Nail Art: #31DC2014 Day 2 Orange

Slowly but surely I will get caught up in the #31DC2014 challenge. In the meantime, I will be posting more than one post a day to do so, hopefully that makes you more happy than anything else! Day 2's prompt is the color Orange. I wanted to use the color Beach Baby from Northern Star Polish which I also reviewed for her a while back (Summer Collection Review). It is a really interesting tangerine type of orange rather than a typical orange with some micro shimmers in it. I combined a couple of negative spaces and white stripes all over to create this sort of skittle mani. I used acrylic paint for the white.  

Neon Week Nail Art: Neon Gradient and Rhinestones

Can you believe it is the last day of Neon Week already? It went by so fast for me. I enjoyed creating every neon look this past week and I think I learned a bit as well. Today I have a simple gradient with Color Club Flamingo, Wham! Pow! and Mrs. Robinson. I topped the gradient with China Glaze Fairy Dust and added some rhinestones on my thumb, middle and ring fingers. 

Neon Week Nail Art (and TUTORIAL): Monochrome Arrows

Day 2 of Neon Week! If you missed day one, you can see my Neon Mist post here. So, today I have one of those designs that started as one thing in my head, but evolved into something else when I actually sat down to do it. I think it was a good thing in this case. I started with a base color of Orly Ablaze which is a bright sparkly orange and part of their summer Baked Collection. After that I painted a thick stripe down the middle of Color Club Warhol from their old Poptastic Collection. I think they re-launched the Poptastic Collection recently. Lastly, I used a striping brush to paint a boarder line on either side of the pink stripe and then I decided to add some chevrons (arrows). I used China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy for the stripes and chevrons and topped it all off with Glisten & Glow's topcoat HK Girl. I am really excited, because I actually did a little pictorial tutorial for you! I added it at the end of my post.

Swatch and Review of JulieG 2014 Summer Collection

I have to say, JulieG hasn't been a brand I've been really excited to try out. I see it at Rite Aid all the time, but I am usually scouring for other brands. I never thought to look at JulieG until Young Wild and Polished professed her undying love for the polish on her youtube channel. You should check her out, she is really funny and gives really honest (brutally honest) reviews of makeup, skin and nail products on her channel. I am constantly checking to see if she has uploaded a new video yet. Anyway, after she talked about JulieG non-stop, I figured I should try it out. It is really affordable at $3.99 a bottle and available at Rite Aid, like I said. I saw a deal on Groupon for the whole Summer Collection for $12, so I figured this was my chance to see if I like it. I received 6 polishes and I have swatches of all of them for you today!

Swatch and Review of Northern Star Summer Collection and Cuticle Oil

Press Sample

Introducing (part of) the Summer Collection from Northern Star polish! Kristin sent me four of her very soon to be released Summer Collection along with one of her scented cuticle oils. I received Appletini! I have to say the first thing I noticed was that she packaged all of these products really well, each polish came in its own box, was well wrapped in bubble wrap and tissue paper, if you order, you will see. 

Nail Art: Richter Scale Nails with Orly Baked Collection

Today I have three of the six colors from the latest Orly Summer 2014 Baked Collection. I have Ablaze, Hot Tropics and Saturated. I wanted to share swatches first, but since I got these lovelies I have had this design in my head and had to do it first! I have created what I like to call Richter Scale nails. I think it looks like the zig zag line that measures earthquakes, maybe I have my terminology wrong, but Richter scale is what came to mind. I painted half of my nail with Ablaze and half with Hot Tropics. I didn't use tape or anything because the center line is covered with Saturated. I used a striping brush to just lightly brush the color with tons of little lines. 

Nail Art: Zoya Tickled and Bubbly Gradient Tape Mani

Press Sample

Oh Zoya, how do you make such fantastic polish? I recently reviewed the Tickled & Bubbly Collections on my blog and was so inspired by the colors I had to do some nail art right away. For this look I started with a base of Jesy from the Bubbly Collection and created a gradient over that with Rocha, Rooney and Kitridge. I used striping tape to create my design. 

Swatch and Review of Zoya Bubbly Summer Collection

Press Sample

Today I have the second part of the Zoya Summer 2014 collection, called the Bubbly Collection. If you missed the Tickled Collection you can view that post here. Unlike The Zoya Tickled Collection, Bubbly consists of jelly polishes packed full of glitter! There are six in all.

