Stamping Skittle in Black and White

Hello gorgeous! Sorry this post is so late, it's been a crazy week. Everyone has been sick in my house, myself included. But that doesn't mean my nails need to suffer, right? As a pick-me-up, I decided to use my new Mega (L) by ILNP, and to follow through with this month's theme of stamping, I did a stamping skittle.

I unfortunately didn't stop and think to get a macro of Mega (L), and I'm really kicking myself for it. Now that I have a very present sun, I really should get pics of the holo...

Speaking of pics, I only got one after final cleanup. Please forgive me, as I've been horribly ill... But I did get a few of the pics from before final cleanup (aka the pics I take before I realize I'm not quite done with cleanup yet...), and I'll share one of those as well. 

Pic (of my right hand) before final cleanup. Surprisingly not my favorite hand. Usually my left hand does a better job than my right (because I'm much more careful and tend to take my time), but I guess it was a bad day.

Pic (of my left hand) after final cleanup. Ah, much better!

To get this look, I laid down a base of Sinful Colors' Snow Me White, then did two layers of Mega (L) by ILNP. I then stamped using Black on Black and a few different stamping plates:

• Gals' GA14 for the dots, 
• GA21 for the thick lines on my thumb and right index finger.
• Mash 46 for the thin stripes
• Mash 38 for the checks
• Bundle Monster's BM-201 for the chevron

I also used my new VAGA stamper. I'm unsure if the quality (or rather, the lack thereof) of the stamping is due to Black on Black or the stamper. Black on Black is not a stamping polish, and it leaves much to be desired. I REALLY need to get my hands on some stamping polishes! But just in case, I went and purchased another VAGA stamper as a part of a set, because I like the stamper itself, but it has a defect. I'll also be contacting the seller with my issue, which is that the stamper isn't smooth. It has a couple of indents and I'm pretty sure it's causing the stamper to be unable to grab everything from the plate. I'm going to keep playing with it though, and see if more conditioning and priming can help. But if all else fails, I have my backups.

Do you have a favorite and trusty stamper? What are your favorite plates? Within my Month of Stamping, did you learn anything that will help you in the future?  Please remember to subscribe, and you can find me on IG as @pinkiesforapenny. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I'll see you next Thursday! Ta-ta!

In Which The Nail Art Industry Brings Liquid Latex Out Of The Bedroom

Heya gorgeous! Hope your weekend is crammed with all the stuff you wanna do :) 

So I've decided that I'm going to spend January doing stamping. I have a lot of plates and I feel like I just don't use them enough :/ I plan on rectifying that this month, and using a lot of plates that I haven't used before, especially the plates that I specifically bought the sets for and then never used (I'm looking at you, paisley from Bundle Monster...)

So I'm looking to do new stamping techniques. Last week was double-stamping. This week, it's a part of the cleanup process, which I totally forgot to take pictures of...

Recently, a new cleanup method has come about called Liquid Palisade. It's basically purple liquid latex in a purple liquid eyeliner tube, according to some who tried it. It also retails for $22/bottle. 

Think about how long a tube of liquid eyeliner lasts. Now, imagine having to smear that all over your fingers instead of a thin line on your eyelid. It's not going to last for very long, and at $22 that feels like theft to this stingy mom. So, I went looking for a solution, and I found one, very easily. Liquid Latex. I went to a couple of smut shops in search of a small jar or tube, but found that it wasn't very popular and were pulled off of the shelves, and was encouraged to go online. I went to my favorite place, smile.amazon.com (where 5% of every purchase I make goes to St. Judes AND I get free shipping), and I found a sizeable tub of latex for more than half the price of the name brand. I chose white as my color, and two days later it was at my door.

So when I was deciding what to do for my mani, I decided it was time to bust out the latex. So I would need a messy and hard-to-clean mani... Gradient. Sponged gradient. Perfect. And then I closed my eyes, opened up a page in my new Pueen plates, and picked a design. It was fate. And as fate would have it, my nails are pretty awesome. 

So I get the gradient done using Sinful Colors' Enchanted and Zoya's Charisma and then decide to take a lesson from last week and add some glitter.  I'm not sure if you remember, it was a very long time ago, but I was having issues with the purple bleeding and nearly annihilating my stamp. In an attempt to prevent this, I decided to put a clear coat of something in between the stamp and my gradient. I still want to get to know Starrily's Eclipse a bit better, so I added a layer as a barrier between the purple gradient and the white Sinful Colors polish I was going to stamp with (Snow Me White), and it worked! I topcoated this with Parrot Polish's Glow Purple (still can't capture that elusive glow-in-the-dark effect on camera...) and there was no bleeding, yaaaay!!!

