Lynnderella She Lived in a Swamp over Wet n Wild Jungle Fever

Hi everyone! So sorry that it has been so long since my last post. Had a few midterms and papers due this week so I was pretty swamped with schoolwork. I have more midterms next week and the following week (ugh) but since it is the weekend I have some free time to share with you my latest nail of the day!

I started out with two coats of Jungle Fever, yet another polish from the extremely hard-to-find Wet n Wild On the Prowl Collection. Jungle Fever is a pretty yellow leaning olive green-ish foil with a tiny bit of brush strokes showing through. It was pretty thick and runny, so it was a bit of a PITA to apply. Thank goodness for my handy dandy clean up brush! Despite it's annoying application, it's a very pretty color and will safely reside in my collection =)

Then I did two coats of Lynnderella She Lived in a Swamp over Jungle Fever. She Lived in a Swamp may have been my absolute favorite from the first Lynnderella batch that I ordered, but there's a slight flaw that is keeping it from that spot. Unfortunately, the bar glitter in this polish has begun to curl. I haven't had this problem with any of my other Lynnderellas, so hopefully this polish is the exception. She Lived in a Swap is an absolutely stunning mix of light green and dark green multi-sized hex, micro and bar glitter in a clear green base. If only it wasn't for those darn curling bar glitters!

Here is Jungle Fever with two coats of Lynnderella She Lived in a Swamp, one coat of Gelous, and one coat of Poshe quick dry topcoat. Sorry, these pictures aren't the best because I had to take these at night:

And here's Jungle Fever alone (2 coats):

She Lives in a Swamp is the last of the first batch of Lynnderellas that I ordered. I hope you guys aren't too sick of them though, because I have another batch that should be arriving any day now =) As I have said before, Lynnderella is truly a genius when it comes to making glitter polishes and I am so excited to finally be able to get my hands on them. You won't be disappointed when you see the rest of them!

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 =)

Lynnderella Very Pretty Vampire over Wet n Wild Buy Me a Drink

Hello again friends! The second part of my post today is another Lynnderella polish =)

For my base layer, I used Wet n Wild Buy Me a Drink from their limited edition (and impossible to find) On the Prowl Collection, again from my friend Krista! Buy Me a Drink is a GORGEOUS burgundy wine shimmer. Ack I love this one soooo much! The formula is a little thin, so I had to do three coats to eliminate streaks and reach full opacity. Love love LOVE it!

On top of Buy Me a Drink, I decided to put Lynnderella Very Pretty Vampire. Another favorite from the polish genius Lynn, VPV is a various sizes of red and black glitter in a clear but murky red base. This blended in really well with Buy Me A Drink, but I think I want to try this again over a more contrasting color to get the full effect. Very Pretty Vampire is more sparse, so it is definitely best as a layering polish. I did two coats of VPV over three coats of Buy Me a Drink. VPV was a very hungry glitter, so I did one coat of Gelous and two coats of Seche Vite to smooth everything out. Here's the finished product:

Not my best pictures today, sorry folks!

Anyways, I will see you all again tomorrow! Have a fantastic Saturday!

-Jacqui =)

Lynnderella Cauldron Drippings over Revlon Royal Cloak

Hi everyone! So sorry I've been delinquent on blog posting the last two days. I am back with two posts for you today! First up is Revlon Royal Cloak smothered in Lynnderella Cauldron Drippings.

I was stumped for a while on how I wanted to wear Lynderella's Cauldron Drippings. It is quite a unique glitter polish, with a base of orange hex, square and bar glitter with green, purple and gold glitters of different shapes. I tried it on its own, and it was pretty but I prefer layering the Lynnderella glitters so I am not using a ton of them at once. I kept seeing swatches of it over orange polishes, but since the majority of the glitter in it was orange it would get lost among the background. So when I tried it over Revlon Royal Cloak, I knew I had a winner! It stood out amongst the purple and the orange glitters were able to shine! Plus, it feels very Halloweenish to me.

Revlon Royal Cloak is from Revlon's limited edition Masquerade Collection fro Halloween. It is definitely my favorite polish in the collection. Royal Cloak is a dusty blue-leaning purple with flakies! I am a huge sucker for flakies, so I had to try Royal Cloak. The application was very good, and I just love how thin Revlon's brushes are because it allows me to do precise, thin coats of color. Two coats was good for complete coverage on this one!

Over Royal Cloak, I did one coat of Cauldron Drippings. Application was pretty standard for Lynnderella polishes - I had to be a little more careful than usual to get the glitter to disperse evenly, but other than that it was perfect.

So here she is! Lynnderella Cauldron Drippings over Revlon Royal Cloak:

These are all photos of my right hand, which is not my default swatching hand so please bear with me as my left hand photographing and polishing skills are not 100%. Plus, my right hand looks weirdly red and yellow today. Odd.

Anyways, here is two coats of Royal Cloak alone:

Thanks for stopping by! Stay tuned for part two of today's post!!

