More polka dots!

Sooo after my first polka dot adventure went over so well, I thought I'd try it again!

This time I used teal and yellow, my favorite color combo!

Check this b out:

This time I used China Glaze Happy Go Lucky for my yellow, For Audrey for my teal, and Sinful Colors White!  Along with my dotting tool, of course.

I've seen a lot more polka dots on nails recently, I think they're perfect for summer!

I'll be MIA for a bit after this, too!  Sorry ladiess!  I've got a business trip coming up and potentially a weekend getaway ;)  SO bear with me, I'll be back!

<3 Whitney

Happy 4th of July!!

Hey pretties!

I'm actually in the car on my way to visit my friends and family for the holiday! BUT I wanted to show you all real quick the mani I've got on for today...

I apologize in advance for the crap cell phone pictures :) My parents actually don't have power since a nasty storm went through last weekend, so all I've got is my phone for this update!

Anywho, I did a double ruffian using Color Club Trippie Hippie, Sinful Colors white cream, Sinful Colors Red Cadillac and I topped it with my independence day polish U.S.A-mericium!

Hope you all have a great holiday :)

Check it out!

More Nail Art! Featuring Julep Parker

Hellloooo!

So I've had this on hold for a while...honestly I kind of forgot about this until I saved my previous polka dot post in my nail art file and saw it there!

It was more of a spring polish post rather than summer, but I still like it!  I finally found a Julep color that I really liked: a bright orange called Parker!  I believe I used 2 coats for this mani, and it went on surprisingly well.  A lot of people don't like the Julep brush, but every once in a while it works great for me!

I don't have many pics but I'll show you ladies anyawy!

At the time I really liked it, but looking back, I probably should've used dotting tools rather than the nail art brush I used!  I stamped the flower using a born pretty plate and then did some yellow dots using China Glaze Happy Go Lucky.  I told you girls I loved polka dots!

Too bad everyone at work thought I was wearing orange and white to support the University of Tennessee.  Silly people, Ohio State all the way ;)  I just like orange!  And boy do they ALL like orange down here! 

I think I'm going to try stamping more often...maybe for my 4th of July mani along with my U.S.A-mericium polish :) 

Hope you guys enjoyed my messy polka dots!

<3 Whitney

Giveaway Winner + Pool Party Polka Dot Nails!

Helllooooo!  I'm back to blogging, horray!

First of all, I'd like to congratulate my GFC follower Tavern Direct Blog for winning my Scünci Hot Streak giveaway!! Horray!  She has 48 hours to respond before another winner is chosen!

Nowwww I'd like to show you some nail art I did this weekend for a pool party we had :)  I got the idea of the polka dots from DIY Polish & More. Super cute idea!

Om nom nom!  I love polka dots!  I think I will probably do this with every color combination I can think of, hahaha.  I've already got another in mind! 

Anywhooo I started off with a base of 2 coats of China Glaze Papaya Punch with 2 coats of OPI Strawberry Margarita as my accent nail!  Then I just used those two colors along with Sinful Colors White Creme and my different sized dotting tools to make the dots!  Voila! Easy peasy and it didn't take very long, either!  I thought they were perfect for summer and I'm leaving them on as long as physically possible, hahaha.

Hope you like!

<3 Whitney

Nail Art Contest Entry!

Hello pretties! 

Today I have some nail art to show you for a contest I'm entering on Chalkboard Nails!

I told my boyfriend there was a contest online where you had to make nail art using only a dotting tool (then I had to tell him what a dotting tool was...), and he designed it for me!

He said that when I hold my hands for pictures it reminds him of an alien or some sort of creature (sweet, isn't he? lol), and that I should do an alien!

So here it is, designed by my boyfriend and painted by me:

For this art I used Funky Fingers Ectoplasmic for the green background and hands, China Glaze Flying Dragon for the purple spots, Funky Finger Tribal for accents on the fingers, and just a white and black cream for the eye.  I used a couple different sized dotting tools for the details.

Overall, it looks pretty much exactly like the picture my boyfriend drew for me, so he was quite happy about it :)

Hope you all are having a great weekend!  The doc gave me permission to go back to work on Monday, so that's good!  Don't forget to check out my Etsy shop where I'm selling my frankens!

<3 Whitney

OPI Lincoln Park After Dark Suede...Ruffian!

Hello pretties.

Sorry for the delay in posts, I was out of town for business all last week!  BUT I spent last weekend swatching a ton of polishes and editing photos so I could update in the evenings from my hotel, but the internet turned out to be something like $14 bucks a day, which I refused to spend, haha.  But now I'm back!

I've got a mani to show you that I did with Lincoln Park After Dark Suede, which is much prettier than I expected.  I first put down two coats of OPI Glamour Game, a pretty gold with slight glitter flecks, and added a coat of LPAD suede as a ruffian.  I was super psyched to get pictures of this right away, but I only got two pics before my camera died and I couldn't find my camera charger, so some of them are from my iPhone.

