Dragonfly Skittles

Quick post today of a skittles manicure inspired by my bath mat of all things. Both dragonfly images are from the Salon Express kit. To create the half moon and french tip, I used reinforcements. For the half and half on my pinky, I used scotch tape. I struggle with the white balance if it's not natural light, so the tone of the picture came out a little too blue, but I was in a rush to get something up since I forgot to yesterday.

e.l.f. - Chocolate

ULTA - Urchin

Loreal - Walk on the Beach

Seche Vite - topcoat

SE19

SE21

Red and Black Animal Print

I recently joined the Adventures in Stamping Facebook group. They have challenges every Sunday. Today's challenge was Red and Black. This is my entry with layered stamping. I used both Bundle Monster and Salon Express for the stamps.

I'm in love with the way this turned out! I think the red on red makes for a pretty background.

e.l.f. - Smokin Hot (base)

Loreal - Haute Couture Red (animal print)

Wet n Wild - Black Creme (hearts)

Seche Vite - topcoat

BM-223,BM-222,BM-215,BM-221,BM-224 (animal print)

SE18 (hearts)

Last Sinful! (this week)

I registered my CVS extra care card online and they were nice enough to send me $5 in extra bucks to my email the other day. The expiration was for August 1st so of course I knew I could find some nail polish I would want. I had been reading that Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Silver Sweep was everyone's go-to polish for silver stamping, but I never picked it up because I already had a couple of silver polishes. I went to CVS yesterday and got it for free with my $5 extra bucks. I also bought a second Insta-Dri to earn $3 more in extra bucks. It wound up being around $3 for the 2 after taxes. I love great deals! Of course I had to try it right away on top of one of my new Sinful Colors. Today is the last day they're $0.99 so it'll be the last day of my Sinful posts requirement.

This one is Mint Apple which is a slightly greener mint color with teeny tiny silver micro glitter which gives it a nice shimmer to the creme base. Of course it's Silver Sweep with more Bundle Monster plates. They're still new to me so I'll be working my way through them for a while.

Sinful Colors - Mint Apple

Sally Hansen - Silver Sweep

Seche Vite - topcoat

BM-201

BM-206

Quick Brick

I got distracted watching the opening ceremonies last night and forgot to post my red Friday manicure. I also forgot I was doing a Sinful Colors theme this week so I'll put up another post to make up for yesterday. I forgot the Sinful Colors because I got excited when I was browsing the polish in the Dollar Tree again and found 2 Sally Hansen Insta-Dri polishes! I'm assuming they've been discontinued because later I found similar colors with different names in CVS.

I had intended to try the Insta-Dri out for stamping because I had read several people loved it for stamping, but as you can see I used it as my base coat instead. I was having difficulty using black polish with this plate so I used my trusty e.l.f. Chocolate instead. I had some issues with lighting. Next time I won't wait so late in the day to try to catch the natural light.

Sally Hansen - Quick Brick

e.l.f. - Chocolate

Seche Vite - topcoat

BM-201

Double Sinful!

Having the day off work with nothing to do equals a double feature. Today's post features 3 more new to me Sinful Colors polishes. Both manicures also features the new Flirt plates I got from Walmart for $3. They worked surprisingly well for $1.50 a piece.

Cinderella is a light blue with pink micro-glitter. Glass Pink is a light pink with pink micro-glitter. Both Cinderella and Glass Pink by Sinful Colors are extremely sheer. Cinderella took 3 coats. Glass Pink wouldn't build up enough without being thick and goopy so I used 1 thin coat of JLB Blush before putting on 2 coats of Glass Pink. Plate B65 has this cute full nail design on it that transferred really well except for my ring finger. I painted in a couple of spots myself. The image fit perfectly on my fingers, but not my thumb. I have small nail beds so I doubt this would work for most people.

Sinful Colors - Cinderella

Sinful Colors - Glass Pink

JLB - Blush

e.l.f. - Chocolate

Seche Vite - topcoat

Flirt - B65

I love Sally Hansen Insta-Dri and Art Deco for stamping! The flowers are from the second Flirt plate B17 and the cute leaves are from plate B65. These designs transferred better than my Bundle Monster plates. I'm very pleased with my $3 purchase! The color combo reminds me of the brown baby bedding/accessories.

