ELF Midnight

Let’s start with a brief swatch of ELF Midnight. When I originally applied Midnight, it looked like it’d be a lovely midnight blue shimmer in the bottle but on my nails it just looked black. Maybe if I had bright lighting, it’d look blue… So what did I do? Rummaged through my CND effects until I found Sapphire Sparkle. It really made a difference, totally brought out the blue shimmer! So in this thumb photo you can see the difference. I love my CND effects.

I stamped with Bundle Monster 21 and Avon Mirror Shine in Pink Ice (which is amazing btw)

Yeah I stamped over that striped thumb 😛

ELF Midnight

Let’s start with a brief swatch of ELF Midnight. When I originally applied Midnight, it looked like it’d be a lovely midnight blue shimmer in the bottle but on my nails it just looked black. Maybe if I had bright lighting, it’d look blue… So what did I do? Rummaged through my CND effects until I found Sapphire Sparkle. It really made a difference, totally brought out the blue shimmer! So in this thumb photo you can see the difference. I love my CND effects.

I stamped with Bundle Monster 21 and Avon Mirror Shine in Pink Ice (which is amazing btw)

Yeah I stamped over that striped thumb 😛

Stamping Polishes

I don’t use the Konad Special Polishes to stamp with because I just never got around to it. I wanted to buy them, Nick told me it was a silly purchase because I was sure to find something else that would work equally well.

Well, I feel like I’ve gained a bit of expertise in this stamping polish business to share my opinions…

First, what exact qualities do I look for in a polish to assess its stampability?

• Thickness 
• Must be nearly an one-coater
• Opacity
• Brightness of color

And that’s pretty much it. The thicker the polish, the better their stamping abilities will be. I’ve never tried this myself but people often leave the cap off their polishes for a while to help thicken the formula. If it’s TOO thick, a drop or two of polish thinner (NOT remover) will solve that.
When a polish is thick it helps the transfer progress go more smoothly and they will appear more opaque and detailed on the nail.

Alternatively, you do NOT want a polish that is runny. I don’t care if it’s an one coater. If it’s runny I’m not stamping with it. It creates havoc when I try to scrape, and no matter how lightly I roll over my stamper, it will SMUDGE. I have this problem with my beloved Sally Hansen chrome oldies.

The brands I use to stamp with are:

• Wet n Wild
• Avon
• MirrorShine Polishes
• China Glaze
• Khrome Collection
• Romantique Collection
• Sally Hansen Insta-Dri
• Sally Hansen Chrome

I have not tried Zoya, OPI, et cetera however I should explore that. I just prefer to stick to my tried and trues. Almost any polish can stamp, it just depends on how well they achieve the two qualities that I look for. Here are the pictures of the stamping polishes I use…

 My Insta-Dris! From Left to Right: Jumpin Jade, Whirlwind White, Wined Up, Co-Bolt Blue, Silver Sweep. I have determined that Whirlwind White is the best stamping polish I have for white, compared to CG Snow.

 My Wet n Wild’s. Burgundy Frost, my trusty stamping black: Black Creme (look how loved it is! The label is all gone), and Blue Moon.

 Avon MirrorShine polishes. They are FANTASTIC. You can order one from online with the link I provided above. From left to right: Pink Ice, Blaze, Glisten, Peach Ice, Polish. They are also easy to work with and I love their vividness.

Check out my Romantiques! I have both the cool and warm collections. They can be found on Amazon or any e-tailers such as 8ty8beauty.com, head2toebeauty.com, transdesign.com as well as any dusty bin.

China Glaze Khrome collection, able to find in any of the places I listed above. The Khrome collection is actually a six piece, but I cannot find Millennium. It’s my white whale. If you have one and want to get rid of it, talk to me. 🙂

 All the China Glazes dry in a decent amount of time, and transfer easily with light pressure on the stamper. Very easy to work with.

Here are my Sally Hansen babies. This is only half pictured, I figured they’d give you the idea. Fantastic for stamping, but dries HELLA fast, and are a huge pain in the butt when you have poorly engraved plates. You have to scrape and stamp in like, one second or something for it to even try to transfer. Also this polish requires you to press hard, so you must have a completely dry polish base to use these.
I have a white whale too: Sally Hansen Chrome in Amber. If you have that, come talk to me….

That’s all for now! When I find more good stamping polishes, I’ll come back here. 🙂

Stamping Polishes

I don’t use the Konad Special Polishes to stamp with because I just never got around to it. I wanted to buy them, Nick told me it was a silly purchase because I was sure to find something else that would work equally well.

Well, I feel like I’ve gained a bit of expertise in this stamping polish business to share my opinions…

First, what exact qualities do I look for in a polish to assess its stampability?

