Butter London - Scouse!

Oh my!  I do believe that my butter London nail polish collection is growing and growing!  They just seem to be coming up with color after color that I looove.

For this post I layered Scouse, which butter London describes as "Sheer, royal blue and indigo duochrome nail lacquer with pink, purple, and blue microglitter.", over Nina Ultra Pro's Cobalt.

The definition of Scouse is a "Brit slang referring to a person from Liverpool"

Cobalt is such a stunning color, and is HOT HOT HOT this season, but it is so hard to photograph, as blues usually are.  I did have to fiddle around with my camera and settings in order to get to capture it's "in real life" color, so please forgive the brightness of some of the shots. 

For this manicure I started with the usual Orly Bonder base followed by 3 coats of Cobalt and topped with a coat of SV to render it super shine-tastic.   I had to include a partial shot of the ring I wore with this mani, which is a sterling silver setting with a chunk of a Ming vase in it.  What can I say?  It matched perfectly. 

After I grew bored of Cobalt all on it's own I layered on 2 coats of Scouse to my mani and topped again with SV.  That's quite a few layers of nail polish, but it all held up very well. 

Scouse is an exclusive color that can be found only at Dillard's stores or via the butter London website and sell for $14.00 each.  Cobalt can be found at Sally's online store  for $4.19 with their beauty club card.  I picked mine up in person and believe it was actually priced at under $4.00 in store with my Sally's card.

Will you be jumping on the Cobalt band wagon this season?  Please do!

Until next time...

☺ 

Once Upon a Polish - Whosits and Whatsits Galore!

There are times when a nail polish makes you ooooh!! and aaaaah! more than the other polishes and this is one of those times and one of those polishes.  I came across this bad ass while I was perusing some other blogs and had one of those "I MUST HAVE IT!" moments and ordered it immediately.  This is a polish that a gal named Kimberly hand makes out of Tallahassee, FL.  Kimberly is a mad and brilliant nail polish scientist just based off this polish alone.  As you may or may not know, indie polishes are just as pricey, if not more so than name brand polishes and this lovely did not come "cheap", but as usual, I think it's totally worth it.  You can find Once Upon A Polish at Kimberly's Etsy store - Once Upon A Polish for $8.50 each + shipping.

This polish is described as "A mixture of matte coral, green, red, white, and blue glitter! "

It's a great layering polish and kind of reminds me of a Jackson Pollack painting, but much MUCH prettier and way more aesthetically pleasing.  I layered Whosits over Essence Black is Back, but I imagine it would look just as good over white, pink, green or red cream...or maybe even a cement gray.  I believe I used 3 steady, even coats and topped off with 1 thick coat of SV.  It's not really grainy or a top-coat eater kind of a polish either, which was a relief.

Now onward to the peektures!!!

Pretty sweet, huh.  What makes it so much more cool and interesting than your average polish is that it's more like a confetti polish vs a glitter.  It's not shiny or shimmery, which I like and it's like nothing else I have in my stash.  So what do you think?  Gonna try an indie polish any time soon?  

Until next time.

☺

Halloween Dot Mani

This Halloween Dot Mani was inspired (thieved!) from Kayla Shevonne's blog.   Hers looks much neater than mine, but she is a true nail artist and I'm just a mere amateur and copy cat.

For this mani I whipped out my dotting tools and used the following colors:

• Black base:  Essence Black is back
• Orange: Pure Ice Hot Tamale
• White: Ulta Snow White
• Purple: American Apparel African Violet
• Green: Blush  no name 

Topped with a coat of SV and there you go.  

Happy Halloween!!

Loreal's - The Muse's Inspiration + Halloween Mani/Revlon Stencils

Loreal has really stepped up their game in the last year, releasing really nice polishes that are finally starting to catch my eye.  Today I have a polish from the Project Runway collection called The Muse's Inspiration.  I bought another 2 from the line, but have yet to swatch them.  Hopefully I'll get to them soon.

So here's The Muse's Inspiration.  It's a shimmery tangerine orange like color like no other I have in my stash.  It really is a rich color -perfect for autumn and the application was very smooth.  This is 3 coats of The Muse's Inspiration on top of a base coat of Bonder and then I topped with SV.   Think tangerine when you look at this pics because, as usual, my camera was confused by this color. 

