Golden Skyline

Another nail look with the gold metal bits, but this time it's gold metal strip. These pictures show the shininess of the metal bits, better than the last one.  I did one coat of Dabo RD440 and then two coats of Sally Hansen Xtreme-Wear Black Out to the side. Gold strips placed so that it'll hide any imperfections, but sometimes the strips made dents, but that's OK.

The strips are bit harder to work with because as your pulling it off the sheet it could break at weak points.  Just gotta be extra careful.  Also because this was more solid with less cut outs it was harder to get it to lay flat.  Had to use the flat handle end of a pair of tweezers to get it to lay as flat as possible.

Gold On Gold On Gold

I recently purchased what I thought were gold stickers from ebay, but they're more like really thin metal pieces.  They are attached to an adhesive sheet instead of being loose in a jar.  You kind of have to smoosh them down so that they'll adhere to your nail better, but some edges still don't lie flat.  Can be a bit annoying, but it's OK.

Started off with two coats of Etude House LUCIDarling Fantastic Nails 01 Sparkling Royal Gold.  Then I placed the metal bits and smoothed them down with a nail buffer which sort of made the residual glue on the metal bits turn dark and hard to remove sometimes.  Lastly a coat of Ardene Disco Ball which isn't really noticeable in the pictures, but does make the nails more sparkly.

Gold Glitter Gradient

Something quick and easy to do and it looks really nice.  So sparkly in real life. 

I applied one coat Color Club Gingerbread on just the tips and then let it dry.  Gingerbread is pretty dense with the glitter so it nicely covers the white part of nail tips preventing VNL.  Then starting from mid-nail I applied one coat of H&M Gold.  There's quite a bit of glitter in Gold, but not as dense as Gingerbread and the glitter is smaller than Gingerbread.  Lastly I did one coat over the entire nail of  Ardene Disco Ball.  Light gold-ish glitter with larger sliver holographic glitter.

Super love this, but I love glittery gradients.

Scales + A Couple of Giveaways

Fish scales?  Dragon scales?  Either one would be OK for the upcoming Lunar New Year.  It'll be the year of the dragon and fish is a symbol for something.  At the Asian malls there are various sweets shaped like fish and one of the dishes for new year's eve dinner is suppose to be a whole fish.  I think every Chinese holiday or special occasion tends to have fish present. 

Anyway, for this I used two coats of Quo by Orly in Turquoise Moonlight.  There were some bald-ish spots, but since I was stamping over it I didn't really care, they weren't that noticeable.  I then stamped with American Apparel Gold Flash and Red Angel plate RA-111.

-----

A couple of really awesome giveaways that I thought people may be interested in.

First up - Giveaway by The Polished Perfectionist

You can win the Hits No Olimpo collection, that includes 12 colours and one top coat.  Click on the above picture to take you to the giveaway.

Giveaway ends January 28, 2012.

Next up - Giveaway by Bunny Nails

Bunny Nails has tons of prizes so the next part is taken directly from her blog.

There are going to be 13 winners!

The prizes are:

1 winner: XL nail stamp plates A, B, C & D (same as magnonails)

1 winner: QA series nail stamp set of 19 plates (QA 1- QA 19)

1 winner: A series nail stamp set of 20 plates (A 01- A 20)

2 winners: 7 QA nail stamp plates 1, 2, 3 , 4, 12, 14 & 17 (Cartoon characters)

2 winners: 6 QA nail stamp plates + 2 A series stamp plates (random selection)

6 winners: 1 Kleancolor nail polish in Chunky Holo Black + 6 nail art sticker sheets

Click on the picture to take you to the giveaway.

Giveaway ends February 17, 2012.

Diagonal Stripes and Flowers

Just a quick post before heading out.  I did two or possibly three, don't quite remember, coats of Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau.  I used Konad special polish in white and SHANY plate SH23 for the stripes.  These stripes are much thinner than the one available on the first set of BundleMonster plates.  The length of the SHANY stripes image is also longer than the BundleMonster one, but the width  is approximately the same.  The flowers are puffy nail stickers that I forgot I even had.  Found them while cleaning some junk off my desk.

Polish Gifts #2 + Layered Reds

Here are the other polishes I received during the holidays.  The American Apparel polishes were Christmas gifts from my friend Judy.  The Color Club polishes which I believe to be from a Pardon My French set were gifted to me via my friend Dawn from her brother's girlfriend.   It's all the colours minus Si Vous Please. 

And that's it for polish gifts this year.

-----

I used two colours from the Quo by Orly mini set,  Garnet (left) and Red Hot (right).  Pictured top right is both colours swatched on their own with two coats each.  Red Hot is pretty pigmented and one coat would have sufficed.  As for Garnet, it's pretty sheer, on the nail by itself you'd probably need three coats for opacity.  For the mani I did one coat of Red Hot and one coat of Garnet.  Then I used some water decals that look like they could have been hand painted.

Polish Gifts #1 + Grey Glitter Snowflakes

Long time no write.  Not because I was super busy or anything just that I haven't been photographing my nails much.  I didn't really paint my nails much during the holidays. When I did do my nails they usually didn't last all that long.

Hope everyone had a happy holiday and a good start to the new year.  To start off this post I have a pic of a set of mini polishes of Quo by Orly polishes that my friend Amy got me for Christmas. (Hi Amy, that was your shout out, though you had to wait a while for it, thanks for the polishes.)

Quo by Orly polishes are available at Shoppers Drug Mart stores and I had never tried them before so this set was a great introduction to them.  No pictures of any of them yet, but I will get on it.  Ah I just realized that the bottom of the pic is missing the names for the bottom row.  D'oh.  I'll list out all polishes.

From left to right, top row:
Very Vixen, Mystic Night, Garnet, Precious, Sapphire Sparkle, Cold Stone, Rock Show, Rock Star and Night Sky.

Bottom row:
Turquoise Moonlight, Celestial Star, First Class, Filthy Rich, Red Hot, Wine and Dine, Old Hollywood, Love Game and True Love.

Most of the polishes are glittery or shimmery and seems like they may work best as layering polishes.  However 3 thin coats will get you full coverage with minimal or no bald spots.  The tiny brush is not to my liking, but that's OK.

-----

Next up nails.  I did this some time last week.

Base colour was two coats of American Apparel Echo Park.  I forgot to include Konad special polish in white in the photo, but that's OK.  Used Konad white to stamp with and plates SH17 for the snowflake on the index finger, RA 119 for the thumb and ring finger and HB23 for the smaller not so well stamped snowflakes on the middle and pinky fingers.  I also did some glitter snowflakes with Color Club Sugarplum, but they didn't turn out as nice as I thought they would.  They kind of just looked like blobs of glitter on the nail.  Topped everything with CoverGirl Boundless Color in Disco Dazzle.

That's it for today.