PANZ Week 6 – Jelly!

Week 6 of the weekly Polish Addicts of New Zealand challenges – these are fun. 😀  This one is Jelly – and I thought I’d play with it, in the spirit of that fun 😀

This is mostly based around China Glaze Creative Fantasy, which I picked up in a semi-recent group Head2Toe order. It’s the most gorgeous royal purple jelly! I had two layers of that, then one layer of Nail Pattern Boldness Bitches Brew, then a final layer of Creative Fantasy on most of my nails, and on my accent nails I played with a design of layering painted images on the jelly layers – original manicure can be found here.

And, I didn’t much feel like flowers, so I tried fish. Kinda… sort of missed that one, I feel. I blobbed the fish on with Kleancolor White, and the middle and top layer I also added Ozotic 907 for fishy shimmer and a dot of Kleancolor Black for the eyes. I still think they look a bit like rockets. Or… something else.

Anyway, this was fun! All topped off with Misa BREAKneck.

“ABCD Goldfish?”

“MNO Goldfish.”

“SAR Goldfish, ICDBD I’s!”

Have a great day

Ami 🙂

 

Pretty Serious: Seasonal Sunset and Nail Pattern Boldness: Bitches Brew – Layering

Pretty Serious polishes recently had a sale, and I managed to snap two of their polishes up – finally! (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to the website and drooled over their polishes and makeup, then sheepishly left). But, yay! And this is the first one I tried, Seasonal Sunset.

I wore this to Danny Bhoy! He is always funny, and this show was no exception, laughed my way through the whole lot. Brilliant night out with my family – and plus, now I’ll always associate this polish with that night. Win!

Anyway, back to the polish. Two coats of Seasonal Sunset, it was opaque in one but the colour was richer in two. Lovely brush, gorgeous formula, the polish almost put itself where it wanted to be. Dry time was on the quick side of average, and it lasted a decent amount of time before chipping.

The colour  was stranger than I thought, and definitely unique to me. In the shade it looked quite an old fashioned rusty sort of warm brown, the shimmer was still there but didn’t glow in the shade; it added depth. It was very flattering.

And in the light it all caught fire and became a gorgeous multi-hued copper orange and gold, whooo boy.

Plus, it has to be said, I LOVE the boxes. They’ll live, on their shelves, in their boxes. So cute 😀

And for extra glitter, I added accents of Nail Pattern Boldness Bitches Brew, and topped it all off with fast dry top coat (Misa BREAKneck)

Tips on some fingers, and one layer all over my ring finger nail. This was a gorgeous combination, and I’m itching to wear it again.

Have a great day

Ami 🙂

OPI Don’t Touch My Tutu: Swatches, Layering, and many, many photos!

My family got me a nail polish voucher from Candy Girl for my birthday, and I spent it so fast there were scorch marks across the computer screen 😀 One of the polishes I snagged was OPI Don’t Touch My Tutu, a sheer jelly from the New York Ballet Collection, and one which I have seen on my bloggers nails in many combinations. I love a versatile polish.

This is two coats of Don’t Touch My Tutu. For those of you who love a glorious, glossy, clean nude nail look, this right here might be a good option. Even I liked it! (side note: you see my wonky nail line on my ring finger? I was feeding a horse some grass and it bit my finger. And held on. And tried to drag me over the fence, because I was screaming and it got scared, but regardless, HALFWAY OVER THE FENCE. Luckily, it eventually let me go, but the skin under my nail fell out and never really regrew. Motto: Horses Bite Hard: When Feeding Them Keep Your Hands Flat. And plus, if they bite you, try not to scream. It’s ok, I was about 11, I’ve mostly gotten over it hehehe)

So shiny, so bright. So… needed to be layered. I went with two lovely coats of Lush Lacquer Seas The Moment. Mmmm love this, it just looks really fresh!

Sun..

And then one more coat of Don’t Touch My Tutu. It softened it all down, sort of water colourish.

Sun

More layering ideas! This one inspired by a combo of DTMT and Crows Toes Maxxed Out (which I desperately want), from (here). But, as I don’t have Maxxed Out, I used a franken of mine on the tips.

Sun.

The trouble is, I think that the yellow base to this franken makes me look like I have the worlds most sparkly snot on my fingers. Sorry for any mental image distress that may have caused, but it was back to the drawing board for me!

