Rainbow drip nail art (with tutorial, kind of)

Hey everyone! Today I have a super fun nail design that was inspired by Karla. I saw her drippy nails and decided to do my spin on it this week.

Taken indoors at my poorly lit table where I do my nails :P

Here's a picture of the colors I used - only the dots; the swatches were done a while ago. From red to purple:

• China Glaze - Salsa
• A random orange polish
• Orly - Glowstick
• Sally Hansen - Lickety Lime Split
• Essie - Naughty Nautical
• Orly - Snowcone
• The Face Shop - BL602
• Orly - Charged Up

How I did these nails (I did them a little differently from Karla):

1. Use a base coat (please, it's important to use a base coat if you want to protect your nails from ugly staining)
2. Paint two coats of white polish; I used China Glaze - White on White.
3. Put a blob of polish (you might be thinking, what a waste and yes, it is kind of a waste) on a piece of scrap paper/hard paper/cardboard/whatever you want to put it on.
4. Use a dotting tool/toothpick/end of a pen/end of a skewer/whatever qualifies as a dotting tool and create a random dot on your nail.
5. If there isn't enough polish on your dotting tool, dip it into the main blob and create a downwards line from the small dot. You don't have to drag it all the way down to the tip of your nail. Now you have a 'spore' (think enoki mushrooms).
6. Make another 'spore' beside your first spore at a different height.
7. Connect the two spores at the base, making sure to make a U-shape connector and fill in the polish at the tip of the nail.
8. Make however many spores your nail can fill and finish with top coat.

Here is my, um, attempt at showing you how it's actually done on the nail... using Paint. Haha, I'm sorry, I should have done a step-by-step like Karla did.

(My sister claims that my tutorial is cool... Well... if you say so, haha!)

Taken in indirect sunlight

Taken under sunlight

Taken with flash

You can't see Glowstick because Orly wasn't lying when they labeled it as neon. It's blinding. I'm sorry for the terrible flash pictures. I need to build myself a light box stat!

Taken indoors under yellow lighting

I've always wanted to do these nails but some other design would always distract me and steer me away from doing this. So glad I saw this on Karla's blog.

How do you like my drippy nails?? Ever done them yourself? What color combos did you use? Would you try this? Inspired to do this for Halloween?

Thanks, as always, for reading! :)

Shades of red nail polish

Hey guys! So I used to think that red polish looked kinda tacky because I used to see a lot of people wearing chipped red polish (why, I don't know lol). Well, I take that right back... or rather, I'll amend my statement. Red polish is awesome!

Taken with flash

Taken with flash

• Thumb: China Glaze - Infra Red
• Index: China Glaze - Ruby Pumps
• Middle: China Glaze - Salsa
• Ring: China Glaze - Strawberry Fields
• Little: Essie - The Girls Are Out

Taken with flash

Taken with flash

Taken indoors

Taken indoors (poor lighting, I'm sorry)

Hmm, Strawberry Fields looks a little orange in these pictures but I assure you that it's as pink as pink can get.

Taken with flash

Some blurry goodness, anyone?

Which is your favorite polish out of these five? Red nail polish - yay or nay?

Thanks so much for reading!

China Glaze - Infra Red and Elephant Walk

I bring you my first ever holographic polish and a fall favorite of mine.

Taken with flash

Taken in natural sunlight

I've probably got you thinking, why is she holding two bottles of polish that aren't even the colors that she's wearing?! Sorry there, I was actually trying to swatch four colors at one go and I grabbed the nearest two bottles which happened to be the other two colors I was swatching.

Anyway, I'm wearing 2 coats each of China Glaze - Infra-Red and China Glaze - Elephant Walk. Unlike Impeccable Greys which is the other grey polish that I own, Elephant Walk is a much subtler grey and has just the finest shimmer in it. I love it. It does have this yellowish pigmentation if you leave the polish in the bottle for too long without shaking it so remember to give it a good shake before applying. Elephant Walk applies smoothly and reaches full opacity in just 2 coats. Great color for fall.

Infra-Red is not as holographic as I expected it to be so that was a bit of a let-down. It is a nice fuchsia though. I have tried layering it over black polish (not pictured here) and it definitely looked snazzy so you could try that with other holographic polishes.

