Manicure Monday: Hearts of Gold Over Blue

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I waited until the coffee kicked in to start this entry. Best coffee is best best best coffee best.

Note the blue cuticle on the middle finger. I had a hell of a time getting my cuticles clean.

This week I faced two challenges: having a polish that stained my cuticles to hell, and trying to get large glitter out of a bottle. My blue polish, Orly’s Witch’s Blue, is a beautiful jewel color. It’s dark and mysterious and dramatic. I knew the holo gold hearts in Revlon’s Hearts of Gold would stand out nicely against it. What I didn’t count on, though, was the fine gold glitter overpowering the background color, or the haphazard way the hearts landed. I did manipulate them a little with a toothpick, but mostly wherever they are is where they landed. Also, I really had to work for these hearts. A little further down, you’ll see that the Revlon bottle is about a third of the way empty. Yeah. I wasted a good bit of it just trying to get the hearts out.

I went back and traced my cuticles after I took that first photo. It’s better now.

I love the colors in the hearts, though. Holo glitter is beautiful! I just keep looking at my nails and fanning them back and forth to watch the rainbow.

Rainbow!

Not the rainbow.

Orly’s Witch’s Blue, Revlon’s Hearts of Gold FX

They’re kinda messy, kinda sloppy, but I’m into it.

Manicure Monday: Blue Marbling Over Gold

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

Today I have two colors: one I absolutely love, one that’s kind of meh. I also have a new technique that gave me a result completely unlike what I expected, and not in a good way.

Quite some time ago, cutepolish posted a tutorial for water spotting. It’s done much the same way water marbling is; you drop polish onto water, but this time, you spray it with alcohol, which makes holes in the color. You dip your nail in, and like magic, you have this cool effect. Well, I got something completely different. It’s not bad, but it’s not what I was going for. I think the alcohol product I used may have been the culprit; I used a body spray that had been in the fridge for a while, so it’s probably my fault.

My two colors this week are Teal the Cows Come Home by OPI, and Amelia by Julep. Amelia looks beautiful in the bottle, but is rather sheer; I have on two coats, and you can still see my nail line. Teal the Cows Come Home is gorgeous after two coats, but after the marbling technique, the light color beneath, and whatever effect the alcohol may have had on the polish, the color is thin, barely visible in some places.

Julep’s Amelia, OPI’s Teal the Cows Come Home

Having said all that, I like these colors together. The summer is ending, the last days are fleeting, and I feel that urge to preserve it, to capture it in any way possible. I dislike autumn; I dislike the cooling temperatures, the leaves, having to wear a jacket, the muted colors, all of that. Well, autumn itself isn’t so bad, but it’s really just a stepping stone to winter, and winter and I aren’t friends.

Manicure Monday: Matte Gold Sparkles

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

Here is another great manicure ruined by cheap top coat.

It started so well. I used two coats of this very dark, very opaque OPI shade called We’ll Always Have Paris. It looked purplish in the fluorescent supermarket lights, and when I got home with it, it was like a deep brown. It still looks purple in direct sunlight, but it’s brown enough that it worked for my purpose this week. I’m still not entirely sure what color it even is, and I’ll admit it I just bought it for it’s name, because I’m kind of obsessed with France. I love these dark, vampy colors, though. They remind me of middle school, when I wasn’t allowed to wear black nail polish (or black lipstick, or dye my hair black), but I could get away with just about any other dark color. As a result, I wore lots of of dark purples and silvers and browns to get the same effect. I still love how it makes my nails look.

The notch on the ring finger is from picking at dried polish around the cuticle. Entirely my fault.

The gold sparkles are As Gold as It Gets by Essie. This is one of the first Essies I ever bought myself, way back around Christmas when I’d gotten some money, and I had to walk the whole mile to Walgreens to get a bottle of acetone because the nearer store was out. While I was there, I checked out the nail polish. I’d come all that way, right? I didn’t yet own any Essie polishes, I had money rolling around in my pocket, I splurged and bought as many as I could carry. I spent literally every cent I had on Essie polishes and acetone. Anyway, I love the Essie LuxEffects line, and I like this one in particular. It gives any color an iridescent warmth and a unique finish, one that’s different from gold leaf or glitter. Adding the matte top coat to it guarantees you can see every piece of gold.

OPI’s We’ll Always Have Paris, Essie’s As Gold as It Gets, Revlon’s matte top coat

Somehow, I don’t know how this happened, the top coat completely smudged my tips. Somehow, it ate through three layers of polish, even though I’d given it ample time to dry so as to avoid this. I am so mad at myself for using up all my Seche Vite. I think I’m going to just buy one of those mega large bottles and be done with it.

Manicure Monday: Yellow Lattice on Grey

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I ran out of Seche Vite this weekend trying to smooth down a heavy glitter manicure, and didn’t have enough of to finish this week’s mani. I had to resort to my backup, the el cheapo LA Colors top coat that takes ages to dry and can’t be applied until the lacquer itself is dry. When I woke up this morning, a couple of the nails on my right hand were dimpled and rough from being pressed into teddy bear fur, and I’d done them hours before I’d gone to bed. This stuff seriously takes until 2014 to dry.

This was my first time using striping tape to make thin, clean lines. Some of the nails came out really well. On some of them, I forgot the order in which I put down the tape pieces and smudged a few of the lines. The dots, thankfully, cover most of those. On the whole, it’s kind of a mess: there are more stripes on some nails than on others; none of them are consistent. That, and with the top coat problem, I’m kind of just counting the days until I take them off.

Julep’s Lexie, Orly’s Decoded, Sally Hansen’s Hard to Get (again)

Here are the colors I used this week. Lexie was a little hard to work with; even after two coats, I still had steaks and bald spots in places. Decoded is one of my favorites, though. It’s pretty much opaque in one coat, dark and mysterious. I’ll be sad when this one is empty.

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: Green and Yellow Color Blocking

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Stacie Wacie

I have an inner perfectionist, believe it or not. It never cares about anything important; it’s never concerned with how clean my house is. My inner perfectionist is kind of a slob. No, my inner perfectionist only notices the flaws in trivial things, things that no one else will ever notice. My manicures are one of those things. I know that a manicure can look great without being totally perfect. My inner perfectionist does not. My inner perfectionist hates this manicure.

Right hand, because it's a little different. Left hand on the top, right hand on the bottom.

I got the idea from this Chalkboard Nails tutorial. I needed an idea that would allow me to use warm, bright colors, but wasn’t too complex or time-consuming. I added to it, rotating the design instead of alternating the colors. In theory, it’s a fantastic idea. In practice, with sloppy taping and thick, goopy polish, I just made a mess. I started with the white base, which took three coats until it was finally opaque, and then I added the yellow, then the green, which is old and thick and tough to work with. I think my bottle of Seche Vite is starting to thicken up as well, because I kept getting really thick, uneven coats of it. Between the green color and the topcoat, they’re a little bumpy in places.

What I used: Orly Bonder, Hard to Get, Daisy, Lickety-Split Lime, Seche Vite

I keep telling myself it’s not that bad, but I can’t stop hoping they’ll chip off soon so I can redo them (which means they’ll stay on all week).

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