Now I decided to layer two dabbed coats of Nail Pattern Boldness’s Bitches Brew over two coats of DTMT.

Sun. I quite liked this, but it just looked too patchy for me to be totally happy with it.

So, one coat of DTMT. The great thing about DTMT is that even though the first coat can be a bit streaky, for some reason it doesn’t look that streaky layered over another polish.

I did NOT expect the gold to look yellow. My mother bought some lycra in the 90’s, which she made all sorts of things out of. This combo REALLY reminds me of that material 😀

Macro. Mmm 90’s aerobic wear. 😀

Sooo…. back AGAIN to the Maxxed Out concept – this time I layered a few different polishes to try and achieve a similar effect. Two  coats of DTMT again, followed by one coat of OPI Servin’ Up Sparkle, and one coat of Nabi Gold Big Ball. Topped off with China Glaze Fast Forward.

Well, I called this a moderate success.

I left it on for more than five minutes, anyway!

Have a great day

Ami 🙂

OPI Stay the Night – Liquid Sands – Swatches

My first OPI polish in a very long time, this is Stay the Night from the new Mariah Carey collaboration. Please don’t hold that against me. It looked a very pretty polish!

And, it is. These photos show three coats, and I found it needed all three: it looked good at two coats, but was a little patchy. I didn’t use top coat, and this is one of the new Liquid Sand  – aka gritty – textured polishes. One thing, in most swatches I thought it was black with pink sparks. It’s not, it’s a very dark brown instead, and it looks AMAZING.

I did think this was going to be very gritty, but it feels more like fine grit sandpaper that has been worn down a bit, soft little bumps of grit, I’ve had worse grit from normal glitter polishes (China Glaze, some of yours, for example!), and this was really tactile, I kept patting my nails, but in a good way. It certainly doesn’t catch on sheets, hair or clothes, and if you were the sort of person who’d ever pick their nose *cough* then this will not interfere with your habit 😉

I adored this polish. It was a lot nicer on than I thought it would be, the pink glitz added something special to the vampy brown, and it went really well with my tanned (olive) skin tone. I also think it will look great on winter hands, too!

The dry time was actually quite slow (it goes on shiny but lumps up as it dries), which was moderately disappointing, but once dried it wore like iron.

Whole hand photo…

On the whole, I’d call this a sexy polish. A bit different, but not in-your-face, and very easy to apply and wear.

Then, because I thought I should, I added top coat. But only as an accent nail. I tell you, this was amazing straight out of the bottle!

And… it was still pretty. But nothing special. To make sure it was smooth I used a coat of Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food, then China Glaze Fast Forward top coat. It was super smooth. And, a wee bit boring compared to it all sandy. Nice to have the versatility though!

Have a wonderful day

Ami 🙂

 

Orly Rock-It & Nail Pattern Boldness Bitches Brew – Swatches

This was a quick fun mani – that I ended up not being able to take my eyes off!

This is Orly Rock-It – a really gorgeous pinkish red, filled with glass flecks which shift from red to yellow, giving an overall orange glass fleck effect. I found it did need three coats to reach full opacity and colour depth, but Orly have some of the nicest handles and brushes around, and generally great formulas, so putting on three coats was a breeze.

On my accent nail I added twolayers of Nail Pattern Boldness Bitches Brew, a Halloween themed polish with orange, purple, blue and yellow, and tiny green shiny glitters in a clear base. The glitters spread out evenly on the nail and although it looks like some may be a bit curly in the bottle, all the ones on my nail were flat.

and a candle made by my mother.. blue cat! 😀

I loved this combo far more than I thought I would. And I thought I’d like it. To me, it looked like I had glowing velvet nails and one of them had crushed gemstones on it… just stunning. One coat of Misa BREAKneck and they were smooth and shiny, and dry time was pretty quick indeed.

Rock-it has a duochrome in the bottle that was much more subtle on the nail, from a pinkish red to an orangeish red, which should have been disappointing but the colour is so pretty that I couldn’t care less if it shifted 😀 I’m going to try this again later, in the sunshine, and try and get better photos of this gorgeous polish.

Have a lovely day

Ami 🙂

A week of holiday nubs – nail diary :)

My nubby diary for the week… sorry about the mess/bad lighting in a few of the earlier photos, I found it much harder to clean up than normal (less nails, same amount of polish on brush = massive flooding). But, here they are!