I do wish I had picked another China Glaze holographic polish off the shelf... I was checking out at Sally Beauty in the US and the display of holographic polishes caught my eye. I think they were going at $5.95 and I couldn't resist. I'd already seen the swatches of the collection online and I don't know why I convinced myself that Infra-Red was one of the stronger holos of the collection. :S Blergh, oh well, I guess I have to wait till I get to travel again to get my hands on other CG holo polishes.

Do you own any holographic polishes? Which ones? What do you think of holos anyway? What is your go-to color for the fall or do you not have one?

Thank you for reading!

P.S: I am now on Polyvore! Thanks to Grace (love her blog!) who convinced me in a heartbeat that it's easy to use. Haha, my mom actually asked me to join it months ago but I was convinced that I wouldn't know how to use it.

I'm all for sites that I don't have to mess around with for hours before figuring out how to work it. Needless to say, once I get the hang of Polyvore there will be no stopping me from making sets all day long.

If you're into fashion, you can also check out my main site which now mainly consists of fashion posts though once in a while you will see posts on music and other stuff.

How I made my images Pinnable

Hey everyone.

I don't have a nail post today but I would like to share something awesome with you! If you have noticed I've been joining lots of link parties recently - I LOVE discovering inspirational and down-to-earth folks in the blogosphere and I have found a few :D - and I've been dropping by random blogs to check blogs out. I've lost count of how many posts about potatoes that I've commented on today :P

Anyway, I stumbled on this Pinterest link party (omg, I can't remember what the exact name is, sorry) and I thought, a Pinterest hop? Cool... so how does this work? And I didn't read the rules properly (it was early, I wasn't fully awake yet, lol) and submitted my link. After submitting my link I reread the post and was like, omg no way. You're supposed to submit the Pinterest link of whatever picture you have from your blog but I submitted my post link.

And I was like, where the heck can I find this photo link?? Then it clicked in my head. It's the big [P] button in the center or upper corner of pictures that I've seen on other people's blogs. I was just wondering a day or two ago how to get those buttons.

So I did the only logical thing right then: I asked my mom (she's also a blogger and I'm sure some of you have seen her in some of the mommy blog hops). Mom, how do I get that Pinterest button that will allow people to Pin my pictures from my blog?? My mom's not the biggest Pinterest user so she didn't know.

So I did the next logical thing to do: I Googled how to make my images 'pinnable'. The first few links were bleh but then I visited this site which led me to this site and found the perfect tutorial that showed me how to insert the code into my blog to get the button. I followed the instructions and voila, now you can Pin my pictures to your heart's content... only if you want to. For those of you who've been meaning to make your images Pinnable or didn't know that such a function existed, now's your chance to do so. :)

Okay that's the story of how I made my images Pinnable. Hope you found the tutorial as helpful as I found it.

If you like, here are a few of my favorite nail designs that you can Pin.

Moving on, I don't know about you but everyone I know seems to be on Instagram. I'm not the biggest fan of Facebook which owns Instagram so I've been putting off making an account. It does seem to be the 'it' place.

Do you think I should make an account? 
Will I have fun there? 
Is it anything like Tumblr (I love it more than Pinterest, I'm sorry haha)? 
Also, should I make a Facebook account for my nail blog? 
Would you follow me on Insta and/or Fb??

Thanks for reading and I appreciate everyone's comments so much! xx

P.S: I am on Twitter and I love Twitter so you can always follow me there.

Frosted tribal nail art

I actually did these nails quite some time ago (when I was a semi-newbie at nail stuff) which would explain the lack of clean up so please excuse that.

Taken with flash

I used all Love & Beauty polishes for this design except for the black polish which came from a black nail art pen.

Love & Beauty doesn't actually give their nail polish names - well, you can see names on the Forever21 site but these came in a set - so I'll just name them myself.

On my thumb is a Frosty Peach polish and the other polish on my other nails is a shade of Pearly Oyster. Both are very sheer and would probably require 4 or 5 coats (!!) to reach any kind of opacity so I layered them over white.

