In the Navy...

ciate


OK So I know that flocking is sort of a last season trend BUT I found this Ciate kit on clearance at a local beauty supply store and I fell in love with the deep blue color.  Of course I couldn't NOT try it with the accompanying flocking powder and last season or no...I'm in love. The color is deep so from afar it really doesn't look fuzzy so much as just sort of soft.  I didn't find the Ciate "crushed velvet" powder any different from any other nail grade flocking powder but I do like that I didn't have to play the "do I have a matching base color" game!  It stayed on really well too.  No chips for about five days which is practically a miracle given the way I use my hands at work!  At any rate, I hope you enjoyed these decidedly NON summer nails!! :)

Put your Dupes Up: Jawbreaker vs. Oh Splat!

dupes up
It's time for another edition of Dupes Up! This weeks contenders: 

Funky Fingers: Jawbreaker 
Retail Cost: $2 (or 3 for $5) 
KBShimmer: Oh Splat! 
Retail Cost: $4.50 to $8.75 



This one is a little bit different than the others because it's an indie I'm doing the dupe comparison on, and not a mainstream brand.  I got the KBShimmer from a friend awhile back and I really love it but it's a mini so I'm always worried about using it and running out!  I probably should just invest in a full sized version but when I spotted this Funky Fingers polish the other day at my Five Below I thought, why not?  I'll start by telling you that both of these are a milky white base with colored glitter. I have swatched each of them over Zoya Purity to save coats and product. Also because personally, I like the look over a stark white and wouldn't wear these on their own. The Oh! Splat! is on my middle and pinky finger and is two coats. The Jawbreaker is on the other two fingers and is one coat. 



The obvious difference here is the bar glitter which is not in the Oh Splat!  It's also pretty evident that the Jawbreaker is WAY more saturated than the Oh Splat! One coat of Jawbreaker was like a party on my nails! Two coats of the other is still a little sparse. For me though, I really prefer the more sparse look so the KBShimmer was a bit of a winner for me! 



Verdict: Close but no cigar. The Funky Fingers is far cheaper but has bar glitter and is very saturated.

Where to buy:  Funky Fingers is available at Five Below stores in certain areas of the US. KBShimmer is available at her website at KBShimmer.com.

Zoya Stevie

pixies


These Zoya Summer Pixie Dust posts are going up much more slowly than I'd have liked! But it's still summer and these bad boys are still gorgeous. So here they come anyway! This one was actually my least favorite of the bunch.  There could be a number of reasons for that! It didn't seem as sparkly to me as the others and the base seems almost milky on this one. Much more opaque than jelly as the others.  It's still pretty but it's just a sort of different vibe to me and may have gone better in the first group of Pixies.  This is two coats of Stevie and you can see that it's pretty opaque!  I do like the pastel purple shade but I'm not a big purple polish lover so I doubt Stevie will see much daylight on my nails!  It also wouldn't be as easy to layer with although you could easily layer something else over it.  

Which pixie is your favorite?

Coral on Coral...

coral reef


This is a post that I've had lying around for awhile and I'm so excited to be able to share it with you today! It was also featured a week ago on Peace, Love and Polish! The inspiration for these nails came from a pillow I saw on a design show.  I love how it sort of looks like flowers but it also sort of just looks like a cool pattern.  I'm also REALLY loving this color for Spring and Summer! It's bright, sort of jelly but opaque enough that it's wearable with no visible nail lines and it's just gorgeous on my skin which is saying a lot for such a bright color.  The white really pops against it which just made me love it more!!  I used all Models Own colors for this design. The base is Coral Reef, the white is their nail art pen and the pink is Pastel Pink. I hope you all enjoy!!

Like chalkboards on a nail...

chalk


This is a really simple design but the purpose of it is less my fancy pen skills and more the new kits from Ciate that you can get at your local Sephora.  The kit is $25 and it comes with a black "chalkboard paint" nail polish, a matte top coat, and four chalk pens to create designs. I passed this up a few times because I thought, well it's just matte polish I could do that myself.  Well ladies and gentlemen...I was wrong. I ended up buying it on a deal but when I started using it I noticed that the polish is definitely not just a matte.  It's actually fairly tricky to use.  It's sort of a weird combination of too thick and too thin and it dries almost instantly. It's VERY streaky the first coat but the second evened it out pretty decently.  The other really cool thing about this is that (after about 15 minutes) when you start to play with the pens over the polish you don't have to worry about mistakes. If you make one, the whole design wipes right off with a wet cloth!  I had fun messing around with them but I'm not really sure what I want to use them for yet.  You DO need to seal them in with a matte topcoat since, as I mentioned, the chalk washes right off.  I'm not the biggest fan of the one that was included but it did dry to a nice, matte finish.  I hope you enjoy these!! Did any of you pick up this kit from Ciate?

Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.

a tree grows in brooklyn


It's the final day of book week and I've saved my absolute favorite book for the very last. :)  Today's nails are based on a book that I probably should have read much earlier in my life than I ended up doing. I've heard a lot of people say it's on their school reading lists but it was never on any of mine and that saddens me to a great degree.  I picked it up just a few years ago and read it out of curiosity and it's just an absolutely amazing book. It will really change the way you feel about life and about your choices and it was one of those ones that you pick up and you never really put it down. Even when it's not in your hand it's on your mind and I love those kind of novels. You can really live inside the world of the book for a few days or weeks or however long it takes you to devour the story and then inevitably, it has to end and you're left both relieved at reaching the end of the journey and sad to leave it behind. Even though it's my favorite book I've only read it a few times because I try to save it as a treat. :)  It may not be entirely obvious from my design but today was inspired by A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I wanted to really just go very simple on this one. It's a complex story but a simple theme. I chose to emulate the early 1900's Brooklyn with bricks on most of my fingers.  One of the important themes of the novel was the lack of trees and green in Brooklyn and I wanted that to carry over to the nail design. And of course there's that tree. The Tree of Heaven so it's called in the book which is a metaphor of course for the ability to thrive in difficult times. I did a tree on some sort of concrete colored polish on my accent nail to represent this. It turns out, in the end that the main character, Francie was the tree that grew in Brooklyn so it really makes a great representation I think.  Anyway...enough rambling! I hope you really loved book week because I've LOVED sharing it with you. Please check out the other girls pages to see what they've come up with for the final day. As always you can see the colors used in my mani listed below and today, because I had to use a bit of a technique I've included a little description as well! Enjoy!!


Colors Used:
Zoya Destiny
China Glaze Brownstone and Life Preserver
OPI Solitaire
Models Own Black Nail Art Pen

Technique:
To achieve the texture I started with two coats of Zoya Destiny (any color will work but I wanted to start with something sort of similar to the direction I was going). When fully dry I sponged LIGHTLY over the top with the two different China Glaze polishes to get a nice brick shade. Then use the nail art brush to make the lines. I did not topcoat. :)

Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.

book week



It's day four of Book Week with the Digital Dozen. I'm sort of sad to see this theme go but I'm also a little glad because it turns out that using books for inspiration can be a very tricky thing! Sometimes it's hard to know how much or how little you want to capture.  I love that books, unlike films, are more of a personal experience to everyone. No two people read the same book the exact same way which means each is a personal journey to the reader. BUT that also means that my version of what's important, may not be the same as yours!! Today I went very abstract for my art.  I thought of doing covers for books but again, to me it's more about the content than someone else's vision of the story. So for that reason, today may not be as easy for you to guess! It's for The Giver.  I read this book for the first time in the fifth grade and I absolutely love it. It remains one of my favorite books of all time and I've read it so many times I can't even count!  The art work today is some black trees or leaves on white to represent the sort of world that Jonas, the main character, lives in.  No color was a huge theme of the book.  I also did some black birds on a white background.  I know there were no animals in Jonas' world but to me, they symbolize the freedom that Jonas sets out to achieve. And finally, I wanted to do an apple on my ring finger because it's the first time Jonas sees the color red but I didn't feel it fit in with the abstract nature of the rest so instead I've done cracks in the red to represent the cracks in his world that the red color will lead to.  I hope you're all enjoying book week! Please check out what my fellow ladies came up with for today and stay tuned for the final installment tomorrow!!


Colors used:
Zoya Purity
Revlon Black Lingerie
Orly Grave Mistake

So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

Barry M


It's day three of the Digital Dozen Book Week challenge.  I'm trying to get through all my most favorite books for this challenge but let's face it, there are way more than five of those!! For this one I went a little further back into my childhood years.  I believe I was eight the first time I read this book and even today it's still one of my favorites.  If you haven't recognized it yet, it's The Phantom Tollbooth.  One of the things I love about this book is that it's very logical while at the same time seeming very illogical!  It tells the story of a boy named Milo and his journey though strange lands with a dog called Tock.  I used my ring finger to represent the map of the Kingdom of Wisdom.  There were so many lands to choose from but I only have so many fingers!! So I went with just two and then added a clock for Tock on my middle finger.  For the index I have the top half numbers and the bottom half words to represent Dictionopolis, one of the capitols of the Kingdom and where Milo learns of the princesses, Rhyme and Reason and learns that they've been banished for their belief that numbers and letters are of equal importance.  Then on the pinky finger I have some numbers to represent Digitopolis, where Milo eats subtraction soup which makes him even hungrier!  I hope you enjoy the nails and don't forget to journey over to my fellow ladies pages to see what they've come up with for todays challenge!!



