pixels&polish

I’m baaaaaaaaack! It’s been a long couple of weeks (months?!) for me without much nail art—I decided to give my nails a much needed break from all the polish and then just did solid colors for awhile, but with summer right around the corner, I couldn’t resist doing some fun summertime dots!

Colors used, from left to right in the second photo:

• Strawberry Fields - China Glaze
• Watermelon Rind - China Glaze
• For Audrey - China Glaze
  
• Hook Up - ORLY
  

These three China Glazes are some of my FAVORITE colors, and I think they paired up really well together! For anyone wanting to use Watermelon Rind as a base, I suggest at least two coats—I did what I’ll call “two and a half” on this design. 

I’m also loving these dotting tools a little too much—I may do a tutorial pretty soon here, but you’ll probably see some more dot designs from me in the near future!

What are you looking forward to this summer?

This is another one for the book of “This was a terrible idea but I should probably document it anyway just in case.” Loose bar glitter! Who knew!

Suffice it to say that I love the combo of China Glaze’s “Shower Together” and “Heart Breaker” by Pure Ice, but adding the pink bar glitter just did NOT turn out like I’d hoped. In person it does have a bit of a “jelly sandwich” look, but that didn’t even come out in the photo!

Oh well, time to bust out the acetone and get back to the drawing board.

Man was this hard to photograph! I usually get away without having a light box, but it was hard to do these colors justice without. So I hope the side by side can show off both the glitter and the base! I really wanted something simple and elegant but still eye catching…this reminds me a little of those chocolate bars with cayenne pepper in them, YUM!

Both colors today are by China Glaze—the base is one of my new favorites, “Ingrid,” while the glitter is “Electrify” from the Hunger Games collection!

Okay, I admit it, I just wanted another chance to play with my holo polish and stripe tape! This was an experiment to try layering paint and tape; I did a layer of holo, added tape, painted over it, then peeled off the tape. I think it looks pretty cool!

Holo stripes are Color Club’s “Harp On It,” while the pink is China Glaze’s “Ahoy!”

My one regret is that the holo polish makes the pink look slightly less shimmery when the light hits it!

Just a quickie today, figured I should document my current look before taking it off! I still can’t get enough of the dotting tools but this mostly started out as an experiment. I’m still not 100% sure I like it, but it is what it is. Gotta try a few things so you know what you can and can’t do, right?

Base is two coats of Essie’s ”To Buy or Not To Buy” with a layer of Color Club’s “Snow-Flakes”, which is basically a dupe of another Essie, “Shine of the Times.” 

I used some various shades of China Glaze for the dots, plus your run of the mill hong kong stripe tape. Topped it all off with CG’s Fast Forward, which I’m learning to love.

A note about “To Buy or Not To Buy” — I discovered after purchase that apparently Essie has a variety of different formulas. Not sure what’s up with that, but as you can maybe see mine is a nice pale blue robin’s egg color…NOT the lilac that is described everywhere. Good luck if you choose to order this online, there’s probably a 50/50 chance you’ll get a different color than you expected!

Holy cow, people, holographic polish!!! I was just going to “try it on” and ended up doing this fun dotted style that reminds me of some sort of 1980s sci fi show or something where everyone wears really angular clothing with huge shoulderpads.  You know what I mean, right? Of course you do.

Anyway, I am absolutely in love with this holo polish by Color Club. It looks a little dull in some settings, but as soon as the light hits it? A complete sparkle-tastic rainbow explosion. It also reminds me a lot of this paper that crayola put out while I was in middle/high school that my dad let me use to print out covers for my binders. Anyone else do that? Anybody? Bueller? 

Colors used this time around:

- “Harp On It,” Color Club

- “No More Film,” Essie

- “Go Overboard,” Essie

- “Hanging In The Balance,” China Glaze

I also used China Glaze’s Fast Forward top coat for the first time around, and while I’m completely in love with how quickly it dries and how hard and shiny it is after the fact, it smelled TERRIBLE. Like, I cannot possibly tell you how terrible it smelled. It was so bad I’m not sure if I want to use it again.

Oh, and just to be clear—I’m well aware there are no Daleks in Star Trek. Who says a girl can’t love both?

Happy Birthday to Me! I got some new dotting tools as a birthday gift and decided that now was the perfect time to try some fancypants nail art outside of my usual comfort zone. So I made cupcakes!

A quick Google search of “Cupcake Nail Art Tutorial” will yield a variety of techniques, but I chose to just do a quick “base” layer of pink and blue for the cupcake “wrapper” and the background behind the frosting. With dotting tools for the icing, cherry, and the wrapper lines (it was an experiment!) and a glitter polish for the “sprinkles,” I think it came out really great! 

Baked with love using:

- Wrapper: Wet T-Shirt, Pure Ice

- Wrapper Accent: Twisted Pink, Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear

- Blue Background: Splash, Pure Ice

- Frosting: Snow Me White, Sinful Colors

- Sprinkles: It’s a Trap-Eze!, China Glaze

- Cherry: Siren, Pure Ice

I’ve been using these colors for EVERYTHING lately it seems like, but I just love the combination! As a bonus, most of them can be found for $2 and $3 at Target, so they’re really great staples to keep around, and REALLY versatile.

With my birthday right around the corner, I really wanted to try out something that just screamed PARTY! That said, I have nearly a week between birthday events and wanted to save my It’s A Trap-Eze for the actual big day, so I went with the next best thing: holo glitter! 

This was my first time using this particular glitter and it absolutely won’t be the last. I absolutely love the way it catches the light—in fact, you wouldn’t believe the way it sparkles at night out in the snow! All in all I think it’s a near perfect Birthday Glitter.

Colors used this time around were:

- Pink Base: Twisted Pink,Sally Hansen (Hard as Nails XTreme Wear)

- Super Sparkles: Techno, China Glaze

I also can’t speak enough about how much I love, love, LOVE this pink! It’s absolutely become my go-to pink, and for anyone else out there who loves pink polish, I’d highly recommend picking up a bottle.

Now I just need to work on not picking at my cuticles during clean up…any tips for clean edges rather than ragged ones?

I got a whole pile of NYX polish in the mail today as a gift and was so excited about this color that I slapped it on right on top of the polish I was already wearing instead of taking it off! Maven by Nyx Girls comes in a set of seven glitter polishes and is definitely one of the stand out colors. It’s this beautiful teal shimmer that when layered on top of anything gives it a bright, holographic blue flavor that just looks awesome. I swatched it on top of a ton of different colors including various shades of blue, purple, and silver, and it came out gorgeous every time! I’ll definitely be taking some photos of the rest of the set soon, but it’s running about $12 on Amazon currently and comes with some truly knockout colors.

I threw a layer of it on top of:

- “Water You Waiting For” by China Glaze

- “All Night Long” by Pure Ice

I mostly just wanted to see how it looked with the other blues, but was really happy with the result—I might not take this off right away!

As a side note, the China Glaze is BEAUTIFUL on it’s own, but topped with the Nyx Maven it really seemed to take on an extra shimmery under the sea quality.

For a My Little Pony challenge, decided to try a spin on Pinkie Pie! Photo was taken pre-clean up, sorry! :)

White - Snow Me White, Sinful Colors

Pink - Twisted Pink, Sally Hansen Hard as Nails

Confetti - It’s a Trap-Eze!, China Glaze

Blue Accent Stripes - Splash, Pure Ice