31 Day Challenge Day 22: Inspired by a Song

Shots! Shots! Shots! Shots! Shots! Everyboooddyyy!!!

If you haven't guessed my song that I am inspired by today is LMFAO's Shots. This was not my first song choice, but I decided to jump into it and have some fun. So let me present my shots of polish manicure!

Each nail is done after an actual drink, of which I will provide the actual and polish recipe for below :D

The funny thing about this manicure is that I don't even drink hardly! It's like a once in a blue moon thing for me that I'll even take a shot. I was asking friends on twitter, Facebook and in real life what shots I should do! LOL

I tried to use all jelly polishes to incorporate a liquid look to the shot glasses. It didn't turn out exactly as I had pictured in my head, but I think LMFAO would be proud! :D

Thumb - TEQUILA! with a lime of course!
China Glaze Desert Sun mixed with a dash of Essie's Marshmallow. Add a lime with Essie Mojito Madness mixed with a little Marshmallow

Index - Upside Down Pineapple Cake Shot 1/2 oz. Vodka, vanilla 1/4 oz. Grenadine 1 oz. Pineapple Juice
Take one part OPI Guy Meets Galveston and add two parts NYC Lexington Yellow mixed with a little Marshmallow

Middle - Pornstar! 1/2 oz Blue Curacao liqueur 1/2 oz Sour Puss® raspberry liqueur
Start off by filling your nail with two thirds of China Glaze Ride the Waves then add a smattering of OPI Too Hot Pink To Hold Em as necessary Ring -Absinthe
Start with Ardene Neon Green and add Ardene Neon Yellow until the drink is glowing

Pinky - Purple Fuck! 1 oz. Curacao, blue 1 oz. Vodka Fill with Cranberry Juice
Fill with OPI Houston We Have a Purple and add a slight tip of China Glaze Under The Boardwalk

This was actually such a fun manicure to come up with! I tried to take an awesome picture of me taking a shots from my nails, but it didn't end up working out so well. You either saw up my nose, or down my throat to my soul lol.

I hope you can find the funny in my shots nails! You should for sure head over to The Lacquerologist to see what awesome song Emily has been inspired by today!

And I shall leave you all with a YouTube video of the incredibly, awesomely obnoxious song, SHOTS! :D

Olympic Fever

Good Morning loves! Who else has Olympic Fever? I absolutely love the Olympics and everything that comes with it. I will watch absolutely any sport, as I just love seeing the passion that these athletes have. I watched women's weightlifting and loved it. So I obviously needed to create some Olympic themed nails! I have seen some amazing Olympic manicures done by some insanely talented ladies and was looking for a way to make it a little original. I googled London 2012 Olympic symbols to look for some inspiration and this is what I came up with!

I think because of my Olympic fever I had a hard time narrowing down the pictures, so I didn't. To see more of this and my inspiration image, check out more after the jump!

Jelly Gradient Sandwich Take Two

Gooood Morning lovelies! It's a Monday, bleeeeh, but today starts my exam period at school. First exam is this afternoon and then in less than two weeks I am done my semester! So I'm going to let you all know that posting might be a little sporadic in these next few weeks. Gotta study for those pesky exams! A few weeks back I posted what I called a Jelly Gradient Sandwich. This was one of my favourite manicures I had done in a while so I decided to redo it using a different colour scheme! At the end of my previous post I talked about doing a gradient in yellow, green and blue. I didn't *think* I owned a yellow or green jelly, but upon further inspection of my stash I found some!

I couldn't decide what pictures to narrow it down to, so I'm just posting all of them! Keep reading after the jump to see how I did this!

Caution: Could Be Toxic

Today I've got some potentially toxic nails to show you! They were maaaad fun to wear AND inspired by fashion! Since I'm bursting to show you I will get to the nails!! 

How awesome are those? I took these pictures in direct sunlight because I used some awesome holo goodness in these nails and wanted you to be able to see them! My inspiration came one night when I was browsing through Pinterest and found a wicked dress!! Unfortunately the link wasn't properly connected so here is the image that I based this design off of, my inspiration is the middle dress :)

After a bit of research I found out that these designs are part of Emma Mulholland's As Bas As I Gonna Be Lookbook.  My final product is quite different, but I love it just the same! 

