Advent Calendar Challenge Day 18: Classic

So what is more classic than a gorgeous red jelly? Or even better...a Chanel red jelly? Oh now we are just getting fancy...

So for today's mani I chose Chanel Pirate. This is my first and only Chanel polish and I figured that if I was going to get a Chanel, I might as well get one that was classic and that I would get a lot of use out of. This is 2 coats of Chanel Pirate.

 

 

 

And then I thought...what is more classic at Christmas than a sparkly red? So I decided to add some sparkle to this mani with a Christmas gift I received from a friend: BB Couture for Men Santa's Sak. I believe this polish was from their 2010 Holiday collection. I am not always a bar glitter fan, but the use of bar glitter in this polish is amazing! It has lots of silver microglitter throughout and small holo bar glitter that just glow in the red jelly base. It is so festive!

 

 

 

 

 

 

So as you can see...I am still missing a few days but my plan is to do ugly sweater tonight, a water marble tomorrow, and then for Christmas day I am wearing CrowsToes Jingle Balls (which will be a repeat of green). If I have time tomorrow before the water marble, I might try to whip up something for Sweets and Candy, Fruit Cake, and Rudolph, but it might just have to wait until after Christmas. And I WILL do my redo of my Christmas Movie mani at some point because I think it is funny. It is inspired by my absolute favorite Christmas Movie. :D

 

 

 

Thanks for looking everyone!!

Advent Calendar Challenge Day 17: Inspired by a Christmas Movie

Hey everyone! So for today's mani, I chose a polish thats name was inspired by a Christmas movie: CrowsToes Making Christmas. This polish was inspired by the song Making Christmas from the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas. It is definantly Christmas in a bottle. It is an absolutely perfect Christmas mani. I like that it is a smaller glitter too. It has an assortment of reds, greens, silvers, some of the plain metallic and some holo for a little extra sparkle. It is a fairly dense glitter as well (this is 1 coat over China Glaze Jolly Holly).

 

 

 

 

 

I have a really crazy (non-wearable) mani planned for my redo day that is inspired by a movie. I'm obviously not going to be done with the challenge by Christmas and I'm going to skip around a bit, but I hope to be done by the end of December. It has bee lots of fun!

 

As always, CrowsToes polishes are available from Llarowe and Overall Beauty. Be sure to snap up these Christmas polishes before they are gone! Thanks for looking!

Bonus Franken Inspired by a Christmas Song

So yesterday I did a mani inspired by Deck the Halls and I totally forgot to post the franken I made named Deck the Halls. I made this back in November and passed it along to a friend, but I did do a swatch before it got sent off. This is 1 coat over Illmasqua Rampage.

Here is another franken I made then. This one was supposed to be candy cane-ish. I need more different glitters for it to look how I want it to look. I called it Candy Man. This is one coat over OPI Sparrow Me the Drama. It could also be a Valentine's polish!

Playing with glitter is fun! Thanks for looking!

Advent Calendar Challenge Day 16: Christmas Song

So today's mani was supposed to be inspired by a Christmas song. I picked Deck the Halls and I decked out my nails with some holly!

 

 

 

I started off using one of the OPI NYC Ballet Sheers, Don't Touch My Tutu, as the base. This is 3 coats of white jelly goodness. I love the Ballet sheers and highly recommend them to anyone who wants some lovely neutral sheers.

 

 

 

 

Then I added 1 coat of China Glaze Fairy Dust. I LOVE this so much. I almost didn't add the holly.

 

 

 

 

 

For the holly, I used a dotting tool and China Glaze Ruby pumps for the berries and China Glaze Emerald sparkle for the leaves. I a white and light green striper for the accents. making the leaves was really easy. They were very "free form" and I just sort of dotted out a leaf with the dotting tool and then filled in the middle and then used the light green striper for some subtle veins in the leaves.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for looking everyone!!

Advent Calendar Challenge Day 15: Cozy

So when I thought of cozy...for some reason this polish kept coming to mind. HARE Polish Reverie in Rubellite is from the fall Finder's Keepers collection. It has a deep raspberry base with gorgeous golden shimmers and orange glitter. It reminds me of glowing embers in a fireplace. It is SO pretty! This is 1 coat over Zoya Zsa Zsa. So yes...this polish is totally warm and cozy to me! :)

HARE Polish is available from Llarowe and from Nikole's Etsy Store ("Like" HARE Polish on Facebook to receive updates on restocks and new collections). There is actually a new holiday collection called Paint the Town Red launching on Thursday on Llarowe which includes two gorgeous new polishes! Be sure to check them out! Thanks for looking everyone!

Advent Calendar Challenge Day 14: Glitter

So today's mani was sort of a disappointment. When Lynnderella's Season's Glitterings collection came out I was the most excited to get my hands on Spumoni. I really love minty glitters and this one looked really cool. As soon as they became available individually I snatched this one up off of eBay. Needless to say...it wasn't all I was hoping for.

This is 1 coat of Spumoni over Linda Johansen Sea Mint. This polish just fell a little flat to me. The different colored bits in it were sparse and I think I was missing some shimmer or something in it to make it more special. It is pretty, but I guess I had built it up to be way more awesome in my mind.

Here is the base color alone, Linda Johansen Sea Mint. This is an easy two coater and it was not streaky at all which is excellent for a mint green polish. 

I guess you can't love 'em all, right? Thanks for looking!

Advent Calendar Challenge Day 13: Snow

So today's mani had a few steps, but I love the end result! This is my favorite so far in the challenge.

