Manicure Monday: Iridescent Glitter Gradient

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

This manicure was a total surprise. I didn’t expect it to turn out this way, and I definitely didn’t expect to like it so much!

I don’t know if it’s been obvious, but I’ve been using a lot of warm colors in my manicures. It’s summer; I’m wearing a lot of warm neutral makeup shades to achieve a natural sun-kissed look, and wanted to get the same effect on my nails. I chose the glitter, Revlon’s Heavenly, because in the bottle, it’s warm and iridescent. When paired with the black, I got a completely different look, and I couldn’t be happier with it. The colors in the glitter are much more visible, as well as the different shapes and sizes. I almost feel as if I’ve judged this glitter polish unfairly.

Sinful Colors’ What’s Your Name, Revlon’s Heavenly

Here’s a picture of a cat my friend drew on my dusty record player. I should clean my stuff.

Manicure Monday: Gold and Nude Half-Moons

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

So I’m back from my work trip, and it’s time for another manicure.

My long, beautiful nails made it through the conference, but broke one after the other when I got home. My index fingernail tore off while I was washing my hair Saturday morning. I broke a thumbnail turning the crank to shut a window. I broke the other thumbnail cleaning for a surprise houseguest. I gave up and preventively cut all the rest. I miss them. I miss how they made my fingers look long and slender. However, my hands are much more functional now.

Julep’s Kennedy, LA Colors’ Cactus, Revlon’s matte top coat

I’m not sure if I wrote about this yet, and I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but I’ve bought almost a hundred bottles of polish in the last month or two. The nude (maybe it’s a khaki) was one of the newest ones; I was totally out of control and bought the whole Julep set because I couldn’t choose just one Maven box. It reminds me of unblended foundation. The burnished gold came from my initial dollar store haul when I was first living on my own.

For whatever reason, I have some major tip wear, and I only did them yesterday. I blame the matte top coat.

Manicure Monday: French Pink and White Gradient

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

So this is my idea of a professional manicure. I’m going on a business trip to Boston, and I wanted a manicure that was office-friendly without giving up glitter. Here I am, having my cake and eating it too.

It looked different in my head, but I’m pretty happy with the result. From a distance, it looks like the traditional French manicure, and the glitter is hardly noticeable. I tried to be professional while still being myself, but I may have done better than I thought.

Another angle for glitter.

I still can’t get over how long my nails are.

Julep’s Emmanuelle, Sally Hansen’s Hard to Get, Sinful Colors’ Pearl Harbor

That Julep polish was full when I started.

Manicure Monday: Orange and Feathers

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I wasn’t sure about this feathered/fuzzy coat texture trend. I mean, it’s just non-reflective glitter, right? What’s even the point of that? I want my glitter to be so shiny it’s blinding. Go big or go home, right? I placed a Sephora order a few weeks ago and needed one thing to push me into enough points for the 500 point reward (don’t ask, my logic module doesn’t work when I’m shopping). I saw the Nails Inc. Feathers and grabbed a couple bottles, just to try it out. Meanwhile, I had this orange I didn’t really know what to do with. It confuses me. It’s too opaque to be a jelly but too sheer to be a creme. Glitter disappears in it, but I can still see my nail line. When I finally got the Feathers in the mail, I put them together.

This one looked better in my head, I think. I envisioned something like a glitter gradient, but the small fibers didn’t play well with that idea, and just formed colonies on the tips. I like it enough to keep it on, but I’ve gotten some interesting comments. One person described them as “strangely horrifying”, while another said they looked like bone shards stuck to bloody claws. Now I can’t unsee it.

Sinful Colors’s Big Daddy, Nails Inc. Feathers in York

For funsies, here’s a test manicure I did with different colors.

Essie’s Boxer Shorts and Nails Inc. Feathers in Cornwall

Manicure Monday: Blue and Gold Gradient

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

Yep, another gradient.

I love the way this turned out, but I do wonder if it’s time to graduate to three colors, since my nails are so long now. With only two colors, it just looks a little lacking. Shiny as hell, though.

