31dc2013 Day Five

31dc2013 Day five: Blue Nails

I love blue nails. I remember being in 6th grade and getting my first blue polish, it was so different, funky, and fun. Also a pretty big deal because my mother didnt like me wearing darker colors on my nails. I still remember a pretty horrific story she told me about a roomie she had when she was in the air-force. This may be a tad morbid, but to make a long story short, her roommate was found in the river with dark black blue nails(and it wasnt from polish). So yeah, for me that meant no blue or black polishes. Okay now back to the nails.

I wanted to do something simple for blue since it's such a vivid nail color as is. So I started with two coats of spoiled's "Your Fly's Down" which is a very pigmented slightly shimmery royal blue. Only needed two thin coats for full coverage, it applied very smoothly. All in all it's a very nice bright blue especially for a $1.99. Well I couldn't stop there, that would be a little too simple.

I added a coat of Zoya "Opal" to my pointer, middle and pinky finger. Opal is a beautiful fleck effect top coat in a very lightly green tinted jelly base. The flecks work so well and differently over all sorts of colors. In my mind this over the blue would look like a blue and green globe. Which you can see in the first picture in this post that it certainly has a nice contrast and depth over the blue. I then added Essie "shine of the times" to my thumb and ring finger just for fun.

All that flaky goodness! I like sparkly things but find it hard to wear for very long. I thought adding a matte top coat to the fingers with zoya opal might make the globe effect i was going for stand out more.

It looked pretty dreamy and kind of reminded me of the ocean. Very pretty and deep. I then added matte top coat to the thumb and ring finger.

It made it look like I had crushed sea shells on my nails! It was a nice compliment to the zoya opal without stealing the show so to speak. I will say though the zoya opal is a tad thinner and less dense with flakies then Essie shine of the times. Still a great glitter topper though! Which flakie polish do you prefer?

Steady hands to all!

31dc2013 Day two

31dc2013 Day two: Orange nails

        I'm back! This is my day two manicure and my second blog post! So orange eh? one of my least favorite colors. As a little bit of back story, I have an older brother who's about 16 months older then me. Understandably we were very close since we grew up so close in age. Well when we were in highschool the whole rave scene was very popular and with that came UFO pants, candy beads, pacifiers, and of course neon orange EVERYTHING! I myself as a self proclaimed punky gypsy however wanted nothing to do with this trend. My brother on the other hand was obsessed! I think at one point he had 5 pairs of those terrible tent like material pants- all in neon ORANGE! bleh! As the good sister that I am, I went out of my way to hide every single pair, but he just kept buying more! Needless to say I still have a strong dislike for this color. As evidenced by my polish collection in which there were only 3 colors in my stash that were in the orange range.

     One of the three (the NYC) is actually way more coral then orange but it suited my needs for this manicure. The other two are Julep the one in the middle is a frosty shimmery thin bright orange, while the one all the way to the right is a very pastel light orange creme. Neither of the julep's were colors I chose on my own nor would I. The frosty orange had a super wonky brush and was so thin you would probably need 4 coats for total opacity and the end result would be a streaky mess. The pastel orange needed 3 coats for full coverage which I find off for a creme.

So first I did a basecoat of Sally Hansen maximum growth (cuz I have weak little nubbins) Then followed that with two coats of the pastel orange creme. Then I added some essie shine of the times. I was originally going to stop there and call it a day, but the pastel orange was just too bright and cutesie or twee for my liking. I then decided to sponge the frosty orange and coral over it which actually made for a beautiful gradient with the slight sparkle of shine of the times peeking through!
But again still very boring and well, orange.  So I decided to give the monarch manicure a try!

Excuse the poor quality photo's still working on that aspect! All in all not bad for my first go though!
Although I'm not a fan of orange, I am loving this look! It was pretty simple too, I did the black with a nail polish pen and used white polish and a bobby pin for the little white dots. My right hand could use a little more finesse when it comes to the details but i'm still pretty proud of butterfly nails! Let me know what you think!

Steady hands to all!