My First Glitter Sandwich

Wednesday night, I noticed a few chips starting to form in my Floam manicure so I decided to take it off and use a polish I had just picked up earlier in the day, OPI Too Hot Pink To Hold 'Em, to make my first glitter sandwich.

I never really had a lot of jelly polishes in my stash but I knew of a place that still had a bunch of the OPI Texas Collection available.  So Wednesday while I was out running errands, I decided to stop in and see what I could get.  I picked up a number of polishes on Wednesday including Too Hot Pink To Hold 'Em, along with two more OPI jellies (or sorbets as OPI refers to them) from the Texas Collection: Guy Meets Gal-veston and Big Hair..Big Nails.  I'm planning to put up a haul post with more details on that later this weekend b/c I also have my recent nail mail still to post about and I made a stop into Sally Beauty as well.

I wanted to try combining colors, not just laying glitter between one polish, so I actually started this out with a couple coats of Zoya Kristen, then one coat of L.A. Girl Glitter Addict Celebrate.

Then I put on 2 coats of OPI Too Hot Pink To Hold 'Em, which resulted in it having more of a purple hue than hot pink/red because of the base of Zoya Kristen.

In the image above, I'm holding Too Hot Pink To Hold 'Em and you can see the difference in color Zoya Kristen caused.  The funny thing is that I went back to the store on Thursday to double check if any more of the Texas Sorbets were there, I found Do You Think I'm Tex-y and Houston We Have A Purple.  When I picked up Houston We Have A Purple, I noticed that the OPI Too Hot Pink To Hold 'Em layered over Zoya Kristen ended up making Too Hot Pink look almost exactly like Houston We Have A Purple's bottle color (which you can see in the pic below).

I may be getting around to glitter sandwich's late in the game, but I think I'm going to like experimenting with them and how different base colors will end up affecting the color of the jelly polishes.  It will also be a good way to incorporate all the different glitter polishes I have, that I don't use nearly as often as I should.

***Edit*** April 3rd 1:14 am: I just realized, at one o'clock in the morning for some ungodly reason, but I did just realize that in my very first post, I included a picture of a Peppermint Bark mani that I did sometime around Christmas.  Technically, that would be considered a glitter sandwich.  But, since that was just me copying a definite themed design, and I don't think I even knew the term Glitter Sandwich back in December when I did that, I'm still going to consider Too Hot Pink To Hold 'Em my "first" glitter sandwich, lol.

Nail-Venturous Floam

In my last post, Sunday night, when I mentioned I had something equally awesome to Lynnderella's Connect The Dots to share, I was referring to Nail-Venturous Floam!

I first saw Floam on The PolishAholic's blog a few weeks ago.  You can read her post about it here.  It's such an odd polish.  A simple polish really, but complex at the same time.  The glitter is not your typical glitter.  It's not shiny or metallic like you would think of when someone mentions glitter.  The polish is made up of very tiny glitter particles that overlap each other in just the right way.  It really looks like actual Floam!  As someone who completely geeked out over the real Floam as a kid, I couldn't resist this polish.  And I just found out they still make Floam too, http://www.floam.com.  Who knew!?!  Almost twenty years later and I still want to buy a tub of that stuff, lol!

I bought my bottle of Floam from Ninja Polish, along with a pair of A England polishes.  I plan to write up a small haul post about them later in the week, along with my new Zoya polishes that I picked up during the recent Zoya Spring promotion sale.  You can also buy Floam straight from the official Nail-Venturous Etsy site, Nail-Venturous Lacquers.  As of this posting, Floam is out of stock on both sites, but they both give you the option to sign up to be notified via email when it's back in stock.

I had almost no problems with the application.  It is a bit on the thick side, but is still extremely easy to apply.  I used three coats of Floam to achieve almost full coverage on my nails.  The only issue I came across was the glitter on the very tips of my nails would get pulled off at the end of each brush stroke, resulting in a few bare spots.  But I would just pat the brush onto my tips and the glitter built back up and surprisingly leveled out.  To top it off, I used a thick coat of Gelous followed by a generous coat of Seche Vite for a smooth finish.

