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.

Leopard Print with Flowers + Experiment

Saw a make up bag at Forever21 with a leopard and rose print and quite liked it so I thought I would try it out on my nails.  Not super in love with it because of the decals I used.  Probably would have been better if I had painted on the roses.

Base colour is Ardene Barely There, used Color Club Soft As Cashmere for the stamping colour and plate m57 for the print.  Was feeling lazy so I used water decals instead of painting.

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Sorry for the dry looking hands picture above. From the Korean blog 달빛샤워의 Coffee Break :: 네이버 블로그 there was a scan from a Korean nail magazine that featured using plastic wrap to I guess smoosh around the polish.  I'm not too sure but that's what it looked like from the pictures.  Here's a link to the blog post with the scans, you'll have to scroll down to see the tutorial.

It looks alright, but it's  kind of bothersome to do.  Basically paint the nail, dab on some dots of colour, place a piece of plastic wrap over the nail and move it around a bit, remove plastic wrap let dry a bit and then put on top coat so it blends the colours a bit.

Here's another version that I did with different colours.

Did the same thing as above but I added some starry glitter top coat and some rhinestones which were a misstep.  Will probably continue to practice this until I am happy with the way it looks or just give up.

A Bit More Hauling

Some crackle polishes that I bought off eBay way back in May finally arrived in the mail.

There were 40 colours to choose from, but I went for colours that I would wear often.  I quite liked them except for the fact that the colour turns darker after putting on a top coat.  You can’t really tell from the picture above, but in my mani pic below it is definitely noticeable.  However I still went ahead and bought a couple more.  You can get crackles from this brand at the born pretty store, but there’s not much selection there.

Here is the mani I did with L006

Base colour was three coats of Ardene - Malibu Splash.

On my nail you can see that with the top coat parts are light while other areas are darker.  I’m not really sure why that happens.  On the nail wheel you can definitely see the difference.  Looks better without shiny top coat, but I worry that everything would just chip off when washing dishes or showering.  Since it dries matte, maybe a matte top coat wouldn't change it.

Here's a polish I picked up from H&M.

My first H&M polish, Blue Wave - sheer blue with I think blue, pink and purple shimmer.  Quite pretty.

And now for a random photo.

Just a picture of blurry Instax photos of my recent hauls.  You can also see the additional Wet N Wild Craze polishes, they were still around when I went to buy some new hangers.

Flowers

Here's a couple of floral designs that I did.


This one I didn't really like and and took it off pretty much after taking the pictures. The green and yellow was just not for me. Sponged on Cosline - 203 Pure Yellow and 702 Spring Green. Then I used a dotting tool with a couple of Mood Struck polishes that I recently purchased from Winners. They came in a package of three with no names. The top left corner is what the flowers look like when cold and the bottom right is when the flowers are warm/hot.


This one I really like and currently have on my nails. I've seen this design plenty of times in Japanese nail magazines. It seems to be a popular design since it is in pretty much every magazine every month though usually in pinks/reds. The blue is an Ardene polish in Deep Sky Blue. They seem to have changed their bottle design once again. Third bottle design within a year. Used some Sally Hansen nail guides to tape off areas then used white acrylic paint. Instead of painting on roses I decided to stamp them on since I wanted them to be more uniform, especially on my right hand. Red and green Konad special polishes for the stamping colours using fauxnad plate F01. Glitter stripes were done using L.A. Colors Art Deco polish in silver glitter.