Challenge Day 6 - Violet

I know I got a little off track so now I am trying to play a little bit of catch up. So for violet I wasn't sure that I had anything that was truly violet so I decided to just go with the brightest purple I have. Enter "Flying Dragon" by China Glaze. I saw this polish many times in the midst of my nail blog readings and I kept falling in love with it every time I saw it. Eventually I took the plunge and bought it and was sadly disappointed when I first tested it out. Truthfully, I am not a fan of the matte finish, I personally just prefer a nice shiny nail to a matte one. So when this dried matte I was surprised, but also a little sad because the amazing blue shimmer doesn't come out nearly as much when it is matte. So when I put a topcoat on I was much happier since that made the shimmer pop and the purple looked so vibrant and amazing I fell in love again. So here I have some pictures for you and I left two nails matte and used topcoat on two so you can see the difference. I also have to apologize in advance since my camera had a hard time accurately capturing the color and the shimmer shows a lot more in real life as well.

This is probably the closest I got to accurately capturing the color of the purple and you can really see how the blue shimmer stands out as well.

The formula on this was okay...it is a matte after all so it does dry very quickly, which is nice. It was almost opaque on the first coat, but I did have some thin patches and a few streaks so I opted for a second coat. If you aren't crazy and don't mind it being a bit uneven then you could certainly get away with one coat so that makes this a pretty awesome polish for on the go. I would expect the wear time to be worse without top coat as with all mattes, but I haven't worn it without so I can't be 100% sure. All in all I love this color and it certainly fits with the recent neon trend. So I hope you enjoyed and thanks for bearing with me while I catch up a bit! :-)

Back to the Challenge - Blue

Hi everyone! Ok so now that I have parted ways with my lovely "Victoriana" I am back on the challenge road! So I have two different blue nails for you today actually since I started with Essie's "Coat Azure" and planned on an accent nail of China Glaze "Dorothy Who", but I loved Dorothy so much I just decided to go with it. So without further ado...Picture Time!

Here is a picture of just "Coat Azure". This is two coats and I might have gone with a third on a couple of nails since I had a few thin spots. The formula was actually pretty good on this one since it wasn't super thin it was easy to get it almost completely opaque in two coats. If I had been a bit more careful with the second coat it would have been perfect. This blue is also really pretty since it has an unexpected amount of shimmer and I do love me some blue/greys. :-)

So here we have "Dorothy Who" on top of "Coat Azure". This is two coats of Dorothy, which is an almost jelly blue base packed with silver glittery shimmery goodness! I love this color! I think this might have to be my next pedi color. :-)

Anyways, I thought this was going to be too much for all my fingers at once, but it ended up not being too overpowering at all so overall a gorgeous fun blue! :-)

Sorry for being MIA - blame Victoriana!

Hi everyone. Sorry for being MIA for the past  few days. I know that I missed a couple days with the challenge and I promise I will get to all of them, but I still can't bear to take off the color I am currently wearing. I actually used my green challenge day manicure as a base for this since I figured it was in the same color family. So I started off with OPI's "Thanks a Windmillion" then I did remove my sparkle accent nail and just put two coats of Windmillion on instead. After that I took my precious, beloved and amazing Butter London "Victoriana". I had been eyeing this across various blogs whenever I saw it swatched I started to drool and finally it is mine! Thanks to my wonderful sister who has easy access to Ulta while unfortunately I don't have such easy access. (or fortunately for my wallet) So she was awesome and picked this one up for me so I used one coat of "Victoriana" on top of Windamillion and the end result is just the amazing "Victoriana" shining and looking amazing as always. I don't think that using Windamillion as a base changed the color at all, but it did allow me to preserve my beloved since I only needed one coat for full opacity. So without further ado onto the pictures! :-D

Amazing! I am too totally in love with it to take it off yet...I just can't do it! I do have my next few manis all lined up, but I think I just need one more day with this before I can part ways with it. After all of the time spent drooling over it I couldn't leave it for just a day. So I think that tonight I will be able to do the dirty deed, but only if I don't end up staying out too late seeing the Avengers. (Finally!) :-) So I will stick with the challenge, but like I said at the beginning I don't think that the timeline is exactly for me. I can't stand to remove prettiness too quickly. Sorry.

Challenge Day 4- Green :-)

Good day all! Well I am MUCH happier with today's challenge because it is much more in my comfort zone and I had a lot more options to choose from for this one. Going through my massive pile o' greens yesterday I realized that I have a lot of untrieds! So I decided to take one of my new greens and test that out for ya and add a bit of sparkle with another untried. So here goes! I used OPI's "Thanks a Windmillion" for all my nails and two coats of Color Club's "Beyond the Mistletoe" for an accent nail to give the whole thing a bit of sparkle.  (Sparkle is for you too Leslie!) Anywhoooo...So I ended up doing three coats of Windamillion mostly because I was tired and not being careful at all so I ended up with a couple of patchy spots after my second coat. If I had actually been paying attention and trying to be careful I definitely could have gotten away with two coats. I did, however, have a bit of a problem with the formula for this one. I found that after a little while the polish started to get thick and goopy so that I had to shake it multiple times. Now, I have seen worse formulas and I have certainly seen better so honestly this one falls somewhere in the middle, but I hate having to stop, cap, shake and resume multiple times so it bothered me a bit. Well enough blabbing and onto the pictures!

