Butter - The Black Knight and Rosie Lee

We were in a winter weather advisory for most of the last 24 hours where I live. If you are unfamiliar, a winter weather advisory means that it was snowing and driving was less than fun (sometimes it means the heavens are opening up and it is somehow raining ice).  I’m not a wuss when it comes to driving in the snow, but I do respect inclement weather and I make sure to drive extra safe when the weather outside is frightful. This being said, on the way to work today I witnessed something just downright ridiculous. While driving down a residential street the car in front of me stopped, put their car in reverse, and then proceeded to parallel park on the side of the snowy street (while it was snowing more mind you). I mean really? I haven’t parallel parked since my driver’s test and we do not live in some big city that requires parallel parking. I think that person in the SUV was just showing off this morning, and I want to let them know it was completely unnecessary.

Now that I’ve lost the respect of everyone that parallel parks frequently I’ll get to my nails. These nails are totally and completely the type of nails that will make me say “they are way better in person”. I wanted to do glitter overload nails, and in person they are so sparkly that they distracted my friend while we were out drinking (apparently bar lighting is good for glitter). For these nails I used Orly Liquid Vinyl as the base and Butter The Black Knight and Rosie Lee for the sparkle. I would like to take a moment to express just how much I love that my name is in the name of that color, I’m going to pretend they named it after me when I’m all alone and no one can judge.

Kitchen lighting just isn’t as good as outside lighting, please come back sun

Every time I paint my nails with a black base I’m reminded what a poor job I do around my cuticles, black is not a forgiving color. The glitter on the other hand (no pun intended, but it was appreciated) went on like butter (yes that one was totally on purpose). I love Butter. It is amazing. The glitter was so dense and went on so well that I really want to try it on its own without a base color. TheBlack Knight looks black overall but has a confetti of micro glitter. I’m convinced that if I ever man up and do a galaxy manicure it will make the perfect base.

No picture can do this glitter justice

 Rosie Lee is the kind of glitter that makes you want to use it every day. I bet it will look amazing over pink in a super girly manicure, or as classy pink tips on nude nails. Oh the possibilities are endless. I put on two coats of top coat because I wanted the nails to be very shiny, in person my ring fingers are distractingly shiny and sparkly, and it is awesome.

If only I didn’t work during all daylight hours

So overall, Butter=amazing (thank you Gayle!).So, you know how I said my nails are too long and I’ve been hurting myself? Well right after I did these nails I cut my right hand with my left thumb (and yes I did cry out in pain). I took a picture of it to include in my blog to show you how dangerous my claws are but after taking the picture I realized how pitifully small the cut was and couldn’t bring myself to include it and risk everyone thinking that I exaggerated the sharpness of my nails. Perhaps by telling that story I did anyway though, oops. Well, I’m off to start the horrible process known as baked potato nails, goodnight!

Christmas nails

It’s Christmas Eve! I hope everyone is having a super delightful Christmas. I wasn’t feeling well yesterday so Thad let me open my gifts from the girls. Jules got me a nerdy Deathly Hallows keychain and Millie got me a Harry Potter 20 questions game. It is crazy how well it can guess what I’m thinking, it must be magic. I guess this means my dogs know I’m a bit of a dork, oh well; they seem to still love me.

Recently I’ve noticed that my nails are getting out of control long, I have a fear of using nail clippers so I decided to try to just file them shorter. This process takes way longer, but as I have a job that requires me to sit on the phones all day, I tend to have the time necessary to file. An unexpected side effect of all this nail filing (aside from the nail shrapnel that I’m covered with daily) is that my nails are like little razor blades now. They are so sharp that I’ve managed to cut myself and draw blood (the cuts are just like paper cuts in size and level of annoyance). I think they are still a little too long but I’m not going to risk anymore filing, my nails are too dangerous as it is.

Unless I paint my nails tomorrow (and as I work tomorrow I don’t think that is very likely) these nails will be my Christmas nails. Since I’m going over to my in-law’s house tonight I wanted them to look classy. For this manicure I used OPI Alpine Snow and Last Minute Shopper, China Glaze Running in Circles, and Butter Fairy Cake.

It looks like I was a little messy with my top coat on my middle finger

On my ring finger I used holographic dots that I put on individually and on my thumb I did dots of Fairy Cake. The holographic dots are part of the gift I wrote about a few blogs ago, they are super cool but most of them were stuck together so getting individual dots was too hard for me to do on both fingers.

The snowflake on my thumb looks straight crazy

The white design is supposed to look like snowflakes, like classy minimal snowflakes, I will admit that a few of them look like deformed flowers instead. But hey, every snowflake is different, right? Overall these nails turned out the way I wanted them. They are festive without being over the top cutesy (like my reindeer). I usually regret my last minute adds but I’m happy with the black lines to make the overall look more mature (if you can call rhinestone nails mature).

Harry Potter 20 Questions, thanks Millie!

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope everyone had as much painting their Christmas nails as I did.  

