon for $3.50 off a $10 purchase you can snag three of them and a polish remover for around $25.  If you're a fan of other polish brands you can still use the coupon and the buy one get one deal.  I plan to run out there sometime this week and pick up some China Glaze colors and a butterLONDON to see how it behaves.  I'm picky about my nail polish! And I try to stick with vegan brands which I'm told butterLONDON is.  If you're a China Glaze fan like myself you can get four polishes for about $25 using the same method. (Buy one butterLONDON for $14 and get the free polish remover and then get three China Glaze colors for $7 each with one free. You get four colors and a remover for like $25!)  They have some awesome colors in the collection.  I'm thinking of picking up Dosh which is a really great green color. I also really like the No More Waity Katie which is a US exclusive in honor of the Royal Wedding (which you know I'll be up at 4AM watching!). FYI: the OPI Black Shatter is excluded from the sales. Happy shopping!

UPDATE:
It turns out that the butterLONDON is not a part of the buy two get one free deal. :( Lame. And it also turns out that Ulta doesn't carry the No More Waity, Katie color.  But you can still get a good deal by purchasing one and using the $3.50 off coupon!  I ended up getting two for $15 plus two polish removers (Bonus: their remover smells like baby powder!) with some $5 coupons and my regular $3.50 one.  :)

The Big Blue


I've been really digging blue nails lately.  A few days ago I snagged a couple of blue polishes for pretty cheap so I thought I'd use them all at once!  The base color on this one is Essie Borrowed & Blue which is a really pretty creamy pale blue. It's from the 2011 Wedding Collection.  The thing I like best about it is that it's very nearly a one coat polish.  It's a nice change from the six or seven coats it seems like I always end up using with Essie colors.  It looks almost white compared to the other two blue's I used for this design but it's really not.  I named it after one of my favorite bath bombs from LUSH called The Big Blue becuase it reminds me of salty ocean waves :)

Base color is: Essie Borrowed & Blue.  Sponged Orly Snowcone over the top and then stamped on Orly Sapphire Silk with the swirl design from konad m63

The Butterfly Effect





So I took a picture of these nails the other day when I first did them. It was a sunny day and the holo polish swirl in these lit up spectacularly.  And then...my camera ate it.  As it's prone to do in the mid-west, the weather has now changed from Spring back into Winter and as such the photo today is not nearly as pretty.  And the polish is chipping up from the bottom on my ring finger (I have no idea).  But they're still very pretty nails!  I wanted to swirl my holographic polish but I was concerned about using a ton of it since it's pretty impossible to get for a decent price anymore.  I tried twice to marble it in with the other colors and had zero luck.  So after that I cheated...I made my bullseye with the other two colors and dropped a single drop of OPI DS Sapphire into the center. Then I swirled and voila!  Holo marble! For some reason the holographic polish seemed to sort of repel the other polish colors on some of my nails (like the middle) and it left large pools of holo polish instead of a little swirl.  After I finished swirling I added a zebra stripe in random directions over the top and it sort of reminded me of a butterfly's wings.  :)


Side note: I had to cut off all my nails because work is psycho this week and a few of them broke :( But now I can do some brighter designs since they sometimes look silly on longer nails! :)


Base color is: Nicole by OPI Justin Bieber Collection in Me + Blue.  I added a coat of Seche Vite over that because this polish has a gritty texture on my nails and also so that if I made a marbling mistake I could swipe it off without re-doing the base coat! Over that I marbled China Glaze Turned Up Turquoise and Nicole by OPI Justin Bieber Collection in Prized Posession Purple and a single drop of OPI DS Sapphire.  Then I added zebra print from konad m57  in Maybelline Express Finish Onyx Rush.  Finished with a coats of Seche Vite :)

Roses are Red, Violets are...



So ever since I got this shirt a few days ago I knew I wanted to do some nails to match.  I just LOVE purple and this also has a great vintage feel to it.  It wasn't really difficult to do this design and since it was simple I gave it a matte top coat to give it a little bit more edge. :)

Base coat is Sally Hansen Xtreme in Concrete.  Over that I stamped flowers with konad plate m22 and Maybelline Express in Plum Intense.  On the bottom corner I stamped Sally Hansen Xtreme in Going Green with konad plate m2.  Topped it with two coats of Essie Matte About You top coat.

Do you Bielieb in Love?


I've now officially used all of my new Justin Bieber polish.  I've been wanting this one for awhile. It's called Lifesaver and it's a pretty minty green.  I don't know what it is about me and the mint green trend (Revlon Minted, Essie Turquoise and Caicos...etc), I just love them.  They remind me of those old 50's era appliances and I have a HUGE weakness for vintage things! I also wanted to use the heart glitter in the collection.  Honestly, I haven't used shape glitter since I was in high school and it's just as awful as I remember.  It's thick, it's goopy, and you have to paint a thousand coats of it on just to get ONE stinkin' shape on your finger.  So I skipped that drama and just placed the hearts on with a dotting tool (I know, I'm lame!)

All colors are Nicole by OPI Justin Bieber collection, Base is My Lifesaver.  I stamped  Prized Possesion Purple with konad m63 on half the nail and then added hearts from the Step 2 the Beat of my Heart polish.  Finished with two coats of Seche Vite.

