Red Carpet Manicure "One of a Kind"

I haven't updated in a while, but I wore this color for what felt like forever, so I had nothing else new to post about!

I like lavender, but lavender is a hard color for gels.  The problem is that, from what I hear, purple pigments are more UV sensitive or "unstable" than other colors, so over time your manicure may change color to a more yellow, green, or grey shade.  Red Carpet has a beautiful lavender color called "Violetta Darling" which is similar to "One of a Kind" but in a creme shade, but since I heard that it had that weird ugly fading issue, I opted for this color instead.

Honestly I was not to happy about this color when I first painted it.  Red Carpet Manicure "One of a Kind" is a very metallic light purple shade that seemed to have a slight mauve undertone at first.  And I do mean very metallic--you may see brush strokes, and may I suggest capping your tips first unless you want to end up with unsightly smudges like you can see on the tip of my middle finger.  Any wayward strokes will mar the look of this gel!  Although in my macro shot you can see that sometimes the metallic finish diffuses the light to reflect slightly purple, blue, or yellow spots of "sparkle", this is not something you will be able to see from more than a foot away--it just looks like it shines a silvery metallic.

I wasn't too happy about that kind of mauve undertone, though; I felt like it made me look older and didn't provide a nice contrast with my skin tone.  But that brings me to my next point: the fading! Since purple gels, especially light purple ones, may tend to fade, I wanted to test this out to see what it would do.  Happily, "One of a Kind" pretty quickly faded to just a shade or two lighter, which I felt just enhanced the metallic properties of this gel.  I tried to grab a photo of a comparison with two nails that had been sporting this gel polish for two weeks, and two nails that were newly painted.  The fading is only very slightly noticeable, and honestly it probably wouldn't be a big deal even if you liked the original color, unlike me!

Lastly, I found this gel polish to be a bit on the thinner side, so I used three coats, and my manicure lasted for about two weeks with a few touch-ups.

NaiLuv "Merry Mermaid" & OPI Gelcolor "Suzi Says Feng Shui"

I want to apologize, first of all, for two things: the lack of posting, and the lesser quality of these photos.  I thought my pictures looked ok... until I got to the computer!  I had to do some editing to spare you guys from how dead my hands looked last week.

But even so, I thought my nails were a little fun!

The darker color is OPI Gelcolor's "Suzi Says Feng Shui", which is a jewel-toned teal creme color.  I used two coats, and I did suffer a little bit of "shrinking" as you might be able to see at some angles, but it was nothing too drastic or noticeable in real life, and was probably caused by my error.

The lighter color is NaiLuv's "Merry Mermaid", which is one of the brand's more popular colors, I think.   It's a great turquoise shade with lots of scattered micro silver sparkles.  What you might call "Tiffany blue" or light teal/turquoise colors have been really popular for at least the last two or three summers, so it isn't too surprising that I hear about this color a lot!  Even though the sparkles in this gel are silver, thanks to the dimension gel polishes give your nails, sometimes sparkles "hidden" in the turquoise gel shine through and give off a more green-blue light as well. By the way: the flash on my camera in the first picture definitely made this look rather neon; the second photo is more true to life! The first picture does, however, give you a bit of an idea of how the shimmer in this polish scatters the light that hits it a little differently than a creme polish would.  Overall, though, the shimmer is pretty muted, so this color can easily play along with creme shades or even pass itself off as a creme from far away.   I used two coats of this as well.

Oh, and just for the sake of it, I tried to get a macro shot of "Merry Mermaid" so you can see the glitters in it close up.  All those little speckled spots are glitter flakes suspended in different layers of the gel:

For the nail "art" on my thumb, I just used the long end of my nail brush to swipe a diagonal line across my nails.  Once again, the great thing with gels is that, if you're wobbly like me, you can easily clean up your lines with an extra brush dipped in a little isopropyl alcohol.  You will never have to worry about making a mistake that you can't fix without redoing the whole nail!

GoldenEye

So finally I'm back, and I have another gold glittery color--however, I think you'll find that this is a lot different than the last one!

OPI's Golden Eye (is it Golden Eye or GoldenEye, anyway?  My bottle definitely has a space between the N and the E) is a great gold glitter.  Now I have to say, I used three coats--you can still kind of see some visible nail line in some pictures, but overall the jam-packed glitter totally distracts from that when your hands are moving about in real life. 

Golden Eye is nothing but irregular flakes of a bright yellow gold glitter packed into a clear base.  The thing that elevates this gel polish, though, is that the glitter is sooooo dimensional!  Some of the glitter has an opalescence to it that will make spots shine orange and spring green when your fingers move in the light. I tried to capture this in my macro shot at the bottom, and you can see tiny little spots of green and orange if you open it up to full size--but trust me, this is much better in person.  And there's also another layer of dimension that comes with the 3D surface of your nail--as you can see in my first picture, the gold transforms from almost a bronze to a bright brassy gold depending on how the light hits it.  Sometimes (and only a very small amount of times) when the glitter shone only bright yellow with more profuse lighting, I felt my fingernails may have looked a bit yellowy, like "smoker's nails". But that was only a passing thought before I looked again and remembered how amazing this gel polish was!

There's only one slight downside to this gel: and that is, because of the sheer amount of glitter packed into it, when trying to cap the edges of my nails, the glitter did not want to lay down  flat and instead caused a bumpy ridge.  That was easily filed down, though, and it did not affect wear time at all.

Ulta Deals - Free Nail Polish Remover!

This sale started a few days ago, but I just found it in my email today, and the sale is going on until July 27th, 2013. 

What is it, exactly?