Christmas Light nails

Some days require drinks after work, today was one of those days. There is something about the Christmas season that makes some people completely unreasonable. Any unpleasantness at work quickly fades away with the appearance of vodka. Tonight I spent my after work hours watching Coming to America and drinking Kinky and Sierra Mist. Kinky is this bright pink, super girly vodka that is flavored with grapefruit. It’s one of those drinks that you regret right away because you just know it’s too sweet. Coming to America on the other hand is hilarious and I forgot what funny Eddie Murphy was like. With that kind of excitement it is surprising I managed to blog.

For this manicure I tried to do Christmas lights, tried is a good word for how these nails turned out. It’s a shame nail blog pictures are taken so up close, these nails actually look pretty cool when you see them from a distance, but alas, their up close shots are not all that I would want them to be.

It was a solid attempt

As you can see I used quite a few colors here, Ulta Sun-Sational, China Glaze Splish Splash and Running in Circles, OPI Last Minute Shopper and Alpine Snow, and Butter Fairy Cake. Oh yes, you read that right, I now own Butter. I got a set of three super fun glitters for an early Christmas gift from a friend. The application with the manicure didn’t turn out so hot though, I wanted the glitter to be a light layer on top (to cover up the insane number of bubbles I had) but it ended up being too dense of a glitter so my pinkie just looks crazy instead.

The glitter is cool, but this was a bad use for it

This manicure had issues from the start, but the worst of it was air bubbles, damn you air bubbles. Air bubbles have a few major causes, shaking polish before you use it, and too think of layers are the biggest culprits. In my case I got so many bubbles because I’m almost out of base coat and the process of getting it out put way too much air in the polish. I’m going to take this as a really good reason to buy new base coat, any suggestions?

I want to be able to take pictures outside again

I wouldn’t say I hate these nails but I would say that I’m really looking forward to repainting them. They seem like a waste since I don’t have much Christmas nail time left.

Reindeer nails

I can’t believe Christmas is a week from tomorrow. I have always loved Christmas; I’m the type of person that wakes up at four in the morning to open presents Christmas morning. My parents had the rule that we couldn’t open presents until coffee was made, that didn’t really slow us down, our presents were usually open before the sun came up. One of my favorite Christmas gifts ever was the year Santa brought me a Barbie and the Rockers Barbie. She was amazing, with bright blue eye shadow and a silver mini skirt. That year we lost power due to an ice storm and our brand new puppy (also a Christmas gift) found Barbie and chewed her hand off in the darkness of the power outage. I was not super pleased with Mollie, but she was so cute I forgave her pretty quickly.

I have wanted to do these nails for a while but wanted to wait to do them closer to Christmas. For this manicure I used Sally Hansen CSM Shell We Dance?, OPI Alpine Snow, Brisbane Bronze, and Last Minute Shopper, China Glaze Mahogany Magic and Luxe and Lush, and Orly Liquid Vinyl. 

Rudolph says hi

After I did one reindeer I knew that doing ten would take way too long so I decided to do different designs on the other nail. I’m really pleased with how the dots turned out on my pinkie, it is the most evenly spaced I have been able to do dots. The middle finger ended up red because my red stripes were so bad I had to paint the whole nails red to cover it up, oops. I absolutely love my thumbs; I painted them pale pink and then used the Luxe and Lush on top. No picture can capture how awesome that glitter is, they are huge irregular flat glitter pieces that look holographic when the light hits them.  It was kind of a pain to put on but I think that was mostly due to the fact that this bottle has the most messed up brush ever.

I have never had a glitter like it before

I’m really happy with these nails; if I were to do reindeer again I would make the black outline thinner and leave more room for his antlers. I enjoy the variety of this manicure; they are entertaining to look at.

The polish in the bottle is Last Minute Shopper

Hope you enjoyed them as much as I did! I’m running out of time to fit all my Christmas ideas in, I need to paint my nails more J.

Caviar nails

For Christmas my super awesome friend Patty got me a super awesome gift. She told me that she wanted to give me my gift before Christmas because she thought I would “get good use out of it”, I was immediately excited. Patty found forty little bottles of all sorts of different nail swag; everything from loose glitter to foil. I gazed upon my bounty all day at work and will admit that it distracted me from my work more than once (oops).

Gaze upon how amazing this gift is

I had all day to plan what nails I wanted to do and as soon as I saw the bottles with beads I knew I was going to do my first caviar nails. A caviar manicure, for those that don’t know, is a manicure where you cover one or more nails with micro beads so that it looks like caviar. As I have never had caviar I’m not sure how much it actually looks like fish eggs, but you get the general idea. For these nails I used OPI DS Radiance and some blue micro beads.

I can’t stop running my caviar nails against things, they feel cool

I made a lot of mistakes with these nails due to poor planning. For some reason I decided that I should paint all he silver nails first and then do the ring fingers, that was a stupid decision. While I was attempting to dip the ring fingers in my vat of micro beads I ended up hitting the silver nails on just about everything. It was at this point I realized that very metallic polishes are not forgiving at all. Every mistake and bump shows up glaringly, even after top coat.

You can see the mistake in my thumb and pinkie L

My favorite thing about this whole manicure is the texture, the silver nails and very soft and smooth because of the high quality polish and top coat and then the caviar nails are really bumpy even with three coats of top coat. When I put the top coat on the beads it pulled off some of the blue color which made some beads look more silver, the overall effect turned out well though.

