Is It or Isn't It?

Here's a quick and simple mani, but the question is, is it a sponge gradient or a funky french?

This was done with a base coat of Gelous, two coats of Wet N Wild I Need a Refresh-mint, a coat of SV (I almost always seal nail art layers with SV so that I can rescue myself if my mistake isn't too big), the tips are Wet N Wild Bite the Bullet sponged on using a piece of a sponge roller, and then two coats of SV.  This is my first time sponging, and I'm pretty happy with 90% of the results.  That middle finger there looks a bit too solid of a line, but the other 9 fingers look great! 

Both of these polishes are in the Wet N Wild Megalast line and have "pro" brushes.  I'm not sure I really like them.  First, I had to trim a few strands on the I Need a Refresh-mint but that's probably more about the fact that it's a cheap brand than brush shape.  The bottle neck is too narrow, you have to be careful putting the brush in and there's no wiggle room for the plastic part, it seems like such an odd packaging method.  Also, I don't have a lot of experience with brushes shaped like this, so I may find them difficult just for that.  I find I press a lot harder with these so I am really bad about leaving gouges in my coats.  Total BLECH!

I'm really happy with the sponging method and I can't wait to try a true gradient now!  I used a tiny piece of sponge roller I tore off and I tapped a fairly dry brush to it.  I tried make-up sponges and picking up polish from a palette, but this is the only method that transferred polish for me or left me with a sponging and not a stamped looking mess.



Keep watching, my hair is currently up in pin curls I rolled using that new tool.  I'll be reviewing it soon!

Not Your Mama's Mani

I was having a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago and she mentioned that she's kind of in a rut.  She likes to do her nails sometimes, but she's not really into like I am, she's not a "girly-girl", and the only colors she really wears are red, black, and white.  So I figured I'd use her as some inspiration for some nail art.

2 coats of NK Really White

 A thicker coat of Sally Hansen Crackle Cherry Smash

And by accident (keep reading!) 2 coats of Wet N Wild Ebony Hates Chris

Topped by a thick coat of SV

My design process was that first that she's got two young boys and isn't into nails enough probably to spend much time on intricate art.  Plus since she's not too girly-girl AND has done a whole lot of kicking-butt and taking charge of the world, she needed something that was loud and demanding.  The crackle is quick and easy art, but it's getting tired these days so I added in some abstract shapes with the black, freehanded but no skill or too much time required.

Originally I had started with the white, added the black shapes, then the crackle coat. 

But the red crackle just didn't stand out enough and looked...ucky...yes, it didn't even earn a 'y'!  So I went back over the black again which is why it looks so thick.  If I did this same design  with these colors again, I would definitely put the crackle between the black and white to start, it would certainly be more pleasing if the black wasn't so thick on the nail. But if I were just doing the polishes together in a similar vein again, I would probably do white, red crackle, and then black funky french tips.  I'm definitely not totally satisfied with it as it ended up, but it wasn't designed with my tastes in mind, so we'll have to see what she thinks.


On a non-nail note, has anyone ever used one of these Curl Easy Pro Volumizing and Curling Tools??

I am a BIG fan of pin curls.  They're a fabulous way to get terrific curls, no hooks on the ends, avoid heat setting, and get a fabulous vintage look if that's your thing too.  My problem being that my hair is nearly to my waist and I got my Eastern European father's hair.  It's pretty thick and doing them the traditional way can take me a couple hours to roll up.  I had read about a Sculpture Pin Curler on a couple vintage hair blogs but I just can't pay $35 for a tool that I have zero experience with.  I just happened to be out at Sally's Beauty today and saw these, the pink one is the smallest, and it looks to be a tad larger than the Sculpture Pin Curler, but actually narrower than I manage to make my hand-rolled pin curls so I think it's a good start for testing the structure of the tool.  Stay tuned, I'll be posting my review of it soon!


*This post contains an affiliate link

Oh Say Can You See

This post may be awfully written since I'm dying of a migraine and our air conditioning is out when it's 103* and rising, but it's time sensitive so it's got to get done.


