31 Day Nail Art Challenge - Day 12: Stripes

I can't believe we're already on day 12 of this challenge! I'm so happy that Meghan and I are sticking with this - I'm still really loving this challenge :) 

For today's stripes theme, I thought about doing something complex with striping tape and going crazy, but in the end, I settled on classic vertical stripes. I recently bought the China Glaze Avant Garden collection and I've kind of been obsessing over the colors since I got them. I used 38 strips of striping tape for this hand alone and I felt my eye start to twitch in frustration after about the 12th strip being placed on my nail! How is it that the tape suddenly acquired a magnetic attraction to my nails for this mani!? 

A Mattified Monday

Happy (hopefully!) Monday my dears! Today's theme for my Lulu*s tutorial is matte and I wanted to show the versatility of a good matte top coat - so I did 3 looks! They vary in difficulty so there is something for everyone, though the final look is more for show since there's no tutorial for that one. Be sure to check out their blog post for my 2 step how-to's!

Happy Polishing! :)

Wondrously Polished X Lulu*s Tutorial

Hi all! I'm so excited to share that I will be doing some collaborative tutorials with the Lulus.com blog! They have some adorable clothing and I was especially inspired by one of their chevron print dresses.

Here's a little teaser of the look, but be sure to check out the blog post to read up on how to recreate this :)

Happy Polishing my dears! :)

Mint Cutouts

I've got a short and sweet post for you all tonight! 

Tomorrow is Earth Day (yay!) and I want to get a fun mani in for that but before I could move on I needed to finish the current theme of the April Nail Art Challenge - "mint." So, I whipped something up really quick to share with you all. I'm not in love with these, but they are different from anything I've done so far so I thought I'd share them anyway. 

I used striping tape and Sephora by OPI's Read My Palm to create these simple cutouts...with my naked nail showing! Scandalous! ;) 

Can't Find My Czechbook Striping

I think some of my favorite manis are striping based looks. They are just so clean and classy to me. And I love geometric shapes more than is probably normal so any time I get to make an interesting design using only lines, I'm immediately in love. 

I recently became the proud mother to OPI's Can't Find My Czechbook, which is a fabulous blue from their Euro Centrale Collection. LOOK AT THIS COLOR! unf. 

I love it. It's fabulous. Let's move one. 

As I've mentioned before, I finally bought a new bottle of OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls (yet another unhealthy obsession). I decided to whip out my striping tape and put my new bottles to use. 

Julep Color Blocking

What do you do when you have just received 4 fabulously lovely Julep colors and can't decide which one to use first? Well, use them all in one mani! I ended up doing a simple free hand color blocking of Julep's Joy, Hoch, Parker, and Gloria and I am really liking how these look. They are definitely on the funkier side of things, but if you haven't noticed yet, that's the sort of thing I love ;) I used my trusty striping brush and sat down to watch Shakespeare in Love while doing these babies. I sort of really love that movie...and now I'm watching Pitch Perfect...which may be my favorite movie at the moment. SO GOOD! 

Saran Wrap and Chevrons

I'm really excited to share this mani with you all tonight! I am really happy with how they turned out :) Yay! 

I've been wanting to try the saran wrap method for awhile now and decided to give it a go tonight. For those who don't know, the saran wrap method is pretty simple method to create some cool texture to your nails. PackAPunchPolish has a great tutorial on it which can be found here. I believe she originally got the idea from Katy over at Blog Nailed It. Essentially though, using two colors (one painted on top of the other), you dab the wet polish with a crumpled up piece of saran wrap to create texture between the two polish colors. Pretty simple! I didn't actually have saran wrap and made due with cup up sandwich bags, but I think it had a similar affect. I ended up using a light shimmery pink as my base color, with a hot coral and purple mix as my top polish colors. I'm really happy with the way they came together. 

Candy on my fingers!

I'm super excited for how tonight's look turned out! About a month ago I bought Gloss n' Sparkle's Unicorn Spawn from the amazing people over at Llarowe and never got the chance to use it. Well, I'm kicking myself now for waiting so long! I LOVE this polish. It's so fabulous and such a fun color for spring...or any time! 

31 Day Nail Challenge - Day 6: Purple

I'm finding that the colors I most love painting my nails are giving me the biggest problems with this challenge! Perhaps I don't want to create something that doesn't do those colors justice. Regardless, I had to think a bit about what to do for the latest installment of the 31 Day Nail Challenge. I actually tried a few things before landing on this...and I think I like it haha I haven't done anything with taping in a long while so it was fun to get back into that. This is a pretty simple design and easy enough to recreate :) The base purple is Creative Fantasy from last night's swatching and I've added Lime Crime's Lavendairy, OPI's My Boyfriend Scales Walls (have I mentioned I'm obsessed with this color?!?), and the grey is my new OPI, French Quarter for Your Thoughts (also ridiculously obsessed with this color now). 

Striping Tutorial with Zoya's Kieko

So after my polishing binge last night, I ended up with Kieko on all of my nails and decided to spend a few extra minutes to make something quick on my middle fingers. I got asked by a few people on Instagram how I did this design so I decided to put together a quick little pictorial to share how easy it can be for you to have it as well! 

China Glaze's I Herd That Chevrons with Purr-fect Plum

Happy New Year's Eve!! Well, it's still the 31st here in California so Happy New Year to anyone 9 hours ahead of me! ;) 

To celebrate, I put together this sparkly fun mani to ring in the new year :) I busted out the striping tape and got started. 

 

I used China Glaze's Purr-fect Plum (left) and I Herd That (right) for this mani and I really like how it turned out. I tried to make it look like the Chevron on my middle finger extends along the rest of the fingers. 

Sparkles and Glitter and Gold, Oh My!

Polish makes everything better. Adorably cute mini Essie Fall Collection polishes are even better. And  it just so happened that these lovlies appeared on my desk yesterday!