China Glaze Innocence - French

It has been a really long time since I last wore a classic French manicure.  I've tried a bunch of different ways to get the perfect smile lines and I'm never fully satisfied with the outcome.  Here it is freehand because I was too lazy to use tape or guides... 

I need more practice but what I find works well freehand, is to start at the corners of the nail and lay the brush flat and just swipe at a downward angle towards the center of the nail and then go to the other side do the same thing and meet in the middle. 

I used Orly's Pointe Blanche french tip white, the brush is thinner than regular nail polish, which makes it a little easier to handle.  I also added Wet N Wild's Snow Globe glitter to the tips which covered up the unevenness of the white. 

The base color is China Glaze's Innocence, a soft pink creme, opaque in two coats.  I need the opaqueness because my nails are badly stained at the tips, from all the teals and greens I was wearing in March.  I topped everything off with some Seche Vite.

Below, is a bad impromptu picture from a week prior.  A different French mani I did, also freehand.  The tips came out better, but I used three coats of Orly's Rose Colored Glasses, which was not opaque enough to cover up my yellow stained nails.  You can see the yellow starting half way down the nail, especially on the ring finger.  The glitter is Nubar's White Polka Dot.  I didn't plan on posting it, so I didn't bother to take better photos...  Sorry for the blue-greenness my florescent lamp is causing.

Three coats of Orly's Rose Colored Glasses, one coat of Nubar's White Polka Dot.

Do you have any favorite polishes that you do your French manicures with?

BTW, you will see more of Nubar White Polka Dot.... I love, love, love this soft pearly white glitter, especially for work. 

Zoya Dita

Hey guys!

Quick post on this week's work mani.  This week is DRAGGING by.  For those of you still in school, stay as long as you can because working for a living SUCKS!!!

ANYWAYS, Zoya's Dita has been helping me cope.  A purple-based red creme, and super smooth formula, Zoya delivers excellence again.  This is two really easy coats. 

This mani took me 17 minutes to do, not including old nail polish removal.  I started with a clean canvas, one base coat, two color coats and one top coat, a standard mani.  Since this was so easy to apply my clean up process was really minimal.  17 minutes is a record for me. 

How long does it take you to do a standard manicure?  Do you have a record time?

Moisturizing Your Cuticles

Besides hand hygeine, if there's only one thing you want to do to take care of your hands and cuticles, is to at least moisturize them with lotion.  Take it one step further and pay special attention to your cuticles and the skin around your nails.  Cuticles serve an important function as a barrier against fungus and bacteria from entering your body.  So why not pamper them and care for them properly?

In addition, when cuticles and skin are allowed to dry out, the dry skin peels and looks unsightly.  If you have been reading my blog for a while you might know that I'm a reformed nail biter.  I use to pick, peel and pull at dry skin and hang nails.  This is a horrible habit!  I used to actually cause trauma to my fingers and sometimes they would bleed!  A nice entry point for bacteria.  I'm lucky I never got an infection. 

Point is, since I have been moisturizing, I don't suffer from hang nails anymore.  Peeling skin is at a minimum.  If there is a small peel, I will trim it with a cuticle trimmer.  So below are some cuticle cremes I use and love.

Let's start with Lush's Lemony Flutter. 

Lots of bloggers love this, and I can see why.  Lemony Flutter unlike cuticle oils, are really easy to use.  The product does not run all over your fingers, it is a soft balm.  Thus it is easy to control its application.  As you can guess Lemony Flutter smells of lemons; a lot.  I like the strong smell of lemons and find it kind of therapuetic.  I put this on before bed, it can be a little greasy, but when I wake up, my fingers look nice and healthy.  The first ingredient is lemon extract, followed by shea butter, then beeswax. 

I got my small pot (0.5 oz) off of eBay for about $5. The regular sized pots at Lush stores are around $12. This small pot is about 6 months old and there is still a lot of product left.