First I started off with a base of Illamasqua Cameo, a gorgeous periwinkle blue creme. It wants to photograph more "blue" than "periwinkle"...but I promise it is periwinkle! It has a lovely formula as well.

 Then I layered on a coat of Girly Bits January Morning. This is SO pretty. It has tiny blue, green, and purple sparkles in it that are so difficult to photograph, but the are magical! I love this polish!

Then to finish off the mani, I stamped with Bundle Monster plate 323 using Sally Hansen Whirlwind White. I then used my dotting tool and dotted OPI DS Shimmer in the centers of the snowflakes for a little extra pizzazz. I am in LOVE with the final mani.

January Morning really pops under this more than the pictures show. I'm very pleased with this mani. I just wish it would actually snow here! Nothing but a bunch of rain. Thanks for looking everyone!

Advent Calendar Challenge Day 12: Family

image from: http://cupcake4today.wordpress.com/page/5/

So who all had one of these growing up? Oh yes...the infamous gumdrop tree. My grandmother always had one of these at her house. When the grandchildren in the family got a little older, she bought a few of these plastic trees and tied one dollar bills all over them and gave them as gifts...MONEY TREES! So yes...money can grow on trees...gumdrop trees!! At least it did in my family. My grandmother always did fun stuff like this  so I have many fond memories of the gumdrop tree. 

So for my mani, I made my nails into gumdrops! The colors I used are as follows:

Red: Cult Nails Evil Queen

Yellow: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mellow Yellow

Purple: American Apparel African Violet

Green: Essie Pretty Edgy

Orange: Essence Get Up!

I think topped them all with Revlon Colorstay Calla Lily and a franken I made with the silver TKB Mermaid pigments and suspension base. It would have looked perfect with Sally Hansen Glass Slipper on top, but I used up all of my bottle making frankens so I had to franken a topcoat!

It's really a very simple form of "candy nails" but it means something to me. Thanks for looking!

Advent Calendar Challenge Day 11: Gifts

I wanted this mani to look like fancy wrapping paper because my mom always uses the most gorgeous wrapping paper at Christmas. She is a gift wrapping guru. I envy her skills...my gifts never look even half as good as hers.

I did gold stamping with China Glaze 2030 over red and green with various patterns from my Bundle Monster and Cheeky XL plates to look like wrapping paper. Then I went back and added ribbons and bows on a few nails to make it look like gifts with a gold striper and a green metallic polish (Color Club Perfect Mol-ten) and China Glaze Jolly Holly. I used China Glaze Jolly Holly as the green base and OPI Danke-shiney Red as the red base.

Here is what it looked like before the bows were added. I had a little gold gift stamped on my thumbs. 

Slowly getting caught up with this challenge! I am going to have a lot of work to do next week to get caught up! Thanks for looking!

Some Non-Christmas Mani Spam!

Well...maybe a few of them are red...but that's ok, right? ;)

First up is one I did a little while back. This is OPI Man of La Mancha over Pretty Serious Poltergeist Puddle. This was SO pretty! I loved it!

Here is Poltergeist Puddle on its own. This is one difficult polish to photograph. It wants to photograph more blue than it actually is...but it has an abundance of pink and blue shimmer in it. The first picture is probably the most color accurate...but it still isn't just right. 

Next is Cult Nails Annalicious. I have so many pretty reds that I can't resist wearing them during Christmas...though they don't represent any particular day of the Advent Calendar Challenge. 

Next up I happened to purchase Layla Ceramic Effect #52 (aka The Butterfly Effect) from Ulta when they put out the new displays. It is very dupey to Nfu-Oh 51, but the purple jelly base is a touch more opaque. This is 2 coats over Barry M Indigo.

This is Barry M Indigo on its own. It is just perfect! It is so vibrant. Hard to photograph accurately too...purples like this often are. 

Next up is Zoya Fei Fei. This one has so much pretty going on. So many different colored shimmers in the base. They are really hard to pick up in photographs, but they are beautiful in real life. 

Oooh and here is a fun one for you...what do you do when you forget to take pictures of your mani? Well you take silly iPhone shots of course! This is one of my absolute favorite red cremes, OPI Red Hot Ayers Rock. Well look at that...it is featured with my favorite beverage!

I was disappointed with this picture, but I did the mani and picture in a rush one day. This is in my top 20 and I wanted to get a new photo of it. This is OPI Diva of Geneva. It will always hold a special place in my heart. 

This polish just made it into my Indie top 20 by a hair. I wore it for the first time days before submissions were due and it stole my heart. This is Enchanted Polish Octopus Garden. I wore it for a few days because I couldn't make myself take it off. I discovered something else too...these polishes do not need black undies! When I reviewed the new Beatles polishes a few months back, I layered them all over black because I assumed they would be similar to the Ozotic Mish Mash polishes and pop over black. I was SO wrong. This is 2 coats, no undies. Color me impressed. I love these Beatles polishes even more now! I didn't have any sun so I didn't get any good pics of the holo in these, but it is there!

And last but not least is Darling Diva Polish Seriously Serious. This polish is also SO hard to photograph (are you sensing a theme in this post? LOL!). It is a micro green and purple holograhic glitter polish. This is 1 coat over black. In real life, it has an overall purple look with splashes of green. You barely see the black undies, but they make the purple and green pop. The black polish shows up in pictures more than it does in real life.

So...how did you enjoy that little spamfest? I figured you might need a little break from Christmas related stuff so I hope you liked it! Thanks for looking everyone!