Woohoo!  While writing that first sentence a friend came over and swooped my kids away to A/C so at least that's a load off my migraine.  Let's see how this goes.

For the last few weeks I have been really excited to do some sort of themed manicure for The 4th of July and have been thinking on it.  I had a lot of ideas, and in the end I decided my freehand still looks a bit too amateur a lot of the time, I'm short on SV to do a tape mani the way I'd like, and my stamping skills and polish selection aren't up to the task yet. So water marbling it was!

I've been asked a lot how to do this, so I'm hoping to do a tutorial to add to the plethora of water marble tutorials available next week when I do a request for friend, but for now, you're going to get a few process pics and the end result.

Please pardon the awful color, my main point was to show the design and my processing computer died yesterday, so I tried to fiddle with these in some freebie program on my media server. After spending most of the day working on this post, I decided showing you what designs I did was more important than getting the colors right.

 I really hate posing nails like this, but there aren't terrific options with water marbling where you really want to show off as much of all 10 nails with as few frames as possible.

Polishes
Base Coat:  Gelous
Underwear:  Savvy French White White
Marble:
Wet N Wild I Red a Good Book
Wet N Wild Blue Moon
Savvy Fre
nch White White
Glitter Coat:  Wet N Wild Hallucinate
Top Coat:  Seche Vite

On my right hand I tried to use the Hallucinate in the marble too, but it didn't work well.  Putting it as one of the first colors caused it to dry before I could marble and putting toward the end and my solid color drops weren't spreading so the glitter ended up mostly just being lumps under the polish.  I was bummed because I wanted streaks like my last marble instead of all over, but such is life!  The biggest difference it made though is you can see the colors on my right hand are more primary, on the left, for some reason the white interfered more with the red and blue and I ended up with more pastels.  But the right also made a bunch of purple, so in the end, nothing ended up being a BRIGHT red, white, and blue as I planned.

I also wanted to try out nail polish jewelry, making a ring that would match my manicure!

This was HARD to water marble.  I have some ideas for next time, which will be happening, because the polish and adhesive never set thanks to the A/C going out.  I managed to keep it on well enough until the end of the night, then I got home and it fell apart.  It'll be taking an acetone bath soon.

Some process pics for you:

Chimneys and Flowers and Giveaways, oh my!

I've been MIA, I know.  It's been a long week, both of my kids were in day camps far apart from each other, and I've been extremely sleepy.  I've done some manis while I've been gone and some other fun beauty stuff that I'll try to get caught up on over the next few days. Especially since we'll be keeping it close to home these days to save money.  It's no-buy central here after the darecho that blew through the East Coast Friday night and did major damage to our house.

Yes, that's our chimney laying in our backyard instead of being attached to our house.  Ouch.

Before my house decided to reenact a scene from Wizard of Oz, I put on a cute little manicure that was a test run of the Salon Express nail stamping system.

It's not the best picture, but for some reason I was having major issues finding focus for this one.

Galaxy Nail Art

I've had galaxy nails on my to-do list for awhile now, but I was putting it off until my nails grew long enough to have enough space to get a decent "picture" in.  After being inspired by all the amazing swatches at Nouveau Cheap's epic galaxy nail battle, I decided two things:  #1 this would be another epically (spell check does not like that but dictionary.com tells me that's the proper spelling of the adverb tense) long manicure if I did it on all 10 nails, #2 my ring finger nails were long enough.  When you add 1 + 2 you get:

I ended up using several of the same colors she used without even realizing it, but I did intentionally use one my many China Glaze Riveting's inspired by what appeared to be her boyfriend's use of it and my love of it. The one thing I changed up was instead of making the stars by dotting a light polish, I used my dotting tool to pick up and put down the large hex glitter out of my Revlon Whimsical.  I love the idea of an old sponge roller too.  I found my makeup sponges are so absorbent that they are worthless for nail art and I'd been looking for an alternative that was cheap.  This was perfect since I had several I don't use anymore and it really works amazingly!