Burt's Bees Lemon Butter Cuticle Creme

Burt's Bees is a very close second, to me, when compared to Lush.  In contrast, Burt's Bees Creme is a hard balm, and I have to rub pretty hard to get some product out.  So now I just scrape the top with the back of my nail.  Half the size of a pea will cover five fingers for me.  It's not as greasy at Lush, and doesn't smell as strong.  It still works really well, if not the same.  The ingredients are a little different.  First on the ingredient list is sweet almond oil, second is beeswax, then lemon oil. 

I got mine at Ulta for $5.99, 0.6 oz.  I've seen these at Walgreens too.

L'Occitane en Provence's Cuticle and Nail Creme. 

I like L'Occitane because I don't have to stick my fingers in it and seems more clean to me.  I also like that I can squeeze a little bit of product on to each finger.  Aside from Burt's Bees and Lush, this is not at all greasy.  L'Occitane's Creme is thick, almost tacky.  I can feel a pull when I rub it in, but it absorbs really fast and smells kind of like baby powder.  I rub this on right before I take photos and there are no finger smudges on things after I touch them.  So I can put this one and go about my business right away.  I only need a teeny amount for each finger.

The first ingredient in L'Occitane's Creme is water, then shea butter, thirdly polyglyceryl-3 ricinoleate.  Sixth ingredient is apricot kernel oil which I see in some cuticle oils, like Essie.

This is the priciest of the three, $18 for 0.5 oz.  I splurged on it because I wanted to try it.  I do really like this creme a lot but with Lush and Burt's Bees around, I kind of hesitate on fully recommending L'Occitane because of the steep price. 

So there you have it, the three cremes I would recommend.  All are cruelty free with natural ingredients. 

Which cuticle creme/oil do you like?

Haute America Glitter Gradient

Hi guys!

Today I have a manicure to show you, that I wore recently, to a little soiree.....

Did I go a bit overboard with the glitter?  What do you think?

Half way through, I wondered what my nails would look like with the gradient in the reverse direction and without the excess glitter, so I tried this on my thumb.  Then I started to regret my first decision to pile it all on and I did not want to start over because I was running out of time.  Urgggh. 

What I used, in order.

 
Above are all the products I used.  I know, its a bit much, but I can explain. 

I love Bonder, but its a bit thin, and my nails are stained.  So I used Nail Defense, a protein nail strengthener underneath, to hopefully protect against staining and strengthen my nails.  I can't tell if it is doing anything or not. 

Two coats of Zoya's America, a beautiful bright red.

I used INM out the door before applying the glitters because it is fast drying and does not cause shrinkage.

ChG's Some Like is Haute is the main glitter I used at the tips.  Ulta's silver top coat for the area near the cuticles.  Then Nubar's black polka dot, I thought would add and extra dimension because they are nice dark black plain hex glitters, with tiny matching black glitter. 

Top off with Seche Vite, which does a great job of leveling out glitters - smoothing out the entire surface at the end.  Whew!

For instructions on how I do my glitter gradients click here, this post has more detail.
I'm going to try the combo that's on my thumb next time.   What do you think?

Tony Moly - GS09 - Shooting Star

I have a few posts lined up but I'm skipping them for now, because I'm totally excited to show you Shooting Star from Tony Moly!  Check it out!

Shooting Star is light lavender milky jelly with multicolored hex glitters.  There's some really tiny yellow glitters scattered in there too which I think adds some dimension to this polish.  Shooting star is sheer but the base color builds up nicely.  Three coats will probably give you full coverage but I liked the sheerness so two coats is fine for me. 

I thought the lavender would stand out more but it is actually really soft and blends in with my skin.  Next time I'm going to try to layer this over a solid pastel lavender polish for more contrast.

I thought about recreating this on my own, with Ulta's Pina yada yada, but that glitter has lots of orange hexs and not too many large green hex glitters.  Plus I don't have a sheer light purple polish, so I went ahead and bought Shooting Star.  I couldn't be happier, so pretty!