So that is the roller coaster of events that lead up to this mani. I do want to give some tips in the event that you decide to grab some liquid latex to try out for yourself, just real quick.

• Put the latex into a smaller container with a brush for easier use. I poured some into a clean and empty nail polish bottle. Don't forget to lay down newspaper when you pour, and the little tiny funnels you sometimes get with glitter at walmart are completely ineffective. 
• Only do one hand at a time. So, I wanted to play with it and got carried away and did both hands to start and MAN that was a messy mistake. One thing I did not know about liquid latex is that when it's dried, it has the consistency of really old waterballoons that sat in your garage or attic for a couple of summers too long. You know what I'm talking about... sticky and mushy and just really weird. When your fingers that are covered in latex touch each other, the latex kinda tries to meld together, making it hard for them to come apart. It causes lifting, and you'll have to redo the latex. When you have all 10 digits stuck together, this makes it really hard to try to do anything, especially nails. So keep it to one hand at a time, K?
• Buy ammonia-free. I did, and it still has a slight hint of cat pee smell to it when it's wet. It's odorless when it's dry, but if this is what the ammonia-free one smells like, I shudder to think what the kinds with ammonia smell like.
• Pull it away from the nail. In some videos, I've seen people just grab a corner and pull off and all of the polish came away. This was not the case for me. When I pulled it away, the polish kinda slid right off, like when you were a kid, you put polish on a balloon and... oh. Duh... Anyways. I'm wondering if the Liquid Palisade has anything special in it to prevent this, or if I shouldn't have waited until everything was dry. More experimentation is in my future, I predict! Anyways, I used a pair of tweezers and kinda cut it away from my cuticle and then pulled outwards, loosening the latex and making sure it took the polish with it, and THEN I was able to pull it away. It came in one piece, too, which was oddly, yet really satisfying.
• Waste not, want not! Just kidding, apply this sh*t liberally. Get it all over your finger, and then some. Make it thick. It'll come off easier. Avoid any hair that might be on your knuckles, though. Hair and liquid latex do NOT mix. Get it as close to the cuticle as you dare, and as far down and away as you think you might get any polish. If you're watermarbling, probably go like half an inch further, just in case.
• If you are allergic to latex, DO NOT USE THIS. I'm just being facetious here. If you're allergic to latex, you probably already know to avoid this stuff. I mean, it has the word "latex" right in the title... if you don't know if you're allergic or not, grab the nearest epipen or some benedryl,  and do a test patch on a hairless part of your hand. Always better to be safe than sorry!

I personally found this to be a better experience than taping my finger, and will definitely be continuing with this method. Keep an eye out in the tags for it in future posts! I'm really sorry about how wordy and long this post got. I generally do try to keep posts short-ish and sweet-er, but I got carried away. It happens to the best of us, right? 

Will you be giving this cleanup method a go, trying Liquid Palisade, or do you have your own tried-and-true method? Lemme know down in the comments, and please remember to subscribe for more fun with me!

Endless Blue by Sinful Colors

I have no clue when I picked this color up, or from where, though I'm pretty sure it was Walgreens when they had a sale of some sort. Doesn't matter though, because I ABSOLUTELY love it!

This color is a one-coat wonder. I went with two, but it's simply because I'm paranoid. Sinful Colors knocked this one out of the park! It's a medium creme polish, with a shiny finish.

Ooooh shiny holo!

I was thrilled to find I have a striping tape to match!

I freehanded that heart. Very proud of it.

The color is a tad bit darker on the nail than in my photos, but that's okay.  

I can't tell if it's the topcoat (Seche Vite) or if the striping tape always does this, but the color is fading from the tape, which is disappointing. It came in this pack, which is really a steal, especially considering the free shipping. 

The holo is, of course, a mix of China Glaze Cosmic Dust and Born Pretty Holographic #7.  I like the coverage Cosmic Dust gives in 2 coats, and the chunk of the #7. 

Because I was short on time, this got a coat of Seche Vite. 

I LOVE wearing these, and the way they turned out, even though I did vary somewhat from my inspiration. I just couldn't get the stripes the way I wanted them trying to freehand.

I'm actually pretty proud of this mani, took me about an hour, but that's because I kept fudging. I'm pretty sure I could have done them in about 40 minutes (including drying time) if I remembered which nails to paint what color and if it hadn't taken me 2 tries to do the striping before deciding on using tape.

Swatches

I got some swatch rounds (I think that's what they're called?) with my birthday Amazon gift card, so I'm doing swatches of the polishes I own.
The one I've got done so far is my Miscellaneous glitters, ones that don't have any particular color placement.

