Digital Nails Review

Hello everyone and Happy Hump Day!!! Today I've got another mini review of a new-to-me indie Digital Nails! Now this brand has been on my radar for some time, but I just never purchased from them for some reason. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I had had a Moscow Mule or two and was on Instagram wanting to be enabled. Thanks to my friend Nichole over at Pretty Girl Science, she showed me the light!



I had an Etsy Gift Certificate from my birthday burning a hole in my pocket and Nichole mentioned Digital Nails and specifically The Dude Abides, and boy am I glad she told me about this polish!







You guys, this polish is OUT OF THIS WORLD. This polish seriously is topping my list of favorites for this year so far. I have not seen anything like it and I can't tell you how much I've been searching for the perfect crelly-flakie-holo combo and you guys this is IT!

This polish is a nude crelly finish packed with multi colored chrome flakies and holo microglitters with a lovely pink shimmer also. The depth and complexity of this polish just does not end. I got so distracted staring at my nails with this polish on – it brought me such utter delight!

This polish was on the sheerer side, as it is a crelly, but built up nicely in three thin coats. The formula was quite easy to work with actually, making me even more impressed!

And while I was wearing this I received my Fair Maiden Polish purchases, which included a limited edition polish – Gilded Garden. Gilded Garden is a lovely golden holographic polish with a pink shimmer that is hard to capture in a photo. I thought it would pair well with The Dude Abides, so I added a quick accent with a single chevron nail vinyl!





Ok so final word is you NEEEEED The Dude Abides. I cannot stop gushing about how much I love this beautiful polish! On to the next polish, but a quick warning first, please excuse my nubs in these next swatches. I had an unfortunate break over the weekend and now my nails are terribly short. Too short in my opinion!










This unique beauty is Digital Nails Natural Zesty Enterprise. This polish is an olive green crelly polish with cooler toned multichrome flakies interspersed throughout! The flakie load in this polish is more than in The Dude Abides, but the crelly formula seems a tad thinner. I used four coats for this swatch, but you could probably get by with three just fine.

Both Natural Zesty Enterprise and The Dude Abides retail for $12 in the Digital Nails Esty shop. 

This was my first experience with Digital Nails and it definitely did not disappoint. They have so many wonderful colors I'd be interested in trying out in their store, but these two were an amazing first shot!

Have you tried Digital Nails before? Have a color to recommend to me?! I'd love to hear about it! Which of these two polishes were your favorites?

Indigo Bananas A Fields Trip with Butterflies Holo

 Recently Indigo Bananas came out with holo versions of their Mega Chrome Flakies collection and I was sent a few to review! Today I'll share with you the fun I had with A Field Trip with Butterflies Holo, complete with a comparison with it's ILNP counterpart.



Now I am going to warn you now, this post will be extra photo heavy because this polish has so many different looks to it. In the shade it shifts from green to teal to blue. In the sun, the holo totally comes out to play.









Application on this one was a breeze, three coats for full opacity. This application is with the brush, no sponging required! The flakies lay flat on the nail and are not difficult to remove at all!

What I really like about this particular brand's take on holo finish, is that it is a good portion of holo. In the shade the polish clearly isn't only flakies, which is what I prefer. Close up the flakies look interspersed throughout the holo, instead of just a sprinkling of spectraflair that really is only visible in the sun. It's a good mixture of both the flakie and the holo trends! To illustrate this point a bit I've compared three coats of Indigo Bananas A Field Trip with Butterflies Holo (bottom nail) with ILNP Gaia Holo (upper nail).





Sorry I know my macros are not the best, but this clearly shows that A Field Trip with Butterflies packs more a punch in the holo and the flakie department! More bang for your buck with the IG and no sponging application required! :)

Since I can never leave well enough alone, I added a little nail stamping to the mix. I've had this butterfly nail stamping image forever and never pulled it out to use it and since butterflies was in the name of this very polish, thought it was high time I actually attempted some butterfly nails!







The Indigo Banana Holo Mega Chrome polishes can also be used as toppers, but I haven't tried that out yet. I have two more of these to show you in future posts, and hopefully by the last one I'll have a comparison of them side by side as toppers so you can see that effect.

Indigo Bananas can be purchased at their website in full bottles (15ml) or mini bottles (8ml), which I always love because then if you aren't sure you'll like it, you can always just test it out. A Field Trip with Butterflies is $12 for full size and $7.25 for mini. Also Indigo Bananas usually has all their polish in stock, so you aren't dealing with out of control restocks or stressful purchasing situations.

You can look for Indigo Bananas news on their Facebook page and Instagram account (which is having a giveaway right now, so go check it out!). And if you are an Indigo Bananas lover, you should totally join us in the We're Bananas for Indigo Bananas Facebook fan group, we are currently having an IG nail art contest!

So what are your feelings about the flakie craze? Love it? Over it? Liking all the possibilities one can experience with flakies? Like it with holo or as a topper? Share with me your thoughts! I've been very intrigued with the flakies jelly combos I've been seeing out there lately!

