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

Studio M - Kalidascope swatch over Orly's Elsabeth's Rose

Yet another one of my Studio M polishes. :) I wasn't sure what the outcome of this one would be. At all. It goes opaque with three coats, but I prefer the one layer that's on my thumb. I lightened the bottle pics a little so you could see it better.

This polish looks like a few others I swatched from this brand, the Rainbow Connection dupes. Only it has a lot of gray/silver in it obviously. Mostly really fine silver micro glitters in with the rainbow circle glitters that are found in OPI's Rainbow Connection, as well as all the dupes of that. You can find my swatches of Studio M's Funfetti and Poparazzi here if you're interested.

I don't love it, I don't hate it. Props for originality though, and props for using the same glitter in multiple different polishes. I can't help but wonder what this would look like over black.

I used the pink Orly I got for $1 at Big Lots. as a base. :)

Three layers here. Little pre clean up-ish, sorry.

Ended up doing a funky french with it, too.

I think it looks best with one layer, and used as a layering polish.
Three coats doesn't look terrible though.

Three coats, pretty opaque really. I need
better lighting, I wish the pics came out better.

One coat over Orly's Elsabeth's Rose
 (sorry for the dry cuticles I used pure acetone last time-I moisturized
with 3 different things and it still drys me out.)

Cirque Du Soleil China Glaze swatches

I did not use a top coat for these.

Shew, lord, this post is going to take me forever to finish. I just did swatches of 3 different new China Glaze's, took a ton of pics, now I have to upload and edit. Hope you guys enjoy them!

When I first started trying to swatch these babies, in my mind, I thought it was a good idea to swatch with a black and white polish as a base. That pretty much absolutely did not work out at all. Which I suppose is a good thing since I had to re-do a few fingers anyway, since two out of the three polishes were pretty difficult to work with.

First up is It's a trap-eze! In my blog post. This was by far, the easiest to work with. Though it NEEDS 3 layers. One layer is terrible and see through, two is ok, three is perfect. Four if you really want to do 4 coats is preferably IMO, but I'll stick to the usual 3 when I decide to wear it.

Yeah i realize this pic isn't 100% perfectly aligned, my patience was wearing thin lol! Please ignore my yellow nails, seche ridge filling base coat stained them i think.

Whirled away over red, silver, and light pink--no top coat and NO base on my pinky,

contrary to the damn yellow coloring the seche ridgefiller gave me for some reason...

This polish is a HUGE freaking pain. Seriously. You can't get anything where you want it, really takes some effort. Took me a lil effort to get the few white glitters I did manage to snag. It's also a very thick formula, and as you can see on the pink base nail (ring finger) it's goopy because I had to drop the glitters on sporadically. Still a neat look, similiar to Sticks N Stones. I was so interested in it because basically no mainstream brands have done things like this up until China Glaze came around. Perhaps with some practice I'll get the hang of this one. Does make me wish I had some Seche Vite though..

And here we have last but not least, Get Carried Away:

My swatches aren't the greatest I know, but I hope they help someone. This polish is another 3 coater, possibly four. Dries relatively fast, wish I had went a bit thicker with the first coat. But there you have it. You don't really need a base with this one either, as it looks really terrible layered over a lot of colors. (I tried pink and silver for curiousity. Ew.)

Zoya's Kali with Sally Hansen Multi Faceted

I did this mani for my daughters 5th birthday party. Her favorite color is pink and I was also sick of brown and orange fall themed mani's. Sally Hansen's Multi Faceted is my #1 favorite layering glitter polish. Lucky for me I got the last one in the store. :)

Lil bit of tip wear, sorry! These are a few days old but I love the color and glitter combo. My cuticles have decided to be very dry even with moisturizing, too. Strange.

Swatches - Essence ~ Party Princess, Studio M - Volcanic

I was originally just going to swatch Volcanic by Studio M but I smudged my middle finger and added the glitter from Essence on top to avoid re-doing it. So it's swatches of both, but the Essence is on my middle fingers only.

I'm soooo excited about this color. Holy moly, is it bright! It's a neon orange pink, mostly a pink-ish color, with very unique undertones that really come out in low light and with the flash on a camera. It's GORGEOUS. I didn't realize how pretty it was. I think I got a bad bottle though cause it looks a bit funky and it applied pretty crappy. (Again, my other Studio M's aren't like that I think someone may have opened it in store. -_-)

Volcanic turned out to be a matte jelly like finish. Definetley matte at the very least.

The Essence is so-so. Don't love it, don't hate it. At least it distracted from the smudges. I'd like to try it over darker colors.

I realize these are more summer nails but I wasn't able to buy any new polish for the past 4 months or so, and was really wanting some neons. Definetley summer nails, though!

NEON ALL THE NAILS.

Essence - Party Princess on top of Studio M - Volcanic

Studio M - Volcanic by itself.

Dang. My nails have never been this long. By now
they would be driving me crazy. (Usually!)

You can kind of see the matte finish here a little even though
I used a top coat.

My 2nd attempt at water marbling

..Turned out much better than the first. I like the outcome a lot better when I stick to two colors. I used Snow Me White by Sinful Colors (hence why the edges of the polish line are weird because it doesn't apply the best at all) to bring out the neon in China Glaze's For Audrey and a pink Sinful Colors I can't remember the name of.

I really need a new white. I like Snow Me White just to experiment with because it's cheap. I haven't entirely mastered water marbling so it really was just one big experiment again.

The color combo reminds me of cotton candy.

I had put a thin layer of white on and it was super streaky, didn't really matter though. The actual marble colors covered it up. Which is what I hoped for. I've tried it with multiple layers and it makes the jagged edges at the top even worse. I haven't been able to go on polish hauls recently so I have yet to pick up acetone to help with the jagged polish line. One of the first things I'm going to do when I get money for it.

Didn't swirl the polish at all and this is the design that came out.
I think my biggest problem is swirling too much. I prefer the
marbles that are larger and less.... swirly. >_<

First attempt at Watermelon nails

So I tried watermelon nails. I HATE my black polish, it's so goopy. So some of the black seeds ended up with very minor strings coming off of them. I decided to sponge on the contrasting color instead of paint, and I liked how it turned out I'm just going to do a few things differently next time. (Perhaps get a better white and black polish for starters--the white is so thin and crap it took on the green under it, and what is SUPPOSED to be white is more of a lime green-ish yellow. Bah.) I didn't hate it though, but it has a lot of potential for next time. Practice makes perfect, right?

I used the same colors, but did an accent nail on both hands for my ring finger. I also wish I made less black seeds, maybe 3 tops would have made it more realistically watermelon like. Next time I'm going to try using a second darker green as well and attempt to make the green rind look better.

Surprisingly my non dominant hand looked best.