Basically, Ulta is offering one of three types of nail polish removers (pure acetone, or one of two kinds of remover wipes) free with your nail purchase of $15 or more. You don't need any coupon if you purchase through the website, but if you want to purchase in-store, you may want to sign up for Ulta emails or check your inbox for a unique coupon code. I'm sure you could also combine this with their usual $3.50 off $10 coupons, too. 

If you're running low on acetone and are lemming for some new Red Carpet Manicure or Sally Hansen gels, you might want to check this out!

Just add items from the sale in your cart until you reach $15 or more, and on the shopping basket page, below your items, you will see a drop down box that lets you select which free item you want. 

Acetone runs for about $3.99 on its own, so it's not a terribly great steal, but it is still a fun and unique offer! And acetone is essential for removing your gel polish.

Gelish "Naughty List"

Long time, no see, internet!

Sorry about the absence; I haven't been doing anything exciting, although I've been really busy.  But I finally have another picture post!

 

Gelish's "Naughty List" is a great black shade jam packed with flecks of gold glitter.  Actually, there may be some silver glitter, too, as in the right sunlight it will reflect both colors (and I DID think it was silver the first night I painted my nails!), but overall the glitter comes across a nice champagne gold color.  Usually, I see black paired with silver, so this is somewhat unique--and there's so much glitter that you definitely will not mistake this shade for plain old black gel polish.

If the glitter doesn't look very gold to you in those photos--my lighting varies, after all--may I present you with a blurry outtake photo for evidence:

That's a lot of bling!

The formula was fine and went on with two coats, although if I wasn't careful, there was some patchiness.  You might pick up on that my pinky...oops!

The other thing you might pick up on is that this color had considerable tip wear.  You can see it in the pictures, and this manicure is only a week old.  Once again, I'm going to blame my spur-of-the-moment color decisions--I felt like this color required lots of mixing to get all the glitter and dark pigments dispersed well.  If I hadn't decided on this color at the last minute, I could have shaken it up a few hours (or the night before) to get those pigments and glitters mixed in without the fear of there being too many bubbles.  

This color is from Gelish's 2012 holiday collection, which contained a bunch of gel polishes packed with glitters.  I know, I know, it's July--but don't you just want to do something different sometimes?  "Christmas in July" movie marathons were on TV this past weekend, anyway!

Hopefully next time I'll be back sooner rather than later. :)

Nailuv "Boracay Beach" & Red Carpet Manicure "Shimmering Gown" Tips

Hi again, world!  It's been kind of a busy week, but I'm finally back to post pictures of the manicure I had in my last post:

  

You're probably thinking, "Uh, why so many pictures? Do you really need FOUR pictures to show off your nails?"  Well, yeah!  I found this color so interesting I had to keep trying to get more pictures. 

Nailuv's "Boracay Beach" is the perfect teal blue creme color.  Like, it literally walks the line between the two:  in inside light it is a little more jade-green-ish (such as in the first two pictures), while in outside light the blue tones show and almost make it look neon (such as in the last two pictures).  I used two coats, and while it is a slightly jelly-like gel polish and I COULD see some visible nail line in direct sunlight,  I thought it looked good enough to stop at just the two coats alone.  Three would probably make it more opaque, though.  This is the first Nailuv gel I used that slid around on my nails a teensy bit--it didn't really "shrink", but I noticed it tended to shy away from the side walls of my nails.  Not sure what was going on, but a quick brush over each painted nail just before curing it fixed any problems. 

At the tips of my nails I used one coat of  Red Carpet Manicure's "Shimmering Gown", which is a sheer teal blue-tinted gel with a light green/gold flecks of sparkles.   This color is hard to describe; since it has a blue base, the sparkly flecks sometimes carry a blue tone, although most of them appear to be a light spring green.  The shade of the sparkles, however, means that they sometimes catch the yellow in the light in such a way that they may appear to have flecks of gold as well.  Since this shade is pretty sheer, which means it's a great addition to any blue polish you may be bored of or may want to jazz up for some occasion.  If you layer it evenly, it may also be a great color enhancer/changer for many other shades of gel polish, too!

I wish I would have been able to get macro shots of this glitter gel, but it will probably have to wait until I paint a full nail with it.  For now, I think you can see the glitter best in the fourth and final picture.

Random... Summer Gel Polish Picks!

Hi again! I did a video showing some nice spring-themed gel polish shades a few months ago, and since summer is nearly officially here, I thought it was high time that I make another video with some summer-themed selections.

I did it rather quickly and after quite a few hours awake, so I'm sorry for any babbling going on--but hopefully this will give some idea of what awesome gel polish colors are available that are still on-trend for the summer time. 


There are two caveats I have overall with the selection of gel colors for the summer, which I mentioned only briefly at the very end of the video:

1. GREENS. I love green polishes, don't ask me why.  I wish there were more shades of vibrant greens available. Bright jade green, grass green, etc.

2. Neons--which always seem to be popular but finicky even in regular nail polish--are no exception when it comes to gels.  They can be thinner or more transparent than other shades of polish even by the same brand, or they may not be truly "BAM in your face" neon, if you know what I mean.  I think I have seen some gel brands come out with multiple "collections" of neon shades, so hopefully this is something that is being worked on and improved upon.  So that's yet another thing I would gladly buy, if it existed!

My next update will have photos of the manicure I'm sporting in this video, which is Nailuv's "Boracay Beach" and Red Carpet Manicure's "Shimmering Gown".  I don't have enough time at the moment, sorry!

Lastly, it appears on a quick search that some of the Red Carpet colors I selected are not available at Ulta right now--at least on their website--so I may have to do some digging to find the Gelish equivalents soon.