In the picture above, I'm wearing one coat of both polishes and you can tell that it's streaky.

Taken with flash

Now here I'm wearing 2 coats of both polishes. The pearly finish has obvious brushstrokes but I don't mind that so much.

I wasn't - and still am not - too crazy about either color since neither complements my skin color. It just makes my skin look washed-out or at some angles, darker. It wasn't working for me but I thought it would be a waste to remove after layering on the polish so carefully... So this is what I did:

Taken with flash

At first, I used Love & Beauty - Pale Blue, Pale Pink and Pale Orchid to do some random stripes. Suddenly the color didn't seem so bad and I found myself reaching for my nail art pen to fill in the blanks with dots and arrows.

Taken with flash

I took the pictures before I put on top coat so if you're wondering whether I was going for a textured look, I wasn't.

This might not be one of my best nail designs but it was spontaneous and I ended up figuring out a way to jazz up the poor base colors. So if you have a nail color that you don't like on you, you could probably try something like this.

I LOVE all things tribal print. Do you?

Thanks for reading!

I found my one true love - Tiger Cam

I don't have a good nail post today - I've been busy, busy with lots of packing and going out - so I'm just going to share a SUPER CUTE LIVE video that will have you going, AWWWW!! wherever you happen to be. I mean, look at those two adorable innocent little balls of fur and their momma.

I LOVE big cats - tigers, cheetahs, leopards, jaguars, panthers, you freaking name it and I love 'em. In fact, it's so weird because I love all kinds of feline creatures except domestic cats. Yeaaahhh... I'm a dog person, not so much a cat person though if you find me a cat like Garfield, I wouldn't mind keeping him. A fat orange spaghetti-loving cat is for me.

Anyway, The Pet Collective is this AWESOME Youtube channel that streams baby animal videos live. I especially LOVED the pitbull, eagle, mini horse and most recent Labrador cam (the one with Buddy!).  This channel has been taking up so much of my time and every minute is worth it!

Did you already know of the existence of The Pet Collective? First timer? Cute, right? Which is your favorite cam? Come on, you know you can't resist cute puppies/kittens/eagles.

Thanks for reading and commenting <3 and be sure to check back for more nail posts coming!

Mystical saran wrap nail art

Here's my first attempt at saran wrap nails. Yup, I've been attempting lots of different nail art so lots of firsts for me.

I actually saw this design months ago but forgot about it until recently when I came across this video and liked how doable it was. I also saw Jen from ThePolishaholic's submission for the Picture Polish contest after I did these nails and I really loved her saran wrap mani color combo. I might try it next time.

I was fascinated by the fact that there was something readily available in the kitchen that could be used for nail art. Needless to say, I got the cling wrap and tore off a huge piece and happily trotted to my desk where I began to work on this super easy and fun design.

Taken in natural sunlight

Taken in natural sunlight

This design is so easy to achieve - almost effortless and if you dab off too much polish, you can always go over with another coat. How to achieve this look: paint your base color, let it dry, paint over with another color, quickly scrunch up a ball of saran wrap and dab lightly over the wet polish. Or of course if you prefer to see how it's done, you can always watch the video.

I used The Face Shop - GR501 (light blue) as the base for my thumb, index, middle and little finger and The Face Shop - PP402 (pink) as the base for my ring finger. Then I used the pink on top of the four fingers and blue for the middle finger.

I did use Essie - The Girls Are Out to layer over my thumb. I really liked the shimmer!! But I thought it was too dark and I didn't want to waste the polish by dabbing most of it away so I switched and used the other pink.

Taken in natural sunlight

Here I used Essie - Play Date as the base and The Face Shop - PP402 (pink) as the base for the ring finger. Then I used Orly - Charged Up to layer over Play Date and Sally Hansen - Mint Sprint over the pink polish.

I'm not too sure I liked the accent nail since it was a lot darker than I expected and didn't quite complement the purple nails.

I asked my sister whether I should layer glitter over my nails and her reply was: I will always choose glitter over non-glitter. That was that. I layered China Glaze - Fairy Dust over my nails.

Do you like these saran wrap nails with glitter or without? Would you try saran wrap nails?

Thanks for reading!