A franken of mine – green jelly with multicoloured green glitters. I had it at two coats, then jelly sandwiched it with Darling Diva Polish Vetiver in the middle. Gorgeous green glitter.

sorry for the blurry, and bad lighting! But this is more a diary than a swatch..

Darling Diva Polish A Christmas Story, three coats plus top coat.

oooh messy.

Very, very sparkly and gorgeous in the sunlight! Don’t worry, I’ll re-swatch these properly when my nails grow back in.

Darling Diva Polish Holiday Lights is the glitter topper here, red, green and gold CIRCLE glitters. Squee!  The silver holo is Color Club Harp On It (two coats), and the accent nail is Darling Diva Polish A Christmas Story – three coats. All covered with Misa BREAKneck top coat.

And here is Darling Diva Polish A Christmas Story, layered this time over China Glaze Thunderbird. I definitely preferred this layered, it made it redder. The combo of glitters in A Christmas Story ended up having a brownish tint without the layering – but this was easy, and gorgeous. 2 coats Thunderbird, 2 easy coats A Christmas Story. My accent nail is 2 coats China Glaze Jolly Holly with one coat of D.D.P Holiday Lights. All are topped with Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food and L’Oreal Quick Dry nail polish.

Full hand shot.. look at all my half-grown baby chicks! Well, ok, a very small portion of my baby chicks 😀

Then, this is the exact same mani but I wanted MOAR – so I added a layer of Darling Diva Polish Snowball to my middle finger. Those snowflake glitters are gorgeous – and a little too big for my curvy nails. I had to fish them out with a needle, but there’s an abundance of iridescent and white glitters, this is a super awesome topper. Finished with N.P.B Glitter Food and Misa BREAKneck

.

Another photo of the three different polishes!

And finally, one coat of D.D.P Snowball over two coats of Revlon Royal. I might try and wear this all winter (o.k, probably not, I love changing my polishes too much. Still, the thought it there!). Love…

Another  angle, more sunlight, and check out that little munted snowflake. See? They ARE unique! 😀

And Micro Macro…It was interesting that Snowball kind of lifted some of the blue from Royal onto the snowflake. It was dry… maybe a top coat in between next time, huh. Royal is crazy pigmented.

If you’d like, come ‘like’ me on Facebook! (button is just over on the right, at the top – click it, you know you want to!) I put all my posts there, plus extras. O.k, usually funnies, but who doesn’t need a laugh every now and then, right? Be nice to see you, not just a stat! 😀

Have a great day

Ami

Rocking The Holiday Nubs: aka Festive Nail Polish for Super Short Nails

Yesterday, whilst in the middle of a Swatch-a-Thon, my nails gave up. I had broken my pinky nail down to the quick, and fixed it with nail glue and teabag paper. Then my index nail broke – I just glued that together. So, painting and swatching was loads of fun: every time I removed a polish the teabag had to be buffed flat again.. and I was GRUMPY. I’m waiting on some polishes to review, AND I have been really looking forward to a whole month of glitzy, blingy, holiday nails. And I couldn’t keep them fixed, not really.

So, I chopped them all off, and pouted a bit. Then thought, how ridiculous! If I want glitzy nails, I’m going to have them, and more to the point, I’ll show them! Instead of making it seem like only those with longer nails can have polish or pretty colours, I’ll rock my nubs instead :D. Here is my first super short nail post, and this is for those people with super short nails, who want to have the holiday nails without necessarily drawing TOO much attention to the length of their nails.

These are my nails. I’m glad I could trim them before they tore the whole way through. I put one coat of Revlon Catty over them. Nice coverage in one coat, and good fast dry time, Revlon. But why you go test on animals, Revlon! WHY! I got this in a sale. My ethics voice was drowned by my greedy voice. Stink. If you are super self conscious of your nails, you could just put another coat on of this, and call it done. It has a lovely little shimmer to it, and is a festive nude shade. The nail polish should also help protect your nails so they grow faster (SCIENCE: they won’t grow faster, they just don’t break as much. hehehe sorry).

