Champagne and Checkers Nails

Last week was dreary and cloudy and not spring like at all in the Bay Area so I decided to wear some sparkles to bring me a little extra happy since the weather was clearly not delivering!

So I broke out my sparkles! This baby is Painted Polish Blinded By Bubbly and man it is totally blingy and amazing!







Blinded By Bubbly is your typical microglitter. Takes about 3-4 coats for to be fully opaque. For this application I did the sponge effect, where you take a make up sponge and you apply a coat of the glitter to the makeup sponge and then apply it to the nail. It ends up being a more dense glitter effect on the nail, but then the glitter is EXTRA top coat hungry.

And can I just take a minute to talk about liquid latex? I've used my bottle of Ellagee Lickity Split several times now and I think I might be doing something wrong. When I remove it, it leaves a layer of the polish (albeit very thin/small) behind. The layer isn't stuck to the skin, but it is still connected to the mani and does still require clean up (and being that this was a glitter mani, that was a lot of clean up because extra glitter is rough to remove!). Which makes me wonder why I use it in the first place?! Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to apply more liquid latex? I remove from one side of the tip of my nail to the other, should I be removing from the cuticle instead? Send me your tips, I'd love to hear them!



And because I can't leave a mani alone for too long, I broke out my UberChic plate U-01 and stamped this checkered look using my Rica Blackout polish (the best black stamping polish in my opinion!).





So what do you think of this look? It's simple but sparkly and did bring me a bit of happiness. Do you have any advice for me and my liquid latex? I'm rather sad I can't get it to work very well for me!

My New Year's Nails

So I'm still on break from work, yay, spending a whole lot time to myself which has been amazing. Been prepping some ideas for the blog in January, catching up on my nail blog browsing and commenting, procrastinating on taking Christmas decorations down and relaxing my butt off!

So anyway, I did fit in some time to do my nails yesterday and I'm wearing these for my New Year's Eve celebration in. My husband and I don't have any grand plans, most of our friends our out of town for the holiday unfortunately. So we are planning on spending the evening in, drinking some great red wine and watching our hockey team play a game.

So onto the look! What I was going for here was a champagne colored polish which looked similar to ORLY Mirrorball, which we are all currently obsessed with right?!?!



So here are the stars of the show F.U.N. Lacquer TGIF and Painted Polish Blinded by Bubbly (which is SOOOO amazing).



This was my first experience with a F.U.N. polish. TGIF is a gold linear holographic polish with gold flakies as well. The polish was a little sheer and required three coats for this opacity. To create the Mirrorball-esque look I added one coat of Painted Polish Blinded by Bubbly on top. They matched pretty well.



For the final look, I stamped an image from my Lily Anna 06 plate which has a star look to it. I liked it okay, wasn't as classy as I wanted it to be, but it's not like I'm going out or anything, so it'll do.



Wasn't as blingy in the sun as I wanted it to be, but oh well. What do you think of this manicure? What do you have picked out for your NYE mani? Share with me on my Facebook page, I'd love to see it!