Thursday, October 27, 2011

Gold and Black Glitter Tips + Cross

I, admittedly a little tipsy, decided last night at 2 am, I was going to drill out my blue green glitter tips off my left hand and replace them with any color combo of my twin bro's picking. He was staying over at our place and was watching TV as I did my nails. He said black and gold so I used my new black hexagons on top of an old acrylic mix from last year that was Martha Stewart's Copper fine glitter and clear acrylic. I dumped a bunch of black hexs into the mix and applied it to my tips.

After shaping and buffing, I applied the black hexs to my index finger in the form of a cross. The center is a small silver rhinestones, with larger black rhinestones on the edges of the lines. I really like this and will probably try again is different colors later on.

 You can see my  thumb here without topcoat because I accidentally forgot my thumb, but thought I'd take a pic anyways for educational purposes. This is what it looks like buffed and before top coat. It looks a little cloudy.
Here's the interesting part of this post: One day, while looking in my black star cut out pot, I discovered a cut out heart. I dumped it out onto a piece of paper and rifled through it. I found about 30 cut out hearts with almost as many center cuts in there! It was enough for my to throw into its own empty container and save for  a rainy day. :) Bonus glitter!

Red and Black Bunny Set - RIGHT Hand

Yay! I finally got to do a set of bunny nails!! I decided it was time to do my right hand over because they were empty for a few weeks! And I'm so glad I did because they turned out pretty snazzy for applying with my left (non-dominant) hand!!

On my middle finger, I put a bunch of 1.5 mm red rhinestones on because my black stars were not encased deep enough in clear acrylic and when I was filing my nails, I shaved off half of the large cutout star :-/

Here's all the stuff I used in this set ^^

My glitter mix was clear acrylic, red hexagons, silver tinsel glitter by Martha Steward in Sterling, and black fine glitter also by Martha Stewart in Onyx.

(My NYE 2010/11 nails were this mix minus red hexagons.)

Aaaand here's my bunny heads and stars in the cap waiting to be placed on my nail. :)

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Nail Mail Haul + Reviews

So this is my most recent and final nail art haul from www.banggood.com . They're located out of China, and like I said in my last nail haul from them, you're getting the same stuff you get off Amazon but for dirt cheap + no shipping. This 12 color hexagon set on Amazon is trying to sell for $17!! I got it for $3. 

The tiny jars ha twist on lids, as with most glitter pots, and there was only a small about of spillage. I wouldn't even call it spillage, it was just a few hexagons stuck to the larger container. I swept them off with a paper towel onto my glitter laden carpet and that was that. They are about 1mm (sorry I didn't have my ruler out to show you) and they are small enough to stick on to your nail with top coat and not have it be sticking out off the nail in one corner, also small enough to throw into a glitter acrylic mix (pic in my next post). But large enough to tell they are hexagons. The only problem I have with these is that some of them are straight metallic (red, black, silver, copper, pink/purple) and some are irridecent (pink, blue, purple, green, yellow, and clear/white). The only reason why I don't like that is because I was REALLY hoping the green would be a straight metallic green so I could do red/green/silver acrylic mix for Xmas! But I still have time before Xmas to figure it out or find a new green hexagon. LOL.....



These are 10 colors of striping tape that I also ordered... kind of an impulse buy because they were I think $1.50 for all ten colors? I just thought since I was ordering stuff, and everything takes so long to get here that I might as well stock up on stuff.

I'm not quite sure how I will use the stripe tape, but here you can see that it is very thin, but you can still clearly see it's pretty metallic blue color. As I was just testing the size of the tape on my nail and wasn't planning on leaving it there, I must report that it came off very easily and remained sticky, so if you place it in the wrong spot, it will be easy to pull off and move over.

The tape was so thin and hard to tell which color was which
, I thought while I had everything out during my nail mail photo shoot, I labeled all of the striping tape bags so it would be easy to grab the correct on quickly while doing nails.

And last but not least, a new set of double ended dotting tools (whose handles match my acrylic art brush set from my last haul) a wheel of flat backed pearls, and some 1.5mm and 2mm rhinestones, I thought I swore off rhinestones forever but these were too cheaply priced to pass up- I think each wheel was about $2 for about 24000 stones/wheel. And to answer the question you always ask: how do they hold up under top coat? They don't! Never do that! Rhinestones always look best if they are the very very last thing to apply! Even Swarovski crystals- you don't want to top coat those either! They lose their tiny facets under a layer of topcoat and therefore, lose their sparkle.

