Tuesday, April 30, 2013

CHANEL TABOO - HELLZ, YEAH! (pic heavy!)

Busy night last night! Late yesterday afternoon, the Custom Nail Solutions PR person contacted me asking for a few more nail designs.  Evidently the folks over at Les Nouvelle Esthetiques & Spa magazine were looking for some specific things. I thought I was done with requested mani's for a bit, but I happily said I'd get 'em done. I mean, when they tell me I'm going to be in their magazine for a second time, I am going to jump through any hoop they want me to. Gotta' keep that left hand semi-famous. LMAO

I really hadn't planned on doing my nails last night and instead ended up doing them three times. Another evening shot in the ass. At least they were easy ones. One is included in these pics.

I've been seeing bottle shots and swatches of Chanel Taboo for awhile now and fell in love with the damn thing. First stop, eBay!! Dayum!! It was going for around $40 a bottle. Even I am hard-pressed to spend $40 for a bottle of polish, regardless of its beauty and the fact that it's purple. And I really heart purple. Like really

Next stop; do a search for it, and DUH, Nordstrom carries it online for the mere price of only $27. After seeing the prices on eBay, that made $27 translate into "Oh, what a great deal!!!" Redonk, I know. But then my brain said to buy two, and sell one on eBay to make up for the price of the one I wanted to keep. Genius, no?

And that's exactly what I did. I bought two, stared at them for a bit and then listed one on eBay which promptly sold for 38 buckweedos. Nice! That means I only paid $16 for mine....totes an exceptional price, IMHO.  No problem justifying that...not that I had to justify it to anyone but me. lol

It's worth every penny. For realz. I want to make out with it it's so beautimous. Realizing how weird that would look, I decided to just paint my nails with it. 

I'm in love with this polish! I was actually going to leave it on for at least three days, but of course, that got screwed up. I stared at it all day yesterday in every kind of light imaginable. Of course I could not capture the beauty of it in pictures even though I ran around the house to every room, used my light box, went outside in the sun and in the shade. That's why I'm posting so many pictures. I think altogether I took around 60 shots of this beauty, and I'm still not satisfied, but I did the best I could. My apologies to Chanel for not doing them justice.

First up are the plain ones, although there is nothing plain about this polish, even on its own. I don't think I own another purple as rich looking as this, and I own over 100 purples, I'm embarrassed to say.




Then since I wanted to do a little something on it without detracting from the color too much, I grabbed my Cheeky "H" plate and Essie's Nothing Else Metals just to put a delicate little stamp off to the side. I was super pumped at how this turned out. "I" think it's loverly.

Finally, CNS had wanted some type of mani using stickers of some kind. I had an old pic of a mani from when I had the shorter, active length nails that was in my personal Facebook album that I offered up. I was supposed to go home, throw a watermark on it and then email it to her. But now that I have the longer glamor length, I'm spoiled by them and decided I would just throw on another coat of the Chanel right over my stamping and then stick on some lace. Easy peezy. I didn't even bother to topcoat over it. Slapped 'em on, ran outside, snapped a pic and then took it off to do another mani. And what a mani it is. Early Halloween anyone?  
I happen to love this.  Figures. It stands to reason that the minute I like something, I don't get to keep it. And since I tend to not revisit old mani's, it's doubtful I'll ever wear it for more than the 10 minutes I had it on. 

C'est la vie.

Monday, April 29, 2013

GLITTERFIED

I know several of my glitter-diva ladies will probably like this one! Apparently another "trend" for the season is messy glitter at the base of the nail. Does anybody know who this "trend-decider" is? I'd like to meet him/her and punch him/her in the throat. Screw your so-called trends; I like what I like when I like it, and I'll wear it whether it's trendy or not. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

I do have to laugh, though....that crazy-ass neon angled french tip mani from the other day has more likes on Instagram and more repins on Pinterest than any of my other mani's. Go figure. I don't know if that calls my taste into question or theirs. Maybe I'm just too old and crotchety for it. Evs. Don't care. Don't like it.

