Pantone Colors of 2013 and 2014 nails

Pin It

Happy new year! This year, my new year's manicure is pretty similar to last year, but I have a good reason for that . . . Apparently last year I was ahead of the times, wearing Lime Crime Lavendairy. Pantone has named Radiant Orchid their 2014 Color of the Year. Seeing as New Year's Eve is a last hurrah for 2013 and a welcome party for 2014, I decided to wear the colors of both years.

This is two coats of Julep Alice with Cult Nails Love at First Sight applied with Saran wrap to capture Radiant Orchid. I then applied a glitter gradient using my 2013 color Emerald, Orly Glam FX Mermaid Tale. And to add a little bit more to the party, I dabbed on OPI Which is Witch?

I very seldom wear Mermaid Tale but it is lovely and needs to make it into rotation more even though the year of emerald is over.

Well, as you can probably tell from my 10:30 posting, I don't have big party plans tonight, just the sparkle on my nails and babysitting nieces and nephews tonight, but the hubby and I plan to open a nice Proseco when we get home and ring in the new year! 

I hope you all have (or had, for my readers in earlier time zones) a spectacular new year. May this coming year be filled with many joys and beautiful nails.

I apologize for this, but it is necessary:  See you next year!

~Alexis

Born Pretty Store nail stickers and water decals

Pin It

So, the holiday season completely ran away on me. I only had the opportunity to wear three holiday nail designs and had trouble finding Christmasy inspiration for my nails. In come the 14 piece Luminous Glow in Dark Nail Art Stickers Delicate Christmas Ornaments Snowflakes Pattern from bornprettystore to the rescue! The nail stickers are adorable, with leaping reindeer and the sleigh loaded up with gifts is precious.

Cult Nails Grunge Chevrons

Pin It

Happy Friday. I meant to have this post up last week, but life got away from me. So, better late than never. On my nails now, you can see Cult Nails Grunge featured. I love it and pretty much anything Cult Nails is fantastic!

This creamy green-grey applied in two smooth, even coats. It was very slow to chip too even though I was pretty rough on my hands while wearing this manicure.

My pinky had one coat of Revlon ColorStay Amethyst which I covered with clear embossing powder. I then painted one coat of Sinful Colors I Love You over the embossing powder. I was very happy with how that turned out.

I am also wearing Grunge as a stamping polish over essie Mod Square. Chevrons! The chevron stamping plate is THE reason that I bought the bundle monster CYO plate set. The other plates are great too, but this made the set a "must have."

You have to be careful while scraping the chevron plate. The scraper likes to dip into the polish in the middle of the lines and scrape up too much polish. This was easily avoided by holding the scraper at a more acute angle.

Well, that's all for today. What do you think of these polishes? Have you tried to create your own textured polish? Any exciting Thanksgiving plans? 

My weekend will be spent painting my daughter's room a crazy pink and watching the new Doctor Who, which I am unashamedly super excited about seeing. I hope you have a great weekend too!

Alexis 

a-england Briarwood Skittlette

Pin It

Hello all. No challenges today, just a fabulous polish. This was my first true autumn manicure of the season.

Ursula manicure

Pin It

This will be very short. I actually forgot to write a quick post about this last of the October Disney villains inspired manicures.

Facilier inspired Disney manicure

Pin It

Let's face it, Doctor Facilier does not have many redeeming qualities, however he does wear a fabulous purple outfit in Disney's The Frog Princess. The different shades of purple, the top hat with the prominent purple feather, and his perfectly maintained moustache make his combo wonderful. However Doctor Facilier is only on the hunt for power. He wants to rule New Orleans and look fabulous doing it. Unlike Demona or Malificent, Facilier does not have any defensible reason for his evil doings

Demona inspired manicure

Pin It

Greetings! Once again, I want to share with you a Disney villain manicure from the Dark Side of Beauty's challenge. My husband loves the show Gargoyles and I watched a couple of episodes with him quite some time ago. Demona, like many villains, began her path to villainy through fear.  She felt hurt by the prejudice of humans against her people and she wanted to protect her people.

Maleficent inspired manicure

Pin It

Hello. I am back after the 31Day Challenge slump. This manicure turned out a lot more Halloween than I expected, but I guess that makes sense since it was inspired by a Disney villain.

31 Day Challenge: Honor Nails you Love

Pin It

As soon as I saw this fabulous animal art manicure from More Nail Polish, I knew exactly what I wanted to do for my "Honor Nails you Love" Manicure.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by a Tutorial

Pin It

This manicure was inspired by the gorgeous waterfall nails tutorial published by nailasaurus.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by the Supernatural

Pin It

For day 29 of the 31 day challenge, I wore Hulk inspired nails. He is pretty supernatural, right?

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by a Flag

Pin It

Sadly, this was a huge manicure fail. But oh, the inspiration for this flag manicure was great.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by Artwork

Pin It

I have to be really quick. My Grandma Janice loved Monet and I loved her dearly, so any time that I can do, or see something that reminds me of her it is a treasure.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by a Pattern

Pin It

Today's manicure was inspired by the pattern on the throw pillows from my sofa. While looking at the pillow I thought, "Yay! An excuse to wear Briarwood!" and there was nothing else to consider.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by Fashion

Pin It

Here are fashion inspired nails. This manicure worked a lot better in my mind, but was executed poorly. Inspired by a dress from Jason Wu's 2011 Fall/Winter line, I think if painted well, this could have been stunning. Instead, I spent lots of time trying to fix mistakes until it got too late for me to do anything else to fix the manicure. But sometimes that is the way these things go.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by a Book

Pin It

I had a hard time with today's manicure. There are books I love that would be really hard to make into a manicure. At the very last moment, I decided to do a Howl's Moving Castle manicure.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by a Movie

Pin It

The first time that I saw North by Northwest was a Friday night on PBS. I was getting ready to go out to a couple of bars, but I was swept up. No evening of bar hopping could be as good as this movie is. I have never regretted that choice.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by a Song

Pin It

Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
All your life,
You were only waiting for this moment to arrive.

