Christmas Glitter Vomit featuring China Glaze Party Hearty

Hi there everyone!! Christmas is just around the corner, so I figured that I would do a festive mani for you guys today! Sorry I've been in and out lately, for some reason I've been ultra critical of my pictures lately (I feel like they get worse as I go along) so I just haven't been posting much.

Anyways, for the base of this manicure, I used Essie Mint Candy Apple from the Essie 2009 Winter collection. This polish is actually the one that really got me started into collection nail polish again so although MCA is kind of a streaky mess, it holds a special place in my heart because it was one of my first polishes! MCA is a gorgeous light mint green cream, and since it is a bit sheer and streaky, I did three coats here.

Then, I layered on 2 coats of China Glaze Party Hearty from the 2010 Tis the Season collection. Ahh! I love this polish so much! It has small round green glitter, medium sized red hex glitter and micro gold glitter. This is probably the best Christmas polish ever. I wanted to add a little bit more sparkly goodness so I added a coat of Essie Golden Nuggets over Party Hearty. Golden Nuggets is the perfect gold microglitter top coat. I love how dense the glitter is in this, but not too dense to still let Party Hearty shine through!

Here is my Christmas Glitter Vomit manicure. Hope you enjoy!!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope all of those out there who celebrate the holidays are enjoying themselves and have completed all their shopping! I, of course, have a lot more shopping to do. Ugh! I always wait until the last minute, you think I would have learned my lesson by now.

Anyways, see you all again soon!

Twitter Swatch Requests: Hard Candy Pea Soup, OPI Two Plums Up & Essie Lollipop

Happy Saturday everyone! Hope you are all enjoying your weekends so far =)

On Thursday I asked some of my twitter friends to go through my stash spreadsheet and pick out a manicure for me because I was feeling super indecisive and couldn't make up my mind what polish to wear. I got three different answers from three lovely ladies, so I decided to do them all in this post!

First up is Hard Candy Pea Soup, requested Madeline over at Girl Germs. This is vintage Hard Candy (pre-Walmart) and probably came out sometime during the late 90's. I got this decant from a lovely blog sale, as I was in need of some green Hard Candy polishes to round out my collection but wasn't having luck finding any. I figured that a decant was the best I could do! Pea Soup is a yellow-green frosty shimmer, and it is relatively sheer so it took 3 coats to reach the color you see here. The formula was decent, your typical non-3 free texture and smell. It's not my favorite vintage Hard Candy polish by any means, but it is fun! Very evocative of the '90s, being a sheer, frosty light green. It just makes me want to go shop at Limited Too, drink some Clearly Canadian and watch Clueless =)

Anyways, here's 3 coats of Hard Candy Pea Soup, indoors.

Next up is OPI Two Plums Up, requested by Maria over at Nails Made Simple! Two Plums Up is an old black label OPI from the Hollywood collection from fall 1999. I am currently in the process of collecting the polishes from this collection, because as I mentioned before, my husband is a film maker and I am a sucker for anything film-related. Two Plums Up is a plummy-magenta color. It's a bit frosty but not so much as Pea Soup is as it has a nice shimmer to round out the brush strokiness (not even a word, ha) quality. I did 3 coats here, as it was a bit sheer and I wanted it to be nice and vibrant. I quite like this color, and although it's not something I would normally wear, I'm glad I took the time to try it out today =)

OPI Two Plums Up, 3 coats, indoors.

 

Lastly, I have Essie Lollipop as requested by my lovely Jamie on Twitter! Lollipop is from Essie's 2009 holiday collection, which was the collection that also contained Mint Candy Apple - the color that reignited my passion for polish. I had originally thought that Lollipop was a jelly, but it turns out that it is just a wonderfully shiny red creme. It only needed 2 coats to opacity, and the formula was perfection. Lollipop is an orange-leaning red, and I think it would look amazing on all skin tones. It is so vibrant and so squishy, and is definitely one of my favorite reds in my entire stash! I'm glad this was the last one that I swatched because now I can leave it on and admire its awesomeness!

Here's Essie Lollipop, 2 coats, indoors. Enjoy!!

So there we have it! I hope you have enjoyed these swatches. I am always willing to take requests, so feel free to take a look at my collection spreadsheet in the link at the top of the page (I fixed the link so everyone can see it now)! Let me know if there is anything that you would like to see =) I love hearing from you guys, so don't be shy!

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday and I will see you all tomorrow!

Essie Starry Starry Nights

Good afternoon my lovelies! Today, I am SO EXCITED to write this blog post! I have for you on this first day of December, Essie Starry Starry Nights. If you are new to the polish world, you may not know why I am so damn excited about this. Starry Starry Nights is a long discontinued polish that is lusted over by many, but owned by few. Some people luck out and find bottles of this polish at old nail salons, and some people just bite the bullet and pay upwards of $300 on eBay. I was very lucky to get my hands on this polish through a very generous swapper on MUA, as I thought I would never see this polish in my entire life. It is said to be based on Chanel's Ciel de Nuit polish, but over time has come to be just as coveted as the Chanel, if not more so. And for good reason - it is an absolutely stunning nail polish.