 

 

I really liked LPAD suede.  I have OPI Ink Suede, which I've only used once and had a really hard time with, so I was kind of reluctant to try another suede.  BUT, I looked up some tips for mattes and suedes and I think I must have just been trying to apply it too slowly.  Since they dry so quickly, you have to be quick in your application.  They are pretty opaque and go on usually in one coat, but I could still kind of see the gold underneath the first coat, so I added a second after the first coat had dried. 

I don't think I'd be opposed to owning more suedes now that I had much better luck with LPAD!  What suedes are your fav? 

<3 Whitney

Nail Fail: Needle Marble

How do you lovely ladies like the new look of my blog!?  The new logo was designed by the super talented Sarah from Chalkboard Nails! She's very sweet :)  The rest of the color change was my doing...I haven't decided if I'm going to keep it like that or hand it back over to Sarah to play with.  What do you guys think??

Anywho, onto the (fail) nails! After I saw Jackie from Adventures in Acetone put up this fabulous needle marbling mani for a Cult Nails contest, I instantly decided I wanted to try it.  Hers turned out SO beautiful I was like "psh I can do that."  Not.  Haha.

I used this tutorial from Liquid Jelly.

I decided to use a white base, China Glaze White on White and then marble ORLY Fowl Play.  I thought that the lovely flakes in Fowl Play would show up, but sadly they did not.

There's a few nails I DO like, but since they were so inconsistent and I really kind of hate the color combination (sadly since Fowl Play is one of my faves) I consider the whole mani a fail.  I think maybe if I would've used a black base....or Fowl Play as the base and maybe a silver on top, it would've been better.  Meh.  We'll see if I try this again, haha.

Have you guys tried needle marbling?  It's less effort than water marble, which is why it appealed to me :)

<3 Whitney

P.S. I'm going out of town for some training for work for a week tomorrow!  I'll have my laptop, so hopefully I can update, but I may not have much time.  We'll seee!

Candy Cane Stripes!

Merry Christmas Eve!

I've had this mani on all week because I like it so much.

That and the fact that I'm out of town and would rather hang out with people I don't see often than paint my nails :)

BUT I love it nonetheless and I've got quite a few compliments on it.  Probably because they didn't look too close and notice that I made white streaks accidentally because I'm too impatient before I add topcoat, but whatever!  Here it is:

Yes I realize those are all pretty much the same picture.  But oh well! 

I've seen candy-cane and striped mani's all over the place lately but it seemed easy enough for me to do quickly and it turned out pretty well, I think!

I used two coats of China Glaze Ruby Pumps and then just added diagonal white stripes with a color club art club polish.  Voila!  I also added a glittery/holo top coat to make the white sparkly like the red but you can't really tell.

Wellll that's it for now!  Hope you guys have a great Christmas if that's what you celebrate!

<3 Whitney  

First Holiday Nail Art! Snowflakes!

Remember Funky Finger Sound Check???

I used it as a base for my first holiday manicure with snowflakes!

I wish I'd had a nail art pen...or better yet, a stamping plate with snowflakes, but I tried anyway and regardless of it's sloppiness, it turned out so sparkly I barely notice:

It's so shiny in person!  I used Funky Fingers Sound Check as a base (since it's awesome), then I used a white nail art polish for the snowflakes and dots!

Then I added some glitter chunks here and there using Color Clubs Orna-Minted (and it smells like mint, yum!).  Then for some added sparkle I added a holographic top coat I have from Northern Lights (not pictured).

Overall I think it turned out okay for free hand!  Snowflakes are hard!

What do you think? Have you ladies tried snowflakes before??

<3 Whit

Fall Nail Art!

First of all: Weeeee 400+ followers!!  Horray!  If I didn't already have a giveaway going on, I'd do another!

Well that reminds me, actually...I will be having another giveaway after this one.  It will be small, but who doesn't like free stuff despite the size? :)

And second: I know.

I suck.  It's been 2 weeks!  I was going so strong for that one week there!  I'm sorry guys.  Work goes in and out of being super stressful and I just don't have it in me after working 10 hours to do my nails.  Not to mention the past few weekends the BF and I have actually had stuff to do :)  And by that I mean the new Legend of Zelda game came out and I've ignored my nails to play video games...

Anywho I just wanted to pop in real quick and show you two nail art projects I've done (semi) recently!

The first one was of my Thanksgiving nails!  I was inspired by the turkeys you used to draw as a kid by tracing your hand:

Let's try and ignore my cuticle here...it's not even my cuticle...it's crust left over from my Posche.  Stupid fast dry top coat!

For this mani I used (thumb to pinky): CG Happy Go Lucky Base, CG Papaya Punch, Essie Brazilliant, OPI Animal-istic + ORLY Ma Cherie (Couldn't decide haha), and OPI Pepe's Purple Passion.

