choose me! ...but don't try to photograph me

I've posted a lot about my love for German cosmetics brand Essence. I bought a ton of their polish in Spain and am ecstatic Essence is now stocked at Ulta! Because now I no longer have to be that d-bag who, when asked where I got a certain polish, has to answer "Uhm, I bought it in Europe."

This is Essence Choose Me!, a gorgeous glass-fleck teal that shines green and gold, depending on the angle. It's not really a duochrome, but the glass-fleck shimmer offers a lot of depth. Here I layered two coats of Choose Me! over one coat of Borghese Mezzanotte Blue, because Choose Me! is a bit sheer on its own and I wanted to conserve polish :)

To complement the gold glow Choose Me! can take on, I added glitter rows using Milani Gems Gold. I manually placed them on my nail using a dotting tool (a toothpick or bobby pin would work great too!)

I got tons of compliments on this (I work at a hotel, so I'm constantly pointing things out on maps/handing receipts and whatnot to people, so when my nails are extra rad, guests let me know), so I'm bummed it looks so lackluster in photographs. The first photo was taken my standard way--using my DSLR with an external flash + diffuser in front of a black backdrop. The second was taken using my point-and-shoot on its macro setting in my bathroom, which has a sky light. It's a bit more color-accurate but still SO GLARY! I just want you guys to see the gold glitter stripes. They're cute, okay? I just want to share cuteness with you. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK????

...apparently.

stick 'em up!

You all are probably familiar with the accent nail manicure, if not from me then from the nails tag on Instagram, because it's gotten mad popular. Painting just one or two of your nails something different from the rest is a quick and easy way to spice up a simple manicure. Traditionally, the accent finger is just your ring finger, or ring and thumb. But lately I've been seeing variations of this around the interwebz, and my new favorite is the pistol manicure: just your index and thumb, your trigger fingers, are painted somethin' special.

I painted my pinky, ring, and middle fingers with three coats of Essence You Belong to Me, which is a gorgeous minty blue that I would love more if a) it weren't so sheer and b) if it didn't make me get that dumb Taylor Swift song stuck in my head, even though those aren't even the exact lyrics. Essence is a faaaabulous German brand they sell all over Europe so I picked up a ton of bottles there, but it is now carried at Ulta, so get yer butt over there and buy all of them cus they are great (and only 99 cents a bottle, though the bottles are .5 oz).

For my accent fingers, I used a base of Essence Got A Secret?, then painted on leopard spots in China Glaze White on White and Wet n Wild Black Creme using a dotting tool.

After I completed this, that T. Swift song was replaced by Paper Planes by MIA (a vast improvement, in my opinion, and not just cus I'm nostalgic for 2007.) All I wanna do is *bang* *bang* *bang*...


In slightly unrelated news, I have jury duty today. I'd been on standby the last two days and I guess today they decided that because it's going to be 76 degrees and sunny out, I would really prefer sitting inside a courtroom. I really hope neon yellow nail polish isn't in violation of court dress code and...if it is...well, all I have to say is:

(Yes, that is M. Ward. Yes, the internet is an increasingly strange and marvelous place.)

you can paint your nails lime green, rent yourself a limousine

The other day I was listening to one of my favorite bands in the entire world, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and was immediately inspired after hearing the lyric from "White Shoes": You can paint your nails lime green / rent yourself a limousine. I thought to myself, HEY! I can paint my nails lime green, even though it's the most obnoxious color ever, so I'm GONNA DO IT.

I started with three coats of Essence Lime Up!, which I think is a dupe for OPI Did It On 'Em from the Nicki Minaj collection. The formula for this polish was horrible. It was thick and bubbly and settled unevenly. No bueno.

Then because the lime wasn't eye-searing enough, I decided to freehand stripes in China Glaze Shocking Pink, which is the brightest neon ever. My camera can't capture how bright it is. Just imagine walking into the Barbie aisle at a toy store circa 1996. That bright.

I feel like this pattern could be found on some canvas flip-flops at a really tacky golf course in Miami. Or maybe just a Lacoste trunk show. Maybe I should have put some alligators in there somewhere.

Well, there you have it...the ugliest manicure I've ever done. Sorry your eyes hurt now. Here's a picture of Anderson Cooper holding a really fat cat to make things better:

matte about whimsical

I'm gonna let you all in on some really intense nail polish world drama: for those of you unfamiliar with it, there's a brand called Deborah Lippmann that makes crazy expensive nail polish, usually $18 a bottle. Being the broke college student that I am (NY state minimum wage is a total joke, I tell you), I can't afford that, regardless of how beautiful her polishes are.