Here are my flat black pearls^^. Love them, haven't really seen them being sold before. I got these because my girlfriend Chrissy loves everything azn and cutesy so these are prolly going to only be used on her nails- maybe I'll take the red and blacks though. 

Oh yeah and I also got a pair of tweezers for picking up tiny things like Fimo slices, glitter shapes, rhinestones, etc. They were 79 cents each and they work great!

I hope you guys check out www.banggood.com because they are cheap, good quality, and they have free shipping!! Only took about 2 1/2 weeks to get here, but hey, I didn't pay a penny for shipping :)

Monday, October 24, 2011

Can we talk about Snooki's nails?

Snooki posted these nails on Twitter today. 

I'm all about weird crazy nails, and I'm not against duck feet tips... but why are these nails so bumpy?? The shape is way off, I can't imagine that she went to a salon and paid to have them do this. Here's an outlined version so you can see exactly what I'm talking about: 


I've seen her nails shaped and filed neatly and uniform before but I just can't imagine that she walked happily out of the salon- she either was drunk when she got her nails done or maybe she did them herself, but I highly doubt it. ><

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Blue & Green Iridescent Glitter Star Acrylics (underside pic! yikes!)

 Ahhhh... finally my challenge is over and now it's time to get movin' on projects I've been neglecting; I have a few birthday presents to knock out and I have to start working on Christmas! (lol sorry to those who don't think farrrrr ahead, but the week before Halloween = it's Christmas time.)

I used a hot pink acrylic mixed with clear to make my nail bed color. I call it "Pinky Promise", I drilled out the area closest to the cuticle and only applied the pink there. It's really hard to see it in the pictures because of the lighting but the idea was to have it look REALLY pink at the very  base of the nail. See picture below:

For the tips, I drilled out the smile line and filed off the thick layer of clear acrylic I'd been painting on during this whole challenge (ew it was sooo stained and gross). Filled the tips with a mix of the Martha Stewart Iridescent Collection fine glitter and glitter stars, encased in clear, and shaped and buffed smooth. 

I'm going to eventually post this method for tip-fill and back-fill but most of my followers don't use acrylic (and if I'm wrong PLEASE correct me  Where the acrylic girls at!) 


This shot is just a "front"? view of my nails to show you how thick/thin they are with my actual nail + acrylic + glitter + stars + top acrylic + top coat. 

WARNING   WARNING   WARNING   WARNING   WARNING   WARNING
KINDA GROSS PICTURE COMING UP...

I'm only posting this shot because my twin bro and my boyfriend saw the undersides of my nails last night and were appalled to see that I'd had my acrylics on for SO LONG (Aug 30th - today) that the tips I originally glued on had grown out completely and all that was left was my natural nails underneath and you can see them EWWW! 

Does this make sense? Look at this picture:


Ew! those are my hella long and gross natural nails! They just have acrylic on top-- And the middle one is still yellowish from when I attempted water marbling during the challenge and it got green under my nail....

For the record I am removing these acrylics, cutting my natural nails, and reapplying a fresh set in about a week. But I had to show you my dirty little secret :(



Friday, October 21, 2011

30 Day Nail Challenge - Day 30 - Inspired by a Tutorial - Plants vs. Zombies


OK so I'm going to make this short: this wasn't a tutorial, but it WAS someone elses nail design. They had french tips in bright green with these crazy zombie heads on them. Oddrey, my lovely hand model is modeling these right now for me as I needed to paint my other challenge on my hand. After I already had painted them on, I realized their original picture was copyrightedand I couldn't show you guys what it looked like! Also I didn't even know these were Plants vs. Zombies zombies until I showed my boyfriend the picture! I thought they were just super cute zombies. :)

I'M DONE WITH THIS CHALLENGE FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

30 Day Nail Challenge - Day 29 - Inspired by the Supernatural - Dia De Los Muertos



Dia de los muertos! I have been waiting to do this all month... Still not happy with how it came out. I should have been layering top coat the whole time to smooth out all these details!!! Now in the middle of the nail where the skulls are, there is basically a pile of polish... Not a good look.

I painted each nail a different color, pink, yellow, orange, blue, and green. Added contrasting flowers to the corners of the nails for some spice. Then painted my white skull shapes on. I decorated the skulls with dots and flower shapes and when I couldn't fit any more deco on, I outlined with black and added my eyes. Wish  I had recieved my package today I could have added something cool into the eye holes... :(