Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Layering with The Hungry Asian's All You Can Eat

If you're not familiar with Kae's blog, The Hungry Asian, you should really do yourself a favor and check it out. She makes some seriously cool frankens and I was lucky enough to purchase a few from her a few months ago. Today I'm going to show you a recent glitterbomb I did using All You Can Eat.


All You Can Eat is a glitter polish to end all glitter polishes. Kae used seventeen different colored glitters in making All You Can Eat. It looks magnificent layered over black, so that's just what I did. I started with two coats of Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Midnight in NY.


Midnight in NY is a black cream base with rainbow colored microfine glitter. It's a hard polish to capture properly on camera. While I really like the idea of a polish like this, I think it could be a little better. Another thing that irks me about this polish is it's formula, which is semi-difficult to work with. It's thick-ish, kinda lumpy and bubbles almost every time I use it. It's pretty unfortunate.


You probably noticed some other stuff going on there with my accent nail. For that I used one layer of Love & Beauty Clear/Silver and one layer of Ulta Pinata-Yada-Yada. Enjoy!

The colors, Duke! The colors!

Sunday, July 24, 2011

China Glaze Let's Do It In 3-D

First things first! I've reached 100 followers! :D I want to thank everyone sincerely for following and commenting on my blog, it's nice to know I'm not the only one looking at it! I will be having a giveaway here very soon, so keep your eyes peeled! 

Okay, down to business. I received this in the mail the other day from the wonderful Chelsea over at Pretty 'n' Polish. It's uh... what's the words I'm looking for... oh yeah, fucking awesome. There really aren't a lot of words needed here, folks, so let's get to the pictures. These were taken in various lighting situations and I'll try to lump them together if I can remember what is what, lol.

Indoor with flash
Outside, direct sunlight
Outside, shade

Bottom line is this polish is phenomenal. It's beautiful even when it's not flashing at all. I'll be hard pressed to find a polish I love more than Let's Do It In 3-D.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Glitterbomb featuring China Glaze Glam

First things first! I finally got around to updating my polish spreadsheet with the help of my best friend, Cathy, so there is finally something on my stash page! You can check out my spreadsheet here :D You should also visit Cathy's ortho/nail blog here because she takes some fantastic photos of her nails! I also got around to writing up a proper wishlist, which if you're so inclined, you can look at by clicking the wishlist tab above.

Okay, now down to business. This weeks manicure challenge was glitterbomb. I actually had these pictures ready to go yesterday, but I was too lazy to update, lol. 


While at a friend's house Sunday night, I spied a bottle of OPI Suzi Loves Sydney hanging out on her kitchen counter. It looked lonely, so I decided to try it on! I had intended to do something completely different for my glitterbomb, but I really liked Suzi Loves Sydney, so I decided to work with it. When I got home I sponged on some China Glaze Mrs. Claus follow by some China Glaze Glam, which is obviously the star of this manicure.


I didn't take photos until Monday afternoon, and as you can see, I dented the tips of my pointer and middle fingers. After taking photos of this gorgeous manicure, I decided I'd try to add more glitter to try and work towards the idea I originally had in my head before Suzi Loves Sydney ruined everything, lol. Sure, this was glittery, but it wasn't glittery enough.

 
I added more CG Glam, then I layered on Icing Born This Way, Orly Fifty-Four and a coat of OPI I Juggle... Men. The end result was extremely hard to photograph.


Now that is a glitterbomb! :D

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Borghese Nero Magico + China Glaze No Tan Lines

A while ago, I posted to PAA asking if anyone had seen Borghese Nero Magico around at any of their local haunts as no shops near me even carry Borghese aside from Ulta. I had been lusting after it since Lindsay posted about it. Not too long after that, Traci altered me to a bottle hanging out for sale on The PolishAholic. I snatched it up and here it is!


I sponged some China Glaze No Tan Lines over all but the ring finger then mattefied the whole she-bang-a-bang with Matte About You. It's incredibly gorgeous.


I didn't think to take prodecural photos, so I slapped some regular top coat over it so you all could see what it looks like all shiny :D 

a comparison
Have you killed any lemmings lately?

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Shitty tape rays with China Glaze Cowboy Up and Señorita Bonita

The name says it all, doesn't it? I'm still failing hard at tape manicures. Not sure if it's my impatience, the humidity or a little of both, but every tape manicure I've done in the past three months has been utter fail. This one I can't blame on anything other than too wide of tape strips and poor positioning. Oh well, the colors are still gorgeous!

China Glaze Cowboy Up and Señorita Bonita
Both of these polishes are just amazing. I love the orange glass flecks in Señorita Bonita and Cowboy Up is loaded with microfine shimmer in different shades of purple and red; it's like my beloved MAC Boom! but better... which I thought was impossible.

Monday Manicure Challege: Sponging

I know a lot of my followers are aware of the Polish-aholics Anonymous group on Facebook (hi ladies!), but for those who aren't, every Monday we have a different manicure challenge. This week I decided to take up the challenge and do a sponge manicure. I know it's not technically Monday anymore, but look at all the fucks I give!


I need to tell you that I am not at all happy with the photos I took for this manicure. The colors aren't as true to life as I'd like and since I shot them around 2pm, the sun was just too much and everything is just blown out. I'm sorry guys :\


For this manicure I used put down two coats of Love & Beauty Jade then sponged China Glaze Frostbite from tips down in an uneven manner. I finished it off with some randomly sponged Sinful Colors Pearl Harbor (which didn't even show up in my photos :|).


I had some inspiration behind this one, a recently acquired pair of plugs which I absolutely love:

neat, huh?
I'm going to try to start participating in the Monday challenge more often because it was pretty fun. I'd like to take this time to apologize about my lack of updates (again) as I am without my laptop (and have been for the past two weeks) as it was, as the computer tech put it, trying to set me on fire. Hopefully I'll have it back soon and will be able to post more regularly. In the meantime, I have some photos of random manicures I've done recently loaded up and ready to go :) Thanks for looking!

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Jon Burgerman inspired skittles mani

In case you're unaware, I work at Lush. Today my store celebrated our third birthday as well as a limited edition gift, Bathtime Favorites, with a tin designed by artist Jon Burgerman. We had a carnival themed party and we all dressed in bright, bold outfits (I wore a red shirt, yellow sneakers and bright blue socks!). I decided that I absolutely had to do a manicure inspired by the Bathtime Favorites tin. I'm no artist, and I don't even have any nail art tools, so I decided to just do a matte skittle mani using colors from the artwork.

Sorry about the bad cellphone pic!

For this manicure I used Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Cherry Red, China Glaze Happy Go Lucky, Zoya Mitzi, Zoya Phoebe, and Zoya Lolly. I topped the two non-matte colors with Essie Matte About You.


 And of course I took this opportunity to wear one of my favorite eyeshadow looks, rainbow :D


This is a little different than my usually rainbow look, but I wanted to match my manicure colors. For this one I used:
Eyelid, from inner to outer: (all MAC unless otherwise specified) Chrome Yellow e/s, Lime e/s (pro), Clarity e/s, Red Brick e/s with Basic Red pigment layered over it (both pro) and Passionate e/s with a touch of Make Up Forever #75 e/s blended in
Other: Fascinating e/l on waterline, NYC Jet Black liquid liner, False Lashes mascara, Lingering eyebrow pencil