I've Got the Blues for Autism Swatch Marathon Part 1

Hello!

Today I have for you the first installment of IGTBFASM (Wow, crazy acronym) Part 1 is comprised of light blues and glitters.

I'll keep each of these short and just say the name and how many coats and if its been reviewed it yet or not.

Let's get staaaarted...

My franken, Baby Boy (new and improved, made with white and medium blue cremes) - 2 coats - flash

Baby Boy - no flash

Sally Hansen Insta Dry Blue-Away - 1 coat - lamp lighting, no flash - already reviewed

On Amanda: Sinful Colors Nail Junkie - 3 coats - indoor lighting, no flash - already reviewed/shown over things

Nicole by OPI Me + Blue - 2 or 3 coats (I wrote it down but left the Post-it at school and am home now sooo...) - indoor with flash - Amanda reviewed before

Me + Blue - no flash

Pure Ice Strapless - 3 thick coats - excuse the poor cleanup - have reviewed before - indoor lighting, no flash

On Amanda: Sinful Colors Green Ocean - 2 thick coats - indoors, no flash, blurry to show iridescence - has been reviewed about a million times...

Green Ocean - no flash

I enlisted Amanda to swatch the sheer glitters to spare you the trauma to your eyes my badly stained nails would cause. :)

So that's the end of Part 1. I hope you enjoyed this, let me know if you did, please! :)

Part 2 will probably be up sometime next week... bright blue cremes... oooooh... ahhh...

Hope you have a great day/night and thanks for looking!!

Fiona

New England "Spring" Has Me In a Dark Polish Mood

I know that the calender says April, but here in New England, it seems that the weather thinks it's actually February out instead. It snowed yesterday, and it was April 4th! Today it rained all day and the temp most of the day was about 38 degrees. It should be in the upper 50's to low 60's out right now, not this 30's crap that we New Englanders have been experiencing for the last two weeks. Come on Mother Nature, get it together and bring some warm weather to this part of the country!

So since the weather put me in such a bad mood yesterday, I felt like wearing a dark polish to reflect what I was feeling towards the weather. This is what I ended up picking out:

This is Avon Pro Wear Midnight Plum. It's a very dark purple creme polish that while putting it on made me think of grape jelly. I actually expected my polish to smell like grape jelly since it reminded me so much of grape jelly in color. This color is very dark and can look black in certain light. This was two coats of polish with one coat of Insta-Dri top coat on top. Very shiny looking; almost like patent leather at times.

Then an hour later my dark polish mood lifted and I added two coats of Sinful Colors Green Ocean on top to brighten it up a bit. With this dark purple polish, Green Ocean actually looked green instead of blue most of the time. While I did like this, it just didn't leave me in awe like Green Ocean over OPI Sapphire In the Snow did. I ended up taking this off after I got back from French since it was just too dark for my mood after that. 

Well, here's hoping that spring will eventually hit New England (especially the Northern parts) and I won't have any more dark polish moods until the fall when I should be wearing this color polish!

-Amanda

Sapphire In the Ocean

So, ever since I've gotten my hands on Sinful Colors Green Ocean, I've been meaning to layer this over a polish that I have. I had tried to do it over Nicole by OPI My Lifesaver, but it just didn't look right so I ended up taking it off. Fiona had told me that Green Ocean is supposed to look amazing over black nail polish, and I've seen pictures of this that proved that point. I also seen her put it over OPI A Grape Fit! and it looked pretty cool also. So I thought 'what about putting it over a blue or a dark purple/blue polish?'. That's when I though of using OPI Sapphire In the Snow.

This is two coats of OPI Sapphire In the Snow with two coats of Sinful Colors Green Ocean and a layer of top coat on top. I love how this came out. While Green Ocean looks amazing on top of black polish, I like it better over this ultramarine colored polish better. The way the flakies change colors from green to teal to aqua to blue to indigo to violet is just absolutely beautiful. It really does remind me of precious gemstones under a shallow amount of water with the sun beating down on them. Just the way the light plays and interacts with the flakies on my nails makes me keep looking at them because I like them so much!

And this is just the nails themselves close up. This is just soo pretty. This will be one of those manicures that I just can't bring myself to take off because I love it so much.

So if you're wondering if it's a good idea to put Green Ocean over dark purple/blue polish, I'd say hell yeah! It looks so amazing and it's a switch up from the traditional black polish base. I hope you all like this as much as I do!

-Amanda

More Guest Nails and Flakies!!

Hello!

Today I have some pictures of my sister's nails that I did on Sunday night. My sister's name is Rowenna (pronounced Ro-when-ah) and she's 13. She loves pink and is a cheerleader and has bleach blonde hair and spray tans. She's my polar opposite (I am naturally very pale and have dark hair) and usually we don't get along. I always bug her about doing her nails because she wears acrylics all the time and I've always wanted to paint them! When I was home this past weekend, I finally convinced her to let me do her nails and she was very happy with them. Like I said, she loves pink so she wanted pink and white. I started out with 2 coats of Sinful Snow Me White (think white-out streaky mess) and we went from there. I painted different stripes with Wet 'n Wild Lavender Creme which I bought for myself and tried it but it needed 3 coats and was streaky and had a crappy brush. And to top it off, it chipped within a few hours. So I re-gifted it to Rowenna (forgetting to mention how much it sucked... ) Then I did some more free hand stripes with Sinful Cream Pink. Then I used my white Kiss striper to paint a line separating the two pink lines. Then I went in with my black Kiss striper and painted random diagonal, vertical, and horizontal stripes. Most of the design was her idea, she just told me where she wanted the stripes which was the only way she was going to let me do her nails. There was no way she would actually let me design it. I just have the steady (ish) hand for striping... *sigh*

Anyway here is her finished manicure, done on Kiss acrylic nails with no base/top coat. No clean-up so a little messy, sorry!

