New Polishes!

A few days ago I ordered from 8ty8beauty and picked up two polishes from China Glaze's Safari Collection- Jungle Queen and I'm Not Lion.

Jungle Queen is a dusty purple whereas I'm Not Lion is a beautiful dense glitter with gold, silver, green and blue glitter. It was opaque in two coats. Jungle Queen liked to pool at the edges but other than that, application was fine. I just needed, like with almost all China Glazes, thin coats. I'm a sucker for purples and have to tell myself to not buy all of the purple.

Here's the mani I did with it. I will probably be using these colors again to liven it up a bit more and "refresh" the manicure.

The glitter is incredibly glitzy but it wasn't translating perfectly into pictures. If you end up buying this, know that it dries matte but with a top coat becomes super shiny!

I love the color combo. It's a great fall combo and one thing I love about fall & winter is the excuse to wear as much glitter (and sequin skirts/shirts) as I can. I originally meant to get I Herd That but that will have to wait another day... I guess I was just too excited and ended up ordering the wrong one. Oh well, I love it nonetheless!

I have a super busy week ahead but I'll still keep up. I'll be introducing something new on Wednesday so stay posted.

I'm also submitting this post as part of a link up!



If you're a manicure blogger, you should do it too.

Oreo Candy bar Mani

Last evening I went to a friend's place to do her nails. She saw my galaxy nails post and wanted me to do that for her, so we did! I hope she likes them. :) While I was there, I also painted my nails since she has a great collection of colors I don't have. So, I decided I wanted to do a jelly sandwich that ended up reminding me of an Oreo candy bar!

I used Rescue Beauty Lounge's Bella and Lynnderella's Connect the Dots. I layered two or three coats of Bella, then two coats of Connect the Dots and then added one more layer of Bella to finish my sandwich.

Please excuse the staining- the red and pink got everywhere last night when I was removing my previous mani.

The Mister says it reminds him of a speckled egg. I think I definitely prefer thinking of this as candy-inspired! What does it remind you of? Speckled eggs or oreo candy bars?

Glitter Gradient & a note on Fall

On Pinterest a few weeks ago I saw a beautiful manicure that I needed to recreate. It is called a Mermaid manicure, and it's super easy. My nails look like a million bucks!

Recently, nail art has become a huge trend; to the point that it's actually being used as an accessory. So that makes my life easier- I don't have to wear as much jewelry. I'm not big into jewelry anyway! However, I do love sparkly nails.

This manicure screams summer. Now that labor day is passed and we're getting into September (holy moly!), I only have a few weeks in which I feel like I can rock the super bright colors. I mean, I'll probably wear neons into fall to be perfectly honest, but it will be for nostalgia. I have some great fall looks coming up, however. Among it, I have two series- a wedding/fall-love manicure series, which I'll debut on September 22nd, and a halloween series that I will start in October. I'll be showing how to coordinate fall trends with nail art/manicures and fall events.

On to the nail pictures-

First I painted my nails with Milani's Fresh Teal. I've raved about this before. It's on of my favorite colors and I use it pretty consistently. I actually need to get a new bottle soon. After that dried, I sponged on Wet 'N Wild's Diving for Pearls to create a gradient. I would start at the tips of my nails, when I had the most polish on the sponge, and gradually moved up the nail until I had none. So the color would be concentrated at the tips and sparse towards my cuticles so Fresh Teal shown more.

After that dried, I repeated the same sponging technique with Sally Hansen's Bling-tastic, which is a part of their Gem Crush collection. If you don't have this blue glitter polish, you need it in your collection. It has small blue glitter with larger circle silver glitters. It coats pretty well on its own.

It's super important that you wrap your tips in this mani- the glitter does sit on the very tip of your nail where it's most concentrated. So if you don't wrap your tips, it will chip within a day or so. I mean, you should always wrap the tips but especially so with this mani. It will prevent the glitter from snagging on anything too.

What are you looking forward to most this fall? What is your favorite trend?

Galaxy nails!

Let me start of with saying: I love this manicure.

It's super easy despite how complicated it looks on the nail. All you need is a black base, 3-4 nail polish colors for sponging, a white (or glitter nail polish) for stars, and a cosmetic sponge. I tear my sponges into tiny pieces, but some people have issues with sponge lumps so you can also cut the sponges.

I actually did this on my friend's nails! A few days ago, I walked into work with these nails and she demanded that I do them. So I'm quite happy to do them for her, especially since she's moving away to FL.

But anyway, have a picture!

The weather was pretty icky today- we have the remnants of Hurricane Isaac so unfortunately this was the only good shot I got because lighting was kind of difficult.


I used:

• Mourning Glory by OPI (Your standard black creme base)
• Turquoise & Caicos by Essie
• Purple Dragon by China Glaze
• Pink Flamingo by Spoiled
• Snow Globe by China Glaze

Thanks R for providing your fingertips! Enjoy your nails. :)