Happy Elephant Nail Art

Hi everyone! How was your week? Honestly..I didn’t have a great one myself. Picked up some sort of virus so I had to deal with that while some other stuff went down in my personal life. So I was feeling pretty down a few days ago, and decided that I needed a pick me up in the form of some cheerful nail art. It took me a while to think of something happy to do, but I finally decided on elephants. Elephants are my favorite non pet animals, and baby elephants are even cuter..so I worked for a while and..

I ended up with an adorable design of a baby elephant making a rainbow. Is this not cute? I’m very pleased with it, and it definitely cheered me up.

The polishes I used were Butter London Petticoat for the base sky color, Sinful Colors Pistashe for the grass, an unnamed light grey shimmer for the Elephant, Sinful Shine Bottoms Up for the water he’s spraying, and the rainbow is made up of Revlon Cherries In The Snow, Deborah Lippmann Lara’s theme, Revlon Sunburst, Ruby Wing Green Peace, Rimmel London Blue My Mind, and Funky Fingers Riot. I also used black acrylic paint to do the Elephant’s outline and the ground.

So, what do you think? Does nail art make you happy?  

Textured American Flag Nail Art

Hi everyone! I hope all you summers have been going amazingly! As for mine, it’s been great. Last week I chaperoned a middle school mission trip, so that was fun, even though I broke a thumb nail working in an urban garden. It was worth the loss to help homeless people though (all the food we picked from the garden was donated to the local food bank), so i'm not complaining. Mission comes before nails. So anyway, as all of you Americans and probably even the rest of you know, yesterday was the Fourth of July. I did up doing nail art for it, but by the time I finished it the sun had gone down so I couldn’t take pictures until today! So here you go! My textured American Flag nails!

So to do this I first made the design in glossy polish, then went over it with textured. I used Sinful Colors Snow Me White, Revlon Cherries In The Snow, and Sinful Colors Endless Blue for that part, then went over the design with OPI Get Your Number (blue), Magazine Cover Mouse (red) and Solitaire (white). I think they turned out super adorable, although next year i’ll try to be more creative with the theme. I saw some amazing designs yesterday. Which reminds me, if you did a Fourth of July mani yesterday, please drop a link in the comments! I’d love to see what you came up with!

So, I hope you all had an amazing Fourth! Happy Painting!

Glitter Placement Strawberry Nail Art

Hi everyone! How is everyone's summer going? I just got back from a trip to Maryland myself. Anybody looking forward to any trips that you're going to take?
Anyway, I figured it's been a while since I've done any nail art, so that's what I have to show you today.
I present to you some glitter placement strawberry nails!

What I did is I painted my nails with a base of OPI Hey Baby, then painted Pop-arrazi Never Too Rich onto a piece of paper and picked up and placed the glitter with a toothpick to create the green top. Then I did the same thing with Elf Dream Maker for the seeds. I think this turned out really adorable. I love fruit nail art!

So, see you next time. Happy painting!

Funky Fingers Neon Shimmers!

Hi everyone! So, how’s your summer been going so far? I love summer. Classes are out, pools are open, and all the summer colors come out, particularly neons.

I have to confess something, I have a love hate relationship with neons. I love the bright colors, but often the formula’s are less than perfect. But I have found two that I love! Not only are they bright and pretty, they’re shimmers! That’s right, neon shimmers!

Behold the glory of these two Funky Fingers polishes.

All The Rave is a neon pink with orange shimmer. It dries to a matte finish, as you can see in the photos. Shown is two flawless coats. It was super easy to apply. I think it’s one of the best formulas out of any polish I own. It is that amazing.

Funky Fingers All The Rave Direct Sunlight

Funky Fingers All The Rave Indirect light

Glowstick is All The Rave’s yellow sister. It definitely lives up to its name. It’s an almost highlighter bright neon yellow with yellow shimmer. LOVE. This color is gorgeous and so bright! The formula wasn't quite as good as All The Rave, but still nice, especially for a neon yellow, which are known to often have formula issues. To get a completely smooth finish you need to do a few things. The first is to watch the brush, I found that I sometimes had to dip the brush into the bottle more than once to make sure I got enough to make a complete coat, if you don't do this it might go on patchy. Secondly make sure to let each coat dry before adding another. Thick coats have a tendency to bubble. Follow those instructions and it looks great! It can be opaque in three coats but I had to use four for a few nails. Note: In the shade picture it looks brighter than it is. It doesn't glow in the dark (unfortunately).

Funky Fingers Glowstick Sunlight

Funky Fingers Glowstick Shade

So, in conclusion, these are absolute must haves for anyone who loves bright colors. Also, good news for those who don’t have access to a Five Below store, these are available on ebay! Go here and here to buy them! I promise, you won’t be disappointed!

So, what are your favorite summer colors?

Butter London Cut Up Collection Swatches!

Hi everyone! I’m baaaaack! It’s been awhile since i’ve done a post here. The story is not a very interesting one. I broke a nail badly and had to wait until it grew back before I could swatch again.

But it finally grew back, and here I am, with shorter nails.

So awhile back I was at Marshalls, and I was excited to see this on the shelf.