But, glitzy nude wasn’t what I wanted, and I’m tired of feeling like I should be ashamed of my hands if the nails are stubbins. So, here is one coat of a franken I made – I really wanted Crows Toes Maxxed Out, but need to stop the buying of polish. This is a conglomerate mix of loads of different silver, gold, and holo glitter polishes. It works for me. 😀

Added to this was one coat of Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food, and one coat L’Oreal Quick Dry (same sale, same shame). Thanks to the Glitter Food this dried smooth as well as fast.

This is lovely and blingy, but still in a good tone range for my skin: I think silver would stand out more, but I wanted a bit of a disguise. The mid sized hexes piled up help give an optical illusion that my nails are a bit longer than they are too. And best of all, it’s FESTIVE!!

So, I think my middle two fingernails look fine with this polish at this length. My index nail is scraping by, and my poor pinky is horrible. But it’s horrible with BLING on it, so that makes it allll ok.

Micro Macro!! 😀

I have quite a stash of previous manis to post, so you probably won’t see my nails this short again. Rest assured I’ll be painting them all holiday-like though, so if you do want to see more super short nails all dressed up, just leave a comment.

Have a great day, regardless of mishaps!
Ami

Gritter Rescue with Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food. Features Indie Polishes :D

Remember how I mentioned that Ador Beauty’s The Universe polish was a gritty glitter? Or gritter, as I want to call it? This is what The Universe looked like the next day, after it had merrily eaten my Kleancolor top coat:

The Universe… pretty gritty glitter!

And lets be fair to this gorgeous polish; it’s not the only glitter polish I own like that. In fact, so many China Glaze glitters are gritty that Sister V calls them China Graze. heh heh heh. But, fear glitter no more! Introducing, again, Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food. In the bottle it looks like milky gel. But what a difference this makes to a gritter polish!

Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food. I love the brand name, too. Makes me grin 😀

Here I have one coat (it’s thick, but goes on very smoothly) over The Universe, on my ring fingernail (one the left!). The little fingernail is as it was… can you see the difference in texture? Click the pic to see better!

Glitter Food dries satiny – not matte, but not shiny. You do need to put a top coat over this for shine. But, super bonus, it dries super fast. Then, when you add the shiny topcoat, which I did to all nails, its super pretty, and they all come alive again, but the one with the Glitter Food is glass smooth, and the others are not. Smoother, yes. Slippery smooth, no.

And to test it Glitter Food’s other use (except I just read you can use it as a base for Holographic polishes! I’m so DOING that soon) – which is to add to glitter polishes with sunken glitter, and resurrect it. I chose Pretty & Polished Hearts & Daggers, added a few drops, and it did work!
Before:

Hearts & Daggers – such a pretty polish!

After – 30 mins after! Much easier to shake up, and I didn’t even use as much Glitter Food as recommended (because I’m stingy, ok?!)

Then, I used Hearts & Daggers on top of The Universe.. one coat is all I needed because I could GET the glitter out now! YAY!

LOOK at THAT! 😀

These photos show one coat of Glitter Food and finished with one coat of Kleancolor Fast Dry. This did dry fast (thanks, Glitter Food!) and was as smooth as a very, very smooth thing.

LOVE. LOVE LOVE LOVE. I can see myself buying backups of this polish, it’s blimmin incredible. And if it DOES work as a base for the amazing but evil super-holos, I can see me buying backups like RIGHT NOW.

Macro to show it off.. I love that it really shows why Pretty & Polished called it Hearts & Daggers 😀

Have an exceptional day!
Ami

Nail Mail Squeee’s…

I want to write Squeeze. But I wont. Today was an exceptional mail day: I got a brand new pair of grey ankle boots with heels, that I can’t walk in but look good in. I almost never wear heels. Black sneakers are my go-to ‘classy’ shoe. I like being able to run, or fight, and be comfortable. But lately… lately I kinda crave some looking nice stuff, too.
And… these.

LOOOK! From Nail Pattern Boldness…. four polishes! I find it so hard to resist a combination of clever names and awesome polishes, and succumbed hard for these.

There’s Bitches Brew, Hades, and Seppuku (with a frisbee) – the name which sold me on the rest. I mean, with a frisbee? That’s got to be VERY hard to do. Still chortling 😀

AND… glitter food topcoat! I’m going to do a post on this very soon, because as far as I’m concerned this stuff is the stuff of legends. Yes. I want a vat of it… right now 😀

Have a great day, full of fun things!
Ami