Since blue polishes and glitter polishes are two of my very favorite things, a polish that combined both seemed like a dream. And Deborah Lippman has just the thing--it's called Glitter in the Air, and it's perfect, but too damn expensive. So when Revlon came out with an exact dupe, I was inappropriately excited. I went to three different CVSes, two Rite Aids, two Targets (in two different states!) and a Walgreens, but to no avail. After a month of searching, I finally found it at Stop n Shop of all prices, for under $5. Take that, Lippmann and your ridiculous prices!

Unfortunately, once I finally got my paws on Revlon Whimsical, I was a little disappointed. It's incredibly sheer, the glitter is hard to spread, and it dries very slowly. For this I layered three coats of whimsical over two coats of a light blue polish, Essence Sure Azure, because I think it would take about three million coats of Whimsical to achieve bottle color and even I don't have the dedication for that.

After wearing Whimsical for a day, I added a coat of Essie Matte About You for some velvety matte goodness. PRO TIP: never ever ever ever use a matte top coat over a manicure that is even slightly wet. The matte will cause the polish underneath to shrink and you'll get unsightly cracks in your previously perfect manicure. To combat this, use a quick-dry top coat first, and then apply your matte top coat. I use Seche Vite Dry Fast Top Coat for all my manicures, and it's a godsend. You can get it for $8.99 at Sally's Beauty Supply, but I've also seen it at Target for a few dollars cheaper. Seche Vite means "dry fast" in French, and has this miracle formula that allows you to put it over tacky (but not totally wet) nail polish and within 10 minutes you'll have a super shiny and super dry manicure. The only drawback is that about halfway through the bottle, the formula will start to get really goopy and will be impossible to apply. This can be fixed by adding a few drops of nail polish thinner, which you can find at Sally's or any beauty supply store.

And because this post has had waaaay too much text and way too few pictures, here's a creepily close-up photo I took with my point-and-shoot of Whimsical before I mattified it:

**note to those who are not Facebook friends with me: I've been posting nails on Facebook since September, but only just started this blog a couple weeks ago. Thus, I have a ton of manicures from the last few months to post, but back then I wasn't really focusing on getting a lot of great pictures. Any pre-blog manicures will have fewer, crappier pictures...just a heads up.

funky skittle

Here's some nail art lingo for ya: a "skittle" manicure is when every nail is painted something different. I love actual Skittles (especially the Crazy Cores...I could eat those by the pound) and I love skittle manicures just as much. They're great for when you can't decide on just one pattern, or have a few new polishes you want to try out, which was the case in this manicure. I pulled the blue, purple, hot pink, and multi-colored glitter polishes out of my "untrieds" stash for this.

Pinky: base of Essence Lime Up! with polka dots of China Glaze White on White.
Ring: base of an unnamed blue microglitter from Urban Outfitters with the anchor freehanded using white acrylic paint.
Middle: base of China Glaze Shocking Pink topped with Milani Gems FX.
Index: base of China Glaze Lemon Fizz with flowers in Milani Classic, Wet n Wild Dreamy Poppy, and China Glaze Holly-Day.
Thumb: base of unnamed purple microglitter from Urban Outfitters with the basketweave pattern freehanded using white acrylic paint.


Pro tip: when using neon polishes (like Shocking Pink) or yellow polishes (like Lemon Fizz) always start with a base coat of white polish. That way you'll only need two coats of your neon or your yellow for full coverage--without a white base, you'll need at least four or five coats, which is a waste of time and polish!

coral clouds

Nailside is one of the first nail blogs I ever followed, and she's behind the ever-popular cloud mani. It's so easy to do and has endless color combinations...I'd definitely encourage any newbies to the nail art game to try this out. You can find Nailside's tutorial for this mani here.

For this I used a base of China Glaze Innocence followed by Essence Shiny Godness and Zoya Kylie 2 and applied all polishes using the bottle brushes. Kylie 2 is such a magnificent color--this photo really doesn't do it justice, it's almost neon, minus the horrible sheer application issues you get with neons :)

teacup french

This manicure was inspired by this teacup I found somewhere on the Tumblrsphere. I normally can't stand french manicures--they make me think of high school, when every girl got french tip acrylics for every dance, but this color combination makes the french not quite so tacky.

 I used two coats of Essence Sweet as Candy for the base. It's a sheer light pink that's perfect for covering stains. The gold foil is Essence Shiny Godness, which I love because it's slightly more bronze than most golds, and the green is Essence Viva la Fiesta. First, I freehanded the green using the polish brush, and then added the gold with a small paintbrush.

I really have a thing for Essence polishes and I'm so sad they're not available in the US. When I lived in Spain there was a drugstore right around the corner that sold Essence and whenever I was stressed (which was often) I'd go in and snap up a few bottles. Ahh, retail therapy...