To get these toxic nails I started with two coats of China Glaze Sun-Kissed which is an amazing neon yellow. It will not need a white base to show up and has a stunning shimmer! Then I took a bunch of greens and did the saran wrap technique. I did the technique one colour at a time and on all nails. Here is the list of greens that I used, this is also the order that I saran wrapped in. 


GOSH Forest Floor
Ardene Neon Green
Sally Hansen Ivy League
Sally Hansen HD Pixel Pretty
Color Club Fly With Me
Dollish Polish Master Chief (holo)


Then finally I took a striping brush and added some random geometric designs using OPI Fresh Frog of Bel Air from the 2011 Muppets Collection. This was intended to be the sequins between the different colours on the dress! 

These were so coool! I really didn't want to take them off, but alas all nails must eventually be taken off lool! They were so bright and sparkly in the sun, my pictures don't quite do it justice. All I could think about while I was wearing them was that this was the colouring that toxic sludge looks like in cartoons. 

Gaaaah I LOVED these! They were super fun to wear and just SO bright! I can't believe that when I first started blogging I hated greens on my nails. I think that this post really proves that I've done a 180 and now I love green colours on my nails. I mean I used like 7 different green polishes in this bad boy. 


Is there a colour you used to hate but now love on your nails? Or a colour you still can't stand to wear? 
Would you ever wear something as bright and toxic as these? Let me know! 


Hope you're having a great Tuesday! And remember to enter my Jamberry Nails Giveaway! 

Abstract Nail Art Challenge Day 6: Dots

Today we've got the fifth day in the Abstract Nail Art Challenge, the criteria dots! I looooveee my dotting tools. They are so much fun to use and can help to create endless patterns and designs. Even though there are a million possibilities I went for an all over dotty nail. 

I was inspired to create this patchwork of dots from a poster that I made at work a few months ago. The CEO was retiring and coming back to his old office in our unit while he trained the new one so they asked the co-op student to make a welcome back sign. This is what I made.

The unit I was part of was called SPAD in case that seems a little strange lol. So these nails were inspired by the background of the banner! On a side note the banner was awesome. We printed it out so it covered the whole door and he thought it was hilarious and said he was bringing it home to hang in his home office. Made me feel good :) 

Anyway back to these awesome nails. I used Sally Hansen White On as my base and then created the dots with the following polishes,


China Glaze Gothic Lolita (purple)
Barielle Swizzle Stix (blue)
Essence Wake Up! (orange)
China Glaze Hang-Ten Toes (pink) 
Ardene Neon Green (green)
Ardene Neon Yellow (yellow)


I started off picking a random polish and creating a shape with my dotting tool somewhere on my nail. Then I used the rest of the polishes to finish filling in my nail in various shapes. 

I loved these! Aren't they fun for summer? I seem to be loving a rainbow of colours over a white base, this is my second one during the challenge and I have another one planned to do soon lol. There is just something about it that seems so summery to me! 


Well I'm off to write my first midterm in my hell week! At my school we have all our midterms in one week for all classes and it's called hell week and this is it for me. I'll be writing Physical Infrastructure and Planning this morning, Wish me luck! :) 


What do you think of my rainbow dotticure? Are you a fan of dotty manis? 


Remember to stop by my awesome challenge buddies to see what they have done for this dotty day! 

 The Lacquerologist

 BeautyGnome 

Manicurator 

Ikat Print Nail Art

Good Morning! How are you doing on this first day of Spring!? Here in southern Ontario you wouldn't know it's Spring today. We have a wall of fog so thick that I can't quite see out of the window from my desk!

I have some ikat nails to show you today in a St. Patrick's themed colours. Ikat has been all the rage in fashion and its been popping up everywhere on various nails in a variety of colours and patterns. I chose to do mine in a chevron pattern.

I started with a base of China Glaze White on White. Then took a striper brush and created a chevron in quick short strokes with Ardene's Neon Green. Then I did the same with Essie's Vermillionaire, then again with Neon Green and finished off the tip with Vermillionaire. Then I took Wet and Wild's Black Creme and created two more chevrons to give the pattern a little more definition.





with flash

  



I really like how this turned out! I got a lot of compliments on it, or maybe it was just the neon colours :)

What do you think of the ikat print?

Sincerely Stephanie

Tribal, Aztec, Warrior or something like that nails

TRIBAL NAILS! 
I have been wanting to try tribal nails on myself for weeks, however have been slightly terrified at  what the results could be as I have never attempted something that intricate before. So last Friday I decided to take the plunge and give it a go. Surprisingly enough they actually turned out really well! 