Colors Used:
OPI Fly
Barry M Silver Foil
Zoya Purity
Revlon Black Lingerie

When it's done, it's done. And no one will know until it's done.

a england


It's day two of the Digital Dozen book week challenge. Today I've chosen to do a mani based on a book which I enjoyed and movie which I loved. Normally it's the other way round for me. I love the book and when the film comes out I'm like, "Why did they ruin the book!?" but this film was a happy experience for me and I really enjoyed it more than the novel.  I really love books about monarchies and even though I generally stick with the non-fiction ones, this book and series is just a must read.  I wanted to use sort of "regal" colors so it seemed fitting to start with A-England's Dragon. Especially given the content of the book and the fact that it's a famous piece of English history.  Have you figured it out yet?  The book is The Other Boelyn Girl.  I wanted to incorporate the things I felt were most important in the book but while sticking with a cohesive theme so I decided to highlight some aspects of Queen Anne. If you saw the film, the necklace should have given this away and if not, surely you've seen the iconic necklace in portraits of the queen.  I also included some stamps to represent the luxe gold brooches and jewels she wore as queen.  I hope you all enjoyed this one and don't forget to check out what my fellow dozeners have come up with for today!!


Colors used: 
A England Dragon
Orly Luxe and Au Champagne

The Digital Dozen does...books!

books


I know you're all excited because it's time for another week with the Digit-al Dozen!  This week's theme is books and it's actually been a bit of a challenge for me because I read SO many books.  Literally, I'm currently in the middle of four (yes, at once) because I can't devour them as quickly one at a time!  This art work is for one of my favorite books.  There were a lot of different ways I could have taken it because the particular book I chose has SO many gorgeous details and descriptive elements.  The setting is just an amazing place.  But when I held it up to a few people and asked them to guess the book, they all got it on the first try.  Have you guessed it yet?  It's for Memoirs of a Geisha. I really love books about Japan and China and it was such an easy read for me.  It's a very moving book but it's not one of those I'm-gonna-cry-everyday-for-weeks kind of reads which really appeals to me.  I wanted to capture the most important elements of the book so I focused on the red/white color scheme and on the umeboshi.  I used some square glitter on the ring finger to simulate rice so that it would sort of resemble the onigiri with the bright red umeboshi plum at the bottom.  Then I used some fans to sort of tie in the Geisha theme.  I hope you really loved these! Please check out what my fellow book worms have come up with for today's theme and stay tuned all week for more books!!


Colors used: 
Essie Blood Curdling
 Zoya Purity 
OPI Lights Of Emerald City 
Zoya Raven

Pussy Galore

bond girl


This is a quick swatch post for you.  I've been trying to avoid buying ALL the textured polishes because I know it's a fad and they'll be SOOO over next season.  But I just can't seem to resist them!! This is from the James Bond Collection and it's called Pussy Galore. One thing I noticed about this one that seems different from the others is that it really looks like a pearly base with a darker pink glitter in it.  It's not really obvious from this picture but it just read as less one toned to me than the other OPI colors and I really liked that about it. I got a few of the other James Bond textures and I have to say, I think this one is one of my faves. I'm still waiting to get my hands on Honey Ryder though! 

Which is your favorite Bond Girl?

Jamberry Strips: Tangerine IKAT

bone chilling


These are some nails I've been meaning to get up for awhile! You'll have to pardon my slowness as things have gotten very hectic for me. I am making an effort to post more frequently though! This is another in the series of Jamberry strips I got to review from Shea at OMG Wait What Polish Is That. If you're interested, you can see the other designs I got as well as the original review for the Mo Mo pattern, here. The pattern I've used here is the Tangerine IKAT. I used it on my ring finger once again (only one strip to the pack on the samples!) and like before it was a breeze to apply. One thing I did differently this time, was rather than digging out my hair dryer I simply rubbed the strip in my hand a bit before releasing it from the backer and then I blew on it a bit to heat it.  It still worked quite nicely but I do think it's easier to gently warm them using the blow dryer.  These do take a small amount of practice to apply properly but they're so easy once you get the hang of it and they last really well.  I also love how many patterns are available AND you can even make your own custom wraps if you're so inclined! This time I paired my strips up with some Essie Bone Chilling and Zoya Sharon! Don't you love them?

 There are lots of other designs to choose from so don't forget to visit her store or her Facebook page to see what's available and snag some for yourself!! :)



These Jamberry wraps were provided to me for my honest review. I have not been compensated in any way for my opinion.

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