A (Late) BCA Manicure! Featuring Pretty & Polished Hello Dolly!

October was Breast Cancer Awareness month & I wanted to show my own awareness!

At work, we do product specials to raise money and whatnot but sometimes sporting the pink just to show your respect for all the survivors out there is just as meaningful! I wore this manicure in late October, so I'm showing you all a little late.

This is 2 coats of Zoya Emme, a light pink shimmer polish with a little bit of a frostiness to it. I actually got this through Glossybox, which is a subcription to a box where I get 5 sample sized (and sometimes full sized!) products for $21 a month. It's also a Canadian company, which I dig since I'm Canadian. Zoya sent an assortment of pink polishes to Glossybox to give to their subscribers for BCA month!

This photo shows the frosty finish really well. I love the baby pink color! It covered well and was not streaky at all despite the fact that most frosty polishes are. Very nice!

I then added a coat of Pretty & Polished Hello Dolly. It's 100% the girliest manicure I have ever worn in my life. I loved how the girly glitter added some pizazz! (You know I love glitter, who could resist?)

It's kinda funny actually, I didn't even remember purchasing Hello Dolly when I first got it, but I'm so glad I did! It is a collection of micro pink, medium purple, & large and extra large white and pink hex glitters. This is only one coat (super dense!) and all of the glitters went on fairly evenly! I did have to do some digging for the large white & pink hex glitters, but it was worth it.

There is a nice macro & bottle shot for you, showing all the sparkle. The larger glitters do sink to the bottom as you can see in the macro shot which is why I had to dig, but if you left it upside down for a while and gave it a good shake, it would definitely make it easier.

 You can purchase Pretty & Polished on Etsy and Llarowe. You can also watch for new collections & updates on the Facebook page! They even have two special BCA polishes!

Nautical Nails!

So i just got a big old box full of new nail art stripers in the mail and I wanted to use them for something fancy, since I've been on more of an artsy kick lately.

I love nautical things, especially pin-up inspired nautical. I was a pin-up sailor for Halloween one year and painted my nails similar to this for my costume!

This mani was a fun opportunity for me to try out my new striper/pens! I bought a set of 30, and they send you random colors. I was lucky enough to get a white & a black which never happens, so I was pretty excited.

The colors used in this mani were Lime Crime Milky Ways, China Glaze First Mate & Zoya Maura. I also used Dollish Polish Toad-ally Awesome on my pointer as a glitter topper! I'll have to do a full mani using this, I love it!

The rest of the art was done using my nail art pens from eBay! They are extremely affordable and easy to use. You can purchase them from this eBay seller (where I purchased mine) for only like $20!

I've been feeling so inspired lately, hope it doesn't die off! Maybe I could finish the rest of the challenge!

Challenge Day 25: Inspired By Fashion

I didn't pick a specific outfit or designer for this challenge. Instead, I picked my favorite fashion trend! Can you guess what it is? I named my blog after it!

Lace! Lace has been huge in the fashion world for ages and, in my opinion, never goes out of style. I own so many shirts and dresses featuring lace, I decided to feature it on my fingers!

I chose to do a funky black lace design! It was simple to create a lace look without getting too fancy. I just alternated between a scalloped design and dots.

The base color used was Zoya Goldie, because what goes better with lace than flashy gold?

Do you like wearing lace? I think it was fun to wear my favorite fashion trend on my fingers!

Challenge Day 24: Inspired By A Book

The theme for this challenge was Inspired By A Book. This was not a hard decision at all, why not chose the book that women everywhere have lost their minds over?

I chose 50 Shades Of Grey. You don't have to be a bondage connoisseur or anything to read this book, it's pretty good! I would recommend it to anyone.

I created the "50 Shades" look by doing an ombre! The polishes used for the ombre were Joe Fresh Concrete, Zoya Kelly and a generic black polish. I also mixed white into Kelly to get the greys on my pointer and middle fingers.

Then I painted a tie on my ring finger to mimic the tie on the cover of the book. Nothing special, because my tie is quite a bit less detailed. But I think I portrayed the idea well!

Have you read 50 Shades of Grey? And what book did you use for inspiration?

Challenge Day 22: Inspired By A Song

This was a hard one for sure. I'm not sure how to be inspired by a song. I was thinking music videos, lyrics, the name. But I eventually settled on something!

I have been obsessed with Lana Del Rey lately, her music is amazing and her lyrics are definitely inspiring. I chose her song Radio so inspired this manicure!