Sinful Colors - Nirvana

Sally Hansen - Lickety-Split Lime

Art Deco - Baby Pink

Seche Vite - Topcoat

Flirt - B17

Flirt - B65

More Sinful

The color wasn't turning out quite right, but these are the 2 attempts at showing Winterberry as a grayish purple. This was an easy day with 1 color 1 stamp. I didn't get a full stamp on the ring finger. I gave it a valiant, but far from perfect, effort of stamping over the top to correct it.

Sinful Colors - Winterberry

Pure Ice - Paying With Platinum

Seche Vite - topcoat
BM-202

Reinforcements!

Sinful Colors is on sale at Walgreens for half off bringing the total to $0.99 a bottle! I picked up quite a few at 3 different Walgreens already. There's one more I really wanted and I should be done buying nail polish for a very long time or until there's another sale! Today I used some paper reinforcements I picked up a while ago at the dollar store. A pack of a billion sheets for $1 isn't too bad at all. This was really easy. It just required a fast drying topcoat before jamming on the reinforcements to prevent them from peeling up my base coat. There were a couple of mistakes where the top polish bled under the sticker, but I was able to get most of it off with a brush and some regular nail polish remover. I will most likely be posting more Sinful Colors throughout the week because I'm so excited about all my new polishes!

Sinful Colors - Unicorn

Sinful Colors - Rain Storm

Seche Vite - Topcoat

Green... Again

I couldn't steal my sister's cupcake thunder so, keeping with the work shirt matchy tradition, I did another green. After today's and last week's greens, I think I'm going to have to put a stop to that trend. When I first started painting my nails with essence Choose Me I LOVED it, but having it on my nails all day with the green shirt got to be too much. Besides, I have a box of untrieds to work through which doesn't include any greens at this moment. So after falling in love with Choose Me, I couldn't stop myself and I had to keep going with stamping and dotting.

essence - Choose Me! (base)

Wet n Wild - Black Creme (stamp)

L.A. Colors - misc blue that I thew away the package with the name for (dots)

L.A. Colors - Fuel  I was all over it this time (dots)

e.l.f. - Royal Purple (dots)

BM-212 (stamping plate)

Seche Vite - topcoat

Happy Birthday!

My sister's birthday is tomorrow. We celebrated yesterday and for the occasion I thought balloon nails would be really cute. There were a lot of balloon manicures out there but I thought the cartoon balloons were the cutest. I did the plastic baggy method for my right hand and figured since I was at it I'd go ahead and do 10 balloons and take care of both hands at once.

First I sponged SH Hard to get on the tips. For the balloons, I used e.l.f. Smokin' Hot, Pure Ice French Kiss, SH Lickety Split Lime, Art Deco Intense Pink, and Art Deco Yellow. After that I outlined them with a black SH Nail Art Pen and topped it off with a Seche Vite topcoat.

My sister was nice enough to share a couple of extra dotting tools with me so maybe tomorrow I'll try to recreate the cupcake nails she did for herself!

Red for Friday

For Friday's red I used my new favorite nail polish by e.l.f.  - e.l.f. just had an anniversary sale where everything was 50% off. My sister and I stocked up on some polishes while they were only $1.00. It turns out we should have bought more! Each polish only took 1 coat with no streaking. I used a gold metallic with a Bundle Monster stamping plate and a burgundy for the accent nail and thumb. To get it to pop a little more, I used NYC Matte Me Crazy over the red.

e.l.f. - Smokin' Hot

JLB - Immortal Gold

Wet n Wild - Burgundy Frost

NYC - Matte Me Crazy

BM-225

Water Color

I'm not a fan of these, but I spent so much time I had to post pictures anyway. I've seen this water color technique on a few different blogs so I thought I'd try it myself. One of the pictures I'd seen had the Bundle Monster stamping over the top and it looked beautiful! I'm not sure what the difference is between my nails and the pictures I had seen; maybe my colors were too aggressive. Anyway here is the result and instructions:

1. Paint nails with 2 coats of Wet n Wild White Creme and protect the white from the polish remover with 1 coat of Seche Vite.
2. Dot Art Deco Intense Pink in a few different spots and spread/pat the color around with a makeup brush dipped in polish remover.
3. Dot L.A. Colors BCC 566 (Apparently the name of the color was on the package it came in that I no longer have. It's a shimmery intense blue) and repeat the previous step.
4. Dot Art Deco Yellow and repeat the previous steps.
5. (sorry just noticed the font for the 5 was different) Using SH Hard to Get, I used the Bundle Monster 2011 stamping plates BM-201, BM-203, BM-212, BM-222, and BM-223.


