Merry Christmas Eve!

I celebrate Christmas on both Christmas Eve and day so I am excited about dinner tonight with my family. I have a quick mani for you today, I'm still trying to figure out what kind of Christmas mani I'd like for tonight and tomorrow. Any ideas or suggestions? I will probably be painting my nails late morning/early afternoon so any ideas would be greatly appreciated :)

On to what I have on my nails today, I was still wearing China Glazes Holly-Day, and decided to layer a new polish over it, a no name from forever 21. It looks identical to L.A Girl's Crowd Surfing from their Rock Star collection. Is comes in a very similar bottle also!

This L.A. Girl dupe can be described as a sheer green base with micro green shimmer and opalescent flakies! this is super awesome layered , it's so thin I'm not sure you could wear it on it's own, but looks great over a darker green as you can see.

This reminds me of a green Merry Midnight, I guess that's fitting for today, right :) Merry Christmas!

Christmas... Sooooo... Close!!

Late post today, yesterday was a weird day and it bled it to today. Long story short, for the last week and a bit I have been mildly sick. On Monday I felt better, but whatever it was came back pissed by Thursday! I decided to see my doctor and leave earlier than planned from work. So glad I did, as soon as I got home I passed out and have felt achy, phlegmy and super sick ever since. So yesterday was a long day, not to mention waking up every couple hours coughing last night. I do feel a little better now, not so achy. So here is Holly-Day from China Glaze's Let It Snow Collection.

What you're seeing in these photos is one coat, no top coat, freshly painted! The formula was great, but be warned not to use too thick of a coat or you will get bubbling. This is such a great green cream, I don't own anything like it.

This is a great colour for the holiday season, although I will be changing it soon for Christmas. I celebrate on Christmas eve and day :) How do you celebrate?

Gifts For All!

I decided to do a quick and easy refresh with China Glaze's Ring In The Red so I did a little stamping. Since I also wanted to play off of the warmness of the glitter, I used a gold foil polish to stamp with.

My original choice for stamping was China Glaze's Mistletoe Kisses, a light champagne foil, but it was too light over the red. I ended up going with an older Sally Hansen called Brushed gold, you can see a swatch I did here. I used my M59 fauxnad plate, its an exact dupe of the Konad to stamp the bow on to my ring and thumbnails.

I then took my striper brush and made one thin line down the middle of the ring finger and 2 down the thumb to make the ribbon.

A pretty simple and quick way to give your mani a refresh for the holidays :)

Ringin' Bling

What a glitterbomb! I'm not usually one to wear red polishes, although I do own a good amount. I still haven't work Ruby Red Pumps as a full mani yet, just as a Christmas themed funky French. Lately I have been choosing polishes to wear without much thought, just picking up a bottle and applying it lol. I do have a small lineup of polishes I waned to wear before Christmas and Ring in the Red from China Glaze's Let it Snow collection was apart of it. Lots of photos ahead, this one freaked out my camera a bit, but luckily I got some sunny ones.

I had originally decided not to buy this one because I thought it was too similar to RRP, but I ended up taking a trip to Cosmo prof with a friend and just could not leave it behind for that price. I figured I could use it for layering, you've seen me try that here, but the red jelly base makes it difficult to layer over any colour that isn't red or close to it.

After applying only 2 coats, I reached full opacity! All I can say is wow. Although similar to RRP, Id say that Ring in the Red has a warmer tone to it, when light it reflected off of it, I see almost an golden/orange sheen to it, and I like it! What also sets the 2 polishes apart is the small hex glitter scattered throughout. I also feel that Ring in the Red has WAY more glitter packed in to it, where in RRP you can see the glitter suspended in the jelly base.

Application wasn't as easy for me, but I don't wear glitter much so that may be why. I didn't get the smoothest curve at the bottom near the cuticle and that drove me nuts! I'll have to be a little more patient next time I guess.

Overall although blingy, this is totally wearable! Like I said, I hardly wear reds but this one is definitely a favourite. A cashier even complimented me on this polish just yesterday :)

Dotty Trees

I new I wanted to do some sort of refresh with this polish when I put it on, that's why I originally didn't apply a top coat. Overall wear was really good, but I wanted to add a little sparkle.

I started with creating a tree out of dots for my ring fingers, I was inspired by Rin's post here. I used a foil silver, gold and white polish with an assortment of different sized dotting tools to create the tree.

I then applied 1 good coat of OPI's Getting Miss Piggy With It, that polish is packed with so much glitter! I finished everything off with a topcoat and I was all done :)

Another view, the tree is upside down.

I love how the red glitter looks sprinkled over deep green base. the shimmering fleck in Glittering Garland also ad great depth tp the overall look.

Glittering Garland

Another Christmasy polish! Can you believe that Christmas is less than a week away? I think I slacked a little too much on my blog this month, gotta make it up to you and get all my Christmas inspired manis in before the 25th.

Glittering Garland is from China Glaze's holiday collection this year, "Let It Snow". Funny enough it seems to be snowing everywhere except for Toronto :( I enjoy white Christmas' so I hope is snows soon. You may recall I did a comparison between Glittering Gardland and Orly's Meet Me Under the Mistletoe, so I won't go in to too much more detail. I applied 2 coats with no top coat. Pretty sparkly on it's own, huh!? Here is is again with my camera flash.

One last non-flash photo:

Double Rainbow All the Way...

First dusty SCORE! It's starting to look like a triple rainbow...

Edit: Let me know what you think these polishes are :) I will reveal them, along with the other HTF polishes I scored in an upcoming post.

Christmas Nails - Refresh

So here are my crazy festive nails again, but this time with some fauxnad. This design is from a dupe plate I purchase from bornprettystore.com, it's a copy of Konad plate M-65.