Nail-Venturous has a bunch of other awesome glitter polishes that I hope to one day get my hands on.  Unfortunately, when they do come back in stock, they then sell out within seconds.  She just restocked her store tonight and I think in less than 30 seconds, everything was gone!  I witnessed it and trust me when I say that indy-polish buying can almost qualify as a competitive sport!

Connect The Dots

Connect the dots, la la la la...connect the dots, la la la la...  Seriously, am I the only one who hears Pee Wee Herman singing that every time they think about Lynnderella's Connect The Dots???  I used to love Pee Wee's Playhouse.  Ok, moving on...ha ha ha.

Friday was my birthday, so I had decided Thursday night that my Spring mani was coming off and I was going to do something new for my b-day.  I considered doing a glitter sandwich using Deborah Lippmann's Happy Birthday...oh so corny, I know!  But I resisted that urge and decided that I wanted to use Connect The Dots instead.  I had received it about 2 weeks earlier but had yet to use it.  I was completely dying to wear it but hadn't yet due to St. Patrick's Day and also the Spring Stamping contest I entered on Enamel Girl's blog.  I wore CTD over Zoya Lolly.  This is the same pink I used in my swatches of CTD back when I posted about my Lynnderella order.  But I liked the way it looked so much on the nail wheel, that I decided to use it as the base color on my nails as well, rather than picking out something else.  This was one coat of Connect The Dots over three coats of Zoya Lolly and then a coat of Seche Vite top coat.

Zoya Lolly ends up looking darker than the bottle color once you add top coat.  If you leave it matte, it does more or less look just like the bottle color.  Even with the Zoya matte polishes coming in the frosted glass bottles, it's a pretty close match to the bottle color without top coat.

I've read on some blogs that a few people had trouble applying Connect The Dots and getting the glitter to distribute evenly.  With the first brush stroke, I did seem to get mostly clear polish and just the small micro glitter.  But what seemed to work well for me was that I would wait a second or two after the first brush stroke and that made the polish just a bit tacky.  When I went in with the second brush stroke, that helped make the bigger glitter stick.  I also would try to lay the brush as flat as possible during the brush stroke and that seemed to make all the black and white glitter transfer from the brush to the nail in one big blob of glitter glory.  Then with one or two more regular brush strokes, the glitter would spread out perfectly.  Hopefully that's not totally confusing.  It's hard to put into words exactly what I mean.

I love this polish!  It's as great as I imagined it would be when I first saw it online and I'm glad I bought two bottles.  I'm a little sad to be taking it off but I've got something equally awesome coming up.

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Ok, so yes, it is technically still March.  But this Tuesday does mark the official beginning of Spring and also, this post is serving as my entry into Enamel Girl's Nail Art Stamping Contest, which ends this Wednesday.  The theme of the contest is "Anything Spring" and when I think of Spring, I think of cooling afternoon rain showers and fresh flowers starting to pop up all over.

I decided to use Sinful Colors Cinderella as my base.  I just received it in the mail Friday.  I couldn't find it anywhere around me so I ended up buying it, along with Sinful Colors Green Ocean, from Traci's blog sale over at The Trace Face Philes.  Cinderella is very, very sheer though, so I decided to layer it over Revlon Blue Lagoon.  I originally bought Blue Lagoon to possibly layer Revlon Whimsical over, but it turned out to look almost exactly like the same shade of blue as Sinful Colors Cinderella.  The big difference is that Blue Lagoon has a silver shimmer and Cinderella has that awesome pinkish-copper shimmer that is making everyone go nuts over, myself included.

Revlon Blue Lagoon is a bit on the sheer side as well, but no where near as sheer as Cinderella.  It builds up very nicely after just two coats, whereas Cinderella would take 4 coats at least to be just as opaque.  So my base ended up being two coats of Revlon Blue Lagoon topped with one coat of Sinful Colors Cinderella.