Sinful Colors’ Love Nails, Julep’s Zelda

I ran out of Out the Door last week, and went back to Seche Vite. Now that I’ve gone back to it, I might have liked Out the Door better. I spend way too much time thinking about and writing about topcoats.

This was unintentional, but it’s E3 Week, and the gold shade is called Zelda. I swear I didn’t plan that.

Manicure Monday: Red and Rose Duochrome

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

This might be kind of a departure from what I’ve been doing with my nails lately. It’s been a really long time since I had a solid color without any embellishments, and I’ll look at them and think “Hey, dots” or “I should try those decals” and then I tell myself to stop because they’re fine.

This is actually two colors, a semi-opaque red with a really tiny shimmer, and a rosy duochrome layered over it. At certain angles or lighting conditions, it shines pink, blue or lilac. On its own, it’s an odd color, but it is beautiful over this red.

You can see some of the other colors here. Kind of.

Having red nails always reminds me of being in Rhode Island with my mother and my grandparents. My mother’s cousin, I think it was, was a nail tech and gave us manicures at least once. Actually, now that I think back on it, this was one of my earliest experiences with nail art. At some point, she gave us a manicure set, one complete with polishes, tools, fillers and fortifiers. I remember most of the colors being sheer, pretty neutrals, except for a bold red. That’s the one I went for, and even though I remember thinking that red was old and busted (blue polish was the new hotness and that was all I cared about wearing), I loved the way it looked on me. It was noticeable, attention-getting, it spoke volumes from my small nails and short fingers. Ever since then, there’s always been something about red nails that I can’t get enough of.

Bonder, LA Colors Animated, Orly Synchro, Out the Door

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Manicure Monday: Brown and Orange Tips on Yellow

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I don’t like these.

I had this yellow, and I didn’t really know what to do with it. I didn’t want to do another gradient right away, and I didn’t feel like trying dots or anything. My original plan was to use the French manicure guides, but I didn’t have enough after last week’s manicure, so I used tape.

Rhinestones! The ring finger is a heart shape, the thumb is a diamond.

I was kind of in a rush with this. I had people over this weekend, and they had car trouble and had to stay over an extra day, so I hurried to get them done. I made kind of a mess, and I made the mistake of using polishes that weren’t very opaque. I put thick coats of polish on, and it kind of migrated away from the tips and left me with some weird discolorations and stringy bits the tape lifted. The tape also pulled up some of the orange pieces, hence the rhinestones. Finally, I didn’t wait long enough to apply the top coat, so some smudging occurred. Basically, these nails are like the sad yellow markers from our childhoods that met the black marker a few too many times. They definitely looked better in my head, and could have turned out better if I had been able to take my time with them.

Bubbles and smudges and all kinds of sadness.

I love the color combination, though. It just came together very easily, and it wasn’t until yesterday when I saw this pillow in my living room that had been crocheted or knitted by someone’s grandmother using the same colors. I wonder if I was subconsciously influenced by it.

Bonder, Quick Canary, Orange Smoothie, Under Your Spell, Out the Door

This is the first time I ever used Wet ‘n Wild polishes, and they have this really wide brush that wasn’t suitable for detail work like this. I bet they get really nice coverage in different situations, but I don’t think I’ll use them again for this purpose. I put on a lot of top coat to smooth down the rhinestones, and it almost feels like Seche Vite again. I miss it.

Manicure Monday: Blue and Silver Half-Moon Dream Nails

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I have really mundane dreams. They’re always about washing dishes, picking up dry cleaning, standing in line at the bank. Even in my dreams, I can’t escape the banalities of everyday life. Some night a few weeks ago, I had a dream about painting my nails, and I gave myself the best manicure ever. Upon waking, I decided that I was going to do it for real. Here’s how it turned out.

It’s not really my style, but I’m very happy with it. The silver is much shinier than I anticipated, but I like it anyway. There are tons of imperfections, but I’m not going to bore you with those details. I’m so pleased with it that I don’t even care.