This one isn't really my style either. I thought it was the last of the requested mani's that I needed, but I just got a request for three more that I'll need to do tonight.  Hey! Maybe my next post will be something that I'm a huge fan of. It seems like forever since I loved something I did. I do like this one, though. I wanna' make out with that Fantasy Makers Confetti Confettis glitter. In a word, amazeballs!  In person it flashes so bright I almost need shades.  
 
I really love the base color on this one, too - Square Hue's Dear John. The color just did not photograph well at all, and I'm still working on figuring out that damn lightbox issue. No matter how I set that thing up, I just can't seem to make it work for me. I don't know if the lights that came with it aren't bright enough or what. What I DO know is I'm frustrated. I want to take good mani pics. Is that too much to ask? (picture me on my knees sobbing and overacting when you read that)
Anywho, I did one coat of the  Dear John and let that dry. After I applied the second coat, while it was still wet I just put some of the glitter on a brush, held it above the base of my nail and tapped it with my finger so the glitter would fall lightly onto my nails. I wanted it to be scattered freely without any type of perfection. I like when things don't have to be perfect.  And oh, was I glitterfied!! My table, my chair, my lap, my hands....it looked like a 1979 disco ball had exploded directly above my head. 

Ahhh, disco.....I'm so sad you're dead.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

BLECH - NEON AGAIN

On Friday I finished the polish reorganization which was supposed to mean that yesterday I'd clean out my closet. Guess who was too damn lazy to do it? I spent part of the day uploading photos into the Polish Sickness Facebook page....am done all the way back through October and part of September. I'm not sure how far back I'm willing to go with that project because when I look back at stuff I did last year, some of those that I thought were decent now I think are SOOOO bad!! 

Another part of my day was spent posting pics on Instagram and wandering all of the FB nail groups I'm now in. It feels like my brain is only ever thinking of polish and polish-related stuff. There aren't enough hours in the day for this "hobby". Hopefully once I load up everything I already have on my computer into the Facebook page and onto Instagram, it'll be a lot quicker and easier to just load up one at a time as I do them. Maybe then I'll take the time to do other things, like lay in the pool if it ever gets warm enough to even put it up.

Okay. That's enough bitching! You didn't come here to read a whining post, correct? If you're here, you're expecting to see nails!
 
If someone had told me I'd be doing neon again, I wouldn't have believed them. Neons are just not my thang. I've accumulated several and considered not even keeping them, but I figured at some point maybe I'd use them in a marble or something. I've actually seen this particular mani on Pinterest and didn't care for it; now I ended up doing it. And I still don't care for it! lol
For what this is, it turned out. How's that for a glowing review! I wonder how anybody can live without striping tape. I seem to be grabbing it all the time; good thing I have a lot of it. I've only used it a couple of times for actually wearing on my nails, which is what I bought it for, but I'll probs use it all up just for making straight lines. I'm estimating I'll be around 60 years old when I use it all up; I have a lot of it.

All I did on this one was sponge on different color neons on each nail. After my topcoat dried, I randomly laid down some striping tape and painted over it with black. This time I actually let that coat of black dry almost all the way and then had to add a second coat before I could peel the tape off. Since it was almost dry, the black did dry with little ridges on their edges, but a coat of topcoat took care of that. 

Since my neons from the tip mani were still sitting next to me on the table, I just used those same ones; China Glaze Happy Go Lucky, QRS Belmont Garden and Sinfuls Dream On and 24/7.  The black is Orly Liquid Vinyl, which is now my new fave black.

Has anyone ever seen the QRS polishes for sale anywhere? I bought ten of them in a lot on eBay really cheap, and I really like them and wouldn't mind getting some more.

Lordie, I wish it wasn't Sunday already. Weak sauce. I really need my ship to come in so I can retire and become a lady of leisure; I would be SO good at that! Much better than I am at nails.


Saturday, April 27, 2013

I DID IT!!

Crap instructions aside, I did it! I put my Helmer together all by my lonesome. It was a pain in the ass, but I'm glad I got it done. I did not want to wait until Kev gets home on Tuesday. That jumble of random polishes laying around homeless was driving me. I would like to know how my fourth white Helmer is not the same color as my other three white Helmers. Um...isn't "white" white when it comes to metal? Weirdness.

