Zoya Remy

Hey Everyone!! Happy Friday!!! I am excited that it is Friday! Tomorrow we are going to the Farmer's Market which should be interesting. Although I really can't stand either team in this year's Superbowl and I am not all that excited to see Katy Perry in the halftime show I do love football so we will have a little party. Our party is always just us but we make sure to have too much food and watch the game. I will have to do some Superbowl nails but I am not overly excited about having to put either team on my nails. I should probably get planning on what I need to buy for Sunday.

Today I have a very pretty Zoya polish from the 2014 Ignite Collection.

This is Zoya Remy. Remy is a gorgeous dark blue shimmery beauty. Zoya says it has a metallic finish but I would consider it more shimmery than metallic. 

This mani chipped early on me which led me to almost send Barielle Nail Building Protein out the window with the Poshe basecoat. Every mani I have used the Barielle with since has been ok so I think it might have either been a fluke or it just didn't agree with Zoya.

You can see that Remy has a little bit of a green flash to it at certain angles. It is a really great glowy polish and one of my favorites from Zoya. I love most Zoya polishes though. 

That's all for now :) 

Out Like a Light and Matte Pearl Glaze

Hey Everyone! I hope everyone up in the cold north is doing well and safe. We currently have a little bit of cold air coming in so that is making me happy. I wish I had worn socks and sneakers today though. I think I am going to have to do another snow themed mani to go along with the cool weather and the snow everyone else has. I should really finish making my brother's crocheted hat too since he is cold and winter will be over soon. I was supposed to finish it this past weekend but I got distracted. 

Today I have a mani for you using one of the Revlon Transforming Effects Topcoats. This display is still up in my store but the collection is from late last year so it isn't really new. It would be lovely if they would put up new collections like, say, the Sinful Colors Valentine's Day or St. Patrick's Day glitters. Anyway, I grabbed this polish and another one when Walgreens was having a sale and I needed some retail therapy. First let us look at the base color.

I used China Glaze Out Like a Light from the 2014 Holiday Twinkle Collection. It is a lovely dark gray creme and it applied really nicely. 

I got this one after Christmas when the polishes were marked down a bit. For some reason I hadn't really frequented the stores much so I wasn't super familiar with the collection. This is a great polish and was almost a 1 coater. 

I am thinking this polish is going to be really good for stamping but I have yet to try it out. I was still trying out the Poshe base coat when I did this mani so it was also one I did twice. Both times the application was great and had I been more careful I could have gotten away with just one coat.

I, of course, managed to ding up my cuticles. I always felt bad when I would get a cuticle cut or have bad cuticles because most bloggers either don't have that problem or know how to hide it. Sadly I have issues with my cuticles all the time and I have no idea how to hide them, especially when they are this bad.

I used one coat of Revlon Matte Pearl Glaze over Out Like a Light. I didn't think to do a partial mani with it so you can see the base and the transformation side by side until I had already done my other hand. That is why we are stuck with pictures of the ugly cuticle. You can see that Matte Pearl Glaze transforms the color into a gorgeous purple with pink shimmery flakie look.

One coat of Matte Pearl Glaze was enough to transform a dark gray creme into this beauty. It looked darker purple in some lights and taking pictures of it proved to be difficult.

The shimmery flakie was very pretty and very pronounced. It isn't a straight shimmer but it isn't a glitter either. If you look really closely, and you can see a couple of bigger chunks on my ring finger, you can see that it looks like tiny flakes. Whatever it actually is makes for a very pretty polish.

It doesn't remind me of a pearl at all, I was expecting something more pearl like when I hear the name. It is definitely very pretty and I am very interested to know what it does over other colors. I am happy I picked this one up. I can't think of anything I have in my collection that is similar.

That's all for now :)

Winter Mani

Hey Everyone!!! Happy Friday! I am definitely happy it is Friday. I have nail mail that is supposed to be en route to me which is a very happy thing. I discovered, thanks to the joys of Facebook groups, a couple of supply stores I didn't know about in my area. I can't wait until I have some fun money to go check them out. I am also looking forward to checking out the craft stores for some fun new toys. I have seen a few manis done with alcohol inks and I am dying to give that a try. For now though I have lots of new plates to play with and swatch into my book. I am also contemplating a new swatch book for my polish and perhaps one for polishes that stamp. I am also not done with project reorganization so that is a never ending process. Luckily there are lots of things going on so I will have some fun posts to write.