Bonder, Haze, Hard to Get, Celeb City, Out the Door

One thing about this manicure: it took me ages to find the right blue. Eventually, I settled on a color called Haze by Sula. I’ve ever seen this polish anywhere but Ulta, and its formula is much like the stuff we used as children, the stuff that came in garish colors and peeled right off. I used it as a base color in another manicure and had good results, so I tried it again. This time, though, I used the French manicure guide strips to get my half-moon shapes, and it hadn’t occurred to me taping and peel-off polish wouldn’t work well together until after I’d nearly pulled a few of them off. Luckily, everything went according to plan.

Did I mention that I’m pleased with these? I’m very pleased with these.

Manicure Monday: Nude and Gold Gradient

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

So my nail disaster this week was a rare event: I emptied a bottle.

Satin Sheets.

I’d had this bottle for a while, almost ten years probably. I got the whole collection of them when Walgreens had them on sale for two dollars a bottle, once upon a time. I’d been using them occasionally ever since, just wearing them over my naked nails to give them a hint of shimmer. When I got into nail art and multiple colors, I struggled to find a way to preserve that natural, minimal look while still getting some attention. I tried to work it into this gradient, and towards the end, I didn’t have enough polish left to finish it. I had my heart set on this gradient, so I took it off and started with another color. I kind of feel like a jerk. Not only did I run out of the polish, I wasted what I had left. Sorry, Satin Sheets. You still had a good run.

So I started over with a crème nude. I still wonder what it would have looked like with the sheer white, but I think I like what I ended up with. The first coat of Whipped was so sheer that I thought it was a jelly, but turned opaque with another couple of coats. Rare and Radiant has a lovely green color in the bottle, but appears mostly gold on the nails. It also appears I didn’t blend my pinky nail very well.

I was trying to get the green shimmer to show up. It did a little bit.

I like gradients. I like them a lot. I feel like it’s the best look I can get with minimal effort. I always manage to screw up taping, dotting is tedious and prone to mistakes, I don’t have the patience for freehanding anything. With gradients, I just dab a sponge on my nail, and that’s it. I still get to try surprising color combinations; I just don’t have to work as hard for them.

Bonder, Whipped, Rare and Radiant, Out the Door

Now I’m off to recount my polish bottles. I was somewhere around 250 the last time I checked, but I need to make sure that’s accurate, especially now since I’m down one.

Manicure Monday: Purple Magnetic Polish

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I am really, really late to the magnetic polish party. I bought this one a really long time ago, right when I heard Sinful Colors had a magnetic collection out; they were pretty late to the party, and this was months, if not a year, ago. So here I am, hopelessly chasing a bandwagon that’s long since been abandoned for Liquid Sand.

I don’t know what went wrong with these, I really don’t. On my test nails, it came out perfectly; the starburst design was always sharp and centered. On my own nails, the starburst shape leaned to the left a lot, but I was okay with it; it kind of reminded me of a lens flare, or a Rising Sun flag. The design was clean and visible, at least until I pulled the magnet away and it began to dry. Now it’s faint, vague, and easy to overlook.

Bonder, Captivate Me, Out the Door

Despite that, I kind of like it. I like the polish in general; before applying the magnet, it was a deep plum color with a fine rainbow shimmer. Part of me wishes I’d just left it alone. The shimmer’s still easy to see, but it looks like many of the colors are missing. I also used the Out the Door top coat on this manicure, and I’m still unsure of how I feel about it. I do miss Seche Vite, somewhat. Out the Door was a bit easier to clean up, but my nails still feel kind of flexible, and I’m worried about breaking them. Seche Vite was so rigid that it was like a suit of armor over my nail polish. I didn’t have a break the entire time I used it.

I’m not sure my nails have ever been this long. Maybe one or two have been, and were cut because they were longer than all the others and looked like coke nails. For a few months, I cut them to fingertip length, because they always broke if they got very much longer, but I got tired of having short nails. I started taking biotin, and the difference it has made is amazing. Comparing the first photo I posted with this most recent one, I can’t believe they’ve grown so long so quickly. Of course, I hit them on everything now, and my typing accuracy suffers somewhat, but who cares? They’re pretty!

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