"Baby love me cause I'm playing on the radio." This song is awesome and was fairly easy to create in a manicure. I started with a nude base and painted on little radios on my thumb nails. I also did an accent nail with music notes! The radios were created with Joe Fresh Cement, Zoya Kelly and a black ebay nail art pen.

On the rest of my nails I did a glitter sandwich with F4 Polish Rainforest and China Glaze I. I thought this would be a cute way to spice up the rest of my nails instead of leaving them plain.

Overall I think this was a fun manicure! And I think it was inspired by a song quite well. Actually a radio and music notes could be inspired by all types of music!

I will be posting my tribal challenge later today, so for now I will leave you with a video of Radio so you can take a listen :)

Nail Art Challenge: Day 7. Black And White Nails!

This manicure was a lot of fun. You have so many options when it comes to black and white. So I didn't want to be lazy and use glitter or stamping. I wanted to do something fun, but simple.
Here's what I came up with!

A funky polka dot mani! I used Zoya Snow White for the base. This was 2 coats of the white creme polish. The application is alright, it's a little on the thick side, but then again my bottle is pretty old. It could just be time for a new one. I like Snow White because it goes on creamy, not like white out.

I wanted to add a little something, something to the dots, so I did a few random colored ones. The colors used were China Glaze Flying Dragon (Pictured. You can even see the blue glitters in the bottle shot, how cool!), China Glaze Turned Up Turquoise and Sally Hansen Blue Me Away!.

It's hard to tell Turned Up Turquoise apart from Blue Me Away in these photos. My camera flash definitely brutalized that a little bit. I saw a post about how Kayla from Nails By Kayla Shevonne has a little photography studio she DIY'd! I think I'm going to make one of those so I can take more color accurate photos sans flash. You can see her post here.

Overall I think this was a fun way to do black and white. What do you think? :)

A New Nail Art Challenge

I know I had already started another challenge, but it was sadly uninspiring for me. I kept wanting to skip days and I felt unmotivated. I was looking for something a little different but then I remembered this challenge I did around this time last year. Now that I have a little more experience and creativity, I think it will be twice as fun!

Lots of different options for every day. That's what attracted me! So here is Day One: Red Nails.

Red nails are an obvious classic. Red looks good with just about any color (except green, I'll leave that combo for Christmas), so it's always been a go to of mine when I can't settle on a color.
This is Zoya Maura. This is one of the first polishes I added to my collection and I've always loved it. The best way to describe it is a neon red creme. It's a super bright red leaning a tiny bit on the orange-y side.

Of course I wasn't just going to leave this mani all red! My nails have been bare all weekend. I was at the music festival Boonstock here in Canada, so I took all my polish off my nails before hand.
The yellow flowers are done with China Glaze Solar Power and a dotting tool. I then did little white dots with a nail art pen from eBay.

Someone said this reminds them of Spongebob! It kinda does look like the flowers, doesn't it? I thought it was a cute way to do a summery, happy mani. This was really simple to do, because the yellow is opaque enough that you don't have to keep going over the flowers.

Do this challenge with me! Drop a link i the comments and I'll be sure to check out how your challenge is coming along :)

Inspiration Monday: Bright Flowers

I wanted to start a weekly tradition for myself to keep me inspired, and I kept searching for what people were doing for their weekly challenges. Then I thought to myself, what if I do a weekly inspired mani? Inspired by a photo, pattern, tv show, jewelry, anything! So here is my first Inspiration Monday! What a good way to make mondays better.

This week's mani is inspired by my iPhone background. I have this little app that I can download background off, and all the ones I download are always floral. Because I'm obsessed with floral.

 

Here is my inspiration photo. Pretty, huh? So bright and cheery.

And here is my inspiration mani! The base color is Joe Fresh Cement, which is an awesome medium grey jelly that paints wonderfully. I did the lines with a white NYC polish (it has no name). The reason I dotted the lines is because they are so subtle in the photo and there's no way I could've got them thin enough to look the same. I like the way they look dotted.

I did the flower accent nail by first painting a white background for them like in the picture. Then I put a blob of Zoya Reneé for the pink flower, China Glaze Breakin' for the orange flower and China Glaze For Audrey for the blue flower. I made them look a little more like flowers by swirling a little white on top of them. The vines were done with OPI Who The Shrek Are You? and a dotting tool. 

What do you guys think about this mani? And would any of you like to partake in Inspiration Monday? Leave a comment and let me know :)