Then I broke out my Konad Special Polish in white and a bunch of pastel Konad Special Polishes for the designs.

Using Konad Special Polish in white, I stamped the clouds design from Konad plate m79 onto my index and middle fingers and my pinkies.

Then on my thumbs and ring fingers, I stamped a flower pattern from Bundle Monster BM-224.

To get flowers of different colors, I placed drops from Konad Special Polishes in pastel violet, yellow, pastel green and pastel pink onto different parts of the flower pattern, then scraped and stamped on the flowers.

Taking my dotting tools, I then used the same Konad colors to dot the centers of all the flowers with a color different than the petals.  I waited for that to set up and then put a coat of Seche Vite top coat on the flowers and let that dry.  This way I didn't have to worry about bumping and messing up any of the flowers while I was trying to add raindrops with China Glaze Blue Year's Eve to my other nails.  To make the raindrops, I used the smallest dotting tool available and once I placed the dot of Blue Year's Eve on my nail, instead just lifting the dotting tool straight up, I gave the dotting tool a small, quick flick upward to stretch the dot into the raindrop shape.  Once the raindrops dried, I added a coat of Seche Vite to those nails to finish everything off.

This is my first time entering a nail art contest online.  There have been other contests that I've thought about entering but ended up procrastinating and just never tried.  So I was very happy with myself that I followed through on this one and making this design was a lot of fun!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Even though it turned out that my favorite St. Patrick's Day themed manicure was the plaid shamrocks I wore last week, I still made sure to rock some green all this past week up until today for St. Patrick's Day.  I have to say though, I just wasn't up for elaborate designs.  Am I the only one who was hit hard by the time change last weekend?  It never bothered me in the past, but this year it just threw me completely off and I was just tired and lifeless all week long.  I hope that's over with now and I'll get back on track this weekend.

For the first few days of the week, I had on a striped manicure using three different shades of green.  I started with three coats of China Glaze Gaga For Green.   I probably could have stopped at two coats, but there were a few thin spots on a couple of nails where Gaga For Green was going to be showing, so I went for a third coat to even it out.

Once that was done and dried completely, I scotch taped my nails and put on a thick coat of Zoya Shawn.  When Shawn was dry, I repeated the scotch tape closer to the tips and put on a thick coat of China Glaze Holly-Day.

I wish it had looked as nice in real life as it does in the picture.  In the picture, you can easily spot the difference between Zoya Shawn and China Glaze Holly-Day, but in real life you couldn't tell them apart in most light and so it looked like a weird two-tone off center pattern.  It wasn't horrible like that, but it bugged me so I ending up wearing it like this only on Monday and then Monday night I took Zoya Goldie and attempted (key word: attempted) to freehand some straight lines to separate the three greens.

That just made it worse!  If I could have done super thin lines, I think it would have worked better or if I had some thin gold nail art striping tape, that would have been perfect for this.  This only lasted another day and then I put myself out of my misery with an Irish flag design with a twist.  I started with three coats of Wet n Wild White Creme.  Then using China Glaze Four Leaf Clover and Orly Crush On You, I made the horizontal stripes.  I wore that plain for one day before deciding to take my red Konad Special Polish and Bundle Monster plate BM02 and stamp the lips design on as an accent on my ring and thumbnails, as a take on "Kiss Me, I'm Irish."

March 2012 Birchbox

This past Saturday, my March Birchbox arrived.  I had completely forgotten that I had opted in for the Teen Vogue Beauty Picks box for March.  Birchbox had sent out emails giving you the option to receive the Teen Vogue box rather than the regular box.  At first I wasn't sure what to do.  I was worried maybe the items would be a bit too young for me, but I think the idea of a special edition box intrigued me too much and I ended up choosing the Teen Vogue version.  So then when it arrived and I saw the outer sleeve with the Teen Vogue logo on it, I thought, "Uh oh!  What did I do?"  But when I opened up my Birchbox and saw a full size bottle of Essie As Gold As It Gets staring back at me, my eyes nearly bugged out of my head!

