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!

Short and Sweet: Two Fab Looks for Short Nails

Do you guys also have the pet peeve of having your nails different lengths from each other? Personally, anything asymmetrical drives me nuts. (Unless it's lopsided in a purposeful way, like the braid I wear over one shoulder, or a diagonal accent color across one side of a nail.)

One of the absolute worst is nails that are different lengths from each other, since it's not just an aesthetic but also a tactile asymmetry. This is one reason why I will pretty much never leave the house without a nail clipper in my bag, just in case some emergency surgery is necessary.

Unfortunately, when moving into a new house, washing a million dishes that have been in storage for six months, and wresting the tops of tons of unruly boxes, nails are prone to breaking.

Oops.

On the bright side, now I have nails short enough to show off some of my favorite understated short-nail looks (and all the dishwashing has made it necessary for me to wear two of them over the course of the last week).

Number one: White. There are many things to love about it:

• Its a true neutral and goes with anything.
• It always makes your hands look cleaner (a major reason I like having my nails done).
• It matches your Easter shoes. (Happy Bunny Day!)
• It's easy to pull off - not exactly a statement manicure - and yet totally on-trend this spring.
• It looks pretty good even after washing countless loads of dishes; since it's a light color any chips or imperfections are less noticeable.

Imperfect, but still sexy.

Number two: Purple matte. So right after I last posted about not being sure purple was on-trend, I read a whole bunch of blog posts saying that it is. Yay! I'll soon have an eggplant-colored office, and purple has been one of my go-to shades for a while, so I'm ready to celebrate all the different shades from the richer ones to those reminiscent of the springlike scent of lilac.

Purple! Yay! 

(And even in artificial overhead lighting, 

you can see the reduction in shine.)

I used a new base coat and a new top coat in this manicure. The top coat is designed to dampen the manicure's shine - that is to make it look matte - and the bottle proclaims it as "new," which I think is supposed to mean trendy. I actually loved this look in about 1997. (Especially with black nails; I was a little dramatic as a teenager.) So to me, it's better than new: it's a comeback. From the '90s. So here are my new kids on the (nail polish) block:

The right stuff: 

Revlon 790 Matte Top Coat

 Revlon 955 Quick Dry Base Coat

What are your favorite short-nail looks? Are there any looks you like on short nails but not on long nails? Or vice-versa? 

DIY Sugar Nails

If you ask my boyfriend, he'll tell you this happens a lot. One week, I am resisting something new, the next week I am totally experimenting with it, embracing it, and loving it. Go figure.

In this case, it's textured nails. I maintain that having rough-textured nails when you meant to have smooth ones is unpleasant, but after reading that Cathy was willing to try pink sugar nails (since she's a redhead she normally avoids pink), I decided to see if adding texture to my nails would really be that bothersome.

I did not go as far as buying anything new, instead I used glitter that was already part of my makeup collection (Possibly from the 90's? Glitter doesn't go bad, right?) and the Rimmel London polish and topcoat I tried for the first time last week. (Although obviously I did not use it as a base again.)

Sugar and spice and everything nice.

The steps are fairly easy. What I did was:

1) Paint all ten nails with a satisfactory amount of polish. I used three coats of the purple to get the color saturation as I wanted.

2) Let nails dry as normal. I wouldn't have tied my shoes or done some other smudge-prone activity, but I let my nails dry around half an hour and was fine to type and open the glitter bottle and stuff.

Products used: Rimmel London 370 "Wild Orchid" and Lancome Glitter in "Hologramme"

3) Apply glitter to each nail. I tapped a pinch of glitter on to one index finger, and tapped it again onto each nail of the opposite hand. Then I repeated the process with the other hand, and kept doing so (slightly obsessively) until there was an even amount of glitter on each nail. As you can see from the picture, the glitter gets places you don't necessarily want it, but it's easy enough to brush off (or remove with a lint brush or scotch tape if you want).

4) Apply topcoat. Pretty straightforward. Two things to keep in mind are: Topcoat makes the bottom coats vulnerable to smudging and smearing and a little bit of the glitter will get stuck in the topcoat brush. In fact, though, I was pleasantly surprised about how little this happened. It was really easy to wipe the brush on a piece of paper a couple of times and get it clean again.

