Happy Valentine's Day!

lightbox

I really wanted to do something vampy and classy today, after doing sweet and cute hearts yesterday. So, I went vintage '40s style. My nails have really grown a lot lately, and are too long (for me), but I hate just chopping them off. Instead, I decided to try out a new nail shape while they were long enough to do it. I was going for almond, but clearly ended up more round. I really suck at shaping!
Anyway, if anyone remembers the 1940's, or has seen old ads and photos, they might recognize this look. I hear it was quite trendy back then! I did this using two coats Sally Hansen Without a Stitch (the nude, of course!), then added two coats China Glaze Phat Santa, masking off the half-moons with hole punch reinforcement stickers.

lightbox

This pic is just for fun. I used my editing software to make this black-and-white, then colorized it, to make it look a bit vintage. Actually, this is pretty close to the real color in low light. Phat Santa is a chameleon - in bright light, it's a nice bright red, but in lower light, it's more oxblood, but always clearly red. So both photos are color-accurate, even though the second is colorized!
Happy Valentine's Day! (aka Happy Half-price Chocolates Eve! )

Disclosure: China Glaze Phat Santa was provided for review. All other polishes in this post were purchased by me.

NotD: HOT Flakies!

Taken in lightbox

Taken in filtered winter sun

Last April, I saw this post on Alizarine Claws & Cammi, and knew that someday I would HAVE to try killing it with fire! (On a side note, I highly recommend their blog - they have some of the best swatches! ^_^) So, someday arrived this week! I used China Glaze Poinsettia for my red, because it's the hottest red jelly I own - seriously, folks, this one's HAWT (and beautiful and even well-behaved! lol). Anyway, I used two coats of that, then started about 1/3 down the nail with Finger Paints Flashy and finished the tips with some Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure. I tried to capture the duochrominess of the flakies, but I couldn't manage the green. Trust me, though, these flakies go from orange to golden yellow to green as the light shifts. Gorgeous!! ♥♥♥ Right now, you're probably wondering why I used two different flakies. Here's why: See that well-defined line of flakies? Yeah. Ugh. That's a single coat of Hidden Treasure, started at the same point on the nail. So, the more sparse Flashy worked perfectly to create the desired effect, but then I wanted a bit more flakie goodness at the tips and Hidden Treasure gave me the coverage I needed. Now, I could have done it the way Feline Flodin did, starting from the tips backwards with HT, but I'm difficult like that. :P Having Hidden Treasure, I wasn't sure I needed Flashy, but now I'm glad I got it. I did skip Essie Shine of the Times, but if you don't have HT, that would definitely be a better substitute. If you don't own any flakie polishes at all, what are you waiting for! O_O Get thee to a Sally Beauty! (Flashy is one of 5 new Finger Paints flakie topcoats, and they're only $4.99 each with a Beauty Club Card. I highly recommend checking out Twisted!) Disclosure: China Glaze Poinsettia was provided by China Glaze for promotional purposes. All other products mentioned in this post were purchased by me.