So fun

I’m a little worried about taking the beads off but I’m hoping the glitter/foil method works out for it. Thank you Patty for the awesome gift, I’m super excited to come up with more ways to use it!

Snowflake nails

It was such a lazy, snowy weekend that I didn’t manage to take pictures of my nails until tonight. That being said, the pictures I have are of a manicure I did three days ago (I say this so you do not judge my tip wear). I’m pretty impressed with how well they did wear considering that I did dishes without gloves with these nails (upon typing that sentence I realized that I forgot to buy gloves while I was at Hy-Vee, drat).

For these nails I used OPI Alpine Snow and Last MinuteShopper, the red is a special holiday color that you can get for the awesome price of free with purchase of two other OPI colors at Ulta. It is possible that I didn’t need two other OPI colors, but I’m not totally sure.

Let it snow!

I love how shiny the red turned out, this is after three coats but it looked pretty good after two. For the snowflake I used a really small brush and my smallest dotter to get the little lines. I went back through at the end and put dots of silver glitter when I was done.

Thad helped me out with the super up close shot

These nails remind me of the first time I got nail art done. It was right after Thanksgiving four year ago and I got my nails painted red with a classy snowflake; after I got them done I showed them off to everyone at work and made sure I gestured wildly. These snowflakes turned out a bit larger than I wanted but I’m still a fan.

I was pretty sure you wanted another picture

Well, I’m off to paint my nails. I got an amazing early Christmas gift from a fellow nail addict and I just can’t wait to use it. Hopefully this will put you in frenzied anticipation of my next post J

Gift Wrapped nails

I got my rental car yesterday and I have decided to call her Not Mittens, let me explain. I used to play World of Warcraft, and like all games that I have played, I played in nonstop in an obsessive sort of way (much like I play Pocket Frogs now). When I played WOW I was a hunter, this was due almost completely to the fact that hunters get pets, so when my Tauren hunter got to a high enough level to get her first pet I had my brother help me tame a tiger (what are big brothers for if not to help their sister tame video game tigers?). I named this tiger Mittens and I loved her as much as one can love a virtual pet. One day a system glitch caused Mittens to disappear and be replaced with a random tiger that didn’t have the allegiance to me that Mittens had always displayed, by that I mean she attacked me. I had to contact the game administrators so that they could recover my Mittens for me; in the mean time I named this imposter Not Mittens. Well, that totally necessary story helped clear  up why I’m calling my rental call Not Mittens.

At this point it would be pretty awesome if I had some tiger manicure planned so that I could tie in how I started, but I don’t have that. I did these nails after picking up the rental car if that helps you put it all together in your head and justify why you now know the name of my WOW pet that I had four year ago. For this manicure I used OPI DS Radiance (I’m starting a love affair with this color) and China Glaze Running In Circles from their new Cirque du Soleil collection.

I’m going to call this hand pose the claw hand

The green is so much fun in person; I wish it was daylight longer so I could have taken an outdoor shot of it. The color is a really deep green that looks like it is made up of multiple layers of green polish and green glitter. It looked horrible after the first coat and I was really worried that it was going to be way too light but it looks great after three coats. Application was pretty easy but watch that you don’t put the first layer on too think trying to get the color right because it makes the next layers a bit draggy.

The green almost looks like moss

I tried to take a super up close one like Thad did from me on my ornament nails but it turned out terribly, lets blame it on the super shiny nails and not my below average photography skills. I wanted the design to look like wrapped presents. If I did it again though I think I would do the bow in a different color and make it a bit larger so it stands out from the rest of the ribbon. I can’t believe how soon Christmas is! I need to decide what nails I’ll have for the big day still J.

Dot Gradient nails

Our Christmas decorations are up which means that the living room no longer has room from my nail table. It wasn’t until my table was moved into the guest room that I realized just how much I have come to love that little table. I’ve been rolling the table into the living room to do my nails because I just can’t manage to do them without also watching TV.

I wanted to try a polka dot gradient for my nails but they didn’t really turn out as a gradient. I think I should have used a smaller dotting tool and had more of a plan before I started. For this manicure I used Orly Liquid Vinyl, China Glaze For Audrey, and OPI DS Radiance. I love how the matte finish base coats turned out, essie Matte About You is simply amazing.

They kind of look like snow

I’m usually a fan of China Glaze and I haven’t had any issues with the colors separating or anything, but this bottle of For Audrey is aging poorly. In the bottle the color looks all separated and it isn’t going on the same as it did before. I think I’m going to have to invest in some thinner, I really like the color so I’m hoping for a way to get it back to the way it was before. Aside from the color issues and the fact that my dots are far too large the manicure was pretty quick and easy.

Metallic on matte is just fun

Oh, and in case you were wondering about rhinestone removal from my last nails. I got really frustrated at work on Saturday and picked most of them off while there. The ones that were stuck on hard enough to make it past my anger picking came off super easy with polish remover (so much better than glitter). I’m pretty sure these nails will not last nearly as long as the last ones, I’m tired of them now and I just painted them last night (oops).