This is a pretty easy and on-trend DIY look. I will report back with any developments, such as the gitter or polish coming off unexpectedly, as happened last week. (You can see the bottle claims it lasts ten days!)

Wear and Tear

Since I was so excited to use my new Rimmel London base/topcoat, I figure I should post an update on the results, which, sadly, were a little disappointing.

One problem -- which actually happens to me a lot when layering nail polish so it might not be the topcoat's fault -- is that adding another wet layer makes the dry layers underneath vulnerable to smudging and smearing again.

What happened this time, which seemed to be unique to the topcoat's interaction with the Covergirl gold polish I used, was the formation of tiny bubbles on the surface of the nails. This kind of thing is not  really noticeable to others but drives me crazy! I love having the surface of my nails feel smooth.

I'm not sure if you can see the bubbles in the gold, but you can definitely see the chipping!

Another problem is the chipping. The whole point of using a topcoat is so that I can go through a whole week (hence the name of the blog) without devising and implementing another manicure. I think that last week's green-on-green held a lot better - without topcoat!

So, I've asked this before but I'm still curious - What are your favorite topcoats? Did I get bad results because I was using a cheap one? How do you apply your topcoats? I ended up putting a layer between each of the polish colors, so maybe that is the problem. Let me know how you do it and what kind of results you get!

EDIT: (a couple of hours later)

Now I am super convinced this Rimmel base/topcoat should not be used as a base. I took a bath and this was the result:

Talk about a different way to remove nail polish!

All of the polish pealed off, easily and, as you can see, in astonishingly large pieces. This has never happened to me before, ever, so I can offer no explanation except to blame the base coat. I'll try to pick up a different one soon and try it out. Several people have suggested OPI, so I might try that, depending on the price. 

You can also see my naked nails, my new green bathroom, and my signature pink robe.

Normally I would include a shot of the products I used to achieve a certain look, so here is the shampoo I used in the bath. Also some bar soap, which did not photograph particularly nicely.

The upside is I now have naked nails without the yucky nail polish remover smell.

Trendblending

I've already posted about nailscapes of mine that have seized on the trend of gold polish. One of my favorite trends this season is actually opaque white nails but I have not done a post on these yet because my nails are a little bit longer than ideal for this look right now and also because I've been feeling too creative to leave things be at plain white lately.

Colors!

To be honest, I am not sure that purple is really all that trendy this season. I do know that I went to a party last weekend and my two favorite manicures there were different shades of this regal color. Since I'd also been on the lookout for a base coat, I was delighted that Rimmel London had a two-for pack of a multi-tasking base/top coat and a pastel purple. Pastels are in this season but this purple actually turned out to be a little darker than I'd expected so it's hard to say whether I've really hit the mark with that one.

As usual when I get creative, I started off with something fun and could not leave well enough alone. Here is how my nails looked after applying the first two colors, which actually amounted to a base coat, two white coats, two diagonal gold coats, and a top coat.

Can't seem to get enough of this color combination.

Diagonal designs are another trend I've been grooving on but haven't put into action until today! As happened last week as well, I've found I am a little too perfectionist about this to love the results, but it seems easy enough that with some practice it will be fine. I probably had much worse results the first time I french manicured myself, which I'd guess was in about 1997.

I wore this gold-on-white mani out to get a bagel for lunch and that went well and everything, but then when I got home I decided to add some more color. I've been digging the idea of layering nail polishes lately, and since I just moved into my new house this week (!!) I have not yet unpacked significantly enough to know where the scotch tape is, which seems to be a necessary tool to create a more structured look. (I am also looking forward to finding the rest of my nail polish collection!). For now I decided to freehand another diagonal and this was the result:

The finished product

I like it because I think the color combination is good - springlike, even though it is still below freezing here and may even snow later in the week - and because in addition to exhibiting my blossoming diagonal-painting skills, it creates a pointed version of the pronounced nail moon which has also been trending this season.