Manicure Monday: Nail Art Ripper-Offer

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Stacie Wacie

For today’s Manicure Monday, I attempted some actual nail art! A couple of weeks ago, Reddit user chill_out_dont_pout did an adorable mani with geometric shapes and negative space, and I’m totally biting her style. For my copycat mani, I used OPI’s Metallic 4 Life and Essie’s Toggle to the Top for the stripes, Fantasy Makers’s Night Glow as the base, and Seche Vite as my top coat.

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It’s been a really long time since I’ve done anything this intricate and time-consuming. For the past several Manicure Mondays, I’ve just been laying glitter down on accent nails and calling it a day. Inspired by that Reddit post, I decided I would buckle down and do some real nail art. I had the time, and I wanted to use this glow-in-the-dark polish but had no ideas for it, so it was a perfect coincidence. It was so easy to make this pattern my own; I used two glitter jelly polishes I really loved, made one edge longer than the other (by accident) and added rhinestones to the vertices. In all, I probably spent three hours or more on this look.

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Of course, I could have done a better job. My lines aren’t clean or even, and Night Glow was actually a big mess to work with; it was goopy and kind of dried out, so I put some thinner in. It wasn’t enough. I put in more. Even though it felt dry to the touch, I guess the under-layers never fully dried, because even though I waited an hour before I started taping, I still pulled up polish. Thankfully, thanks to a stealthy fourth coat of Night Glow and the power of Seche Vite, you can barely tell!

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Night Glow, as you might have guessed, glows in the dark. However, I am terrible at glow-in-the-dark nail photography, so here are some glow fails.

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Thanks again to /u/chill_out_dont_pout for the nail inspiration!

Swatch Sunday: Fantasy Makers’s Night Glow

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Stacie Wacie

I know I said all the unseasonal polishes were over with, but I lied. Swatch Sunday’s subject is a Halloween-themed glow in the dark polish, complete with gravestone-shaped bottle. I’m wearing three coats of Fantasy Makers’s Night Glow with one coat of Alter Ego‘s She Shines top coat.

Night Glow is a pretty typical glow in the dark polish. It’s very sheer; even at three coats, I can still see my whole nail bed. I’m not sure full opacity could be achieved. The polish did dry quickly and with a gloss. The formula isn’t bad, but I won’t say much about it; my bottle is pretty old — at least five years, if not closer to ten — and it was quite thick when I opened it, so I did have to thin it out. This is probably irrelevant. What really matters is that it glows in the dark. I got one good photo of the effect in action; it glows a vibrant green.

I love glow in the dark polish. It is so fun and so satisfying to wiggle my fingers around in the dark when I go to bed. My boyfriend think it’s annoying but I love it. It feels a little weird, though, to wear such a sheer color without any glitter or other adornments. I’m wearing practically nothing at all. It’s like wearing a revealing dress, I suppose; when I first put it on, I’m a little insecure, but the longer I wear it, the more it grows on me, and at the end of the night I feel sexy and empowered. The analogy is a bit of a stretch, but I think you get it.

Final word: the polish isn’t anything special. It’s probably the most available and affordable glow polish out there; I see it everywhere around Halloween. However, the quality is comparable to the glow polishes I’ve tried from China Glaze and American Apparel, so it’s whatever. If you need a glow in the dark polish, this would be a good one, but this particular one isn’t at all a must-have.

Fantasy Makers is usually available in drugstores during Halloween. I got mine at a costume shop.

I bought this polish myself.

News: Wacie Nail Co. for Depression Awareness

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Stacie Wacie

This is so exciting, guys! There is now a Wacie Nail Company polish you can actually buy. Yes! Julie, the owner of Wishes of a Blue-Eyed Girl and Blue-Eyed Girl Lacquer, is holding a huge charity auction, with dozens of rare, hard to find, and one of a kind polishes up for grabs. One of these is the first-ever Wacie Nail Company polish to actually leave my house. Blue Skies Ahead is a silver linear holo with rainbow flakies that turns blue in sunlight and glows in the dark. Yeah, it does all that! I’m wearing three coats with one coat of Ciate’s Speed Coat Pro top coat.

Indoors, this polish is already really pretty. In the studio, the holo effect isn’t too obvious, but the rainbow flakies shine nicely. Then, when you go outside, this happens:

Did you see that? I had to make a gif, just to prove that it actually happens. It’s a subtle change, but it does change. Then, when you’re in the dark, this happens:

Crazy, right? It’s amazing! This polish glows really brightly in the dark, and glows blue rather than yellow or green. It only takes a few seconds to charge it up, and it glows for a very long time.

There is only one bottle of Blue Skies Ahead available, at it’s up for auction. All of the proceeds of this auction benefit I Need A LightHouse, an organization that raises awareness of depression and suicide prevention education. This is a cause that means a great deal to me, and I really hope you’ll help Julie and me raise lots of money for it. You can find Blue Skies Ahead and the rest of the auction here. Thank you so much.