Today I have my first mani of 2014. This was actually my first three manis. I got Butter London Victoriana from a very sweet nail group friend. Now, I have a few Butter London polishes in my stash but they are all untried so I have no experience with the brand. I have been quite interested in several of their polishes over the years and figured it was about time to try them out. My major issue was that my newest goal is to use up all of  the various brands and types of base and top coats I have lying around. For some reason the first two manis chipped within 24 hours. Since I am stubborn I refused to give up and kept redoing the same mani until I could get it to last past 11am the next morning (I do my nails around 9pm) so that I could  take pictures. Try #3 finally worked which is good because I was getting frustrated.

After three manis I learned that Poshe base coat does not like me and that I really like the formula of Butter London. Poshe will be finding a new home soon. I finally got this one to stick using Barielle Hydrating Ridge Filler and Palladio Fuse Nail Bonding Basecoat over that. 

I used two coats of Butter London Victoriana as the base coat. For some reason I forgot that I needed to take pictures of just the base color. 

I used Funky Fingers Elsa sponged on my pinky and middle fingers as a gradient. I used a full coat of Elsa on my ring and index finger. Elsa is from the Funky Fingers Frostbitten collection. I really wish we had a Five Below located somewhere near me so I had easier access to these pretties. 

Elsa has an ice blue and white glitter mix that has both matte and satin glitter in it. The glitter is various sizes. One thing I didn't get on my nails with this mani is any of the snowflake shaped glitter that is in this polish. I totally forgot about the snowflake glitters until I used another polish from this collection and one happened to appear. The snowflakes definitely have to be fished out. Between two polishes (Elsa and Olaf, which I used on a different mani) and 20 nails I only got one snowflake and none for this mani. The glitter is pretty enough that I won't hold the lack of snowflakes against it. 

That's all for now :)

Naked Nails January 2015

Hey Everyone!!! I finally got a chance to edit about 100 pictures so I am good to go for awhile at least. I spent the first half of the evening trying to be a computer technician and getting a program to run so my father can record his records onto the computer. I don't know a whole lot about the system and apparently there was software that wasn't on the computer so it made life fun. I think I got everything ready so that he can actually record them however converting them to mp3 files is a whole other ballgame that I completely lost. 1-1 is better than 0-2 I guess.

When I first started blogging I had been a huge blog follower and would look at so many gorgeous nails everyday. Mine have never been the best but I thought I could baby them into becoming some of those gorgeous nails that bloggers showcase. I have gone through my shares of breaks and peeling issues and cuticle troubles as I have blogged. I resorted to doing gel manis while I was on break to help protect my nails some. It did and they grew nicely but they were so damaged that even the gel polish couldn't protect them from everything. The holidays were rough on them with all the baking, cleaning, wrapping and such. It so happened that because I decided I was going to start blogging again with the new year they all decided to break and go straight to hell right at the end of the year. Lovely. 

I was telling a friend about the situation and she suggested I show the world my poor nubs anyway. Not all of us have the gorgeous nails that bloggers have and that is ok. Not all of us can grow super long nails and some of us don't actually want to. I would love to grow longer nails but they just don't cooperate. So today I am showing you my damaged, peeling, ugly little nubs. I always felt bad because my nails were far inferior to most bloggers nails. 

This was the way they looked at the beginning of the year. I think it was literally January 2nd or 3rd when I took these pictures. There are white marks and peels and bad cuticles. I have a peeling problem where if my polish or even my nails start to peel I just go ahead and help them along. I like to peel things. It isn't a good habit and it definitely doesn't pave the way for nice nails. I also have been known to pick off my gel polish which has caused damage. On top of the fact that my nails are on the weak side anyway all this abuse has caused them to break and look like this. They aren't pretty but they are real. I am going to discuss my nail care routine a little bit in this post. Hopefully it isn't too boring. Next post will be nicer pictures I promise :)

I don't do much for my cuticles because the more I do the worse they get. I rarely use cuticle remover because I have found that it just tears my cuticles up. Every single time I have used it I have come away with sores and tears and really nasty cuticles. I have a cuticle scrub that I will occasionally use but other than that I just push them back. I have tried so many different cuticle oils and balms and lotions it is crazy. Right now I am LOVING my Emerald and Ash cuticle oil and I started using my Sunnys Miracle Balm from 365 Days of Color again. 