I stamped with Sally Hansen Insa-dri in Whirlwind White. I didn't apply topcoat fast enough and accidentally scraped off some of the design while cleaning up my room... Oops.

My boyfriend said they looked like little gifts! They reminded me of candy canes.

Red and Green Themed

I had an interestingly themed officer Christmas party this year. We all participated in a murder mystery in which we had to dress the part. The storyline was all Christmas themed so the first thing I thought about? My nails of course :)

My character was to be covered in red and green to stand out, so red and green my nails were!

I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Groovy Green and Love Hangover. I also took this opportunity to use my SH moisturizing base coat. A quick side note here, I find most SH base and topcoats don't play well together with other brands of polish, im talking crazy bubbling. So I tend not to use them. There is an exception however, they never seem to ruin my SH polish, conspiracy or what!

Anyways, my nails had been dry and brittle and I figured I would try it out. I applied 2 coats of each polish on every other finger. I would describe the finish of each polish to be an opaque jelly with iregular shaped glass flecks, such an awesome find. he red reminds me of OPI's Meep-Meep-Meep. They both have the same formula and applied flawlessly. I finished it off with NYC's quick dry top coat and I was set!

By the way, I totally won best costume :D

Is this the real life? Is this just Fantasy...

I'm super excited to show you this polish! I almost didn't purchase it, but after I hauled 12 OPI's from 1 store, this was the clear winner for what to wear first.

Look how beautiful OPI's DS Fantasy is, and only 1 freaking coat! The formula is so pigmented and perfect, it glides on the nail so effortlessly!

Fantasy is a deep royal blue polish, saturated with super fine prismatic particles (or holographic shimmer). These photos I have honestly don't do the polish justice, it's just so much prettier in person, and I haven't even had the chance to see what it looks like in the sun. Although it's not DS Glamor (which I originally thought it was on the shelf at first!) it is so awesome. And a guy recommended it too! If it wasn't for him I wouldn't have gotten it. He worked there by the way, not just some random lol.

So in short, this polish is awesome but the overall haul may just be a tiny bit more awesome. More info on that to come soon...

One last shot that captured some of the rainbow.

Some Broken Nails and Lace

So, here are my nails now, after the break. I went to pull open a drawer, didn't have as good as a grip as I thought, pulled real hard and SNAP! My middle and index finger nails snapped clean off :( My index finger doesn't look too bad, but my middle, although trimmed, still has a crack in the side right down to the skin! I'm going t try to grow it out as much as I can before cutting it down more. It is also lopsided now.

Here are my nails right after I filed them neat and and clean, and shortened the others to match.

So how to fix it? Nail art of course! I had my first Christmas get together of the season and wanted my newly filed nubs to look their best. I decided I would create a lace look on my nails.

To start, I pulled out Wet n' Wild's Tangled in My Web, I applied 1 coat and a bit, trying to get a good amount of the hex glitter on each nail. When that was dry, I pulled out Konad plate M-57, this has the fishnet pattern and flowers. First I stamped the flowers on my mails randomly, sometimes more than once in different spots. Then I stamped over that with the fishnet pattern. Once you apply your top coat, you're all done! This was my first time trying it, but I really liked the effect :)

Have you ever tried lace nails? what did you use to create them?

Lovin' Nude

Today I have an awesome nude that wasn't boring! It was very unexpected, Nordic Nude was included with the Color Club Boho set I bought, but it didn't really stick out to me originally. I don't even remember why I chose to wear it, but I'm glad I did.

The formula was awesome, not too thick and definitely not too thin. I applied two thin to medium coats and coverage was perfect. I'm pretty sure if I used 1 thick coat coat I could get full coverage without having to layer any more polish on top.

I would describe Nordic Nude as a beige, almost greyed out nude with slight yellow undertones. I found it to be similar to OPI's Skull and Gloss Bones, which I picked up recently, minus the yellow undertones. It is not a dupe, just the closest colour I own that I thought to compare it to.

Look how long my nails are! Whoa! I think that may be the longest I've ever had them. Tragedy struck, obviously. I hadn't had a break in so long too :( I really think it's the cold weather, my cuticles have been super dry too. Any tips on preventing dry skin and nails in the winter time?

A Festive Combo

Happy Friday!

Here's a quick refresh post. Tonight I have my work Christmas party, so I thought this would be appropriate to share. I layered a thin coat of China Glaze's Ring in the Red from their holiday collection this year over Zoya's Ivanka.

In my head it seemed like a good idea, but because of the pigmented red jelly base it was a little too strong to be layered over a different coloured polish. This is the only photo I could get where it actually looked ok. There is no topcoat in this photo because I removed it right afterwards, it didnt come out how I thought it would, which was sad because I looooooved Ivanka and didn't want to remove it so soon :(

I'll have to test layering this polish over some other colours to see what looks best for next time. What do you think, yay or nay?

December Already!?

Wow, the first of December. Where has the year gone? In a month it will be 2012! While I already started getting in to the holiday spirit before December, I am definitely in full gear now. I love the music, the shopping, the family get togethers, the first snow :)

I wore Zoya's Ivanka mid November, it definitely got me in the holiday spirit and I LOOOOVVVED it. It is just so perfect. I would describe it as a foily green with a yellow/blue duochrome. Although the duochrome is faint, it is still gorgeous. This just screams winter to me :)

I wish I could remmber how many coats I applied, I think it was 3, the polish was kind of sheer, but it built up nicely, these types of polishes always do.

It's so sparkly and shimmery and just reminds me of elves working away at Santa's work shop lol. When I first saw this polish and heard it's name I mediately thought of money, Ivanka being Donald Trumps daughter. I wonder if they named it after her...

So lovely, all the Zoya's I've owned have amazed me with colour, formula and wear. I can't wait for the spring trade in promo next year so I can get me some more :)