Even my bins got a clean-up. I did discover I don't dare give my whites and blacks their own drawer.  It wouldn't be long until I'd just have to take them back out to make room for more colors. For the time being, I did give the sheer almost-whites a drawer even though I doubt they'll be there for very long. It might be time to steal a couple more bins out of the garage. I think I had eight bins that I bought when I first started this craziness. Once I bought my first Helmer they were banished to the garage, but it wasn't long before six of them were needed again. Am I going to have to eventually buy more of them?? Damn my addictive personality.

Next up on media mani's is a not too shabby stamped dealio. It makes my life easier and takes less time when they need mani's that I can accomplish by stamping. That freehand nonsense sometimes is a challenge for me. Luckily I only end up having to do my left hand for the photos. Left hand coordinated I am not.
Purdy dark green and gold - if you're a Green Bay Packers fan, shut it....I don't wanna' hear it. At least one of you knows who I'm talking about. KIK (and a bunch of you know what that means) 

I've used another Studio M for this, Happy Hunter. I wasn't sure what to use for the gold because I needed something a little more metallic, and some of mine don't work very well. I was pleasantly surprised that the first one I tried, Orly Glitz, stamped perfectly. I've tried using some of the others from that collection for stamping without luck so I'm not sure why it worked this time. Whatevs. I'm glad it worked!  This was another DRK-A image. Honestly, I need to find some new plates that are big enough to cover my nails; I'm getting bored.

I spent a bunch of time last night watermarking photos and adding them to the Polish Sickness Facebook page. I still have tons more to do!! Why I thought that would be a fast process, I have no idea, because it is time consuming. Have YOU gone and liked the page? I'm at 51, so please come like it and share it. I'll beg if I have to. ;)

I see a nap in my future; I stayed up until 4:30, and a good sleep it was not. I had to get up twice to shake myself out of some weird-ass nightmares. I hate when that happens. And those damn dogs do not seem to care that we went to bed late. Baylee still was bugging me at 8:15 a.m. I tried to ignore her, but she climbs on my head and talks to me. My brains are not cut out for 75 pounds of Lab on top of them. Turd.

Enjoy the weekend! 

Friday, April 26, 2013

NEVER SAW THIS BEFORE

TGIF....for realz. It's been a tiring week which is what happens whenever I take a day off. Bossman must get his motivation on when I'm not here. All I know is playing catch-up blows. The end.
Finally finished up doing the CNS requested mani's last night. I decided that since the hubster didn't remember to put my Helmer together, I would attempt that starting at about midnight last night. I figured, "hey, can't be too hard or take too long, right?" Wrong. Talk about piss-poor instructions, or mabes I was just over tired. I just know that it did certainly not go as planned. I'll be finishing that little project this afternoon. 

Part of my plan for the weekend is to get that thing set up so I can rearrange my polishes and have a spot to put the bunch of new ones that I had no room for. I'm really hoping that I'll have a spare drawer for my blacks, whites and topcoats because those poor things are stuck in a bin on top of a Helmer at the moment along with the bins that hold all of my other art supplies. For some crazy reason, I thought having Helmers would mean I wouldn't need those bins. Sha', right.  Guess again, elk breath. I wish I could say I won't buy more, but we all know that is simply an unrealistic goal. I do not, however, have room for more than the four Helmers. God help me once that fourth one is filled.

On to the mani! I had never seen this one before. I actually had to ask for clarification after reading the description of it.
The more I look at it, the more I kind of like it. It's sort of cool, and it certainly is different. Once again, I don't know if I'd do it again, but you never know. It might be fun in some other colors.

My periwinkle for this one is Studio M Hydrangea. I love a good periwinkle, and I'm a fan of the Meijer Studio M polishes. Decent price, and I find the quality and application to be really nice.  

