First swatch spam post!

Hello everyone!

I just noticed that I have a bunch of swatches that for one reason or another got put into my limbo file, and I thought I'd throw them together and show them to you. This is actually partly in preparation for something I'm excited about that I'll be posting later. In the meantime...Enjoy!

Finger Paints Merry Mistletoe: 

Finger Paints Merry Mistletoe, indirect sunlight

Julep Claudette: 

Julep Claudette, artificial light

Julep Jodie: 

Julep Jodie, artificial light

Julie G Shimmer Island: 

KBShimmer Get Clover It: 

KBShimmer Get Clover It, indirect sunlight

NerdLacquer Home Of The Untempered Schism:

 

NerdLacquer Home Of The Untempered Schism, direct sunlight

 Zoya Midori: 

 

Zoya Midori, indirect sunlight

 

Zoya Midori, direct sunlight

 

Zoya Nidhi: 

Zoya Nidhi, artificial light

Zoya Rikki: 

Zoya Rikki, indirect sunlight

Hope you saw something you liked! Hugs and smooches,

M.

Before & After: Tangerine Flowers

Hello!!

This month's theme in my Nail Challenge Collaborative group is 'Flowers'. Since July is here and summer is upon us, I wanted to share something fun and summery for the first week.

I started off with a base of Julie G Tangerine Dreams, a pretty yellow-orange textured polish:

Julie G Tangerine Dreams, direct sunlight

Julie G Tangerine Dreams, indirect sun

Next I stamped with Sally Hansen Orange Impulse and on top of that with Rapid Red on three of the nails, and with Sally Hansen Lightning n the accent nail, to create a yellow-orange-red color grouping.  I stamped with Red Angel plate RA121:

Here's what happens in my light box most of the time when I'm trying to take pictures...what is dat furry wee beastie in dere?? :)

Thanks for taking a look! And please check out the other flower manicures linked below. :)

Big hugs,
M.

Before & After: 1960s Mod Squad

Hello!!

This week the Llama Nails way-back machine is taking us to...the 1960s! I wasn't alive then, but I hear it was a great decade, and there's certainly no denying that some awesome music and fashion came flooding out of that era in a major way. I decided to focus on the fashion side of it, and bring you a manicure that I'd love to have as a groovy mod dress. :)

I started with a Julie G Rock Candy, a pretty teal textured polish with lots of sparkling glitter:

Julie G Rock Candy, indirect sun

Julie G Rock Candy, direct sun

I wanted to go with a slightly darker teal, so I put a coat of Zoya Frida over it:

Julie G Rock Candy + Zoya Frida

Finally, because when I think of 1960s' fashion, I think of geometic patterns and blocks of color, I chose a square-block pattern from Pueen 16, and stamped it using Barry M Silver Foil. Then I added a couple of rockin' doughnut glequins to each nail, to give contrasting shape and a complementary color...oh, and they kinda look like little 45s, which my mother assures me was the way she listened to music as a little girl:

I love the look of the stamping over the texture--it reminds me of a beautiful chenille fabric. :) Overall I think the look is fun, mod, and very groovy, baby. :)


Thanks for looking! Peace, love, and retro hooks,
M.

Before & After: Can duochromes do texture?

Hello!

You know I've been playing around with textured polishes like crazy, particularly with Bee Polished's technique of painting over a textured polish. You might also remember that when I tested this with a holo, most of the holographic effect disappeared (although a little did remain). The next question I set out to ask about this technique was, what about duochromes? Do they lose their color shift when put over a textured polish, or do they preserve it?

I started out with Julie G Crushed Candy, the light purple splash of happy from the Frosted Gum Drops collection:

Julie G Crushed Candy

Look at that sparkle!

Next I layered one of my favorite duochromes over it, Zoya Adina, which has a stunning purple-to-green color shift to it. Here's how it came out:

Zoya Adina over Julie G Crushed Candy

Oh yeah, baby! the beautiful duochrome was perserved, now new and improved plus texture! This combination does cover up the glitter in the polish, since Adina is opaque, so you might want to do this with a non-glitter version, or not, as you wish.

I hope I'm not boring you with all this stuff about the textured polishes, but I'm having just a ton of fun with them. When I first heard about them, I didn't think they'd be that interesting, sort of a one-trick pony. But that has turned out to really not be the case, and I'm so glad I have some. :)

Thanks for looking! Peace and love,
M.

Before & After: Fun with textured polishes and jellies

Hello!

Guess what? When I did my post on using striping tape with textured polishes, I mentioned that I'd had some fun playing around with textured polishes and jellies. I'm back today to tell you about it...

Remember how I posted about the technique I found on Bee Polished where you can layer a regular polish over a textured polish, and keep the texture? Well, that's awesome and all, but it hides the pretty shiny bits if you're using a polish like the Zoya Pixies, or if you're using a glitter version like some of the Julie G textured polishes. So I thought to myself...what if I use a sheer jelly? Will that change the color of the polish, but let the bling shine through?