Swatch and Review of Zoya Tickled Summer Collection

Press Sample

I have something very special to share today. I am so excited to share that Zoya has accepted me as a media partner and sent me the new Ticked and Bubbly Collection for Summer 2014! I literally squealed when I found out! I am a huge Zoya fan, I have not yet met a Zoya I didn't like and now I get to swatch for them! I am just blown away. Zoya is a great company committed to keeping harsh chemicals out of their polish. They sent me these polishes in exchange for my honest review. Now on to the polish, there are 12 colors in all and I have broken the swatches into two posts. Up today, I have the entire Tickled Collection. The Tickled collection includes all of the bright creme polishes. The Bubbly Collection includes all of the bright glitterly polishes. This may be my longest post to date, but it is worth it! There are some great colors in this collection.

Nail Art: Glitter Placement

Today I have sort of a two part post. One is to review China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy and the other is to share my first ever glitter placement mani! I had a hankering for neon polish a week ago and picked up several neons that I have been wanting for a while. Flip Flop Fantasy is a great one that everyone seems to have. I would describe it as a peachy neon, but I have seen other versions as more of a coral color. I think there may be two versions out there. For the glitter placement I used some loose glitter I picked up at Fred Meyer from Essence.

Swatch and Review of OPI: Where Did Suzi's Man-Go?

OPI recently released it's Brazil Spring Collection, it is full of vibrant gorgeous colors. The whole collection is very reminiscent of Brazil! I've never been but this collection is what I imagine it to be. Today I have an orange from the collection: Where Did Suzi's Man-Go? It is a lighter orange creme that isn't too bright but not a pastel either. I used two coats for the photos below.

Nail Art: Catching Fire Nails

I feel terrible, I have been neglecting my nail community here. It has been five days since I last posted, can you believe it? Work has been crazy lately, which makes it difficult to publish blog posts. I promise, today's post will be worth the wait. For #nailartnov the theme for Day 22 was "Catching Fire" for the premier of the movie Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I read all the books after I saw the first movie, so, needless to say I was really excited for this challenge. Some of you know, last year China Glaze came out with a Hunger Games collection, two of the polishes I used here to create my Catching Fire look. I used Smoke and Ashes as the base color and the top gradient color. I used Riveting as the orange gradient color. I sponged on the two colors over a layer of Smoke and Ashes and it worked really well. I also finally got my order of nail studs, so I was able to use those for this design!

What do you think? I wore these for the movie, which felt really special. I loved the design, I did notice that the polish chipped really quickly, which was not cool. Maybe I just had too many layers. For those of you who have the China Glaze Hunger Games nail polish and the new Cover Girl Hunger Games nail polish, which collection do you prefer? Do you know of a difference in quality? I love the HG collection from China Glaze. I loved what they did with their collection, I was a little ticked that they weren't doing the polish this go around and haven't picked up any Cover Girl because I was protesting. Let me know if you like it though, I am always a fan of good polish finds! Hope you like this design, I will try not to neglect the blog so much anymore! I am planning a tutorial soon, so stay tuned!

Nail Art: Fox for Nail Art November

Have you seen this YouTube sensation- Ylvis "The Fox" or "What Does the Fox Say?"? I hadn't seen the video until today, you need to check it out! This month I am again participating in a nail art challenge. Day 4 was Fox and everyone had been tagging their fox nails with what does the fox say? I had to google it and now it has been stuck in my head all day! On to the nail art, I wasn't really sure of how to paint a fox, but I saw a few tutorials and this is what I came up with:

At first, I did a fox on all my nails, but I didn't like the way that looked. I swapped that out for the large polka dots and I like this a lot better. I used a larger dotting tool and a striping brush for this design. I painted a base of white (Sally Hansen- White On) and for the fox, painted the lower half of my nail orange (Essie- Meet Me at Sunset). I added the ears with a fine brush, dotted the eyes and nose and added the whiskers with the striping brush. What do you think? I think it is cutesy! I've done two cutesy designs recently and I think I need to move to edgy to balance it out now. Do you participate in the monthly nail art challenges? I do as much as I can, I missed "movember" on the first but I plan on doing the next one for the 7th, which is maroon. If you participate I'd love to see your designs on Instagram (@HandtasticIntentions). Thanks for reading!