I thought I would show you a picture of the brush, its a little different than what I'm used to.  The brush is short, soft and blunt.  It actually works really well.  I skipped the clean up process entirely and the soft brush was really good at picking up lots of glitter and depositing them on the the nail. 

Tony Moly is a Korean cosmetics brand that's not readily available in the US. I found mine on eBay, for $7.95 with free shipping from Hong Kong.  It took 10 days to get here (east coast US), and the seller enclosed a free skin care sample, some tape/stickers, (I don't know what I'm going to do with them), and a really nice thank you note.  Don't you just love it when sellers add some nice extra touches? 

Lastly, I want to add, I just love the ultra modern bottle design, and pearly white cap.  The bottle I got is 10 ml. 

Have you tried this brand?

My Nail Polish Storage & Display

Hi guys,

I've been busy re-organizing and remodeling my home office.  I'm still busy sewing curtains!   I'm not near finished yet but I thought I would share my new nail polish storage solution with you.  First, you have to see the before in order to appreciate the after....

Before I stored my nail polish in this little wheel-y cart, which held at maximum, 120 bottles, 40 per basket, which was about the size of a shoe box.  The top basket held top coats, treatments, base coats and glitters.  The middle basket held neutrals and lights, and bottom basket held dark polishes.  This was an okay solution, but I did have trouble finding things and quickly out grew it.  In the very beginning when I didn't have very many polishes, other supplies were in here like files, remover, lotions etc, it was useful, plus I could wheel it around the house.

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Now, ......  TA - DAH!

I went ahead and bought a bookcase set from IKEA.  This is the "Billy" system.  The two bookcases on the sides are classic Billy, and the two shelves that the nail polishes are on are called "Benno".  The Billy system has a bunch of mix and match bookcases, corners cases, doors, cabinets and larger/deeper cases you can buy to suit your space, but I bought two billys and two bennos.  The Benno shelves are adjustable, CD/DVD shelves and are about 6 inches deep.  I spaced mine out equally.  There are 12 shelves per "book case", 24 cubby holes total. 

I currently have 194 bottles of nail polish and these two cases could easily hold more than double what I have.  I estimate at maximum, 480 bottles of nail polish.  I don't know if I'll ever get to that many bottles???
The shelves are 79 inches tall, 12 inches across, 24 inches for the both of them.  All the bookcases are bolted to the wall, as they are not stable, especially on carpet!  The four cases ran me just under $300. 

Overall

Top half, zoom in.

Bottom half, zoom in.

As you can see I organized them by color.  I started with reds, and I placed my top coats and base coats at arm level, so I can easily reach them.  My glitters sit above and below my top coats and base coats.  At the bottom are neutrals, sheers, blacks and whites. 

I love this new system.  I can see exactly what I have.  Everything has a home, its neat, organized and is actually nice to look at a rainbow of color. 

How many bottles do you have?  How do you store your polishes?

Now back to remodeling....

Zoya - Chloe - Layering experiment - Part 2

So here is part two.  Orly's Rock the World was another polish I thought would go well with orange-green mylar flakies.  Rock the World's base color is purple where as Space Cadet's is green, so I thought it might be better with Sinful Color's Fig. 

Zoya's Chloe

Orly's Rock the World - purple base with strong gold shimmer.

Overall.

Macro shot.

Instead of two coats of Chloe this is just one coat.  Topped off again with Seche Vite, and the base is still the same, Sinful Colors Fig.

Between the two I liked Chloe with Space Cadet better.  The flakies stood out more against the purple shimmer and more color shifting was apparent.  Rock the world was more monotone with gold being very prominent and the orange shifting was lessened.  Its not too terribly different from yesterday's post but small differences sometimes are noticeable. 

Click on yesterday's post to see part one, in case you missed it.

Are you going to try this?