Hey everyone! I thought I'd give you a quick update of my recent manicures. I've been playing around with a lot of glittery nail polishes lately and I decided that they would love REALLY cool with Essie's 'Matte About You' matte top coat instead of the Seche Vite I normally use.
This is a before picture- if you will, of China Glaze's Ruby Pumps polish. Let me first just rave about it. BECAUSE. I went through my collection the other day and realized that I don't have many deep reds in my collection- and they really do compliment my skin tone well. I've just been so into crazy cremes lately that I forgot how beautiful a red based glitter polish could be. So I went to my Sally Beauty Supply and it's literally like this was waiting for me. I had to get it, and what you see here is three coats. Great formula, not too streaky. Looks solid after two coats, but I have it three here for the extra depth of color.
AFTER. For some reason, on blogger, these pictures look a lot dimmer. In both pictures. Trust me, this is a GREAT red. And I almost cried when I put the Matte About You on it. It's just so beautiful! The only problem I have with matte top coat (IN GENERAL) is that, unlike a matte nail polish COLOR, you really have to make sure to cover all of the color on your nail. Otherwise, the edges on the sides and along your cuticles will still shine (but you'd have that problem with any matte top coat). Otherwise, fabulous!
This was a little experiment of mine- and let me say that I'm in lurve. That's like love, but x100. I've had this L.A. Girl's Rock Star Glitter in my stash for a long time, and I've never really used it until now. But I layered it over China Glaze's Grape Pop. First, even without the matte top coat, it was gorgeous. But WITH the matte over top? No words. I just love it so so so much.
See you all later!
As I am still waiting for my Zoya bottles to come in from the polish exchange, I thought I'd upload some recent manicures I've had over the last week or so :)
This was what I was wearing when I wrote the first entry of this blog; Kiwi Cool-Ada. I love this color so much in the summer for two reasons. It's really two different colors. There's an indoor cooler and an outdoor color. What you see in this picture is the indoor shade. It's just brighter than Four Leaf Clover from the Up and Away collection and so gorgeous. Indoors, it stops just short of crossing into the realm of obnoxious. When the sun is out? Different story! It's so fun to wear outside because of how BRIGHT it gets. The neon really pops when the sun is out to help it. In short, I loooove this green from the summer Poolside collection.
I realized the other day that I had very very very few OPIs in my little collection. So I when for the little mini pack of the Shrek Forever After collection. It's called 'What's With the Cattitude?' Cuuute. It's such a pretty light blue. I don't think it complimented my skin tone very well, but I think it would look gorgeous on other people :)
Mannequin hands! I love the All Lacquered Up blog, and her post a long time back about finding your mannequin hand shade had me on the prowl. I think I finally found my shade in Sally Hansen's 'Nude Now' from the Complete Manicure bottles. Btw, I LOVE the brushes in those bottles. That is, if you get a good one. I have five of them and two (including Nude Now) have flawless brushes. The other three... I took it upon myself to give them a trim ;)
Have I mentioned that my absolute favorite department store nail polish brand is Revlon? We just click for some reason. But anywho, I was bored with the stuff I had at home one day so while I was at the store, I picked up Bewitching Bordeaux. I LOOOVE this color. It's so rich and dark purple with red hues but NOT black. Very vampire-esque.
So, I'm a little fangurl of the British nail artist, Sophy Robson. Especially her famous rainbow manicure. I had to try it for myself. As you can see, I am nooo professional, but I was very pleased with this 'french' manicure with a twist :) The colors I used were:
Pinky: Rumple's Wiggin (OPI), Grape Pop (China Glaze)
Ring: What's With the Cattitude (OPI), Pacific Blue (Sally Hansen)
Middle: Turquoise and Caicos (Essie), Four Leaf Clover (China Glaze)
Index: Happy Go Lucky (China Glaze), Chubby Cheeks (Essie)
Thumb (not pictured): Juicy Glo (Milani), Siren (Pure Ice)
There you have it :) My last five manicures!
So, do you ever wonder what it would be like to collect your old crap around the house and exchange it at some magical location for bright shiny new trinkets? That is precisely what Zoya is doing to celebrate Earth Day! I know I'm a little late to post about this, but think of it as a reminder to get going on this! The exchange ends on June 30th. Basically, what this entails is that you find all the old, new, used or unused nail polishes you don't want anymore, send them in to Zoya and receive the equivalent number of new Zoya polishes back! The best part? You can choose what colors you want back! And they have TONS of colors to choose from. The only catch is that you pay $3.50 per bottle to cover shipping. But seriously, that is even a steal because Zoya polishes retail at around $7. This is a 50% off deal, people!
These are the bottles I found around my house. I've had some of these since 8th grade. I'm a junior in college now. That is a loooong time. I'll update when I get my pretty new bottles! And I will, of course, swatch them :)
http://www.zoya.com/content/category/Nail_Polish_Exchange.html
Do this!
So, a preview picture has been released for Orly's 2010 Fall Cosmix Collection!
I don't know about anyone else but I am SO excited for these. Especially the one on the far left. I've been in a creme kick lately and now I've gotten a bit bored, so nice shimmer polishes will be much appreciated. As soon as I can get my hands on these, I'll swatch them and put them up on here :)
Hello, fellow nail-philes! The name's Neva. I've been reading a lot of amazing nail and beauty blogs recently and just felt inspired to join in the community. As you can probably tell by the name of the blog, my favorite brand of polish (currently) is China Glaze (wearing Kiwi-Cool-Ada as I type). But I love, love, love, trying different brands, colors, textures of nail polish. I'm open to anything and everything. But anywho! A little about myself within the context of the world of nail polish... I am by no means a professional. I don't have boxes and boxes of nail polish- I only have about 50 bottles. I'd call myself an enthusiast. But I'm expanding my collection and branching out and I figure this is the perfect place to write about my findings (what I like/ don't like). I figure it would be great to those who are similar to me and have limited budgets and really wear nail polish because it's fun!
How did I get to this point? Well... I've been becoming gradually more obsessed with doing manicures (on myself, and my friends) throughout the course of the year. Until march of last year, I literally did not have nails to speak of. I bit them. Yes, yes I did. Really, I just didn't know how to take care of my nails and every time I'd grow them out a tiny bit, they'd chip, I'd get discouraged and wind up back with short gross nails. But for some reason, last March, I kicked the habit! As they got stronger, I started to think maybe I could nail polish. Before I had nails, I just stayed AWAY. But I tried it and LOVED it! So my 2 bottle collection turned into more. One manicure every five days turned into more and it snowballed and here I am changing the color of my tips almost daily.
Long story short, I'm here and I'm excited! Because I'm new to this, I won't have the MOST recent colors and collections like some other bloggers, but I'll do what I can with the stuff that I've got and we'll see where that takes us. Hope you all enjoy what I have to say :)
Aerial view of my modest little collection :)
Until later,
Neva
:)
[china] Glazed Over