Marshalls and TJMaxx sometimes sell Butter Londons, but I'd never seen sets there before. They were selling for $8, so I quickly snapped it and I'm going to show you the polishes included here today!

So without further ado, here's the Butter London Cut Up collection!

First up is Dust Up, a polish with micro gold glitter and small copper glitter in a clear base. This one is the most dense out of the collection, but I don't think it could be quite opaque on its own. I used two coats over LA Colors Delicate for the photos.

Next is Anorak, a polish with black and white hexes and silver and white shred glitters in a clear base. It looks pretty in the bottle and I thought it would be my favorite but then I put it on. The formula has some issues. It doesn’t go on smoothly, and you have to dab it on as you go. Sometimes even then its hard to get it to look even. The glitter clumps up or the base dries on the brush while you’re trying to dab it on and it smears. Yeah, i’m not terribly impressed considering that Butter London is a high end brand. This is what it looks like with patience. I used two-ish coats over a blue creme from Rue21.

Last is Titchy, rainbow glitter with blue micro glitter in a clear base. This one also looked amazing in the bottle but was a bit of a let down on the nail. It didn’t have any formula problems it just didn’t really wow me. Maybe it was the shade of blue I used for the base. I don’t know. It was a bit hard to photograph, but I did my best. I layered it over Maybelline Dayglow Teal for the pictures. I used two coats on my middle and ring fingers and one on my pinky and index to show you the glitter pay off.

Overall, this collection is okay. Not good, not bad, just okay. If I had paid full price for it I would’ve been disappointed, but fortunately I only paid $8. So considering the price I got it for, i’d still say it was a pretty good deal. I’ll have to experiment with other base colors to see what looks best with them (particularly Dust Up).  

Anyway, see you next time here on the blog! Happy Painting!

An Awesome Texture Polish From Finger Paints!

NOTE: This post was supposed to go live LAST Friday. Whoops. Well..I had it all ready..so heres what you would've seen.

Hi everyone! TGIF! I’m so ready for the weekend, and it’s going to be a nice one. I’m headed to Asheville with my family. Should be great! I’m looking forward to doing some shopping while we’re there!

Anyway, back to the polish. Today I have a random polish that I picked up a while back. It’s been sitting around untried for the longest time and yesterday I was like screw it this is getting reviewed right now. I loved it the second I put it in my swatch book, even though it surprised me.

The funny thing about buying polishes from clearance sections is that sometimes they aren’t what you expected. This is especially true with textures. With most of them you can’t tell from the bottle that they’re textures until you try them on(Except china glaze, who seems to label their textures). For a while it seemed like every time I bought a clearance fingerpaints polish from sallys it turned out to be a surprise texture, and that was true with this one. In the bottle it looks like a shimmery metallic, until it dries and hello texture!

This baby is called Rock Hard Lilac, and is from the Winter 2014 Rock My World collection. Now, usually i’m not a fan of metallic textures. I avoided the china glaze crinkled chromes like the plague when they came out. I prefer “sugary” textures, like the Nicole By OPI gumdrops collection. When I think “metallic” I think smooth and shiny. Textured chrome just didn’t sound right to me.

That being said, I found the exception. I adore this. Onto the review!

Application

FABULOUS. It was completely opaque in one coat. I used two because that's just what I do but one would’ve been just fine. It also went on smooth and all in all it was my dream formula. Why why can’t cremes be like this?

Look

This is really awesome looking. The texture is fine and it’s still shiny and the whole effect actually looks like kind of like metal. But I think the thing I like most about it is the way it feels. I can’t stop running my fingers over it. As someone with sensory sensitivities the feel of textures are hits and misses for me. This one is awesome.

Price

Don’t hate me for this, but I actually don’t remember how much I paid for this. I do know that you can still get it and others from the collection from destashes on storenvy and pinterest for pretty cheap.

Overall

I love this. It’s a completely unique texture, I haven’t seen anything else like it. Plus the formula is flawless and it’s just an all around awesome polish. If you like textures, than you should track this one down.

So, what do you think? Are you still into textures or are you ready to move onto other trends? Let me know your opinions, I’d love to hear from you!

Rainbow Drip Nail Art!

Hi everyone! *Singing in a loud borderline obnoxious voice* I’m baaaack! I apologize for being absent. In all seriousness..last week was not a good week for me. Some crap went down in my personal life, and I had a hard time finding motivation to write a blog post when I felt like I was about to fall apart. But now i’m back and staying positive. I even did some awesome colorful nail art for you all to see today!

Rainbow drips! The design itself isn’t exactly the most original thing ive ever done, but I really enjoyed doing it and I think it looks really cute! What I did was I painted my nails with a grey creme, did the outline of the tips in black with a nail art brush, then carefully painted above the line with white and covered that with rainbow stripes. The polishes I used were Nuance Black Dahlia, Sinful Colors Snow Me White, Revlon Cherries In The Snow(red), Deborah Lippmann Lara’s Theme(orange), Funky Fingers Alex’s Lemonade(yellow), Ruby Wing Green Peace, Sinful Colors Endless Blue, LA Girl Muse, OPI Hey Baby, and an unnamed LA Girl grey for the base color.

So, do you like it? I think it has an awesome artsy vibe to it! :)