Swatch Saturday: American Apparel’s Moon

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I almost don’t even want to post these today. I have the saddest nails right now, and I’m a little ashamed of them. I had a nasty break over the week and had to cut my nails short. In what is surely to be the saddest swatch of all time, I give you American Apparel’s Moon, the last of the glow in the dark polishes I bought there for my birthday. All photos, except for one, were taken with natural light indoors, and with three coats of Moon and three coats of Seche Vite.

Compared to the other two I’ve swatched, this one is the least wearable on its own. Even with three coats, it’s very sheer, and looks like I’m just not wearing polish at all. There’s a slightly greenish appearance in natural light; in fluorescent light, that color isn’t there. In some photos, the bottle seems to glow; that color is representative of what the glow looks like in the dark. As you’ll see below, I tried to take a glow photo and only half-succeeded. I honestly have no idea how I got those great (by comparison) glow photos for my Neptune review. I haven’t gotten any that good since, and I don’t know what I’m doing differently.

I am so sorry about the appearance of my nails. I didn’t realize how uneven and jagged the edges were until I photographed them with the macro setting. That is just terrible and I’ve been pounding the biotin in the hopes they’ll at least be fingertip-length by the end of the year. It’s weird feeling my actual fingertips on the keyboard keys. My hands look like baby hands; my fingers look like fat sausages. I can’t wait until I have nails again.

Swatch Saturday: American Apparel’s Jupiter

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

Today’s Swatch Saturday officially ends my streak of blue nails. This orange sherbet shade called Jupiter will take us through the weekend. This is a second polish I got from my American Apparel haul in October. Here I’m wearing three coats of it, topped by three coats of Seche Vite. All photos are taken indoors with natural lighting.

After three coats, it’s still somewhat sheer. The color also varies on the lighting source; in natural light, it looks more yellow-orange, whereas in fluorescent light, it looks like a sheer nude. The glow in the dark effect is comparable to last week’s swatch of Neptune, only more yellow than green. I tried getting photos, but I just couldn’t make it work this week, for whatever reason.

I’m a little disappointed by the opacity. It’s buildable, so I could probably achieve complete opacity in another coat or two, but I didn’t feel like it.

I’ve actually worn this one before: I went to a Halloween party and wore Neptune and Jupiter over Maybelline’s Dotty and Blue Marks the Spot. These polishes are great toppers, and maybe I’m defeating their purpose by trying to get them opaque. Also, these polishes react to UV light as well; here’s that Halloween party manicure, glowing in the black light of a Tron arcade machine.

Well, that’s it for this week. See you next time!

Swatch Saturday: American Apparel’s Neptune

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

Okay, so I’m starting a new thing for the blog this week. This started somewhat out of necessity; my Manicure Monday mani would start to show signs of wear: chips, cracks, peeling, and some would have to be totally redone. At the same time, I would have a new polish or two or five I’d want to try, so I’d scrap the mani altogether at the end of the week and try out something new. I’ve come to the point now where I have nearly five hundred polishes, and if I polish my nails once a week, it would take me almost ten years to use every polish (a number that increases every week or so). This new feature, Swatch Saturday, is a way for me to use some of these polishes that I wouldn’t get to use in my normal manicure routine for quite some time, and to represent them more accurately, away from the confines of nail art. I’m going to start at the top of the polish list and work my way down.

This inaugural Swatch Saturday kicks off with a glow in the dark polish from American Apparel called Neptune. I bought it when I was Atlanta visitng my boyfriend for my birthday. For whatever reason, my city doesn’t have any American Apparel stores, but I’ve seen their polishes all over the nail polish internet, so when I went in, I didn’t even look at the clothes. I went right for the polish, bought six bottles, and walked out.

All photos were taken indoors with sunlight.

All non-glowy photos were taken indoors with sunlight.

Neptune is shown here with three coats, covered by three coats of Seche Vite. As you can see, even with three coats, my nail line is still visible, and another coat would probably have given me more opacity. Apart from that, the color is really nice for a glow in the dark polish.

Monster teeth.

I am kind of ashamed of these.

I read the manual for this.

I had a hard time getting these glow in the dark action shots, but I had to try. I shut myself in the darkest room in my house — my bedroom closet — with my camera. Well, first I had to read the manual to find out how to change the shutter speed. Then I locked myself in the closet. Then I got a bunch of horrid pictures. Yeah. I even got the tripod out for this, and they’re still bad. It doesn’t matter, though. You can still see the glow. I got it close enough.

To be honest, I just really missed having glow in the dark nails. I wore this once over a blue glitter polish for a Halloween party (with orange accents, we’ll discuss this next week), and when I went to bed that night, my boyfriend just laughed. “Your nails are foolish,” he said. I don’t care what he thinks. It’s fun waggling my fingers around in the dark. Also, I think I like them best when it’s only sort of dark, when I can still see the blue, but they’re just slightly glowing, like I have uranium on my nails. I love the novelty of it. Thankfully, I have like two more of these to do.

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