• Thickness 
• Must be nearly an one-coater
• Opacity
• Brightness of color

And that’s pretty much it. The thicker the polish, the better their stamping abilities will be. I’ve never tried this myself but people often leave the cap off their polishes for a while to help thicken the formula. If it’s TOO thick, a drop or two of polish thinner (NOT remover) will solve that.
When a polish is thick it helps the transfer progress go more smoothly and they will appear more opaque and detailed on the nail.

Alternatively, you do NOT want a polish that is runny. I don’t care if it’s an one coater. If it’s runny I’m not stamping with it. It creates havoc when I try to scrape, and no matter how lightly I roll over my stamper, it will SMUDGE. I have this problem with my beloved Sally Hansen chrome oldies.

The brands I use to stamp with are:

• Wet n Wild
• Avon
• MirrorShine Polishes
• China Glaze
• Khrome Collection
• Romantique Collection
• Sally Hansen Insta-Dri
• Sally Hansen Chrome

I have not tried Zoya, OPI, et cetera however I should explore that. I just prefer to stick to my tried and trues. Almost any polish can stamp, it just depends on how well they achieve the two qualities that I look for. Here are the pictures of the stamping polishes I use…

 My Insta-Dris! From Left to Right: Jumpin Jade, Whirlwind White, Wined Up, Co-Bolt Blue, Silver Sweep. I have determined that Whirlwind White is the best stamping polish I have for white, compared to CG Snow.

 My Wet n Wild’s. Burgundy Frost, my trusty stamping black: Black Creme (look how loved it is! The label is all gone), and Blue Moon.

 Avon MirrorShine polishes. They are FANTASTIC. You can order one from online with the link I provided above. From left to right: Pink Ice, Blaze, Glisten, Peach Ice, Polish. They are also easy to work with and I love their vividness.

Check out my Romantiques! I have both the cool and warm collections. They can be found on Amazon or any e-tailers such as 8ty8beauty.com, head2toebeauty.com, transdesign.com as well as any dusty bin.

China Glaze Khrome collection, able to find in any of the places I listed above. The Khrome collection is actually a six piece, but I cannot find Millennium. It’s my white whale. If you have one and want to get rid of it, talk to me. 🙂

 All the China Glazes dry in a decent amount of time, and transfer easily with light pressure on the stamper. Very easy to work with.

Here are my Sally Hansen babies. This is only half pictured, I figured they’d give you the idea. Fantastic for stamping, but dries HELLA fast, and are a huge pain in the butt when you have poorly engraved plates. You have to scrape and stamp in like, one second or something for it to even try to transfer. Also this polish requires you to press hard, so you must have a completely dry polish base to use these.
I have a white whale too: Sally Hansen Chrome in Amber. If you have that, come talk to me….

That’s all for now! When I find more good stamping polishes, I’ll come back here. 🙂

Glitter in the Air

You thought I was done with my Lippmanns, didn’t you? So did I! The other day I went to a photography exhibition and my friend, Liane, presented me with this:

Glitter in the Air! So my theme week has gone on for an extra day, making it a total of about 9 days. Wow! 🙂
This is a GORGEOUS polish. I have ordered my own bottle actually. I had to. I couldn’t NOT have this.

Brief swatch. I thought/hoped that the murky grey/pale blue or lilac base would transfer onto the nail, and no dice as you can see above. That was about two coats. It’s a mix of pink and blue hex/round glitter.
So I decided to layer it on a pastel baby blue and wow is it ever gorgeous. It’s a very Easter-y color, too.  I chose Avon Vintage Blue:

Then I layered Glitter in the Air over this!

The only issue I had with this was that it was very hard to align the glitters, but I think that’s just a thing we deal with when dealing with glitter toppers. The sheer murky base muted the pastel blue down and it was PERFECT. However I logged on this morning and found out Chloe did the EXACT same look! GRR. 🙂 I should have gone with yellow or grey. Liane did lilac, (American Apparel L’Esprit if I remember correctly) with matte and it was gorgeous. Oh, speaking of matte…

Yep! I felt that the matte topcoat gave it a lot more Easter feel, it was like an eggshell you know?

However this one reacted badly with the Seche Vite and I felt like it shrank by the hour. Horrible. You can see some tip wear already, and I think this was definitely over 15 hours of wearing it. 😦

A few NOTDs

Nails of the Days, that is. I don’t really do them– I just post ’em as manicures, but I guess they would be categorized as Nails of the Day. Anywho. I’ve been focused on the Lippmann glitters for the last 9 days, I overlooked a manicure from back then. So this post will show you two manis, one from the past and one that I’m sporting now.