I have been flip-flopping on this polish for months.  For some reason, I just couldn't decided if I wanted to buy it or not.  Now, I don't have to think about it anymore because it's mine thanks to Birchbox.  I was also excited because I had searched online and saw that some people had received different polishes from the Luxeffects collection.  Out of the five polishes in the collection, I was really only interested in Pure Pearlfection and As Gold As It Gets.  They were the only two that weren't like anything I already had.  So I'm glad that I received one of the two I had originally considered buying (I then proceeded to go out this past Wednesday and buy Pure Pearlfection!).  I did a quick search online to see what people received in the regular Birchbox and I would have definitely liked a few of the larger items that were in this month's regular box.  Also, the regular March Birchbox had a full size bottle of Color Club polish, but I'm more excited about the Essie Luxeffects polish than I would have been with the Color Club polish.  So in the end, I'm still happy with my choice.

The other items in my March box were:

- Twirl by Kate Spade New York perfume sample

It says it's supposed to be a fruity floral.  It doesn't seem fruity to me at all, but it's still a really nice floral scent and a more mature scent than I would have expected in a Teen Vogue sponsored box, so that was a plus.

- Kerastase Elixir Ultime: nourishing oil to hydrate hair

I've heard a lot of good things about Kerastase so I'm excited to get to try this out because the full size bottle is pretty pricey.

- Tarte LipSurgence lip tint in Lucky

This is pink.  Like really pink.  I haven't decided if that's a good thing or not.  I've seen a few people post who got a different shade than Lucky, but I haven't tried this enough times yet to know if I'm happy with the shade I received or not.  Formula-wise though, I really like it.  I would buy it in other shades for sure.

- Twistband Hair Tie

This is actually my second twistband from Birchbox.  I received my first twistband in a box several months ago.  I'm happy to get another, I really like using them.  They hold very securely and don't rip any of my hair out of my head when I take them out.  And if I want to take it out of my hair, I can put it on my wrist and it's very comfortable to wear there for the rest of the day.

There was also a coupon for a special price on a Teen Vogue subscription and a $10 Off coupon for Modcloth.com.  I won't be subscribing to Teen Vogue but I definitely plan to check out Modcloth.com.  I already took a quick look through a few parts of the site and there is some really funky jewelry and home decorations listed.

Lynnderella Order

I've finally got my hands on some Lynnderella polishes, especially Connect the Dots, which is the main one I've been wanting since I first saw them.  I've seen them online for a long time now and considered buying them through Llarowe.  I had bought Hits and Glitter Gal polishes from Llarowe before, but never Lynnderella because they were usually out of stock.  Recently, due to the high demand for them, Llarowe developed a wish list system for ordering Lynnderella.  I was lucky enough to get my invoice during the very beginning of the process and all of the polishes I had put on my wish list were available.  I didn't want to go crazy with my wish list, my main goal was to get Connect the Dots.  I did have a few other polishes that I decided to put on my wish list though.  My order consisted of Chocolotta Love, Snow Angel, Very Pretty Vampire and Connect the Dots.  I ordered one bottle of each, except for Connect the Dots, which I ordered the maximum allowed, two bottles.

I can't wait to wear Connect the Dots!  If it wasn't for the fact that I'm planning some more St. Patrick's Day themed designs, I'd be sporting CTD right now.  I did do some swatches on Saturday though, because I just couldn't resist testing each polish out.  I'll start by apologizing for the quality of the images.  I'm still in the process of deciding on a new camera and while my old camera does have a macro setting, it's not as good as what's available in newer cameras.  The CTD and Snow Angel pics look ok, but my camera does not come close to doing justice to the glitter in Chocolotta Love and Very Pretty Vampire.  But crappy macro pics or not, I still have to share these.  I did each Lynnderella over two different base colors, as labeled in the pictures.

Now I just have to decide what other Lynnderella polishes to pick, once we can start submitting wish lists again!  Visit Llarowe's site at http://shop.llarowe.com/main.sc.