-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

Kleancolor Metallic Orange: Swatches and Review

Holy crap, you guys. This is probably the most amazing orange nail polish I have ever seen in my life. It is so wonderfully shiny and glowy, I can't even handle it. It's a perfect orange for Halloween season as well. This orange is part of the Kleancolor Metallic line, which has taken a spot in my top 5 collections of all time. All of the metallic polishes that I have tried in this line are outstanding, I can't wait to show you the rest of them. You will be amazed.

I have a lot of nail polish. Really, I do. More than you probably think I have. So it really takes a lot for me to be amazed when it comes to nail polish these days. Most of the collections that people are fawning over these days (coughOPIMuppetscough) fail to impress me even the slightest bit. The fact that Metallic Orange made me gasp when I was applying it, really says something about this polish. It's truly unique, amazing and a MUST HAVE for your collection. In fact, every Kleancolor Metallic I have tried is a winner. And again, for $1.75 a bottle, what have you got to lose?

The application on this polish was flawless. FLAWLESS I TELL YOU! I did two coats because I was photographing, but in real life this is definitely a one coat polish. These photos are no cleanup at all. No cleanup!! Thats how smoothly and evenly this stuff went on. The only gripe I have with this polish is that the dry time is very long. It definitely does not have normal dry time, even with a quick dry top coat like Seche Vite. I'd say it was dry to the touch in 5 minutes, and a good 20 minutes before it was dry enough for me to start using my hands again. And yes, that was with my quick dry top coat. But for how awesome this polish is, I really don't care how long the dry time is.

Lots of pics in lots of different lighting situations so you can get a good idea of what it really looks like:

This is my perfect, glowy autumn orange and it is perfect for Halloween!! Hope you enjoyed the 80 bajillion pics I took of Kleancolor Metallic Orange =) Have a fantastic day everyone!

- Jacqui

Ecto Cooler Nails featuring Pure Ice Crackle in Shattered

Hello there! I have a bit of a weird manicure for you today. Every kid who grew up in the 80's and 90's loved Ghostbusters. It's just a fact of life. Ghostbusters and Halloween always seem to go together in my head, so I wanted to do a Ghostbusters inspired mani for you all this month. Since I'm crap at freehand nail art, I tried to think of something Ghostbusters related, and then I remembered Hi-C's Ecto Cooler!

Image Credit

Ecto Cooler was a staple in my lunchbox during my elementary school years. It was based on Slimer, the gluttonous green ghost sidekick of the Ghostbusters. The drink had a sweet citrus flavor but instead of the typical orange color, it was lime green. And it was damn good. It was discontinued in the late 90's, but us 80's and 90's kids remember this drink fondly.

Ecto Cooler Commercial

So, I'm not much of a crackle fan and I think it has been way over done since it's release early this year. However, if you can't do crackle in October for Halloween, when else can you do it? For this manicure, I did a base of China Glaze Papaya Punch, a bright (almost neon) yellow-orange creme. Then, I slapped on Pure Ice's Shattered, a lime green crackle. Definitely not my favorite manicure, but it's super fun for Halloween and definitely reminiscent of Hi-C Ecto Cooler. 

Have a great Sunday everyone!

-Jacqui

China Glaze It's Alive!

Happy October everyone! I'm so excited that it is finally my favorite month of the year. It is my favorite for several reasons, but mainly because of the holiday that it contains. Halloween is my number one holiday of all time, favorite until the end, till death do us part. Yes, I even had a Halloween themed wedding! Coming up this month is our one year wedding anniversary and I have a super fun post planned for that day =) But anyways, since Halloween is the most wonderful time of year (whoever said that Christmas is the most wonderful time of year was sadly mistaken), I have a month full of fun, spooky and ridiculously fun manicures for you all!

First up is from this year's China Glaze Haunting collection, a wonderfully murky polish named "It's Alive." Yes, I know you have all seen a lot of China Glaze polishes on this blog already, but they are my favorite brand so expect to see a lot more in the next month because they have some spectacular Halloween polishes! It's Alive was the only polish that I got from the Haunting collection, as I had dupes of the others in my collection already. It is truly the star of the collection, and if you can only buy one Halloween polish this year, It's Alive should be the one.

Anyways, It's Alive a dark and grubby olive green jelly packed full of lighter green hex and micro glitter to create a fantastic polish reminiscent of the Swamp Thing. It is so sparkly yet so dreary at the same time - a perfect Halloween polish! It took two coats to reach opacity, which is not bad at all for a glitter polish of this nature. Application was very easy. It's Alive is definitely a "hungry glitter," meaning that it definitely takes more than a few layers of topcoat to smooth it out. To solve the hungry glitter problem, I always use one coat of Gelous (available at Sally Beauty Supply) and then one coat of my normal quick dry top coat and I'm good to go!

I have been dying to wear this polish ever since I picked it up at Ulta a few weeks ago, and I knew that it would be the first polish I would wear during October. So here are a few pics, hope you enjoy =)

And here a macro shot for you, to see how awesome the glitter is in this polish!

Hope everyone's weekend is off to a great start! Thanks for reading =)

-Jacqui