Swatch and Review of OPI: A Woman's Prague-ative

I have a swatch and review to share with you along with a little nail art at the end, just in time for Halloween! This is actually a swatch and review of a polish I have worn before, I added it to my toes for summer and now it is on my nails for fall! This is OPI A Woman's Prague-ative from the Euro Centrale Collection from Spring 2013. I love the whole collection, I may have most of it now. This one somehow was really special to me because I lived in Prague for a time. This color doesn't remind me of the city at all, but it is gorgeous nonetheless. Check it out:

It reminds me of a somewhat burnt orange, but still looks bright. It is shimmery and it applies pretty well. I have three coats here and I probably could have done a fourth. I would say that this is the biggest drawback to this polish. I really feel like if you need four coats to cover well, you may as well get a different polish. I think this color is really unique though. One color reminds me of this, and that is butter LONDON's Sunbaker, but that is much more rusty. I decided to make it a little more seasonal:

I hate spiders, I don't know why I did this, but I kind of love it for Halloween. I saw a similar design on Facebook somewhere, so I thought I would recreate it. It isn't super spooky but that's how I like it! Hope you enjoy it!

Nail art: Orange Leopard and Chevron Nails

Hello all! I've been thinking about animal print and particularly leopard print a lot lately. I don't usually wear animal print, but I like it. Sometimes I think it is a bit too wild, but I like mixing it with solids. That's kind of what I did here. I decided to create an unnatural leopard print coloring of orange and red and added a deeper red overlay to kind of balance out the print. I did this for #nailartsep on instagram.

I used only the above polishes in this mani from left to right: Soul Mate, Cherry Bomb, Mind's Eye (All Orly). I started with a base of Cherry Bomb and added irregular spots of Soul Mate. Then I added somewhat irregular C shaped around the spots and added some random dots using Mind's Eye. After I let it all dry, I cut up some tape into smaller angled triangles and painted Mind's Eye over that to create the sharpened chevron tip. This manicure made me want to perfect my leopard print painting skills, so look out for a more natural leopard spot on the blog soon! Thanks for reading!

Nail Art: Orange Camo

On Instagram, I am participating in a monthly nail art challenge which has a new design theme every few days. If you are on Instagram, the host of the challenge is @Californails and you can see all the designs and themes by searching #nailartsep. For September 1st, the challenge design in camo, which makes sense since hunting season is gearing up. I don't hunt and didn't want to do all greens, so I decided to get a little creative. I picked orange since it is still related to hunting.. I don't know how to paint camo nails, so I kind of guessed at it along the way.

Above are all the oranges I used. Left to right: Orly: Cherry Bomb, Color Club: In Theory, Nailtini: Mai Tai, Color Club: Wham! Pow!, Sally Hansen: Sun Kissed. I started with Sun Kissed as my base color and added blobs of other oranges. That's really all I did, add blobs of color and layered the colors in abstract shapes. There was no real pattern to it, which made it pretty easy and fun. I got pretty creative with it. I don't think it looks exactly like camo, but it is still fun! What do you think? I think if I tried this again, I would add a darker color in the mix as well, and maybe try pink or blue. Thanks for reading!

Swatch and Review of Sinful Colors: Skylark and Song of Summer

Recently I picked up some nail polish at Walgreens on sale. I got 1,000 points for buying two Sinful Colors polishes and they cost me $0.99 each! There was a new display on the end cap, and I found two lovely shades. Skylark is a bright orange yellow leaning color and Song of Summer is a light mid-tone green. I can't really tell if Song of Summer leans more yellow or blue. Here is Skylark:

 Outdoors

 Outdoors in shade

I applied two coats of Skylark. The formula was consistent with what I have grown accustomed to from Sinful Colors. The polish is fairly runny but can get a little gummy. This color is pretty bright but great for summer. It reminds me of an Illamasqua shade called Purity. I don't own it, so I'm not sure if this is a dupe for it or not, but it could be. I have been wanting to get Purity for a while now, so this could satiate that! Now let's get to Song of Summer:

Song of Summer was great! I applied one very careful coat. I could have done two, but I wanted to see if one would work. It covers well, but it can get patchy. This one has great coverage and a beautiful green color. It isn't too bright or too showy which is great if you like to wear brighter colors to work.

Overall I think these are both a great deal. I love these colors and for the price, you really can't beat it. If you are looking for some good summer colors, these would be great in any collection. Thanks for reading!