This is the round blank:

And this is what it looks like when it's done. As you can see I need to get a much thinner marker. Here's my silvers, golds, and misc glitters:

Right now I'm working on a week-long project for you guys, as a part of a review of a popular product I've found online, so unless someone lets me do their nails I won't be posting anything until then.

Oops

The Dollar Tree has some new scissors! Zigzags! So I thought I'd do some chevrons.

...yeah.

Hall of Shame today!

The zig-zag was too big, except for on my thumb. AND THEN I brushed my hair back and destroyed my pointer and middle fingers :/

My right hand was much, much worse...

Waterfall Nails

I saw this post in quite a few places, and fell in love with the waterfall look. I started reading through her blog, www.thenailasaurus.com, to find out she's in love with waterfalls too, and even made this tutorial. I didn't follow it to the tee (I didn't use the right brush), but I just had to use my new China Glaze Cosmic Dust today and I thought grey/black/white tones would be GORGEOUS over it. And I was right. But it did need a pop of color, so I added purple (based on my ABF's preference). And man oh man I'm in love! (with the mani...)

Obviously, I need some practice, but I loooove this!!! The way the holo is grey until the light hits it, it works perfectly! When the holo, y'know, holos, it's just brilliant. In certain lights the purple looks like another grey, and it all is just perfect :)

Comparison: China Glaze Cosmic Dust vs Born Pretty Hologram Effect #7

So Sally's was having another sale, and OF COURSE I had to get in on it. This purchase was my first bottle of China Glaze! I got Cosmic Dust, which is a medium grey holo.

And I decided to compare it to Born Pretty's Hologram Effect #7:

Coat 1

Hologram Effect #7                                                  Cosmic Dust          

  

Coat 2 

Hologram Effect #7                                                  Cosmic Dust        

Cosmic Dust is very opaque, only needs 1-2 coats. As you can see, after two coats, you can't see the difference between the black bottom coat and the no bottom coat. Hologram Effect #7 is very sheer, and could maybe be a topcoat glitter for a mani. 

Hologram Effect #7 is a little more of a vivid holo, and a little chunkier. It also has a bit of a sage green color in it after it dries, whereas Cosmic Dust is just a straight dark silver.  

Both of these will have its use, and they are definitely nothing alike. I was just curious what the difference would be. Turns out it's like night and day and I'm okay with that :)

Fun with Holos

Sorry it's been so long! I got a promotion at work that changed my hours (I'm now 3:30-Midnight), my babysitter quit with no notice, and I've got an almost-boyfriend that I spend most of my days off with, so I've been pretty busy! Please forgive me!

After getting the Born Pretty holo #7 and then getting the FingerPaints Peacock Portrait, I HAD to do a collaboration of the two! 

On my thumb is a gradient with #7, with a coat or two of Peacock Portrait. My ring finger is #7 with a couple coats of Peacock Portrait.

I used three coats of Peacock Portrait over black to get some opacity. The glitter is not terribly dense, as you can see on my ring finger.

Peacock Portrait is on every finger, while #7 is only on the thumb and ring finger.

Peacock Portrait is a chunky holo with teal hexagons. I'm in absolute love! My ONLY criticisms would be to make the glitter denser, with a faster-drying formula. It took FOREVER for one coat to dry, and I honestly could have used a couple more coats, but I got tired and frustrated, waiting for it to dry.

It was a very fun, very distracting mani a good way to get away from work lol

Born Pretty Store

I've been wanting a holo polish for a while, so when Born Pretty had their holos on sale, PLUS the 10% off discount if you follow Polish Art Addiction, who has her own coupon code, I kinda had to finally get one!

Get it here

For the price, Born Pretty's holo polishes are very small. I wasn't aware that it was only .2 fl oz, which is really disappointing. The regular (non-sale) price is $12.88! That's... WOW. One of the reasons I assumed they were full-sized bottles!

I haven't gotten the chance to try it, as Era hasn't gone to bed yet (it's only 1:15 and I JUST got the mail. Had to share this asap!!) and it's such a tiny bottle I would feel it a waste to do a swatch on a fake nail.

I'm gonna use it tonight.

NEXT ITEM!

I've always wanted to try Fimo decals, and I REALLY like the fruit-salad-looking nails, so...

Get them here

Ooooh! They're tiny and rubbery and very cute! Apples and oranges and watermelon and citrus and strawberries!  I can't wait to figure out the designs I'm gonna try!

I was very happy with the size of this item, there are quite a bit of each design, and the detail is great :)

Overall, I'm very excited to use my new stuff!



These items were NOT given to me by Born Pretty for review, nor were they given as gifts.