Adding to the Stash

When I had gone to Ulta two weeks ago, my plan was to pick up the rest of the OPI Nicki Minaj collection.  A friend of mine had gone down to Philly a few weeks prior and was going to stop in a Philly Ulta on the way back, so I had asked her to pick up all 6 colors for me, if they had them, or get me basically whatever they did have.  They only had Super Bass Shatter, Did It On 'Em and Fly.  Ones that I wanted, yes, but not as much as I wanted Metallic 4 Life and Save Me.  When I finally got a chance to go to my sorta-local Ulta to pick up the other 3, all they had available from the Nicki Minaj Collection was one lonely bottle of Did It On 'Em, which I already had, thanks to my friend.

There was one website that I had stumbled across a couple months ago, mbeautylounge.com, that sells OPI polishes among other brands, but I had been hesitant to buy anything from them.  On the drive home from Ulta though, I decided to take a second look at it and by Sunday I had placed my order.  For some reason only after placing my order did I decide to do a search for reviews of the site and oh my God, all I found were bad reviews! At this point, I was more than a bit nervous about my order.  Luckily, by Wednesday, I received an email with a tracking number and by the following Monday my polishes had arrived safe and sound.

I had ordered the rest of the Nicki Minaj Collection: Metallic 4 Life, Pink Friday and Save Me, along with Glow Up Already! from OPI's 2010 Burlesque Collection.  Skimming over some of the bad reviews, it seemed like a lot of the problems dealt with really large orders and international shipments.  I only ordered 4 polishes and they only had to ship from Ohio to PA.  So maybe that factored into why I didn't have any issues with my order, but after reading all the bad reviews, I don't think I would order from them again.  It worked out for me this time, but I don't know if I'd want to take a chance on a second order.  A lot of people have had legit nightmare experiences, so I consider myself lucky on this one.  Even though I had no problems, I honestly would not recommend this site to anyone.

After that drama was out of the way, I got a chance to stop back in at Sally Beauty to see if they had Smoke and Ashes from the China Glaze Capitol Colours Collection.  I wasn't in a hurry like my last trip to Sally's, so if they didn't have it out I was going to ask for it this time.  When I got there, they did have a bottle of Smoke and Ashes out and I decided to get Harvest Moon as well.  So now altogether, I have half of the Capitol Colours Collection and I think that's probably all of the colors I'm interested in from this collection.  Besides the two China Glaze colors, I also grabbed Orly Prelude to a Kiss and Steel Your Heart, from the Cool Romance Collection.

I know I had said previously that I didn't want Steel Your Heart, but then standing there in the store, that neurotic part of my brain kicked in that says, "There's six colors in the collection and you're going to have five of them.  What's one more?  You might as well just get all six.  Just buy it!"  So I did.  ::Sigh::  That's the same "logic" that I lost to when I ended up buying all of the colors from the China Glaze Let It Snow Collection, even though I'm sure I didn't need half of them.  We'll see how it goes with the Capitol Colours Collection, so far I'm standing strong at six!

You can expect a few more posts from me this weekend.  On Friday, I received my first ever Lynnderella polishes in the mail and today my March Birchbox arrived and I'm really excited about both!  I never got around to posting about last month's box but I will be taking pics of this month's Birchbox tomorrow.

My First Blog Win!

Last Saturday, I got a package in the mail that I was highly anticipating.  It was the entire China Glaze Magnetix collection, which I had won in a giveaway on Kristina's blog, My Lucid Bubble.

This was my first win off of a blog giveaway.  The only other times I've won polish were both from Zoya.  First, I won the Gems & Jewels Holiday Collection last October through Zoya's twitter contest and then a couple months ago, through Zoya's Facebook, I won a free color of my choice from the Feel Collection.  But this was my first win from a blog, so I was very excited!  I want to give a big "Thank You!" to Kristina for having this giveaway for the entire collection.  I thank you and my wallet thanks you!  I was definitely planning to buy these, so winning them instead helped me save a little cash, especially since I bought a bunch of other polishes this week.  By Thursday, my St. Patty's Plaid design was starting to take a beating, so I took that off and tried out Instant Chemistry, from the Magnetix Collection.