I really do love this color and the accent nail adds just the right amount of sparkle for it to still be somewhat understated. The muted almost dusty green is great for my skin tone too since it doesn't make my hands look red. Overall, LOVE! This is one is hands down my favorite for this challenge so far. :-) Well until next time ladies! :-)

Challenge Day 3- Yellow

Hello again everyone! I have to give myself a bit of a pat on the back so far for keeping up with this whole challenge thing so...*pat pat*. Done. OK now onto the polish of the day! As I sorta mentioned in my last post...I don't like yellow nail polish. In fact I am not really a fan of yellow anything. I actually realized recently that I didn't own a single piece of yellow clothing so I went out and found a yellow tank top so I can say I have something in yellow. Back to nail polish though. I have always had an aversion to yellow nail polish because I think it can look like you just have yucky yellow nails and sometimes makes your skin tone look terrible as well.  I didn't even own any yellow polish until recently. When Finger Paints released their gumdrops and lollipops collection I noticed they had a more passable yellow so I decided to take the plunge. "Lemon Sour" is a paler creamy yellow that doesn't scream highlighter, which is great for me.

The picture below was taken outside on, yet another, cloudy overcast day so the color looks a bit paler in natural lighting.

As far as application and formula goes this polish was a NIGHTMARE! Maybe if I wasn't a crazy perfectionist it wouldn't have been too bad, but I am. So the first coat went on streaky, which is fine and to be expected. Second coat definitely evened things out a lot, but there were still tons of thin patches and it still looked a bit streaky. The formula was VERY thick and goopy so it was almost impossible to do nice thin even coats and I ended up needing to cap and shake the bottle between each nail to get it to stop being so stringy. I think I ended up with 5 coats just to even things out and fill in all the thin patches. All in all this isn't a favorite, but I feel like it would be great as a base for some pretty pastel designs. Well I am very much looking forward to tomorrow's manicure since tomorrow is green, which is more in my comfort zone and I have a new polish that I have been waiting to test out. :-) Have a great day everyone (even if this weather stinks!) and I'll be back tomorrow! :-)

Challenge Day 2 - Orange

Hi there everyone! Well after yesterday's somewhat failed attempt at red I figured I had to do better with orange. I have actually been wanting to test out this color for a bit since it is somewhat more "on trend" at the moment. So without much further ado I bring you Color Club's "Sparkle and Soar". This is a more sheer orange with TONS of gold shimmer I guess it could almost be considered a foil actually.

It has been overcast and rainy all day, but I still figured that I should show one picture of this polish outside so this picture below is outside, but not in direct sunlight.

As far as application goes with this polish I can't really make up my mind. I didn't exactly have problems with applying it since the formula was actually pretty good, not too goopy and not too runny, but I lost count of how many layers after the 4th. I personally can't stand any visible nail line so I guess if I didn't have that personal quirk then I would have been fine after 2 or 3 coats, but for full opacity I think I ended up with 6 layers. All in all this color isn't really something I am a huge fan of since it doesn't play all the well with my skin tone and it is just a bit outside my blue/green/pink/purple comfort zone. :-) If you like orange though then this one is pretty amazing since it packs a TON of great shimmer and it did actually apply well (if you don't mind a little VNL). Anyways, hope you enjoy! Tune in tomorrow for probably my all time least favorite nail color ever! Yellow! :-)

31 Day Challenge- Begin!

Hi everyone! Well I have read my fair share of nail and beauty blogs and I have seen some pretty interesting things come out of some of these challenges. I thought about doing one a while ago, but that didn't quite happen so now I am going to try again and it is perfect timing since today is May 1st! I don't honestly think I will be able to keep to the 31 day timetable, but I think this should be good to give me something specific to work with rather than just picking at random. I also think it will force me to do more interesting things with patterns and such so here goes!

Although I really wanted to keep to this with exact colors called for I just couldn't do it for this first one. I am sorry to admit it, but I just don't like red. I never have really liked it and so I am starting off on a bad foot and cheating a bit, but oh well. So here is my version of red nails! I used two easy peezy coats of Orly's "Rococo-A-Go-Go". I originally picked up this polish because I loved how the color looks like it has so much gold to it in the bottle. Unfortunately the gold gets a bit lost on the nail, but this is still a really amazing polish. The shimmer is really beautiful and if there were any sunlight today (instead of all this rain!) I am sure it would be sparkling like crazy. This is also one of those colors that changes a ton depending on the angle and lighting so here come some pictures!

In this lighting it actually leans more towards the pink side, but this also shows off more of the sparkle.

Here you can see how it is a more plum base with some red shimmer and you can almost get a hint of gold .

I think this is the best shot of the gold edge, but it is still really hard to see and just very subtle. 

Here is a picture of the bottle just so you can see what I mean about the gold in the bottle.

I almost forgot that a while back I used this color on my BFF's nails and we topped it off with a coat of Essie's "As Gold as it Gets" and that really made it look like the bottle color. I love how the gold flakie looks on top of this color it just makes it so much more interesting as it changes even more dramatically with every movement! 

Anyways, here is my first attempt at this challenge and hopefully I won't wimp out when it gets to the trickier stuff. ;-) Enjoy and have a good day!