Tribal!!

As detailed as this looks, it was actually a lot easier than I expected, just very time consuming to accomplish. 
For this manicure I used White on White by China Glaze, a Yellow from Ardene, Red, Blue, Black and White stripers! I must confess I copied this tutorial from one of my favourite youtube channels Cute Polish. Since I have been so scared about doing this myself I thought following a guide for my first time would be helpful!

polish used

To get this look start off by putting on your basecoat! Again I used Start to Finish by OPI. 


The first step to getting this look is to paint all of your nails White on White. This white polish is much thicker and more vibrant than the white I used in the last tutorial, so I only put on 2 coats to have a beautiful and vibrant gorgeous white nails. 


Now the next steps differ for every nail, as I did a different pattern, but the basic idea is the same. I will go through the steps for what I did on my thumb. 

thumb :)

To start off I took my blue striper and made a line about 1/5 of the way up my nail. Then at about the 2/5 I made another line with the blue striper, then filled in the gab between the two blue stripes. 

The next thing I did was take a brush and dip it into the yellow polish that I have. I used this brush to create a thick yellow line, leaving a white gap between the two colours. 

Then I went back to my blue striper and painted the tip of my nail blue, again leaving a white space between the yellow and blue. 

I then took the black striper and made a line across the top of the blue blue line I made on the bottom of the nail. Also did black lines surrounding the yellow stripe. 

The black striper was then used to create four black vertical lines on the bottom of my nail. 

Next I took my red striper and did a line along the bottom of the blue that I did on the tip. 

Back to the black striper, I made small lines changing direction on top of the yellow polish to create a triangle effect.

Then finally took a dotting tool and made small black dots between the red and the yellow stripes!

I have to say it was worth the amount of time it took to do as I absolutely love the look of it! 

On some of the nails I am really not happy with the line work, but for my first shot I have to say I'm pretty pleased! The great thing with nails is too that no one notices from far away! 


Here are the rest of my nails up close,

I apologize that the quality is so terrible, I didn't realize until today and by then I had already taken this off! 

Even though I copied a tutorial for this, it gave me enough confidence to try and do something completely different next time! I already have ideas and will no doubt be doing another tribal nail art sometime in the upcoming weeks! 


Until next time,
Sincerely Stephanie

Pink Dots!!

Hey all!! 


One of the past few manicures that I did involved using my new dotting tool rather heavily. I used a white base coat a hot pink on top and then put white dots all over it and added a little glitter! 
It looked super cute and was SO EASY to do. 
Here was the final result! 

pink with dots!! 

I think it looks adorable and gives this time of year a litter extra something! 


The polishes I used for this manicure were a white from Ardene, Hot Shot by Orly and Hallucination by Wet and Wild. The other tools used were a dotting tool as well a makeup sponge. 

White from Ardene, Hot Shot and Hallucination

To start off this lovely manicure always put on your base coat to protect your nails! I used Start to Finish by OPI. 


After this I took the white polish and painted my entire nail white. The polish I used was very thin, so it took about 3 coats to get an opaque white. I was concentrating on making the base of my nails more opaque than the tips because I knew I would be painting over it. 

white base coat

Once the white coat was completely dry I took Hot Shot and painted a few strokes onto the side of the makeup sponge. Then starting at the tip of my nail I sponged the colour on trying to get a gradient effect from white to light pink to opaque hot pink at the tips of my nails. I did have a bit of a challenge using only the one colour sponging, usually I will use multiple colours to get a real gradient effect, but I think it still looked pretty good. 


Once the sponging has again completely dried take a dotting tool and use the same white nail polish that you used to do the base coat to line dots across your nails. I tried to do as many dots as would fit on my nails. Since this was my first time using this dotting tool I made a few first timer mistakes. I didn't clean the tool off after every nail, instead choosing to continually dip in polish. This made the dot bigger than I thought and some of the dots especially on my pinky finger had a real texture to them, which also took muuuch longer to dry. 


Once the dots are complete I thought my nails could use a little sparkle so I took a dab of Hallucination and placed it over the bottom white portion of my nails! 


Finish with a top coat, again I used Start to Finish by OPI and there you have it! All done! 

Finished Nails!

Doesn't it look pretty!?

:D 

After I finished this it reminded me a little of watermelon! I'm going to have to try this again in the summer with some green black and pink instead of the white!

Until next time,

Sincerely Stephanie