Monday, September 26, 2011

Faux Peridot

This delightful greenish gold manicure came into existence by surprise.



It actually started out as the blue/gray/taupe/pink oddity from this post, China Glaze In The Mood Pink Shimmer to Purple Shimmer, shown below on the right.



After adding some Ulta Moody Blues, Revlon Orange Flip, and just a touch of Nabi Purple Glitter, it turned into this crazy franken.



The orange flashes are pretty intense indoors and give this polish almost magenta undertones.



But outside it becomes a slightly more subdued purple. Still an unusual color though.



Then I topped it with a sheer no name key lime green, and that's when the magic happened!  It turned into an awesome greenish, goldish, purple-ish duo-chrome.



It looked completely different in every lighting condition.  Dare I say it is Chanel Peridot-"esque"?



J'adore!





I was actually tempted to leave this manicure unstamped because I loved it so much... but I couldn't do it.  The compulsion to stamp is too strong!!  Here it is topped with Wet & Wild black and stamped with Bundle Monster plate BM-208.





And from afar:



I took my nail stamping plates and some polishes to a friend's place for a girls' night.  This was the result:





So much fun!

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Nail Perfect review

So I saw Nail Perfect (As Seen on TV) in the clearance bin at Ross and I thought I'd give it a try. Nail Perfect comes with plastic plates with various nail cut out sizes, a travel handle (bizarre), a polish holder, and nail decals.

IMG_0978

The basic idea is that you find the nail cut out size that most closely fits your nail bed size, stick your nail in it so that the skin on either side of your nail bed is covered, rest your hand on the base, and apply your nail polish. This is supposed to result in a "perfect" manicure with no clean up required.

IMG_0982

It works just okay. I still ended up with some polish on the skin around the tips of my nails. I don't have pics of the result because I was too impatient and wanted to stamp right away! Considering the result was not "perfect," it wasn't worth the extra trouble. I get a similar result on my own, and I don't have the steadiest of hands.

The little chair holder for your nail polish bottle is an interesting idea, but not really that useful. It would have to be a more extreme angle to be of real use.

IMG_0992

The decals were cute, but definitely not worth the price. Not even from the clearance bin.

IMG_0995

All in all, a big meh.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Pretty pretty purple

I'm moderately obsessed with the color purple, especially rich dark purples. For this manicure I used Nabi polish in Purple Glitter. It is highly pigmented and nice and sparkly. I added a gradient of some mystery polishes in blue and green on top with Bundle Monster plate BM21.

IMG_0963

To stamp the gradient, I dotted the blue and green on the side of the image, and scraped two or three times, overlapping the colors as I scraped. The difference between blue and green was hardly noticeable on top of the purple, but I'm definitely going to make another attempt at gradient stamping with some more opaque polishes.

IMG_0962

Here you can kind of see the green on top and blue on bottom:

IMG_0966

And from afar:

IMG_0143