I didn't really have any issues except once or twice I looked away from my nails for too long and I guess my hand moved, so when I looked back the magnet was touching the polish, oops!  But I just quickly put another coat on the nail and started over and it was fine.  It didn't seem to me like holding the magnet over the polish longer made the design look crisper.  But I think it helped to hold the design in place while the polish dried.  So then when I took the magnet away, it seemed like the polish was dry enough so that design didn't settle and get blurry, which is an issue I've read some other people having because of the China Glaze magnet not being as strong as magnets from other brands like Nails Inc. or Icing.  The only other issue I had was the design on my thumb was basically just in the middle of my thumbnail.  Since my thumbnails are wider than the others, the magnet didn't seem strong enough to pull the polish into the design along the sides of the nail.  I tried tilting the magnet back and forth when I did my other thumb, but I got more or less the same results.  I think it will be something I'll have to experiment with some more.  But I really love this color.  I haven't tried the other Magnetix colors yet, but even just looking at the bottles, I think this may be my favorite.

Be sure to check out the new giveaway Kristina is having, this time it's a raffle.  You have to make a donation to get entered into the raffle but the proceeds are going to be donated to food banks, which is a very cool idea, and there are some awesome polishes up for grabs if you win!  I personally have not come across any giveaways like this on blogs before.  I think it's a pretty great idea to hold a blog giveaway that offers up some unique polishes but also will raise money for those in need at the same time.

St. Patty's Plaid

If I had any idea how much I was going to end up loving this, I would have saved it for next week instead of doing it the week before St. Patrick's Day.  But, like most of my manicures, it wasn't planned.  It just kind of happened.

First off, I was wrong about the Super Bass Shatter/Rumble's Wiggin' combo.  I didn't get bored with it.  In fact, I ended up keeping it on all week.  Although, around Wednesday or so, I decided to put a coat of Essie Matte About You on top.  I wish I could have gotten a good picture of that.  I tried.  I failed.  I took a couple, but it was late at night and I couldn't get the artificial light to cooperate.  By the time a day rolled along that the weather didn't suck and the sun was out, there was so much wear and tear on the polish, it just wasn't worth photographing any longer.  A matte top coat over shatter or crackle is mesmerizing.  At least to me it is.  There's something about the matte top coat that makes the ridges from the shatter just vanish.  Even with a decent layer of Seche Vite, you usually can still see the edges of the shatter raised up, where the shatter lays over the base color.  But with the matte coat on top, it practically melts into the base color.  It's perfectly smooth and almost looks like it would have been a Sally Hansen polish strip rather than something you did yourself.  It's bizarre.  But awesome.  I couldn't stop staring and examining it.

Anyway...back to the current manicure.  When I took off the Super Bass Shatter mani on Saturday, I was trying to decide what to put on next and I kept going back to butter LONDON's Bossy Boots.  I just bought it last weekend and wanted to try it out.  This is 3 thin coats of Bossy Boots.

I wanted to do more than one St. Patrick's Day themed manicures this month and after I put on Bossy Boots, I thought it would work great as a background color for one of them.  There's a shamrock design on one of the Red Angel plates that I decided to use, but I thought the shamrock alone would be too plain.  So I took the plaid looking pattern from Konad plate m60 and stamped my nails once with Konad Special Polish in brown.  Then to really make it look more like plaid, I stamped the same pattern again but with Konad Special Polish in white.

I love the plaid design by itself.  But then I took Red Angel plate RA-116 and Konad Special Polish in green and added one shamrock to each nail.  I finished it off with a coat of Seche Vite top coat.

Holy cow, I love this!  I love plaid.  I love green.  I love St. Patrick's Day, even though I'm not even remotely Irish.  So this is the trifecta of nail art for me!  The plaid pattern shows through the shamrocks a little bit, but I don't even care.

Now I'm just a little worried I won't be able to think of anything else for St. Patty's Day.  At least nothing that I'll like as much as this.