31 Day Challenge: Inspired by a Color

Pin It

Yes, some nails are missing polish, but they were polished earlier today. I ran my very first half marathon today and it was POURING rain. My peel off basecoat just gave up and pieces of my polish apparently ended up littered near the Niagara River. My husband said yesterday's mani looked like water, so I ran by the river with watery nails.

31 Day Challenge: Water Marble

Pin It

So happy! My very first successful water marble. Every other time I tried, the polish wouldn't spread for the bullseye. I have no idea why it worked this time; I'm just glad it did.

31 Day Challenge: Galaxies

Pin It

I did a galaxy manicure about a year and a half ago. I loved it. It had a little TARDIS nail and everything. I vowed to do another one because it is so cute and not difficult at all. Well, today, thanks to the challenge, I am finally making good on that promise.

31 Day Challenge: Half Moons

Pin It

Hello again! Day 18 of the 31 Day Challenge is half moons. I've never done traditional half moons before, so I wanted to try a fairly traditional version.

31 Day Challenge: Glitter

Pin It

Much happier with today's manicure. I love sparkles and this polish is pure sparkle!

31 Day Challenge: Tribal Print

Pin It

Really quick, late post. Sorry. I finally had an idea that I was happy about for tribal print. I figured that I'd honor the Iroquois people since they are from where I live and I am the teeny-tiniest bit Mohawk myself. But this manicure, sadly, did not come out as I envisioned.

31 Day Challenge: Delicate Print

Pin It

Half way through the challenge and here I am with another manicure. This is the most often I have ever painted my nails and I even do the cheat of transforming a previous day's mani whenever I can. Is that frowned upon? If so, I apologize, but it is the only way I could to this while maintaining my sanity.

31 Day Challenge: Flowers

Pin It

Happy Saturday! Today I am wearing my most successful handpainted floral manicure.

31 Day Challenge: Animal

Pin It

Today's manicure is a pretty big departure from my normal style. It is more bright and bold and I am not big into animal prints . . .

31 Day Challenge: Stripes

Pin It

Today's manicure, I expected to be quick, but it took a bit longer than expected to create this look.

31 Day Challenge: Polka Dots

Pin It

I was going for a nice easy mani today.I did a very simple dotted manicure with two different sized dotting tools.

31 Day Challenge: Gradient

Pin It

I modified my rainbow manicure to create this gradient. As I said yesterday, I wanted to do something a little different than the traditional sponged gradient mani.

31 Day Challenge: Rainbow

Pin It

Rainbow nails today. I really like how the rhinestones pulled the whole manicure together.

31 Day Challenge: Metallic

Pin It

Happy Sunday all! Today I show you another transformed mani.  

31 Day Challenge: Black and White

Pin It

This has been my favorite challenge day so far. I have never worn a black and white mani before and I love this. There will definitely be more in my future.

31 Day Challenge: Violet

Pin It

Day 6 of the 31 Day Challenge, my favorite color! I took yesterday's blue manicure, added a coat of China Glaze Crackle Haute Metal, one coat of Nfu Oh JS27, and finally a coat of Nfu Oh 51. I love this flakie polish. It has flashes of indigo, copper, pink, and of course there is the underlying purple jelly. I wish that Haute Metal cracked a little better, but I still like the overall look of this manicure.

31 Day Challenge: Blue

Pin It

So, when I thought blue nails, I immediately wanted to try yo do a manicure with Gallifreyan writing. I am in Doctor Who withdrawal right now as I always am this time of year. Please be kind: I am not very good at nail art except for stamping. My hands are just not steady enough.

31 Day Challenge: Green

Pin It

So, today was my daughter's first day of first grade and I'm wearing her favorite color on my nails. I transformed yesterday's yellow mani to green dotting Zoya Logan and Sonia Kashuk Golden Ticket to create some green flowers on my nails. I then decorated the manicure further with some green striping tape. Hey, how do you keep striping tape from peeling? I've only used it to polish stripes before, but the tape started lifting pretty soon after I finished even with a topcoat.

31 Day Challenge: Yellow

Pin It

Yellow nails! I am not a big fan of yellow nail polish, but Revlon Buttercup is a really creamy, delicate color and I do like it a lot. Three coats of Buttercup and then did a freehand, diagonal line with Sonia Kashuk Golden Ticket and filled that in with two coats of polish. Using a dotting tool, I created little flowers of Sinful Colors Unicorn and Zoya Logan. On my pinkies I added two coats. of Golden Ticket and topped it with embossing powder and a final coat of Golden Ticket for a textured finish.

31 Day Challenge: Orange

Pin It

Here is my orange manicure. This manicure is a perfect example of the old saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

31 Day Challenge: Red

Pin It

I've wanted to do the 31 Day Nail Art Challenge for quite some time, so I'm finally going to try it. We'll see how it goes. I will probably need to just do manicure retouches for a couple of the days when I can, just because I expect that I'll be pretty busy.

Models Own Indian Ocean with Water Decals

Pin It

It has been a very long time. I am sorry and can make no guarantees that I will begin posting more regularly. Too busy to do a lot of the things I love in life. I have had these pictures hanging out for quite some time, so here is a quick description.

Cult Nails Fetish with FNUG Psychedelic

Pin It

Happy start of the weekend! Here I am again, showing you a very late manicure. I wore this about 3 weeks ago or more. It seemed very different from my usual manicures, but I really enjoyed it anyway.