Rubies are a Girls Best Friend


Through a stroke of luck (and a carefully practiced pout!) I ended up with a few new Bieber polishes this week.  I'm told that they sell these at Target, Sears, and Walmart but I'm only able to get them at Walmart.  Also annoying: only ONE Walmart out of the probably 10 around me actually carry the One Less Lonely Girl collection and everytime I'm in there they're sold out.  They must have recently restocked because they actually had a few of each color this time around.  I already have two so I chose four more of them. The only one I don't have at this point is One Less Lonely Glitter. But I found that Me + Blue (the other glitter of the collection) was flaky and gritty on my nails. It rarely lasts more than a few hours without flaking off in sheets so I'll probably skip out on that one.  One of the ones I got was OMB! which is a GORGEOUS red shimmer.  It looks pretty tame in the bottle but once it hits your nail it's a whole other story.  It has a ruby tone with pretty gold flecks in it and it's MEGA sparkly and shiny.  It almost has the look of a foil or a metallic on the nail.  I thought it might not marble well but I wanted to try it out anyway. It might have marbled better with a creme color but I used China Glaze Swing Baby which is another color which doesn't always marble well.  I still like the effect though. In places you can really see the swirl and in other places it just looks SUPER sparkly. :)

Base coat is: Nicole by OPI Justin Bieber collection in OMB! and on top I marbled more OMB! and China Glaze Swing Baby. Topped it with a coat of Seche Vite.

The Lindsay


These nails are loosely inspired by the infamous nail art Lindsay Lohan sported while in court a few months back. Obviously I went for an obscenity free version! I'm working on improving my sponging technique and this was a fun one to do as well!  As an added bonus it was super easy and took less than 15 minutes from base coat to top coat!

Base coat is: Essie Like Linen.  Over the top I sponged Essie Tart Deco and Lapis of Luxury, NYC in Taxi Cab and Revlon Minted.  Then I put a quick coat of Sally Hansen Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend and topped it with two coats of Seche Vite. :)

Chester Cheeto


I made a stop at my not-so-local Sephora store the other day (there's one much closer to me but I was picking up some new LUSH bombs!) and they had a ton of polish on clearance from older collections.  I guess they're making room for the new Glee polishes.  I wasn't impressed at all by the Glee collection. The colors are pretty standard, nothing exciting, and some of the ones I looked at on the display seemed to have changed color from the bottom to the top of the bottle.  I'm not really a huge OPI fan anyway but I might go back and pick up Slushied. It's a pretty blue and blue is one color that I don't have a lot of.  Anyway...I picked up Rumba Romance from the now defunct Havana Nights collection. It looks like a pretty rust color in the bottle though it comes out a bit more orangey on the nail (or maybe that's because I'm super pale!). I decided to sponge it with the China Glaze Mega Bite and then it reminded me of a cheetah so I threw some leopard on top for good measure! :)



Base coat is: OPI for Sephora Rumba Romance. Tips are sponged with China Glaze Mega Bite. Leopard is Maybelline Express Finish in Onyx Rush and the centers of the print are China Glaze Swing Baby.

April Showers bring May Flowers


Finally we had a sunny day here and I was able to see the sparkle in my new holo polish!  I didn't want to cover up the base color too much so I decided to do a simple design to let the polish shine! Of course, by the time I took this picture the sun was mostly gone :( But it looked seriously amazing in the sunlight!  You can see a little bit of the rainbow effect on my thumb and index in this picture.  I'm going to have to invest in a better light source for taking these photos on cloudy days.

Base coat is OPI DS Sapphire and the flowers on all fingers except the ring are stamped on with konad plate m60. The ring finger flowers are free hand.  All flowers are China Glaze Midnight Mission.  The centers of the flowers are Nicole by OPI Justin Bieber Collection in Give me the 1st Dance.  The large flower on the ring finger has a gem stone center.  Finished with a coat of Seche Vite.

Hey there, sailor...

These nails weren't really inspired by anything other than the striped shirt I happened to have on that day. Unfortunately, they didn't come out very well either. My white nail polish is at the halfway point and we all know what that means; goopy, thick, messy polish. I might have had better luck if I had painted the white on as the base coat and striped the blue on top but I didn't think about it beforehand and didn't feel like taking off the polish and starting over. Also, I think I should have made tape strips for each nail instead of re-using the ones I had since the polish bled through a little on some of the nails. It was a good plan, if not well thought out! I might try again with new white on another day. But they were cute for the day anyway! Base coat is: China Glaze Midnight Mission. White stripes are Sally Hansen Xtreme in White On. Red dots are Revlon All Fired Up and the gold anchor is painted on with Orly Luxe.

Bow Down to Pink



I forgot to clean up these nails before I took this picture so I apologize for the messy cuticles. The pink is such a delicate color that it's really difficult to see the messiness in person. I wanted a simple design for today and I really love the new scented polishes from Revlon. I can't keep my hands away from my face when I use them! You can't really tell from the picture, but the matte topcoat on this really brings out the pink shimmer in the base coat. I almost think I like it better as a matte!

Base coat is Revlon Scented Collection in Cotton Candy, bows are Orly Prince Charming stamped from konad m56. Bow centers are Orly Luxe and then two coats of Essie Matte About You.

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