Pull out the trusty striping tape!!  Add those little segments of Orly Liquid Vinyl, topcoat, and then go take it off because there's one more mani to do! Perhaps you'll see that one next; perhaps not. ;)

Honestly, I love reading the comments you guys leave for me. You've all been really great, complimentary and supportive. I hope that means this little project is worth the look and the read.

Enjoy your weekend, peeps!! Rumor has it we should get into the 50's, maybe even 60 this weekend!! I'll believe it when I see it, but hope springs eternal, right? 

Thursday, April 25, 2013

NEON NIGHT (kinda)

Sunshine!! What a nice change! It's still way too cold here for almost May, but it looks like we're supposed to have a balmy 50 degree week coming up. Wowsers....I hope the heat doesn't get to me. This weather has really diminished my mood and my motivation, even for nails. 
 
Is this seriously a new trend for summer 2013? If so, I don't like it much. At least it was easy. This is one that was requested for use in some media stuff. I try to do whatever is asked of me.  Whether or not I personally would wear it in public is irrelevant. So I did this one and then removed it right away to move on to another.

I did get very lucky because I was able to give them some of my older mani's which will save me a lot of time. Normally I only have a couple of days to get them all submitted, so I have done 3 or 4 now and will do a couple more tonight.
I wanted to do a basecoat of something sheer enough to cover my light pink Custom nails but didn't want it too opaque. For that I dug out my China Glaze Linger, which I've probably had for 10 months but never used. I seldom use sheer colors, but this was perfect for what I needed.  Neons!! Something else I rarely use, but I have somehow managed to accumulate them just the same.  I just dug through my Helmer drawers and pulled out the brightest things I could find.  For my yellow, I used China Glaze Happy Go Lucky, the pink is Sinful Colors 24/7, my green is QRS Belmont Garden, purple is Sinful Dream On and the orange is LA Colors Shock.  Holy brightness!!  And of course there's nothing like striping tape to make some nice straight lines; super helpful! Scotch tape works well for a lot of people, but I've gotten pretty attached to the striping tape method.

Overall, this is probably not something I would do again, but I still think it turned out okay. 

Now, here's a question for you who are taking the time to actually read the blog posts:  Should I continue writing the type of things I write in here? Or do you all prefer just a straightforward, "here is my mani and this is what I used" kind of blog? This enquiring mind wants to know! Since this is new to me, I don't want to waste anybody's time with a bunch of garbage nobody is interested in.

Until next time! :)   

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

AN "IN THE MEANTIME" MANI

Humpa-hump day. I really need it to be Friday. Seriously. I mean it. This will be the first weekend free I've had in what seems like forever. In actuality, I've only had two busy ones in a row, but that's enough to really screw up my dvr catch-up time. I foresee 3:30-4:00 a.m. staying up even though I know I honestly do need to get some extra sleep to recharge.

So last night I received the list of manicures that are needed per yesterday's post. Luckily I had a few in my stash of pics that they might be able to use. I do have my work cut out for me over the next couple of nights. With a couple of the descriptions, I'm not even sure I know what they are. Luckily there are a bunch listed, but I don't have to do all of them. I usually just try to do as many as I can so hopefully I'll make them happy. 

I waited as long as I could last night for directions, and when I hadn't gotten them due to some glitch with my Facebook messages, I went ahead and just did something simple to get me through the day today. It isn't exciting, and I am pretty annoyed with how it turned out. As usual, it look WAY better in my head. Hmmm...does that mean I'm delusional? It's possible that I am. But I digress; on to the mani.
As you can see, I did not put a whole lot of work into this. I bought some new polishes while I was in Illinois over the weekend and since they were sitting on the table next to me after being swatched, I just grabbed two and did what you see here.  The basecoat is a Color Club Halo Hue, Cloud Nine. Then I grabbed my trusty little fan brush and went over that with Color Club Port-Folio. One thing I do like is that some of the holo shows up even with the purple over it.

I had been thinking about doing a fan brush mani for awhile. Now I wish I had waited until I had more time to choose colors. This one does nothing for me. No great loss when I remove it after work.

I'm hoping these mani's I'm doing for Custom Nails are something cute. Of course, you'll be seeing them even if I don't like them. 
  