I used LA Looks Black Velvet as the base of the nail.  This is quickly becoming my favorite nail art black.  Perfect formula, it spreads perfectly, can be used in one coat for small art, and is only $1.  For the galaxy I used:


 (in this general order, one or two may have been switched around)

Wet N Wild Lavender Creme
Wet N Wild Red Red
China Glaze Riveting
Wet N Wild Blue Moon
Revlon Mysterious
Zia Unnamed off-white frost with silver sparkle
Revlon Whimsical


I then covered it with a light coat of Petites Stardust.  Careful, this one surprisingly has enough coverage that a regular coat will be too much glitter.  Note the difference in coverage between the right and left pictures.  Otherwise I'm really impressed with how these came out on my first try!  For the rest of my nails I used Wet N Wild Everybody Loves Redmond.  


I was not happy with the red, it was just too orange, but I didn't have anything better.  But the next day I hit up Rite Aid's Wet N Wild deal and got Burgundy Frost which worked perfectly!  I wish I had this exact shade in a creme though, I didn't want the distraction of frost or shimmer or glitter or anything.  I really feel like accent nails with nail art needs a complimentary but subdued color on the rest of the nails to allow them to stand out.

In the end, I love this art and can't wait to try it again with other colors. Also I loved that both my husband and my older daughter knew what it was right off the bat! What do you think about galaxy nails?  Have you tried it?

Girl Scouts Rock the Mall!

In addition to being addicted to nail polish, I'm a Daisy Girl Scout leader.  This year marks 100 years of Girl Scouting in the US and this past Saturday our council tried to put off a huge sing along on the National Mall with 200,000 Girl Scouts.  I say "tried" because the general consensus seems to be they failed miserably and it was an embarrassment to the Nation's Capital.

But anyway, I did a special pedicure just for the day!

I have awful feet, I know.  I'm an avid gardener among other feet uglying activities that I do barefoot or in flip flops pretty much always.  But I'm working on them!  The blue is Revlon Mysterious and the green is Wet N Wild Fast Dry SaGreena the Teenage Witch (I love the Fast Dry names!) with the painting done in NK Really White.  I have shown these off to EVERYONE!  I cannot draw for anything, so I totally impressed myself with these, especially the right one!  And I just adore these two colors together, they're definitely going to make more appearances as a pair around here.

My Girls trying to keep cool

Sparkling Darkness

I've been trying to put this off until my nails got longer, but I'm not patient enough.  Does the fact that these are actually freehanded tips make up for my impatience?  I think I did a pretty darned good job for someone who a month ago looked like a 3rd grader when I tried to paint the entire nail!  The worst was the middle finger you see, it was a bit wide, so I painted over the too-wide glitter with the black using a detail brush.  Worked out wonderfully enough until the SV dragged it when I top-coated it.  That's the little ding you see dragging into the CG on that finger.

2 coats of Wet N Wild Fast Dry Ebony Hates Chris
1 coat SV
2 coats of China Glaze Liquid Crystal on the tips
2 coats of SV

Experimentation

This blog is an experiment of sorts.  I want to see if I can grow my nails out, break the nail picking habit, use manicuring my nails as a sort of psychotherapy, improve my manicuring skills, and find out if I enjoy blogging about them.  I've learned a lot so far, and over the next few weeks I'll talk about that.

For today, the first one I photographed, these were done about 4 days ago on a whim, before I had settled into any idea that I really wanted to get into painting my nails.  No top or base coats, both colors are from the Wet n Wild - Wild Shine line; the base is one coat of Lavender Creme with one coat of Sparked on top.

Not a clue why this is called Lavender anything though, it's most certainly pink with not a hint of purple anywhere to be found.  Sparked is a pretty high density glitter.  For a $0.99 bottle, it goes one well, has great coverage, and is great fun for my two little girls.  It has taught me that I will NEVER wear glitter without 100% acetone around ever again though!  This is the most difficult to remove glitter I have used to date.