Review: Tea Fragrant Nail Polish

You guys know I love Walgreens. While I was there picking up some things to help me organize my new office, I could not resist also getting a new nail polish. I'd been thinking of a latte-like color to use as a base for French and French-inspired manicures, and this is what I decided on.

Tea Beauty's Vanilla Petals

It wasn't until I was checking out that I realized this is a scented nail polish - Vanilla Petals is not just the name, it's also the flavor. This was interesting for my boyfriend, who normally claims I am trying to poison him with chemicals because of the smell - even several hours after my manicure has dried. He even (if unenthusiastically) approved the scent.

I was pleased with how this look came out. (I also used my now go-to Revlon base coat, Color Club's French Tip, and a Sinful Colors top coat.) This was exactly what I'd had in mind, kind of glamorous and up-to-date but at the same time not shiny or overstated. (I am on a shiny hiatus after last week.)

Re-imagined French: diagonals instead of tips

This morning, though, as happens, I got bored and decided to move on to another look, perhaps even one that will last until the wedding I'm excited to be attending this weekend, and to my horror I found that the scented polish had stained my nails yellow! I am thinking it also might have been the combination of the Tea Beauty polish and the Color Club polish, but I can't say for sure.

Ew. 

Nail polish remover would not remove this stain.

I'm also not sure yet whether I'd recommend that others try out this type of polish. I think I'll get a flashier color to wear by itself and see if the results and after-effects are the same. (You could say I need a larger N, where N = nail polishes.) For now I'm going to wash the dishes and see if the dish soap has any success removing these ugly yellow stains.

Have any of you tried scented nail polishes? Have you ever had a polish leave such an ugly stain on your nails (even with a base coat!)? Leave a comment and let me know!

Spring Sparkles

So I've been really busy with cleaning and moving into my new house - and tons of other activities: translating and editing, planning my summer, etc. etc. All this does not mean I've stopped giving myself manicures, just that I've stopped telling you about them. So here is a collection of recent ones.

A theme that has emerged over the past couple of weeks is sparkles. I bought some various glitter polishes on a recent trip to Walgreens (kind of obsessed with Walgreens right now, to be honest), but really I've only used one of them: Sally Hansen's Disco Ball (on the right).

Also pictured: Sinful Colors' Fantasy

Recently I also added a new classic red to my collection, Color Club's Look Book. Here it is with a couple of coats of the glitter over it. I tried to layer so the glitter would be thickest at the bottom and thinnest at the top, but I'm not sure how discernable it is. I plan to work more on the graduated look in the future, probably not until my office is totally set up.

You can pretty much never go wrong with red nails. 

(At least according to my boyfriend.)

Something else I did was super-girly pink-on-pink with two pinks I bought last year when I was really into pink nails. (This was in part due to the influence of my guiltiest guilty pleasure TV show, the Bachelorette... Another post on that will possibly follow.) Adding to the effusive girlie-ness was, of course, a layer of sparkle on top. Not sure exactly why, but this look (minus the diagonals) really brought me back to 1996.

OMG pink!

Sinful Colors' Easy Going underneath Sinful Colors' Soul Mate

My third and most favorite of the sparkle looks was diagonal swipes of glitter (two coats) over Color Club's Status Update. Part of me thinks I just love this color for layering, since I also think it looks fab under gold. Brian invariably thinks it looks trashy, though, so there you go. There's no accounting for taste. 

You love it as much as I do, though, right?

Unfortunately with me there is no accounting for planning, either, since I put this polish on less than a day before I'd planned to help some friends of mine who are new parents clean their bathroom, so the look didn't last long. Oops.

Are you guys as into glitter this season as I am? What have your go-to manicure looks been so far this spring?

Delayed Beautification: Two Online Nail Sign-ups

I work online, I am new in my town, and there have only been a couple of days so far this spring that it's been nice enough to just go play outside. (Today will be one of them, though!) The result is that I spend a lot of time on the internet. A lot.

Besides being terrible for carpal tunnel syndrome and other parts of my body, being a connectivity junkie has its perks: not only have I gotten way better at Words with Friends, I have also learned about some up-and-coming nail ventures available to consumers on the web. Without further ado, here they are!

I'm not sure I'll ever be skilled enough to freehand like this.

(Image from the Scratch website.)

Scratch
This LA-based company is seeking to combine the trend of nail wraps with actually trendy patterns and nail art, instead of the floral, boring, and/or leopard print patterns currently common to nail wraps. Their Kickstarter campaign has already raised more than four times its goal, with nearly three weeks left to go. Donate and you can try out one (or more) of their nail wraps as a thank-you gift.

Check your mailbox: You've got nails!

(Image from the Laquerous website.)

Laquerous
A subscription-based service, not unlike Netflix, that sends you nail polish in the mail for you to use and return. This is perfect for those who are indecisive about nail color, want to have the feel of expensive polish without the high per-bottle price tag, or want to try before they splurge on expensive polish. I requested a membership a little while ago and haven't heard anything yet, but I'm hoping to get the chance to try out this service soon. (Also I'm a little in awe that they're starting a business based on sending nail polish through the mail, since normally the USPS is not down with that.)

There will be lots of new things to try this spring! Not only have I just found my nail polish collection (which was packed away in a box for the last six months), but I am already behind on trying out the new polishes I picked up last week, so I'd better get going before Scratch and Laquerous put their products in the mail to me!

Any nail news around the interwebs that I've missed? Leave a comment and let me know!