I had a week off - vacation - and dreamt for the last two weeks before my break from doing lots and lots of swatching and testing and playing with nail polish - but every so often things turn out differently and I was scurrying busily through that week of mine tending so many "to do's" that somehow always seem to amass in the background. But got them all down and I could tick off the majority of them - YAYYY! Still there was time to do some fun stuff with nail polish.
I discovered happily that I had quite some reward points collected with Llarowe - I haven't used any of them for months, and it provided me with three new Hare Polishes. Melissa from Lacquer Reverie certainly has done her best to get me on to the latest releases but first up Dancing Bird of Paradise. This is a sheer pink base filled with golden and pink hex and square glitters in various sizes. Now to get it properly opaque I certainly would have had to apply three coats at least - eeeeks chunky, bulky nails - no way.
I applied one coat of Hare Polish Dancing Bird of Paradise over one coat of Colorama Garoto Verao. I put Dancing Bird of Paradise sometime upside down before application to get all those glitters spilling out of the bottle once you start painting!!! The glitter lays nice and flat on the nail and distributes evenly onto the nails. I just had to dab one or two bald spots. Given the density of the multisized glitter it does dry bumpy so I applied one coat of Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food first and sealed the whole melange with Essence Better Than Gel Nails Fast Dry Top Sealer.
Colorama Garoto Verao is an orange leaning bright red that applies evenly and nicely. If worn on its own I certainly would go for a second coat to achieve even more saturation and vivacity.
On Tuesday I met my sister and my five year old niece for a nice girls afternoon. Knowing my niece I thought I better bring some polish along since the little one is mesmerized by anything nail polish and make-up. Indeed the second my butt hit the chair she was all over me begging to paint her nails. Being only five her hands are tiny and her nails minuscule - just right for the brushes of the Opi mini-bottles. I came with bare nails too and between the two of us we decided on a Skittelette with some dots. After watching us for a while my sister wanted to have her nails done too - I ended up painting nails there FOREVER - not to mention that my little nephew also wanted to get some polish onto his nails (I think that was for the sake of belonging to the pack - haha). Unfortunately none of them wanted their hands photographed and published in the net so you have to bear with my own hands:
Pinkie, index and thumb: two coats of Essie Naughty Nautical
Ring: two coats of Opi My Buff is Vampire and dots in Essie Naughty Nautical and Sunday Funday
Middle: two coats of Essie Funday Sunday
The next mani happened sort of accidentally: I wanted to do swatches of Butter London Pistol Pink, a berry colored, shimmer loaded beauty. Yun from the Polish Hyde-out has posted about it earlier this week - this is the link to her post - and looking at her pictures I started to wonder how Pistol Pink would compare to Butter London Victoriana. Well in case you wonder too, here is the comparison:
I applied two coats of each polish over Essence XXL Nail Thickener. Now a couple of words to the formula of Pistol Pink - as with Giddy Kipper the formula is sheerer than what we are used from Butter London and frankly the application is not as flawless as we came to be used by Butter London either. Comparing the two bottles the shimmer seems quite prominent in both of them, once on the nail the difference though becomes rather evident. While Victoriana (now that is a dream of a formula) has very prominent silver shimmer Pistol Pink let's its shimmer work in the back. It illuminates the base color beautifully and twinkles and sparks up in sunlight.
In two of my posts of this week I introduced my two new NCLA cream polishes. Up to now I only knew their Nail Wraps. One of their new sets is called … and holds xxx nail wraps in different sizes and varying patterns. I love to implement them into Skittelettes and right after getting them I had this Skittelette firmly implanted in my mind:
Recipe:
Pinkie, middle and thumb two coats of Nail Inc Leather Effect Noho
Ring: NCLA Nail Wrap from the xxx set, applied over Base Coat and sealed with Top Coat
Index: two coats of Butter London Giddy Kipper
And since all those nail wraps look different this is what my left hand looked like:
What a week - phew!!!! Thank you for bearing with me ;-)
I look forward to reading your comments - thanks for visiting!!!
Christine
