NotD: Sinful Neptune

Sinful Neptune, two coats with topcoat. Beautiful slightly dusty medium blue with copious opalescent shimmer, giving it an awesome speckled look. This came out recently, in the Cast Away collection, which snuck into drugstores just after Walgreens' 99¢ sale, of course. But still, it's totally worth $1.99 (normal Sinful price), so I snagged it anyway.

Vault 106: Life of a Manicure, Deconstructed

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It's not uncommon for me to get bored with a mani quickly, but I'm too lazy to remove it and it still looks okay, so I just add something. Yes, I confess to polish ADD. This time it turned out alright, if a bit thick. Here's the final manicure after about 5 days. This shows the stamping, using plates BM03 and fauxnad M96. The blue is Sally Hansen Navy Baby and the white is Love My Nails White.

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Sans stamping, this layer shows one coat OPI Big Hair... Big Nails. Mmm, jelly sandwich, anyone?

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Here we have three coats Sinful Deep Red Ocean. Starting to look a bit thick already. But SO sparkly!

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Back to the beginning, this is two coats China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy alone. It's a typical neon, so it dries matte, and I liked it that way. It's so bright! Love this one.
Whew, that's a lot of layers! Did you follow all that? Are you polish ADD, too?

NotD: Jelly Sandwich

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Revlon Blue Lagoon, two coats, no topcoat. Pastel blue with iridescent shimmer. Unfortunately the shimmer gets completely lost on the nail, especially amongst all the bubbles. I bought this specifically as an opaque base for Sinful Cinderella. It matches and is opaque enough, but the formula is awful! It's chalky, streaky, gritty and bubbly. Yuck. I'm so glad I only paid about $1.50 for it. Too bad it's such a pretty polish in the bottle! I think it'll be worth trying over a different basecoat, waiting a little longer between coats, or something.

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Spoiled Pet My Peacock, one coat, no topcoat, over Revlon. Equal parts blue, green, purple, gold and silver hex glitters, all the same size, in a clear base. Love the glitter, hate the brush! Just like everyone else who's reviewed the new Spoiled (by Wet n Wild) line, the brush in this was wonky and needed a haircut before I could use it properly, even with a glitter like this.

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Sinful Cinderella, one coat with topcoat, over Revlon and Spoiled. This looks so awesome, and is worth the application issues with the other two polishes. I love how Cinderella really intensifies the color of the glitter while subduing the bling. It also makes this look like all one polish, not three layered. What a neat effect! I think the milky finish of Cinderella is perfect for jelly sandwiches, and the pink-gold sparkle just adds some extra oomph.
If you enlarge these pics, you'll still see the Revlon bubbles, but they're less noticeable in real life and I think I can manage to ignore them for a few days. Maybe.

Sweet and Girly Valentine

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One more Valentine's Day mani. This is 4 coats of Sinful Cinderella, with hearts stamped using plate BM202. I really like how sweet and delicate this turned out. Click to enlarge and see the beautiful sparkle in the Sinful polish. I really adore the color, but 4 coats is excessive - next time I'm wearing underwear!

Vault 106: Insane Neon Glitter!

Okay, so picture in your head mac n' cheese powdered cheese. Got it? Good. That's the exact color of the this Hot Topic polish:

Hot Topic Marigold. 4 coats. Eye-popping light orange neon. I should have put this over white, because 4 coats is always excessive to me - and, look! you can still see VNL! And do I need to mention the horrible mop that Hot Topic calls a brush? Yeesh. Too bad the bottles are so cute. This is not a unique color, so you can skip it in favor of one with better application.
This is shown with top coat, because it does dry matte, like all neons. I liked it matte, but after the fourth coat, it started to bubble - so I panicked and threw on Seche Vite, which does seem to cure bubbles handily. (I'm finally starting to get along okay with SV, learning its quirks and stuff. See, there's no shrinkage this time!)
So, what do you do when you have VNL, but you know another coat won't build up? Go for the bling, of course!

Sinful UFO. 2 coats. Sheer orange jelly with huge bling factor! Nice. It does bring the neon glow down a notch, but WOW. I loved this! So HAWT! I think this is what UFO was made for - these two together should have been one polish! I'll be doing this combo again this summer, for sure.

Here's a bonus sun pic, because it almost makes me look tan. LOL.

Silver Bells

Woohoo! I'm so excited because I actually won something! JP at nails of the day had a contest to give away the six Zoya polishes from their Green Friday sale, and I WON!! I'm so excited to see these colors in person! The six colors will be Tangy, Envy, Midori, Irene, Suvi and Veruschka. Thanks so much, JP, for a fantastic contest! :) *little happy dance*

Ahem. Enough gushing for now. :) On to the pics!

Sinful Sugar Sugar. This is a gorgeous true red that just glows. If it weren't for the ever-present Sinful bubbles, I think this would be a favorite red. But of course, I couldn't leave it alone - I just had to rev it up for Christmas!

Pure Ice Heart Breaker with silver bells stamped onto ring fingers. I have to agree with those bloggers who rave about Heart Breaker - it really does just make everything better! I was amazed at how true the green glitter stays, even in a blue base. It gave the red the Christmas kick it needed!
The silver bells I added are from a fauxnad kit I got from an eBay seller, in Pure Ice Silver Mercedes. I've never done stamping before, and I think this design may have been too ambitious - I just could not get the little narrow line under the bell clapper to stamp completely. The first pic above (my right hand) was the closest I could get. I ended up filling in a little with a striping brush on my left, and it looks really sloppy.
Anyway, I really like this mani, even if it wasn't perfect. :P My family was really impressed, though, so maybe it wasn't as bad as I think. Great idea, less than stellar execution, as usual. I'll just have to keep practicing!
Thanks for reading!

Tannenbaum

I really love the idea of holiday manis, so I've done a few. I'll just jump right in with the first one, which I did last week.

Sinful Show Me The Way. I've seen this one swatched before, and I really like it, but it looks a little swampy on me. At first, I thought ugh, too yellow, but it kinda grew on me, except for the application. I swear, I haven't been able to paint on a single Sinful color that didn't bubble on me (with the possible exception of the glitter topcoat-types). I think this is two (sloppy) coats.
Anyway, I liked it for a day, despite the bubbles. I really wanted to try Nihrida's decoupage technique though, and I just happened to find the perfect napkins to go over this polish, so I plunged right into it.

Here is Show Me The Way with a paper napkin over it. I really liked the effect, and my husband said the dots looked like water droplets. Cool! :D (I was a bit worried that they would look like a weird nail disease, especially over SMTW! ;P)

Here is the napkin I used. I really like these napkins, because there are several options for a design. Just like Nihrida showed in her video tutorial, I pulled the layers apart so there was only the top layer, then cut out the areas I wanted to use this time. Since the polish was a day old, I used topcoat to stick it to my nails. Then, I used more topcoat to "melt" the paper and make it all shiny.
Learnings for next time:

• Use a lighter color for maximum impact. I liked this OK, but it was a little too subtle.
• Cut more carefully for less clean-up, i.e. rounded edges at the cuticle!
• Start with the good/thick topcoat to save layers. I think I used 3 coats of a cheap topcoat and it was still rough. Essie Trillionails saved the day with one coat on top of that.
• This is a great use for that crappy Dollar Tree "Quick Dry" topcoat that never actually dries - I used it underneath the napkin to stick it down. Worked great!
• Try a glitter topcoat - it might make some cool effects.

Overall, it was fun, relatively easy, and I will be doing it again sometime.

Thanks for reading!