Springtime Tape Manicure!

Spring is here and it's time to dismiss the dark vampy winter colors and welcome in the bright colors for spring. I grabbed the brightest blue (ChG 'Flyin High'), pink (ChG 'Rich and Famous') and purple (ChG 'Spontaneous') in my stash and went to work. Initially I was going to do a water marble with these three colors but decided that I have done a lot of those recently and went for this striped design instead.

I took several pictures during the process of doing this manicure, but it was late at night and my lighting at night is terrible. The picture quality came out horrendous so I'll try to explain how I did this manicure with words instead.

Firstly, I painted three vertical stripes on each nail using the three colors from my stash that I chose. After the polish dried, I applied Sinful Colors 'Smoking Hot' to the entire nail to give it that glitter effect and then applied Seche Vite top coat. While I waited for the nails to dry completely through, with scissors I cut up several strips of scotch tape. Once my nails were COMPLETLEY dry (approx. 10 mintes) I did my best to place the tape on my nails evenly and as straight as possible. You can see in the picture above that I chose to change the direction of the diagonal lines in each nail but obviously you dont have to. Once I was happy with the placement of my tape, I painted over the nail again with Sinful Colors 'Black On Black' and immediately removed the tape before the black polish had a chance to dry. I do this because if the black polish were to dry before I lifted the tape, it would leave a messy line instead of a nice crisp line. Again I applied Seche Vite to the finished design and thats it! Pretty simple.

I hope you guys enjoyed this manicure! Talk to ya soon!

-Amanda

Easter Manicure and FACEBOOK!

Happy Easter everyone, and if you don't celebrate Easter then happy Sunday! Before I forget, I want to mention that I made a Facebook. If you'd like to be friends on there, here's the link to my Facebook. I created a "page" on Facebook a week or so ago but I could not get it figured out so I created a normal page and deleted the old one. :)

Okay, being that today is Easter, I wanted to share with you my Easter mani. I didn't want the typical "chick" or "bunny" manicure so I went with a pastel blue floral water marble. I practiced on the thumb first and loved how it turned out, so I recreated the design on all of my nails. The rhinestone represents the center of the flower.

I used ChG "Sea Spray" as my base color and marble with that and a white polish from Rimmel. For the dots outlining the flower pedals, I used a toothpick and ChG "Icicle". The rhinestones I bought in a set awhile back from Sally's. They were way overpriced, so if you're looking to purchase some, I recommend Ebay or Amazon.

I hope you guys enjoyed this manicure and I will talk to you all again soon!

-Amanda

FISHNET AND GLITTER, OH MY!

Hi guys. I have been rather lazy when it comes to my manicures lately. My husband is on vacation from work and I am on spring break, so I've been spending a lot of time with him. I did mess around with my nails a few times this last week but every manicure looked terrible. It was almost like I was forcing my creativity instead of allowing it to create itself. LOL! So, today something came to me and I wanted to share it with you guy. I'm calling this my, "Fishnet and Glitter" manicure. Hopefully my creativity will come back soon because I'm having a dry spell at the moment. LOL. I installed the Instgram app and used it to add a little effect to this picture. If you don't have that app yet you should get it. Ok, so for this manicure the polishes I used are Sinful Colors "Black on Black" and China Glaze "Rock Solid" and then I just applied silver glitter particles to my accent nail. I hope you guys like this manicure, and I will talk to you guys in the next post! Bye!

-Amanda

March 2012 Nail Polish Haul Swatches!

Here are the swatches of the polishes I bought in March! My favorite one this month defintely is "Zeus" from Sinful and my disappointment of the month would have to be "Luxe and Lush". I had high hopes for this layering polish but cannot find a combo that I like. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoy these pictures! See ya next time!

-Amanda

China Glaze "Luxe and Lush"

Revlon "Whimsical"

China Glaze- Agro

Sinful- Zeus

NYX-Robotic

NYX-Emerald Forest

Nabi-"Navy Blue"

Kleancolors-"Chunky Holo Black"

NYX-"Indigo Blue"

China Glaze-"Rock Solid"

Essie-"Pink A Boo"

How I Made My Swatch Sticks/ Swatcicles

Good morning everyone! Today has started off on the right foot; I went to class this morning, and my professor called in sick so no school today! Yay, more time to play in my polishes. I do have an exam tomorrow so I'll have to keep this blog post short and to the point.

I posted a blog a few days ago on how I've decided to swatch my nail polish collection. I've switched from nail wheels to swatch sticks. There were a couple of you that wanted a step by step on how I made them and where I got my supplies so I recorded a fairly quick video on this for those of you interested. If you have any further questions, or need something clarified, don't hesitate to ask! I'm off to study! Hope you enjoy the video and find it helpful! See you guys in the next post!

-Amanda

Wanna Know What's In My Stash?!

Hi guys! I'm not sure how many of you guys are subscribed to me on YouTube, but I get requested quite a bit on there to do a detailed nail polish collection video. I havn't done one yet because my collection grows almost daily and by the time I film one and upload it, I'll probably have added another couple polishes to my collection so the video won't even be up to date. Sad, I know! LOL. "Then stop shopping for nail polishes Amanda!" Seriously, it's easier said then done. So, what I've decided to do, for anyone that is interested in knowing what polishes I have, I have created a little tab titled "Nail Polish Collection List", and there I have listed in alphabetical order by brand (you can  thank my OCD) all the polishes in my collection. Since I do monthly hauls and record haul videos on You Tube, I thought I would update my list on here every month as well. You can find the tab up top but in case you don't see it, I'll link it here as well.

See you guys in the next post!!

-Amanda

Swatch Wheels vs Swatcicles

Hi guys! How was everybodys weekend? Mine was awesome despite the weather. It was really cold and rainy all weekend where I live so I opted for a productive weekend inside. I actually got two major projects done this weeked: switching nail polish swatches from nail wheels to swatch sticks (also known as "swatcicles") and I also started on and completed about 80% of my nail room! It looks so beautiful. I'll blog about my nail room once it's completely done but today I want to show you the swatcicles I made.

Swatcicles and nail wheels both hold the same purpose; they allow you to easily see what a particular polish looks like on the nail before painting your own nails. Some polishes can look different in the bottle than it does on the nail so this is a convenient way to see their true colors so to speak. When my polish collection was fairly small, nail wheels were ideal and worked really well. However, as my collection has grown, so has the amount of nail wheel I've needed and they've just become a huge nuisance.

Swatcicles are much easier when you have a larger collection. It's easier to keep them organized by color, they aren't oddly shaped so storage isn't difficult and they're easier to swatch on than the nails wheels where the nails were so close together. As you can tell, I'm really loving my new swatcicles. :)

Here are the 'cicles I made this weekend. The styrofoam cups they are in are only temporary until I can decide how I want to store them or display them. I wasn't able to finish my entire collection but I made a huge dent! If you'd like to see a step by step on how I made these, I'd be happy to show you, just let me know!

-Amanda