Fair Maiden Garden Party Swatches and Art

Today I've got a review of the polishes I purchased from Fair Maiden Polish's Garden Party Collection! When the collection initially released a few weekends ago, I purchased three of the polishes from the collection I wasn't sent to review and over the last week I've had fun making various nail art looks with them!

And news around the block are these are being restocked next Saturday April 18 at 12 CST!



I purchased Sweet Honeysuckle, Green Goddess and Mint Succulent, so let's get to the swatches shall we? And stay tuned, I've got some awesome nail art I made with these polishes coming up as well later in the post!





First up we have Sweet Honeysuckle which is a gorgeous peach creme polish with the most amazing golden flash with the slightest hint of violet flakies throughout. This polish is not just a creme, it has so much more going on with it that makes it special.

The consistency of this polish is thicker than the other polishes I worked with from this collection. It wasn't difficult to work with, just be careful how much you load on your brush during application. This is three thin coats.





Next up we have Green Goddess which is a gorgeous light green holographic polish with a lovely golden flash to it!

The application on this was a breeze. Most people could probably get away with two coats, I added three just to be safe!







Finally we have my favorite of the these three polishes, Mint Succulent. This is a gorgeous sea foam green holographic polish with the most complex shimmer sparkle in it! I took home the work DSLR camera and captured a stunning macro shot of it! See that amazing pink shimmer with red micro flakies in it as well. This polish has dimension!!!

This polish also applied completely easily, much the same as Green Goddess. Would probably be fine with two coats, I added a third for good measure and more sparkle! :)

Now on to the fun nail art looks. Sweet Honeysuckle is the first polish I took out to play with and I was looking through my stamping plates to see if I had anything that looked close to a honeysuckle and this was the closest I could get. I used my Lily Anna 07 plate using Essie Come Here to create this fun stamping look!





In this funny polish world, we find inspiration in the silliest of ways. On my polish tray (which is actually a breakfast tray I can move from room to room) I have an old Stampin Up catalog from the days when I made cards for fun. Anyway I use the catalog as sort of a place mat and turn the page when I have made enough of a mess of the previous page. When I turned the page to work on my Fair Maiden swatches this is what came up.



I saw all those colors and a light bulb went off in my head. I have Fair Maidens to match that color scheme! So off I went to create a fun nail skittle!





Colors used here, from thumb to pinkie are KBShimmer Eyes White Open (which I also used to stamp with, it's an amazing opaque white polish), Mint Succulent, Green Goddess, a special fan-group custom polish and Be Your Own Heroine.

For the stamping designs, I used my Uber Chic plates 1-01 and 1-02. These are great nail stamping plates, so much you can do with the designs. If you haven't checked them out yet, I highly suggest it!

And here are a few more shots in the sun and daylight because I wanted to share with you how amazing these polishes are in all lights!





So anyway, you'll want to get you hands on some of these polishes when they are restocked on April 18. If you haven't tried out this brand I highly recommend it. I previously reviewed two polishes from this collection, and I just love those as well!

So which polish do you like best out of this post? Have you tried Fair Maiden yet, which are your favorites?!

Color Block Nails with Literary Lacquers Mirror of Galadriel

Ready to see a polish that is totally sparkle-riffic? Today I've got Literary Lacquers Mirror of Galadriel to share with you and whoa is it super amazing!



So like a total dumb dumb, I was so excited to add flair to this polish, I completely skipped the step of swatches of it alone. So I have it here with my color block nail art!



I don't know about you but when I see straight silver holo polishes such as this one, the violet and the coral are the colors that jump out to me most. So I took two of my Essie polishes, Come Here and Chills and Thrills and decided to have fun with nail vinyls and do a little color blocking.



Now I've never actually tried color blocking before, so I didn't really know what I was doing. But I guess I kind of like the effect. What I didn't like was how I couldn't capture how soft and light Chills and Thrills is with my camera. When paired with Mirror of Galadriel, it actually helps draw the violet out of the holo glow really well. I think paring it with the warmth and brightness of Come Here didn't really help.

Anyway, Mirror of Galadriel is a lovely silver linear holo polish with larger holo microglitters scattered throughout. It is very much like ORLY Mirrorball, but with even stronger bling. Kirby of The Mercurial Magpie does a good job comparing them here (She also has a good rundown of the Magic and Mysteries collection, which Literary Lacquers recently released).

I used two coats for this opacity, and for even more bling you could add a third. I think in the future I'll pair this with a stark black stamping, but there is just so much bling there it is a shame to cover it up!

Have you tried any polishes from the Literary Lacquers Magic and Mysteries collection yet? Which ones were your favorites? I still have my eye on a few for sure!

Strawberry Nails with KBShimmer

Today I've got a fun strawberry look using some new KBShimmer polishes I recently purchased from their spring collection.



First I'll give the lowdown on the application and appearance of these lovely polishes and then I'll share the specifics of the nail art!





First up we have Blush Money. This polish is a lovely creamy pink holo polish with golden flakies which gives it a lovely golden glow. In some swatches I've seen this polish lean peach, I think that is the golden flakies glowing through on certain skin tones. On me it was clearly a creamy pink.

