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.

girl on fire

I finally got around to ordering a couple polishes from the China Glaze Capital Colours Collection, inspired by the Hunger Games. I wasn't the biggest fan of the collection because I tend to favor bright and light colors over dark, moody ones, but I love the Hunger Games so I had to waste some money on HG-inspired polish.

I fully acknowledge there are about eight million manicures exactly like this floating around the internet, but in my defense I only had about ten minutes to do this manicure and thus couldn't be terribly creative.

I started with two coats of China Glaze Stone Cold, an awesome shimmery matte (!!!) charcoal grey, and then applied China Glaze Electrify to the tips. It's a super bright and shiny mix of gold and red small glitter. Once Electrify dried, I put a coat of Essie Matte About You top coat over just the glitter because I wanted the glitter to match the matte base, but the effect ended up being kind of cloudy and messy-looking. Lesson learned.

So, there you have it! District 12-inspired nails. I'd like to think Cinna would be a fan :)

mattified midnight

Ever since buying Essie Matte About You top coat last week, I've been searching for the perfect matte mani. I tried mattifying a shimmer--baaaad idea. I tried matte base with gloss leopard spots--too subtle. I did rainbow skittles with tape zig-zags, which actually looked cute, but I didn't realize that matte polish attracts dirt, and the light yellow I used looked horrible after just one day. So then I finally decided to try mattifying some glitter, and I love the result!

For the base, I used Borghese Mezzanotte Blue which after two coats looks pretty much black. I was a little disappointed, but I do think it's subtly softer/more velvety than if I had used just black. The glitter is two coats of Wet n Wild Party of Five Glitters. I love the colors in it, but its formula is so difficult to spread evenly. And for the matte top coat, I used two coats of Matte About You. I did get some cracks/shrinkage, so I would suggest using a quick-dry top coat like Seche Vite before applying the matte top coat.

Since I'm new to the nail game, this was the first time I actually remembered to wrap my tips. It's been a whole day since I finished this mani and I have zero tip wear! Wooooohoooo.