Starry Starry Nights is a beautiful midnight blue jelly polish with fine silver sparkles throughout.  The sheer, jelly quality allows the glitter to shine through and appear almost as the stars in the night sky would. It is beautiful. The application wasn't without flaws - the first two coats were as streaky as could be but the third coat evened everything out perfectly. It is an old, non 3-free polish which means it's a bit runny and smells quite strongly. Despite the glitter, it dried to a smooth finish and only required one coat of Seche Vite to provide a shiny surface.

There are several viable dupes out there, though some are just as hard to find as the Essie polish itself. Many people have frankened dupes using Wet n Wild Nocturnal, a deep blue jelly polish, with fine silver glitter. These dupes are all fantastic, so if you want to try your hand at the franken, you will more than likely have excellent results! I made a franken of it and was quite satisfied until I got the real thing. There's nothing quite like the real thing sometimes =) So girls, don't give up hope! You never know what you will find or who you will meet that will fulfill your greatest polish lemmings!

Anyways, here are waaaaaaaaaay too many pictures of Essie Starry Starry Nights. Here is 3 coats of SSN with one coat of Seche Vite. Don't forget to click to enlarge, you'll want to see the detail on this bad boy!

Outdoor, natural light

Indoor, artificial light

Thanks for stopping by! See you tomorrow =)

Blood Splatter Manicure with Essie and Illamasqua

Hello everyone, happy Monday!! Today I'm continuing right along with my Halloween manicures. I did a manicure similar to this one at the beginning of summer for the True Blood season premiere. I was inspired by this:

Image Credit

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to recreate this for you guys today. I can imagine several types of Halloween costumes that this manicure would be perfect for! To do this manicure, I used Jen @ The PolishAholic's awesome splatter tutorial here. Definitely check it out if you are feeling so inclined, it is a great, simple method to get the splatter effect on your nails.

I used two coats of Illamasqua Load for the base. Load is a funny color. It is a yellow-ivory-whitish creme. Usually, I'm a huge fan of Illamasqua polishes, but I had a bit of trouble with this one. It's pretty streaky and gloopy, pretty much like every other yellow or white polish out there. But, I don't have any other color like this in my stash so that is why I allow it to stick around. However, if anyone knows of an awesome yellowy-white out there that applies better than this one, please let me know!

For the blood splatters, I used Essie Bordeaux which is an awesome burgundy red jelly, a good match for a blood effect. To do the splatters, I would dip the end of a straw in nail polish and blow out the other end onto my nail. Very simple! Clean up was a bish with this, so please excuse my reddish cuticles. I think it just adds to the effect here though!

Enjoy!

See you all tomorrow for another Halloween NOTD!

-Jacqui =)

Pink Wednesday - Spiderwebs!

Hi everyone! This is going to be a quick post today, as I have a migraine and am not really feeling up to a full blog post.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, this October is my first wedding anniversary.  Since I've been feeling nostalgic about my husband's and my relationship these days, I decided to base this manicure on a tank top that I wore on our first date =) It's kind of ironic because this shirt has spiderwebs on it - perfect for October!

Here is the shirt:

As I base, I used Essie Can't Filmfest, an old non-3-free blue-leaning magenta pink. It went on perfectly in two coats and the formula was awesome. They don't make them like this anymore, folks. I used Can't Filmfest partly because it matched the shirt, but also because my husband is a videographer and often makes films and submits them to filmfests =) Can't Filmfest is a play on Cannes Film Festival, which is the most prestigious film festival in the entire world. Here is Essie Can't Filmfest alone:

Stamping with black polish is always a bit of a pain because the black polish will often stain the cuticles. So I apologize in advance for the staining and yucky cuticles. I stamped using Wet n Wild Black Creme and a plate from BF-beauty.com.

Ugh. This would have been really cool if the black didn't stain the crap out of my fingers.

Have a great day everyone =)

- Jacqui

Pink Wednesday: Lynnderella Connect the Dots over Essie Pink Parka

Good morning everyone! Today I have a neon pink manicure for you for Pink Wednesday. I chose Essie Pink Parka as the base color for this manicure because it is my favorite neon pink nail polish that has ever existed! I have several neon pinks of all different shades, and this one is the brightest one that I own. Neons can be pretty tricky as far as application goes, and this was no exception. It was streaky and had several bald spots along the way, so I needed to do a good three coats to get where I wanted this color to be. A good tip is to apply a coat of white under a neon color to help the color really pop, but I didn't do that this time because I feel that Pink Parka is just so awesomely neon on its own. But difficult application aside, this is truly an amazing shade and I'm glad to have it in my collection.

I layered two coats of Lynnderella Connect the Dots over Pink Parka. Isn't it fabulous?! I just love all my Lynnderella polishes. Connect the Dots has black and white square, hex and bar glitter in a clear, shimmery base. Application can be a bit tricky with this one because sometimes the glitter doesn't go where you want it to. So you just have to play around with it a bit and see how it works for you. I put two coats of top coat over the manicure just to make sure everything was extra smooth and shiny!

You may notice that the color of my hands seem a bit off in these photos. That is because neons are notoriously hard to photograph, and you really have to mess with the white balance to get the true color to show up. I find these photos to be very color accurate as far as the polish goes, but my hands, not so much! You can tell how really eye-searingly bright this color is in real life. I think Connect the Dots looks fantastic over neons, so this combination for Pink Wednesday was perfect!

And here is Pink Parka by itself:

Thanks for stopping by! Have a fantastic day everyone!

-Jacqui