Hiatus

I don't know if anyone actually reads this blog, but as evidenced by the lack of posts for almost two months, I'm going on temporary hiatus.

This semester, I'm studying in Uppsala, Sweden. I had to pack really lightly, and that means I've only got ten bottles of nail polish with me, no tools, and no acetone. I didn't even bring a brush to clean up my nails with. Between the lack of supplies and the general lack of time that comes with traveling around Europe, I can't keep up with the blog.

Hopefully, I will be back in full force by summer, but you may have to wait until the new school year starts for any attempt at quality work.

Experimenting With Butter London

I was gifted two Butter London polishes for my birthday (my friends know me so well), and they ended up being the nails that I wore home for Thanksgiving. Butter London pretty much blew my mind. 

This is about four coats of Old Blighty and my thumb and ring finger have an additional coat of Brown Sugar. I can't even with this formula; a brand name has never made so much sense. AND CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW THIS SHIT DIDN'T CHIP, LIKE, AT ALL. 

Nine days later

I put this on the Sunday before I left and I didn't take it off until the next Tuesday. Nine days, give or take. NINE, and the polish was only fading a bit around the tips. The only weird bit was that Brown Sugar started getting a bit patchy on my thumb. But still, that is some pretty fantastic staying power. 

Conclusion: Butter London boggles my mind with its magical nail polish powers. 

My Favorite Color

WHOA I am way behind on posting. It's been about a month, and I'm going to try and stagger my next few posts. This was from way back before Thanksgiving. I had wanted to use my favorite nail polish for my birthday, but I got new polishes, and you know...

But here it is!

That would be my favorite color, OPI Lucerne-tainly Look Marvelous with what may or may not be OPI Ski Teal We Drop over some striping tape on my ring finger. It's a super simple mani, but I really enjoy it because I love looking at Lucerne-tainly Look Marvelous. It's not even the best formula, you can kind of see how it didn't like the tip of my thumb nail, but I don't even care because I think it's just that pretty.

SO PRETTY.

Happy Birthday To Me!

The very best day of the year, November 18, has come and gone. It was my 21st birthday, and I proved to be the weirdo that I am and didn't get drunk. Or even have a drink. Oops.

But it was a Monday night. I'm not about that life. Also, drinking, not really a thing I do. 

I did however, get the best birthday present in the mail--four new ILNP colors! I got one Ultra Chrome, Birefringence, which I keep accidentally calling Bifrost because it reminds me of the magical rainbow bridge from Thor. I also got Purgatory (dark green shimmer), Contraband (dark purple shimmer), and with my three polish pre-order, I got Absolute Zero (bluish gray) for free! Obviously, I had to use all of them immediately.

Waterfalls seemed to be the easiest way to use all the polishes at once. They're over two coats of OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls and topped off with Sally Hansen Dries Instantly. My accent nail is Birefringence, and it's way shinier then it shows up in the picture. 

I'm not super happy with these nails, especially in the pictures, because the colors are too similar and they blend together a bit. 

On another note, my nails are breaking like it's their job. I currently have about 6 nails where the corners have cracked off, so I'm rounding my tips. I hope it turns out better than these waterfalls. 

Lady's Man, Man's Man, Man About Town

One of my guilty pleasures is this movie Down With Love. It's set in the sixties, and Renee Zellweger's character writes a book about letting women have sex like a man, without falling in love, and she denounces Ewan McGregor's character as the worst kind of man. So of course, Ewan McGregor assumes a fake identity to make her fall in love so that he can write an expose about her. While Ewan McGregor is all kinds of sexy, the best part of the movie is their respective best friends' relationship.

So I did some Down With Love nails:

My base color is Nicole by OPI How Fairy Nice of You! I used a nail art brush to paint on the arrows and the broken heart in Essie Off the Shoulder. As per usual, everything's topped with Sally Hansen Dries Instantly. 

My nails are meant to look like the book cover in the movie, but I may have neglected to check what the actual color scheme was before I painted my nails. The nail colors are inversions of the movie colors, but I don't care too much. 

This is another one where I like my right hand better than my left hand. The heart shards don't match up on my left hand, and once again, I was to lazy to redo them. That seems to be a common theme in my life.

Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Ooo Harry Potter

Saturday night, one of my school's organizations hosted a Harry Potter trivia night. Of course, I did my nails for good luck, and it totally worked-- I won! (It could also be due to the fact that I've dedicated a large chunk of my life to reading and watching Harry Potter, but I prefer to think the nails brought me good luck.)

Weirdly enough, I actually prefer my right hand for this mani. I hadn't quite perfected my striping technique on my left hand, and I was way too lazy to redo it. Also, I'm such a Harry Potter nerd that I did the houses in order of how much I like them. I started with my own house (Slytherin 4 Lyfe), followed by Hufflepuff, and so on and so forth. Yes, Gryffindor is my least favorite; sorry, not sorry. 

For all of my nails, I started with the metallic color (or yellow, in Hufflepuff's case), and let them dry completely before placing my striping tape. Then, I did the color one nail at a time, taking the tape off as I went. My thumb has a free handed lightening bolt. 

Slytherin: Sinful Colors San Francisco over Essie No PLace Like Chrome

Hufflepuff: OPI Baby It's Coal Outside over Sally Hansen Lightening

Ravenclaw: OPI Into the Night over Essie Penny Talk

Gryffindor: Sally Hansen Red Carpet over Revlon Golden

Thumb: Revlon Celestial Fix over Revlon Spirit with Claire's Nail Art Pen 

Everything topped with Sally Hansen Dries Instantly

I seriously LOVED having this on my nails, but there were a few things that bothered me. First, my "bronze" for Ravenclaw came out a bit pinker than I would have liked. Second, the green I used was pretty terrible quality (it was the only option that fit, color wise) so the top coat made it streak which gave the silver a bit of a yellowish tint. Gross. Lastly, while I adore the stars and moons on my thumb, there were also little bits of glitter that mostly just looked like bubbles over the white. 

Here's my right hand with the iffy striping technique:

Overall, I love love loved these nails. Anything Harry Potter themed is an A+ in my book. 

Halloween Part 3

It's way late, but I'm finally posting my final set of Halloween nails, and they're my least favorite of the bunch.

These nails took forever, they were super messy, and I couldn't take a picture without massive amounts of glare. They looked and felt pretty cool in person though. 

I tried to take my favorite aspect from my last mani and hoped that doing it on all my nails would make me love it that much more. No dice. I used the sugar-spun technique with Sephora by OPI Caliente Coral and Sinful Colors Black on Black, finished with Sally Hansen Dries Instantly. I tried to have an accent nail, but it turns out that it's almost impossible to tell if a nail is black with orange stripes or orange with black stripes. I should have stuck with black stripes because my orange was way too thin for this technique, which explains why my ring finger looks so much messier than my other fingers. 

Unless I figure out a way for these to work better for me (maybe using quick-dry polish?), I probably won't be trying sugar-spun nails in the near future.