Again, I'm not crazy about it, but there's one more thing to cross off my list of manicures to try.

Pull Me Close

These may be more gray than blue but they're very acceptable for blue day at work! I mostly only use drugstore brands for the price, but I found some good deals in the clearance section at Sally's. I picked up another magnetic nail polish and a nail magnet. Both by China Glaze. I was really in love with the star effect. The first attempt was offset accidentally, but it worked out beautifully when the offsets matched up on side by side nails! This was a very easy manicure. Only 2 coats of Pull Me Close by China Glaze Magnetix with one round of magnets and a top coat of Seche Vite.

AND a macro shot because the first one really didn't do it justice!

Gold Vein

I was trying to achieve the look of an actual vein of gold:

I wanted a shimmery peach color, but I didn't have it so I had to do some layering to get the color I wanted. Sorry I should have used a flash to get the color to show better. For the gold I painted gold polish on a small piece of a crumpled up sandwich bag and patted it on.

I used Milani Metallic Mango for the base and did a very sheer layer of SH Lavender Marquis which toned down the orange to give it a shimmery peach color. For the gold, I used Immortal Gold by JLB Cosmetics with, of course, a Seche Vite topcoat. 


The gold came in a pack of 7 metallics that work beautifully for painting a full nail or stamping. I've found 2 different packs of 7 colors at Ross for $5.99 each. They're the most pigmented and smooth polishes and I wish I could get more without having to stop in Ross randomly. The only downside is the metallics and glitters smell awful, but it's definitely worth it for the end result.

Green Snakeskin Gradient

Monday is green at work. For green I did a snakeskin stamp over a gradient. The dark green was too sheer and with the combination of extra polish and over zealous sponging, it made for a little too much texture. Oh well another day another design!

This look is SH Lickety-Split for the base and gradient, Wet n Wild SaGreena the Teenage Witch, and NYC Big Money Frost layered on top to tone down the other two colors. The stamp is from Bundle Monster plate BM-215 done in Wet n Wild Black Creme and one coat of Seche Vite to finish it off.

White Day

My job requires specific colors on each day of the week. Sunday is white day and it's my goal to match my nails to my work shirt for the day. So this is what I came up for this week's Sunday! 

I used Wet n Wild White Creme for the base, Wet n Wild Black Creme with plate BM-224 for the flowers, and filled in the flower centers with a yellow Art Deco striper and an unknown branch for the pink. As always, I finished it off with one coat of Seche Vite.

Dolphin Gradient

Very first blog post!


For my very first post (other than the tutorial), I chose to show you possibly the best gradient I've ever done in combination with a How To! For this look I used a base coat of Wet n Wild White Creme, SH Lacey Lilac, SH Mint Sorbet, NYC Cashmere Creme for the gradient, Wet n Wild Black Creme for the dolphin, and topped it off with one coat of Seche Vite. For the dolphin tutorial click here.

How to: Pre-Painted Nail Art

This is easy way to add cute designs to your dominant hand or either hand to avoid redoing an entire nail for one mistake!


1. Start by printing a simple scaled down version to fit your nail of the image you want.

2. Place a plastic sandwich bag over the printed image and paint nail polish directly onto the baggy. For this I used Wet n Wild Black Creme with an acrylic paintbrush.

3. Once the image is filled in, let dry. The dry time will vary depending on how thick you apply the nail polish. Using just enough polish to achieve 100% opacity, the dry time was only 10 minutes for me. Gently peel off the image. If it's not peeling easily, let dry a little longer.

4. Now you can place the image directly onto your nail. It doesn't matter which side of the image is facing up. Apply a topcoat and you're all done! Be careful, your image may streak if you're not careful applying the topcoat.