Sinful Colors Unicorn and spring floral manicure

Now that it's spring, I finally decided it was time to try the first yellow polish I ever bought! (not including the detailing polish) I only recently had the guts to try the trend, and this soft yellow is perfect. The only problem with Unicorn is that it stains your nails, even with a base coat. Next time I wear it, I'm going to try two coats of base coat to see if that helps.  

This is Unicorn.  I had to use three coats, because it was very streaky and had lots of dragging issues.  Click to enlarge.

The base color is Sinful Colors Unicorn, the orange is AC #10, the green is Pa A32, the sparkly white is Diamond Nail Homei D-1 (the worst quality polish ever if you remember a past post.. I still have to swatch it for you), and the yellow detailing polish is AT #4 Yellow. I used my handy Beauty World dotting tool to make the flowers, and a fine nail art brush for the leaves. I used the mini Poshe quick dry topcoat mom gave me to seal it off.

Spring floral manicure, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

What do you think?

Blue zebra manicure, all jazzed up

I was looking at my blue zebra mani last night, and rather than change it I was thinking that it might look better with silver glitter stripes along the black, and when my husband suggested the same thing today (without me even mentioning it) that did it- it was decided :)

A quick recap: The base color is AC #68, the black is Majolica Majorca, for the silver stripes I used Zoya Luna, and I topped it off with Nailene clear coat.
I think it does look better this way! What do you think?

Blue zebra print manicure

For this manicure, I had a little inspiration from a mani on nailcrack. I saw a manicure similar to this on their website, and I had just gotten a blue nail polish (though not the same color blue) so I wanted to try my hand at it :)

Here's the blue polish, from AC (a Japanese low-cost line, who makes some pretty decent colors! I used it in my recent turquoise pedi, and a past orange mani.) As far as quality goes, I'd rate them higher than NYC because their polishes only need two coats for even coverage, and they cost about the same. However, NYC has more variety.

I used AC #68 as the base color. It's a nice, vivid blue, and I do mean vivid! After that I painted the stripes on with Majolica Majorca black nail polish. Majolica Majorca is made by Shiseido, I LOVE this brand (they also make other makeup, their eye shadows are so pretty!) I need to get a thinner art brush one of these days, this one is good for most art but not when I need more detail.. Finally I finished off with Nailene clear coat.

Blue zebra print manicure, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

It is a little loud though, and I'm going out with my husband and his coworkers/friends this Friday night, so I may change it Friday to a basic swatch of a little more subdued color ^^;; I mostly just wanted to swatch the blue!

Turquoise glitter and stone pedi

Turquoise glitter and stone pedi, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

It was time to change the polish on my toes, and I had just gotten this really pretty turquoise nail polish, so why not?

The turquoise polish is by AC. I'll swatch it on my nails another time.. as soon as I think of a good manicure idea that uses turquoise glitter ;) It's very pretty, the polish base is a clear turquoise color with big and small glitter pieces. It is actually much shinier in person, but my camera didn't catch that too well.

Next, I applied gel topcoat to give the stones a good base to stick to. Then I used a gold jewelry jump ring to frame the center hot pink stone, and coated it with gel polish to make give it the illusion that it is bigger. Then I placed two light pink stones on either side.

This one is simple, but elegant :)

Just another manic Monday~

So here's something to "brighten" your day!

Don't mind the chipped thumb nail, it's still growing out from where I cracked it last month ^^;;

So, this manicure was in one of my books that I have, so I decided to try it. It was in the chapter of "fresh" look manicures, due to the bright contrasting colors and patterns, and it was inspired by the color of fruit juice.

A little background about this color, don't trust fluorescent lighting. I bought this thinking it was a salmon-y color, and it was neon orange. I know there are fans of neon polish out there, and I actually really like neon blue, pink, and purple, but I'm not the biggest fan of neon orange (please don't hate me, everyone has one thing they don't like!) and I wanted the salmon-y orange for this mani, so it's now a franken. Here's a swatch:

Believe it or not, before I painted this mani, I added a total of about 8 drops each of pink and white polish, some before the swatch and some after, and it hadn't changed much.. it's a tough one, but I do like the color it is now.

"Fresh" juice inspired mani, a photo by KitaRei on Flic

The orange base color is from AC. For the random pink and white glittery circles, (some of them are two-toned, from this pic it's hard to tell) I used the awful Diamond Nail Homei and New York Color Polyester Pink Creme, and topped it of with Nailene top coat.