Base: Butter London Victoriana (light teal glitter)
Stamp: Sally Hansen Chrome in… something I forgot, it was a long time ago. But it’s a gold chrome.
Konad plate m78

Current manicure:

Base: Avon Electric Green, a light spring grass green jelly. About three coats to get it all evened out.
Stamping color: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Jumpin’ Jade
Plate: Bundle Monster BM19

Glitter in the Air

You thought I was done with my Lippmanns, didn’t you? So did I! The other day I went to a photography exhibition and my friend, Liane, presented me with this:

Glitter in the Air! So my theme week has gone on for an extra day, making it a total of about 9 days. Wow! 🙂
This is a GORGEOUS polish. I have ordered my own bottle actually. I had to. I couldn’t NOT have this.

Brief swatch. I thought/hoped that the murky grey/pale blue or lilac base would transfer onto the nail, and no dice as you can see above. That was about two coats. It’s a mix of pink and blue hex/round glitter.
So I decided to layer it on a pastel baby blue and wow is it ever gorgeous. It’s a very Easter-y color, too.  I chose Avon Vintage Blue:

Then I layered Glitter in the Air over this!

The only issue I had with this was that it was very hard to align the glitters, but I think that’s just a thing we deal with when dealing with glitter toppers. The sheer murky base muted the pastel blue down and it was PERFECT. However I logged on this morning and found out Chloe did the EXACT same look! GRR. 🙂 I should have gone with yellow or grey. Liane did lilac, (American Apparel L’Esprit if I remember correctly) with matte and it was gorgeous. Oh, speaking of matte…

Yep! I felt that the matte topcoat gave it a lot more Easter feel, it was like an eggshell you know?

However this one reacted badly with the Seche Vite and I felt like it shrank by the hour. Horrible. You can see some tip wear already, and I think this was definitely over 15 hours of wearing it. 😦

A few NOTDs

Nails of the Days, that is. I don’t really do them– I just post ’em as manicures, but I guess they would be categorized as Nails of the Day. Anywho. I’ve been focused on the Lippmann glitters for the last 9 days, I overlooked a manicure from back then. So this post will show you two manis, one from the past and one that I’m sporting now.

Base: Butter London Victoriana (light teal glitter)
Stamp: Sally Hansen Chrome in… something I forgot, it was a long time ago. But it’s a gold chrome.
Konad plate m78

Current manicure:

Base: Avon Electric Green, a light spring grass green jelly. About three coats to get it all evened out.
Stamping color: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Jumpin’ Jade
Plate: Bundle Monster BM19

spam

I’ve been back from Florida (which has been great to me, by the way) since Saturday and have gone a bit crazy switching my manis out. So I bring to you a spam of pictures and manicures that I’ve done.

 Base: Rimmel Night Before

Stamped: Pure Ice Outrageous
Bundle Monster plate

 Base: Milani 3D (holographic collection)

Checkers: Zoya Savita

I wasn’t nuts about this one. You Just Wait would make a nice base for a muted down french, but I couldn’t get the french tip stamp to cooperate with me.. See how they all kind of lopside?

 Base: Sinful Colors You Just Wait
Stamped: Color Club Where’s the Soiree?
Bundle Monster plate

 Base: Essie Nice is Nice (From their Spring 2011 collection)

Stamped: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Jumpin’ Jade
Konad

I bring to you my official favorite yellow as of now. Needs about three coats as it is streaky, but evens out and builds up nicely. Also looked great on me.

Avon Sunshine

What I have on now. Nummy. 

Avon Powerful Pink with Nfu Oh 48 layered over.

spam

I’ve been back from Florida (which has been great to me, by the way) since Saturday and have gone a bit crazy switching my manis out. So I bring to you a spam of pictures and manicures that I’ve done.

 Base: Rimmel Night Before

Stamped: Pure Ice Outrageous
Bundle Monster plate

 Base: Milani 3D (holographic collection)

Checkers: Zoya Savita

I wasn’t nuts about this one. You Just Wait would make a nice base for a muted down french, but I couldn’t get the french tip stamp to cooperate with me.. See how they all kind of lopside?

 Base: Sinful Colors You Just Wait
Stamped: Color Club Where’s the Soiree?
Bundle Monster plate

 Base: Essie Nice is Nice (From their Spring 2011 collection)

Stamped: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Jumpin’ Jade
Konad

I bring to you my official favorite yellow as of now. Needs about three coats as it is streaky, but evens out and builds up nicely. Also looked great on me.

Avon Sunshine

What I have on now. Nummy. 

Avon Powerful Pink with Nfu Oh 48 layered over.