Turns out, it will. Let me demonstrate for you. Here we have Julie G Rock Candy:

Julie G Rock Candy

Ooo, aaahhh! Pretty isn't it? But let's say that I decide to wear it the next day, and I'm in a more...teal sort of place. But I don't want to lose the pretty glitter. Well, I've got a bottle of Zoya Frida over here...let's see how that looks over it:

Accent nail to show the color contrast. :)

I love it! It changes the color of the polish without hiding one bit of the blingy glitter. So, let's see how it looks in a full manicure rather than just an accent nail:

Zoya Frida over Julie G Rock Candy

I love it! And this is going to make my glittery textured polishes more versatile. While this is a sheer jelly made for layering, I imagine you can use any sheer polish of the type you'd use for a glitter sandwich and get good results. I'm definitely going to be trying more combinations. :)

Thanks for reading! Peace and love,
M.

Tutorial: Fun with textured polish and striping tape!

Hello!

As you know, I recently received most of my shipment of the Julie G Gum Drops collection. With this and the three Zoya textured polishes I have, I now have a fair number of textured polishes, and that makes me want to play and experiment!

One thing I wanted to play with was striping tape manicures. I wasn't sure if they'd work because it's much harder to create a clean seal with textured polishes than smooth ones...and sure enough, when I first put the striping tape down, I found that it didn't adhere well at all. But regardless, I was determined to see it through and see if I could make it work. I'm happy to say that without too much difficulty, I did. If you know what to expect, I don't think you'll have a problem, either.

For my play session I started with Julie G Blueberry Fizz:

Let's use my index finger as the main example of how I did the striping:

There are a couple of things to notice here, and steps to take carefully:

1) The striping tape on the manicure doesn't stay put very well, particularly at the edges. The more you press it down, the more it will not want to stay put. So put it down where you want it, put the next piece down, etc., and then once you have all pieces placed, give it one final press-down and then quickly polish it.

2) See how the tape ends at my cuticle, and doesn't go past it? Because the edges of the tape want to stick up and not stay on the textured polish, you need to cut the edge close to cuticle or sides of your nail. If you do, they will stay down on the polish, as you can see my ends doing there. You don't have to do that on the free-edge of the nail (where you see mine sticking out); you can bend those over a bit, and use these edges to remove the strips when the time comes.

3) As much as possible, polish the nail in the direction of the nail tape, and only stroke once; this keeps the polish from bleeding under the tape. Then, pull off the strips right away, in reverse order from how you put them on, just like you would with a regular tape mani of this sort.

Here's how it turned out:

[ Now keep in mind, this isn't meant to be a finished wear-outside manicure, I was just playing around and testing things out. It's just for illustration purposes. : ) ]

You can see the index finger came out really well, as did the ring finger. On the middle finger and pinkie, I tried to do something different; I thought it would be cool to turn the design into a V, after I had done the same initial design as I did on the other nails. I altered the design by going over part of it with a second coat of my polish (China Glaze's Def Defying), and as you can see, it came out patchy. Also, if it had been equal coverage, it would have covered the texture, which I didn't want. Either way, it looks different and gunky from the rest, and I consider those two nails a fail. Next time I'll just tape the design that way in the first place.

The last thing to mention is that if your polish does seep a bit under your tape, I found it really easy to fix with the smallest dotting tool I have--I just literally pushed the edge of the polish to where I wanted the line to be, using the top of the dotting tool. The polish didn't seem to fully adhere to the textured polish until it was fully dry, so this was no problem at all, and left no residue. You can't even see the two places where I did it--I can't even remember where I did it, looking at the pictures now. :)

All in all, this wasn't nearly as impossible as I thought it was going to be, or as it seemed like it would be when I first tried to put the striping tape down on the polish. So if you go into it knowing that the tape doesn't stay down firmly like in regular manicures, but have faith it will work anyway if you follow my tips, you'll be okay. :)

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this helpful!

Hugs and love,
M.

Review: Julie G Frosted Gum Drops Collection (plus a tale of trivial tragedy and triumph)

Hello!

Today I have the new Julie G Gum Drops textured collection to show you. But first…I must share with you the sad, tragic news of my first nail mail fail.

I’m sure we’ve all been there…a package of polish we’ve been waiting for desperately finally shows up, but has that smell—the one that makes our blood run cold in our veins. That smell…the one that tells us the polish is now outside of the bottle, and not inside where it belongs. ‘How many bottles are broken?’ we wonder. ‘Maybe it’s only one!’ we hope, and we hesitantly open the box with our hearts in our throats and our pulse racing while we survey the scene of the mass polish-cide.

In my case, 4 of my 6 bottles of polish were smashed. One of them was only really cracked a bit, and I could keep the bottle intact. But the other three…::sobs::

Luckily for me, the polish had only begun to leak. In the case of one of the bottles, I was able to save pretty much the whole bottle. In the other two, I was able to decant about half of Sugar Rush into another bottle, and about 1/3 of Tangerine Dreams. Thank goodness I’ve been saving empties for frankening purposes! And of course, as luck would have it…Sugar Rush and Tangerine Dreams are the only two colors in the collection I’m really crazy about. Ah, well, c’est la vie, right?