For the turkey I used OPI Warm and Fozzie (<3) and a combo of the other colors used on the other nails.  For the eyes I actually used some sort of calcium base polish that I had with me...I didn't have any white or light polishes with me when I went home to my parents, haha!  Yay for creepy turkeys. 

And more recently (like...yesterday), I decided to try these cute owl nails that I initially saw done by Cristina at Let Them Have Polish who was inspired by Sarah at Chalkboard Nails (Also sort of inspired by Cindy Blogs Nails hahaha).  Let all of the gorgeous bloggers get some credit for this cute idea :)

All of their owls were cute and colorful...but once I tried Warm and Fozzie I knew it'd look great!  It's such a pretty color, I wish I'd used it sooner before it turned all cold and wintery.

With flash

Some of their eyeballs turned out wonky (you should see my right hand...or maybe you shouldn't...), but I still think they're cute nonetheless.  I had terrible shrinkage from my top coat (Poshe), which bums me out 'cause I wanted to wear this for a while....maybe I'll fill it in and pretend it was never there.  Anywho...I love this idea because I love owls!  

Here's the polishes I used:

OPI Warm & Fozzie, Funky Fingers Cayman Island, Zoya Tangy, CG Happy Go Lucky, Art Club Red, and a nail art pen in black!  

Obviously I used Warm and Fozzie as the base...the only thing I used the FF for was the belly...Tangy wasn't opaque enough to go over the brown so I had to put that on first.  The rest you should be able to figure out :)

Initially I tried to use little round dot stickers that I had to get the half-moon shape but they were kind of thick and it didn't really work out for me so well.  I had to fill in the owl "horns" a bit.  I wanted some of the hole-reinforcer stickers but they didn't have those where I went.  I think they're thinner and more pliable, which should work better (or so I hear).

I have very little patience with nail art so I'm surprised at both of these!

Hope you enjoyed...I'll be back soon (this weekend) with some great reviews I have planned! 

Don't forget to enter my GIVEAWAY! It ends Friday :)  And check out my blogsale if you're looking for some extra polishes for the holidays!

<3 Whitney

31 Day Challenge, Day 3! CG Happy Go Lucky + Nail Art!

So Day 3 = yellows!  Horray!  However, since yellow is my favorite color, there wasn't a yellow in my collection that I hadn't used before, so I thought I'd have to spice it up a bit!

I've been wanting to do yellow and white polka dots for a while, so I figured this would be the perfect time for it.

I started off with three coats of China Glaze Happy Go Lucky and added some polka dots with one of my dotting tools in China Glaze White on White.  I didn't take too much time on the dots so they're not all perfectly the same size, but I don't care too much...surprisingly, actually, since most of the time I'm pretty anal about that kind of stuff.  But here it is:

I like this mani because it's so happy!  If it was a paler yellow it'd remind me of Easter eggs...

So what I've been doing for a while is using a normal top coat (such as OPI) along with these cuticle oil/drying drops from Beauty Secrets instead of a quick dry top coat such as Seche Vite:

They're normally great...they dry your mani quickly along with moisturizing your cuticles, but if you're trying to do nail art it's kind of a hassle because you have to rinse off the oil in between your coats if you want a top coat in between your base and your art. 

BUT I decided for this mani I was going to bust out my Seche Vite and give it another try.  I stopped using it because I was tired of the shrinkage and the crusties on the sides of my nail...I cleaned up again with acetone after applying the SV to stop the buildup but I still got a noticeable amount of shrinkage.  Does anyone know why this happens and how to stop it?  I think next time I'll try Posche again.

How are you guys doing with this challenge??  Whats your fav yellow??!

<3 Whitney

First attempt at a sponge mani!

Hey everyone! It's Monday and if you're a member of the Facebook group Polish-aholics Anonymous, you know that means it's time for a Nail Art Challenge!

This week's theme was sponge mani.  I attempted my first quite a few days ago and liked how it turned out.  Which is good because I was too busy to try another one!  Here is how it turned out:

I started off with a base coat of China Glaze Happy Go Lucky:

Old picture ;)

I cheated a little and used tape to make a diagonal line down the middle and painted Essie Watermelon near my cuticles and Essie Meet me at Sunset down to the edge of my nail.  When I removed the tape I think took a tiny sponge from an eyeshadow applicator and created the sponge look in between the two Essies!

Overall I really enjoyed how it turned out:

I got my inspiration from my glass nail file haha

Ta daaa!

And that's ALMOST all....until I added Funky Finger White Scales over top of it.  I can't believe how much I love this crackle.  And I really like the look of multi colors under the white crackle polishes!

Thin coat

Thicker coat of crackle

Well that's all folks!  Hope you enjoyed :)

<3 Whitney