Swatch – Girly Bits More Cowbell

Hi everyone! I am still on vacation over the winter holidays, but wanted to put out a scheduled post since I don’t want my blog to be completely silent for two weeks! This is a swatch of Girly Bits More Cowbell: a muted aqua holographic polish with small flecks of blue microglitter that peek through the base color. It’s so gorgeous! And it looks rather nice as a wintery, ice princess polish. Other than the pretty color, I picked out this “More Cowbell” polish because it’s named after my dad’s all-time favorite Saturday Night Live skit – obviously it was a must-have for me!

FAQs (as of December 2014)

Hi everyone! While I’m on vacation, I thought I’d write a post that answers some questions I’ve gotten about my nail art. In addition to making this post, I’m going to add an FAQs page to my blog so that this content is easy to find in the future. I hope the answers are helpful!

Swatch – Julep Ciara

Hi everyone! This is the first of my scheduled posts, since I am now officially on vacation! Not to worry though – I’ve got three more posts coming during the few weeks I’ll be gone, so my blog won’t be completely silent during that time. I anticipate that I’ll start publishing new material in early January once I’m back from my trip. Anyways, I hope all of you lovely readers enjoy your holidays!

I have a quick swatch to show you today of Julep Ciara, which is quite a mesmerizing polish. I picked this one to wear for a few days, and I couldn’t have picked a better choice! It’s very eye-catching and fun to wear because it has some duochrome elements to it. To me, it seems very insect-like, as if I’m wearing crushed scarab shells on my hands. Fun stuff!

Julep December 2014 Swatches, Comparisons, and Nail Art

Hi everyone! Today I have my picks from the Julep December 2014 collection (Countdown) to share with you! As I wrote in a previous post, I got to see what all these polishes looked like first-hand at the San Francisco Maven Meetup in November, so I was absolutely sure what I wanted to get. This time around, I chose the Bombshell box with no add-ons, since I was only really interested in the two Bombshell polishes out of the selection. Fun fact: for the entire time I’ve been a Maven, the Bombshell box is the one I have most frequently picked out of the four main profiles…in spite of the fact that my default profile is Classic with a Twist. Discounting the month of June (I went with Polish Lover’s), I’ve picked the Bombshell box 50% of the time. Funny how that turned out!

Anyways, the two Bombshell polishes were absolutely gorgeous and I am quite glad that I picked those two. I thought about doing a two-color nail art design with just those polishes, but I had no good ideas. So I decided to add a few more colors and do something more awesome: Hanukkah nails! In the spirit of the season, I wanted to do a fabulous manicure that celebrates my favorite winter holiday (Chanukah/Hannukah/Hanukkah/whatever spelling variant), and I opted for a dreidel nail art design. For those of you who don’t know what the game of dreidel is, I’ll write down the game instructions at the end, if you’re curious. Read on!

SquareHue December 2014 Swatches, Comparisons, and Nail Art

Hi everyone! Today I have the SquareHue December 2014 collection to show off on the blog! This collection was inspired Rovaniemi – a town in Finland that is supposedly the home of Santa Claus. As someone who does not celebrate Christmas or care much for the holiday, this aspect of the collection was not a big selling point for me. All the same, I wanted to try SquareHue polishes again and so I ordered the box, partly to see just how Xmas-y things could get.

As it turns out, this collection is indeed very Xmas-y (surprise surprise), with the requisite red and green shades accompanied by a gold polish. Things get interesting, though, when you check out the finishes: out of the three polishes, two of them have unusual finishes (one textured, one matte). Not so conventional after all, I suppose! Like I usually do, I swatched all the polishes, did some comparisons, and then combined them all into nail art. Since the colors were so Xmas-inspired, I got seasonal with my nail art and made my nails look like presents. On with the swatches!

Swatch – OPI Under the Mistletoe

Hi everyone! Sorry about not posting for over a week – things have been rather stressful for me. I have a TON of stuff to do in the next two weeks! Well, even though it’s a week later, I hope all my U.S. readers had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I certainly did, excepting my major screw-up in which I accidentally left my laptop at the airport security scanner. YIKES! Since it’s my only computer, you can imagine how much my life, including this blog, would be set back if I had really lost it forever! When I realized it was gone, I felt like I’d lost a piece of my soul! You know, as if my laptop was a horcrux and someone had just destroyed it? Luckily, the TSA security line was probably the best place I could have lost my laptop because it was (obviously) found by security guards who cataloged and stored it until I was able to recover it. Crisis averted! While I did get my laptop (and sanity) back in the end, I highly encourage all my readers to BACK UP YOUR COMPUTERS!!! I kept putting it off, and therefore would have lost all my data if I couldn’t get my laptop/horcrux back. So don’t put it off until it’s too late!

Anyways, in other news, today I’ve got a swatch today of OPI Under the Mistletoe, which is the polish I wore for Thanksgiving. Because I spent the holiday with my boyfriend’s family, Thanksgiving-themed nail art didn’t happen. Things got busy right before I left and, besides, I wanted to be more conservative with my manicures while visiting them. So I chose this darling sparkly red! It’s a fairly traditional hue, but it’s got enough sparkle to make it interesting while not being overly showy. Overall, I think it worked well for the festivities. While the name of the polish implies a different occasion, red nail polish like this is always in style.