I should mention that Groupon refunded the full order within 24 hours. Their customer service was great, and I’ll happily order through them again. But sadly they couldn’t send out another shipment, which was what I really wanted, because the deals are only good for a certain amount of time. My Rite Aid tends to not carry the new Julie Gs for ages and ages, and of course they’re $5 each there, as opposed to just over $2 each through the Groupon deal.  But this is a minor issue—at the end of the day, when I do manage to get my hands on another bottle of Sugar Rush and Tangerine dreams, I will still have paid a little less than the Groupon price anyway, to end up with a full set. So it works out in the end. Nail mail fail averted. :)

But enough about my nail misadventures! On to the polish!!

This collection has two types of textured polishes. Half of the collection has glitter added to the textured polish, and half doesn’t. In terms of bling quotient, the ones that don’t have the glitter come in somewhere between the Milani textured collection and the Zoya Pixie polishes—they aren’t quite as sparkly as the Pixies, but they have more flash than the ‘plain’ textured polishes. The ones that have the glitter—green ghostly goose gams on a stick, they are BLINGY. They approach the China Glaze Prismatic collection in terms of glitziness, imo. So let’s take a look at them first.

Here's Rock Candy, a concoction of light green-blue with silver glitter:

Julie G Rock Candy artificial light

Julie G Rock Candy direct sunlight

All pictures are two coats, with no topcoat. All of these applied very easily; I’m starting to really love that about textured polishes, they all seem to practically apply themselves. This was the first one of these I tried on, and it packed a punch, for sure. The best way to describe these is that if they were red, they’d look like sequined ruby slippers; if that’s what you like in a polish, the three glitters in this collection are definitely for you.

Next we have Blueberry Fizz, a medium blue that leans ever so slightly towards purple, also with silver glitter:

Julie G Blueberry Fizz, indirect sunlight

Julie G Blueberry Fizz, direct sunlight

Again, two coats, no topcoat. Another sequined-shoe-like wonder that will appeal to those of us polish fanatics that have glitter in our veins. :)

Then there’s Crushed Candy, a lilac polish with silver glitter:

Julie G Crushed Candy, indirect sunlight

Julie G Crushed Candy, artificial inside light

This is the last of the polishes with added glitter, and this will make you look makes your hands look like spring came to life in Las Vegas and then decided to dance on your fingertips. :)

Now we turn to the three polishes in the collection that don't have added glitter, they just have the frosted effect similar to the Zoya Pixies (but a bit different). Here we have Hot Cinnamon, a bright tomato red:

Julie G Hot Cinnamon inside artificial light

This is a pretty red that has a slightly faded look to it, and that sets it aside from other textured reds a bit, at least from what I've seen. I like this just fine, although it doesn't stun me like Sugar Rush and Tangerine Dreams.

I wanted to show you on one of the polishes the difference you see when you add topcoat:

Julie G Hot Cinnamon with topcoat

As you can see, a fair amount of the textured effect does come through, even with topcoat. Also, adding topcoat, at least Seche Vite, seems to brighten up the polish a bit and takes away the faded effect. So if you like the texture trend, but miss shine and durability, this line will work well with topcoat for you. :)

Next we have my absolute favorite of the collection, Sugar Rush! This is a stunning mix of reddish-orange and orangish-yellow, with the frosted texture finish:

Julie G Sugar Rush, indirect sunlight

Julie G Sugar Rush, indirect sunlight

Julie G Sugar Rush, direct sun

Julie G Sugar Rush, direct sun

Oh man oh man oh man. This is what the surface of the sun looks like in my dreams. I adore the blend of colors here and I wish more textured polishes were like this.

And to end our journey through Julie G, we have Tangerine Dreams, a yellowish-orange that is the most subtle of the collection, and none the worse for it:  

Julie G Tangerine Dreams, direct sun

Julie G Tangerine Dreams, indirect sun

I like the shade of orange they chose here, and I think the 'frost' adds to it nicely. It feels summery and bright, and makes me want and orange soda, lol. :)

A few final comments. As I already mentioned, application on these was beyond excellent. Removal, however, was another story, at least in the case of the glitters--they weren't as bad as an opaque glitter, but they were certainly a PITA. As for my thoughts about the whole collection, I think they did a good job covering a number of spring/summer colors in a small-ish collection, and I think the colors that have added glitter add something different from the other lines on the market. I personally don't care as much for the ones with the glitter, at least not on their own (yep that's a hint about a future post or two, hee hee), but people who love glitter will definitely love these, without question; it's only my own somewhat-conservative nature regarding glitter that makes me feel that way. I personally prefer the three without the glitter, with their more subtle frosty flash. :)

Thanks for stopping by--I hope this has helped you decided which one of these you want/need!

Hugs and love,
M.

(The polishes reviewed in this post were purchased with my own money.)