One thing I started doing is using oil before my manicures. I can't remember where or who suggested it but I know we discussed it in one of the nail communities I belong to. Basically you take the cuticle oil and oil your nails up then I use a napkin to wipe the remaining oil off the nail. Then I base coat and proceed with my mani. I don't wash my hands between the oil and the polish, just wipe the nail off a bit.

Shockingly oiling before painting my nails doesn't cause the polish to peel off or chip any sooner than if I didn't oil them. I generally don't leave the polish on for more than a day or two so I can't comment on how long my manis would hold up. I know I just had a mani on from Thursday to Sunday with no chipping so I don't have any adverse effects from using the oil. 

I actually think the oil helps out because I use acetone for removal of the previous mani. Since the acetone dries out the nails and skin the oil helps re hydrate them before adding polish. You can see how bad my nails look in the photo above vs. how they look after oiling them up before doing my mani below.

I am going to show progress of how my nails are doing as a follow up later on. I figure not everyone has stellar nails and I am not going to feel like mine are inferior any more. I know I have particularly difficult nails that don't like to grow and love to break and it is time to be honest about that. Not everyone has perfect nails and that is ok. Those of us with problem nails can still have just as much fun with polish. 

That's all for now :)

I am Back! Lots of Pictures Included!

Hey Everyone!!! I AM BACK!!! It was a nice break but I am finally back. Things have settled down for the most part so I am confident I can devote my attention to the blog again. My nails, however, have decided to be complete jerks and not cooperate. I decided to go forward and blog anyway. All of that will be explained in the next post. I figure I will start out with 2-3 posts a week instead of trying to do daily posts. I even got a little calendar to keep track of my manis so I can stay organized. When I was going through pictures on my camera I had forgotten what mani of the polishes I had used were. I decided I must write down everything from now on to keep myself from staring at the computer for 20 minutes trying to remember what I used. The great thing about my memory is that I eventually did remember all but one of the polishes I used in the pictures below. I wish I could say the same for the stamping images though. 

Today I have some of the manis I have done over the past few months. My nails will be various lengths because some of the pictures are older than others. Shall we take a look?

Back at the beginning of football season I did this mani combining C's NY Giants and my Buffalo Bills. It didn't quite come out as well as I had wanted it to.

I wasn't thrilled with the gold stamping. It looked much nicer in my imagination. 

Back when I was taking ds to the doctor all the time I saw this NYC Fashion Queen collection at one of my CVS stops. Since I was stressed and they were cheap I did a little retail therapy and bought the glitter polishes called Crystal Couture. I, of course, did not buy them all at once which tells you how many doctor trips we actually made. 

The Blue one is called Blue Majesty and the purple is named My Princess.

I don't usually do gold but I actually really liked this one a lot. It is called Fashion Queen.

I decided that it reminded me of gold coins and pirates plus I just really wanted to use a skull image so I stamped one on as an accent. 

I used Sugar Bubbles stamping plate 008 for this cute skull.

Queen's Jewels is the green color for this collection and I love it! 

I decided to do an accent nail with another recently acquired polish Sinful Colors Cauldron Couture.

This was the only bottle shot I took for some reason. I have no idea why I do the things I do.

The red from the Fashion Queen Collection also caught my attention despite it not being my favorite color.

The red one is pretty pink but I still loved the vibrant juicy color. It is called Ruby Queen.

I had done a few gel manis as well to help my nails grow a bit. I figured the protection of the gel mani would help keep them going.

For this gel mani I used Gelish Race you to the Bottom.

My nails were pretty damaged so the gel manis didn't wear quite as good as I would have liked. I hate when one or two nails ruin it for the whole mani!

This mani was the one that I could not remember at all. I finally remembered that the base color was one of the Fall Limited Edition Wet N Wild Megalast Matte polishes but I still am not positive what the glitter accent is.

The Wet N Wild is called Distressed to Impress. I love the color of this one oh so much! I believe the glitter is a Sinful Colors glitter but I am not 100% positive on that one. 

That's all for now :)