Yeah... her thumb got smudged with the top coat so I only put it on that one nail. The Kiss black smudges with top coat like its its job! :P This is her right hand.

And her left. The pinks look really similar in the pictures but they're not IRL. The Lavender Creme is much more red and darker so its the darker one you see here. And Cream Pink looks kinda purple-y over the white. And yeah, her skin really looks that orange.

 

This is a small picture of Rowenna (left) and I. I hate this of me so its small.

Now onto my nails. These pictures are of SH ID Grape Going with Sinful Green Ocean (!!!!!) on my ring nail. Grape Going is absolutely gorgeous and I highly recommend this color as its very unique! It reminds me of swatches I've seen of Rescue Beauty Lounge Scrangie (which I also want). Its a medium, violet purple super shimmery base (I think) with tons of iridescent blue shimmer. It creates a goregous teal-y blue flash which is present most of the time so its not really a flash... but it gets stronger depending on the angle. The only thing about this is that its kind of sheer so you need 3 coats for full opacity but you could get away with 2 if you don't mind VNL. Its also not of Insta Dry quality, meaning it doesn't dry quickly. At least for me it didn't. It had a slightly longer drying time than of average polish and of course I went right to bed after I put on 3 coats (letting each dry in between!!) thinking it was an Insta Dry... yeah, no. It was all messed up when I woke up! :( So that was upsetting! The pictures are of 4 coats because I added another the next morning to fix the smudges/dings and it still doesn't look that great. But I'm sure if you gave this some extra time to dry it would look great!! I also put a layer of Green Ocean over my ring to test it out!! AND I AM OFFICIALLY IN LOVE/OBSESSED WITH GREEN OCEAN!! I want to wear this over everything! I thanked Amanda so many times for picking this up for me (with Irish Green which will debut tomorrow!) but I feel that I can't thank her enough! At least she got a bottle for herself because I would have stolen hers, haahaaa!! This is amazing-sauce! EXCEPT it does have some drawbacks. (I know, *sad face*) This base its in is like petroleum jelly, its so thick and goopy! Yuck! Also it smells horrible! I can't explain it, you'll have to see for yourself if you can find this little beauty (try Walgreens! Walgreens, I love you!) And removal is a PITA (pain in the ass). Even the foil method was tricky getting this off because the flakies stick everywhere and stay on the nail! This problem is also true with application. Between the goopy base, it was bad enough, but the flakies like to stick up everywhere so you have to push them down while the polish is wet or else you get sharp thingies sticking up everywhere. And it feels awful without a top coat, gritty and spikey!! But it looks so awesome that I am able to forgive these seemingly nightmare-ish qualities. Whew, that was a lot of writing. If you're still reading this, go you!!

Photographing this was very difficult! The flakies just don't look right!! So here's about a million pictures, trying to capture this beauty!

Now here it is all on all my nails. The bald-looking spots are camera tricks reflecting different colors in the flakies making them look flesh colored... weird I know. But there are no bald spots!

Now here it is layered over black. I nearly screamed when I put this on, it looks so amazing IRL!! This is 2 or 3 on some nails coats over 1 coat of SH XW Black Out with 2 coats of top coat. Again, hard to capture, but I tried like hell!

PRE-CLEAN-UP WARNING!!

Sorry for the loooooong post!!

Hope you have a great day and thanks for looking!

Fiona

Flakies, Irish, and Sapphire

Lookie at what I found at the Epping Walgreens yesterday...

Yep, I found Sinful Colors Irish Green AND Green Ocean! These two are the bottles I surprised Fiona with this morning when she got back. She had posted yesterday that she hadn't found either bottle so instead of posting these yesterday, I did it today instead to not tip Fiona off that she was getting these two colors.

So last Wednesday Fiona and I went to our Rite Aid to see if they for some reason might have put out Irish Green or Green Ocean for St. Paddy's Day. Well that was a laughing matter for sure since they haven't replenished any of their nail polishes in the last three months. But we did walk by the only nail salon in Plymouth that sells OPI. We both said that we didn't want to go in and buy a bottle of OPI, but on our way back we went in anyway just to see. At first I said that I wasn't going to since I didn't want to spend that much, but that all went out the window when Fiona pointed out that they had Sapphire in the Snow.

Oh my God, I've been pining for this color ever since I saw swatches of it on other blogs. I fell in love with it's purple-blue (blurple?) shade. As soon as I picked up the bottle I knew I was buying it. And also I like the name of the polish. Whenever I think Sapphire in the Snow, all I can think of is some young woman walking through a snow covered forest at night. Around her pale, slender neck is a dark blue oval sapphire on a thin, worn out leather cord. The full silvery moon hanging in the night sky provides the only light by which to see by, resulting in her tripping on an unseen hidden tree root. The leather cord breaks and the sapphire falls into the snow, making the stone look more like a deep blue-violet than blue. She reaches out to retrieve the sapphire but is stopped when a young, dark haired man reaches down and picks up the sapphire. She looks up at the handsome man with his shaggy dark locks and realizes that his eyes are the same shade as the sapphire when it was in the snow. Yep, this is really what my brain thought of when I thought of this color.

And it looks exactly like the sapphires in my necklace!

Love, just love it.

-Amanda