25th birthday cupcake nails

I've been wanting to do cupcakes for awhile and decided that between Valentines Day and my birthday on the 17th, these were a good bet! And since I had a bit of patience on working with something new, I went for it.

They're OK, I don't love nor hate them. Pretty neutral about it honestly, though I do wish I had used tiny dots for the sprinkles instead of using a toothpick for lined sprinkles. Kinda thought I should have made the cherries a hair bigger but oh well!!



Didn't use a base color hence why the cupcakes don't seem to go all the way up to the cuticle.

Used the following:

• Cupcake stripes: China Glaze Chocodisac & ELF Nude
• Icing: White striper brush
• Cherry: Wet N Wild Red
• Sprinkles: Orly Elsabeths Rose & China Glaze Sunshine Pop

Red + Gold glitter + accent nail

Used the following for this mani, forgot to get bottle pics:

• ELF: Cherry Bomb
• Orly: Sashay my Way

Also Konad's special white stamping polish for the accent nail. I was originally going to stamp all my nails but suddenly got lazy. I actually wasn't going to post this because I ended up being lazy on cleaning up and making the edges look nice. Some of the glitters had gotten near my cuticle and made it awkward to clean up. Oh well. ELF polishes are generally also difficult to get to smooth out properly and look nice around the edges.

Essie's Shine of The Times dupe comparison

Something I've been meaning to do for awhile is swatch polishes that are very close in similarity to the ever popular Shine of the Times by Essie. If you hadn't heard, that polish was discontinued sadly. You can still order it online here and there, but it's becoming more difficult to find.

I also got my old camera going, and boy is there a difference in quality of pictures! I missed it.

I used the following:

• Maybelline ~ Onyx Rush
• Essie ~ Shine of the Times
• Color Club ~ Snow Flakes
• ELF ~ Fairy Dust
• Sally Girl - unnamed?

I threw the Sally Girl in there for the hell of it, because it'd look weird to only swatch polishes on 3 out of 4 main fingers. (Excluding the thumb.) It's similar  though it doesn't have any orange tint to it. Just blue mostly, and it's tiny flecks.

As you can tell, Essie is still the winner by far. Application was the best, one semi thick glossy coat and you're good to go. No struggle, no gloop, little mess. It pretty much applies itself!

Color Club comes in second place, good application, though you don't get as many flecks compared to Essie's. You could probably get the same amount if you wanted to do two coats.

ELF was pretty crappy to be honest, it applied okay but it has a funny smell. It looks so watered down compared to the others that I don't think it's really worth the $1 unless you want many many goopy stinky coats of it.

And the last one I threw in, the tiny Sally Girl, I would actually rank it above the ELF polish though it's not a dupe for SOTT (Shine of the Times!) at all.

I got some more pictures of them as well, so check out the rest of them below!

Lush Lacquer - Dippin Dots swatch

Used a really terrible ELF nude as the base color. Pretty color, stunk badly and applied terrible. Excuse that. :/

But here we have Lush Lacquer's Dippin Dots (Thanks Secret Santa!), over a nude base. Wish I went with a different base, it kinda looks like piss in certain lighting. :/

I'm having an affair with Lush Lacquer, I think. Considering it's my main indie brand I seem to be collecting. Looove it. :)

Damn you crappy bubbly ELF polish that was in a super adorable 14 piece polish cube !!
It does kind of remind me of cake though... with cute sprinkles, heh.