This polish was on the thicker side, but not too difficult to work with or anything. Just a tad thicker than most holographic polishes. I used three coats, because after the second coat I could still see visible nail line.





Next we have Ins and Sprouts. This polish is quite a bit stronger in the holo department, but also has a stunning golden glow to it in the light.

This polish was definitely thinner than Blush Money, definitely a different formula. It went on very easily in two coats.

Now when I put these two polishes together, I had no idea what I wanted to create with them. When I started to add Ins and Sprouts to Blush Money, I think I was going to for the whole freehand star burst look, but then I just thought they started to look like the tops of strawberrries!





So I used a small nail art brush to free hand the tops, and then used a dotting tool to created the seeded look. And the funniest thing of all, I totally forgot that the creator of KBShimmer used the Pantone color of the season Strawberry Ice when creating Blush Money (I really only found out when I was getting the links put on this post). So this look is seriously perfect in more ways than one!

I'm not sure I'm totally crazy about having this on all five nails, but I definitely could see this in a fun skittle look, maybe with another glitter polish like To Peach His Own.

What do you think? Do you like my strawberry nails?! I sure did like creating them, I think they are a super fun look for the spring and strawberries are everywhere in the grocery store right now. California is a bloomin' people, despite the terrible drought. 

Another Quick Nail Art Post

I'm going back into my vault for this fun look, but resurrecting it because the design vaguely reminds me of Easter eggs and I thought, why the heck not, with Easter being Sunday and all!



This fun skittle look was designed specifically around KBShimmer Make My Gray, which is this super fun gray-ish crelly with coral, holographic aqua and gray glitter pieces!



I wanted to pick other polishes for this design that would match all the awesome that is going on with Make My Gray, so I added another KBShimmer, You're So Shellfish and then paired that with Smitten Polish Himalayan Blue Poppy.

For the base of the chevron design I used a-england Encore Margot, a soft scattered holo polish. And to tie in the whole design together, I used three dots at the base of my thumb and pinkie design.



There is something so beautiful about a good skittle nail and I really do just love this design. I'm not so much into glitters anymore (as they are the biggest PITA to remove), but they make a great accent and wonderful inspiration for a fun skittle such as this!

So what do yo think? Do you like skittle nails? I'm thinking of picking up a few more KBShimmer glitter polishes just so I can create some more fun skittles just like this!

Indigo Bananas Spring Polish Review and Easter Nail Art

Hey guys, today I've got a press sample from Indigo Banana's Spring Quintet to share with you!



Today I'm sharing with you two of these five glass fleck scattered holo pastel collection that is just perfect for the spring when everything is in bloom!





First up we have Land of Green Ginger which is a gorgeous minty green creme polish with lovely golden glass fleck and scattered holo pieces swimming throughout the polish. The holo is very subtle, but a fun addition to the polish that you aren't expecting. It mostly looks like a mint polish with a golden glow, but in certain angles in direct light you can really see the holo pieces come out to play.

This polish was on the thicker side, but I'm guessing that is because it had so many elements too it. It wasn't difficult to work with. This is three coats with a top coat. The first coat looks very patchy and the second coat completely covers that, I added the third to completely hide the nail line.





Next we have Saffron Revolution with is a lovely peach leaning pastel coral polish with lovely blue glass flecks and scattered holo finish. This was very similar in appearance as Land of Green Ginger, with that hidden holo coming out to play making this polish so special.

Application was the same as Land of Green Ginger, with Saffron Revolution being just a tad thinner, but barely noticeable. I would suggest allowing a little dry time between each coat for best results. This is three coats with top coat.

And because I like to add a little nail art to my reviews, and Easter is just around the corner, I decided to combine the polishes for a fun seasonal look.





Now please forgive me for the stamping here, it's not the greatest job I've ever done. I think clearly, I've been out of practice for awhile and I need to jump back into this stat! But for this look I used designs from Bundle Monster Plate BM-603 using KBShimmer Eyes White Open to create this fun Easter egg look. These two colors pair so well together, and their pastel brightness made them the perfect backdrop for this fun decorated-egg look.

Overall I was very impressed with these two polishes, and am definitely eying the entire collection. One thing I've always really liked about Indigo Bananas is that the creator always does something a little different than everyone else out there. Just when I was starting to hear people ask about glass fleck finish making a comeback, bam, here is Indigo Bananas fulfilling that want and taking it a step further with that scattered holo.

The Spring Quintet was just released this week at the Indigo Bananas website. Full size 15ml bottles of this collection retail for $10 and if you just want to sample, they have 8ml bottles for $6.50.

Also recently released was the holo versions of Indigo Bananas Mega Chrome Flakies, which I have a few of to show you in another post sometime soon!

Oh and if you are already a fan of Indigo Bananas, you should totally join us in the We're Bananas for Indigo Bananas Facebook fan group, we are currently having an IG nail art contest!!!

So what do you think of these polishes? Have you tried Indigo Bananas before, what did you think? Which IGs are your favorite?