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

STAMPED AND FRAMED - A GOOD COMBO

Some of you may know that my left hand is semi-famous. Custom Nails has been using my photos for quite a few online beauty magazines and blogs.  I've also been used in two print beauty industry magazines, which I really find pretty damn cool
Today I got a message today from one of the PR peeps that they want me to do a few mani's for submission, and since I'm waiting to here what they need this time around, I'll have to show a manicure I did previously. I'm kinda saddy-pants about it, but hopefully tomorrow I'll get to show something that's actually new.
I do have to say, I  was very happy to take off the butterfly mani....having that on since last Thursday night was way too damn long for me. I'm sick of looking at it and don't even like it anymore.
So here's a framed mani I did back in February. 
For this I used OPI Moonraker and Revlon Iconic.  As much as I love my OPI's, I am a pretty big fan of the Revlon Colorstay, too. I have good luck with them, and they are killer for doing marbles. For my stamping I used my Konad plate M64.  None of the Konad designs are big enough to cover my entire nail, which is why I did the hand-framing around the edges. I do like how the frames look when I use a stamp, so I'm a fan of this one.
That'll do it for tonight!  I'm looking forward to hopefully showing you something new tomorrow. 
As always, thanks for peeking in and following! Now drag your other nail buddies over here to do the same, please? ;) 

Sunday, April 21, 2013

GO CHRIS - HAPPY NEWS!

The very first thing I saw this morning when I got up was a notification on my phone that our friend Chris had left a comment on the Polish Sickness Facebook page. What a great way to start the day!! She is out of ICU and is definitely on the mend. Thanks for all the prayers. I'm pretty sure it was all the red manicures that did it, though. ;)
 
Nail polish shopping was a complete disappointment today. Not even one!! Clothes shopping was a success, and I did have fun buying a few things for Griffin. He has kept us laughing almost non-stop, and he really is such a good kid. "Out of the mouths of babes" definitely applies in this household. 

Another past manicure tonight. I do love me some marbled nails. I try to choose colors to put together that might not be an obvious choice, so this one is a bit different. I would do marbled nails damn near every day; I have to convince myself to NOT do them. To me, they are just one of the coolest things to have on my nails.
For this one I also used more colors than normal.  Most of the time I use 3 or 4; I decided to get wild and cray-cray on this one.  I just loved all of these colors together....Fingerpaints Hue Are You, China Glaze Re-Fresh Mint (best light mint polish ever), Barielle Ocean Breeze, Essie Spinning Again and Wet n Wild Wet Cement. I was afraid using 5 might make it murky, but all of these worked really well. 

Tomorrow night will probs be another blast from the fairly recent past, but I'm hoping I'll still manage to chat it up a bit here. 

Until tomorrow.....have a great Sunday night!
 

SUNSHINE....BUT STILL NO HEAT WAVE

We actually saw sunshine today! What a nice change since we had 50 mph winds, rain, sleet and near white out snow conditions on our way to Illinois yesterday. I thought it would be warmer in Illinois than Upper Michigan.  What a fool believes.
Jim Gaffigan was beyond hilarious last night.  We laughed non-stop from the time he started until he finished, sore cheeks and sore abs. I'm so glad we got to see him.
Dinner tonight was Sushi Train, and watching a 2 year old eat miso soup and about 10 avocado rolls is hilarious. He's so cute I can hardly stand it.
  
I'm not doing my nails, so I pulled up something I did a couple of months ago. I think it's dainty and pretty purdy.
I used 2 coats of China Glaze Cheek to Cheek and did the tip with CG Skate Night. I added the silver with OPI  Crown Me Already, which is one of my fave silver glitters and then just stamped the little flower with one of my Konad plates and Konad black.

I got some good polish deals at TJ Maxx this afternoon, and I'm hoping to score some more good stuff tomorrow. Sally Beauty was a complete bust; walked out of there with nothing. Boo to that.

Now we're sitting down to watch Seven Psychopaths. After that I have a feeling it'll be time to catch some sleep.

Hope your weekend is going well!