Side note: please excuse my right hand, it's not as nice as my left. :o/

 Now for a Halloween mani!  I found these Revlon Nail Stencils at Walgreens for around 3-4 bucks and thought I should give them a chance.

I used Essence Black is Back for the stencil color.  Let it dry completely (or at least what I thought was completely) and then carefully peeled off the stencil.  This is the result:

Pretty cool, huh.  Now they're not perfect, by any means, but they did the trick.  I think one would achieve a neater, more crisp result with a stamping plate than with this, but if you don't want to spend the money on a stamping kit and plates then this is a nice little shortcut. The only catch is that they really don't seem to be reusable as then bend out of shape when you pull them off.   I'll be using the mustache stencil for a Movember manicure next month.  Can't wait.

What do you think?  Would you give the Revlon nail stencil a try?

Until next time!  ☺

Sally Hansen Salon Effects - Stud-io Time

Howdy, folks!  I can't believe October is almost gone.  It just got here, didn't it?  You wouldn't know it's October by the temperatures were still getting here in AZ.  I can only hope that by Halloween our highs will only be in the high 80s.  :::crossing fingers:::  The evenings here are pretty gorgeous though.  I definitely have nothing to complain about when it comes to that.  Right now its 71 degrees out.  It's the perfect weather to have dinner out on the patio of a restaurant, which I did last night with several of my girl friends.  It was quite lovely.

So I have bought several of these Salon Effects kits and have never tried using them until a couple of weeks ago.  I don't know what it was about them, but I think I thought they wouldn't work and I wasn't ready to flush what I spent on them down the drain so quickly.  Well, I finally sucked it up and decided I would finally give them a try.  I bought this set at Ulta for half off about 8 months ago!  I opened the box and was ready to get down to business when I realize one of the sets of strips was missing.  The box is supposed to included 2 sealed packets of the various sized nail polish strips- one for your right hand and one for the left.  It's also supposed to have an orange stick and a small nail file.  This box had the orange stick and one set of the nail strips.  I was robbed!!!  Lesson reluctantly learned.  If you see these on clearance, check the box to make sure everything is there before you buy or be a sucker like me.

Because of the above, I decided to still use what I bought and came up with an accent nail mani using the Stud-io Time strips on every other nail, alternating with OPI's Sanguine.  I'm not going to go into the application process because you can watch a fantastic video instead, if you would like: Nail Strip Application Tutorial.

I wasn't sure what to expect with these nail polish strips, but they turned out to be pretty cool.  There was some very obvious lifting that occurred immediately on only my thumb nail near the cuticle line  (I think I should have watched the tutorial first!).  No matter how hard I pressed down on it, it kept popping up.  Even still, it wasn't really a problem - it didn't get snagged in anything and pretty much stayed the same degree of separated the entire time I had them on, which was about 4 days.

Here's how to make the best of half of a box of nail polish strips:

You can really see the lifting up of the strip on my thumb in this one. :(

What do you think?  Have you ever tried nail polish strips before?  If you have what was your experience?  Any tricks or tips for flawless application?

Until next time.  ☺

OPI GoldenEye is GORGEOUS!

Hello folks!  I couldn't wait to put up some pictures of GoldenEye from the recently released OPI James Bond Collection because it is to die for.  I grew up watching James Bond movies on the TV with my dad so I was super excited when I found out there was going to be a nail polish line inspired by Bond.  And then to have that line be by OPI?  Swoon! The whole collection is pretty darn awesome, but this one is the one that grabbed me.  Let me tell you, I received many compliments on this polish and I could not stop looking at my own nails for the couple of days I had it on.  It's just ridiculously ah-mah-zing.  I have never seen a gold polish that can even hold a candle to this one.  The color is so saturated that is makes your nails look like they have been covered in sparkly gold leaf!

For these photos I used a base of Bonder, 3 coats of Goldeneye and a top coat of SV.  I noticed that the polish would seem to apply a little bit more sparse as I got to the top of the nail with the brush so I ended up having to splat some polish at the top first and then I would dip again and start application again from bottom to top.  A fourth coat probably wouldn't have hurt as it dried very well.

Here is GoldenEye - which I have been calling Goldfinger for the last 2 weeks (Gee, I wonder why).  Oops!

So what do you think of this shimmery sparkly golden goodness?  Gotta have it?

Until next time!!  ☺