Polish Review: Zoya Envy

I'm just going to say straight out, Zoya Envy is a beautiful color.  It's like distilled swamp, without the smell and a whole lot more class; a deep, fluid green with just a touch of brown.  So dark it's almost black, unless you're in the right light.

Just two coats! Goes with most of my clothes! LOVE!

I wore this for three or four days, and was disappointed to have to take it off.  But when it was gone, I was horrified - it left behind this sickly yellow-green stain that has now lasted well over a week, though multiple applications of new color and cleanings.  There is clearly visible definition between the stain and the pink of new nail.

It's completely maddening, because I can't use any transparent polish, or even go natural.  It looks terrible.  I'm so disappointed in this color, because it's so pretty and I would love to wear it frequently, but the stain means that it's relegated to accents on top of other colors.  Either that or I get a steel-strength base coat, and even then, I can't be sure.

:(

Belated Easter French Nail Design

A nail broke on my left hand. Right at the quick. So now, all my nails are short and slo-o-o-owly growing back out. Good thing French tips make the whole nail look longer, eh? (Compare the length in the photo below to this one. Yes, they're shorter. >.>)

Taking a picture of my right hand, using my left hand, with a right-handed camera. IT WAS NOT EASY.

This design... just kind of happened. I wasn't expecting anything Easter-like. I just picked up my purple, painted one nail, decided to do a different color - all nails ended up different colors, and then SILVER TIPS! The pinkie wasn't originally yellow though, it was a teal, but I changed it for better warm/cool balance.

There isn't anything special to how I created this, either. Just, one color for each nail, freehand silver tip, topcoat. Ta da!

Colors used: China Glaze Grape Juice, Sinful Colors Aqua, Wet 'n' Wild Lavender Pearlescent, Kiss Neon Yellow (sidenote: that stuff REEKS), Wet 'n' Wild Sage in the City, Zoya Trixie.

I'm in space!

[Note: This was supposed to be posted ages ago. It did not post when I told it to. So it's being posted now. Sigh.]

This will be the last of the backlog of stuff I did before I started the blog. Which means the last of the poor-quality, non-clean nail photos! Yay!

After the success of my flowers, which I left on for almost a week, I got ambitious. I'd found another video on YouTube that I desperately wanted to try, and even though I didn't have all the colors they called for, I did it anyway.

Space. Trial. Puttin' the system on trial. In space. Space system. On trial. Guilty. Of being in space! Going to space jail!

The colors I used were black, dark blue, white, green, dark neon pink, translucent light pink and glitter. I didn't yet have yellow, which I think sadly means my nails were just that much less cool. I used the green instead, which worked pretty well, and dabbed a bit of the light pink on top since the overall result was very dark.

I'll be honest, I kind of struggled with this design, and I wasn't especially happy with how it turned out. The first struggle was that the nebulae came out incredibly opaque, even though I made a point to try to follow the video's instructions to keep it light and transparent. The second struggle was symmetry. I LOVE asymmetry and employ it a lot in my photography, but drawing asymmetrically is much harder to get used to. As a result, the nebulae on my nails were mostly symmetrical and solid, instead of cloudy and natural-looking.

The third struggle was the stars. I didn't own any toothpicks, or really anything that had such a narrow point at the end, so I had to use my tiny eyeliner brush. The problem with this is that brushes bend when pressure is applied to them. Even using the lightest of dabs, many of the stars ended up much too large and oblong.

I've gotta admit too, the narrator's voice for that video is a bit... spacey? (Yuk, yuk.) Sorry. The voice was kind of irritating, though.

BUT! That doesn't mean that this design wasn't a lot of fun, and didn't still look pretty dang cool when I was done. I may very well give this another try at some point, especially since I now have the tools to do it properly.