Hey there, folks! I hope everyone is having a great week. Do you ever have one of those days that you know is going to be a little difficult and you know that if you have the right manicure, it'll help just that little bit that you need? Well, I had one of those today. So, I knew I needed something special on my nails to help me through. Max Factor's Fantasy Fire is one of those legendary polishes. If you haven't seen or heard of it yet, do yourself a favor and google it right now. Shortly after I discovered my love of nail polish, I heard about Fantasy Fire on a blog that referred to it as "Unicorn Pee"...which is actually a good thing lol From that moment, I knew I had to have it in my stash. I promptly found a somewhat reasonably priced bottle on Ebay and snagged it. It's one of those magical polishes that makes everything better, if only for a brief shining moment.
Instead of pairing FF with plain black (which is often how you see it worn as the black makes that multichrome-y goodness shine), I decided to layer it over a gradient to see how it would look. Whaddya think?
I started with 3 coats of 2% Milk by Wet n Wild Megalast. 2% Milk is my all-time favorite nude polish. It has a gorgeous translucency that can't be beat. I know I'll have arguments from the O.P.I. My Vampire Is Buff fans out there, but really 2% makes it in to many, many more of my manis than the O.P.I. (as much as I love the name!).
After the 2% had dried, I did a gradient (using The Nailasaurus' tutorial, which is seriously the best evahr!) with Wet n Wild's Black Creme, sponging the black out to the tips of my nails. This looked pretty darn awesome all on its own but I forgot to snap a pic of it, so you'll just have to use your imaginations :)
After the gradient had dried, I topped it off with 2 coats of Fantasy Fire which just makes the whole thing sing! It created a gorgeous lavender to black gradient and that multichrome sparkle is to die for!
Excuse the crappy bathroom photo above, but I wanted to give you an idea of the shift in this polish. Bright orange and copper to beetle-back green to fiery hot pink and, if you're really lucky, you'll catch a flash of a breath-taking deep purple. This is just one of those polishes that you need! Unless you have the Clarins 230 of which it's a dupe. However, the Clarins is much more expensive and almost impossible to find, so Fantasy Fire is a brilliant substitute.
By the way, don't forget to enter my current giveaway if you haven't already! There are some really fun prizes up for grabs!
Thanks so much for reading!
Howdy, everyone! We've reached one of the most challenging letters of the alphabet in the ABC Challenge this week; 'X'. This was a tough, tough letter. Very polishes start with X, E-X, yes, but just X? Not so much and certainly nothing I have in my stash qualifies. I did some internet searching and was lucky enough to find this guy:
Meet Xenopeltis unicolor, the Sunbeam Snake. Xenopeltidae are a species of snake that lives in Indo-Asian countries and kill their prey by constriction (non-venomous). Their most distinguishing feature is their shiny, iridescent scales which give that "oil slick" look. I'm kind of a weirdo in that I like reptiles. I used to have a ball python named Methos and I used to catch lizards out at my family's farm pond when I was little. So, a manicure inspired by a snake seemed appropriate.
I started with 2 coats of Essie's Case Study followed by stripes of China Glaze in Kalahari Kiss on the sides of my nails. I thought I had a stamping plate with a snakeskin pattern, but it turns out I don't. Instead, I used my dotting tool to create the pattern. I dotted first with China Glaze in Mahogany Magic for the base color of the scales. I went back in on top of the MM scales with Sally Hansen's Nail Prisms in Turquoise Opal, Coral Amber, and Amber Ruby and Max Factor's Fantasy Fire. It may seem silly to use all those fabulous polishes for dots, but I knew they'd give a great flash of color and I wasn't disappointed!
The more I look at this mani, the more it grows on me. These aren't normally colors I'd put together, but that's the fun of being inspired by something, right?
Please take some time to check out the other participants in the challenge. You can find them via the thumbnails below. I can't wait to see what they came up with for this most challenging letter!
Thanks for reading :)
Hello, everyone. It's been a rough few weeks for myself and my friends and so I haven't been posting regularly. I haven't even been doing my nails. One of my favorite people in the world passed away two weeks ago and I miss her terribly. It was a sudden and unexpected thing and it seems very unfair. Shannon was one of my biggest blog fans and I'll miss her support immeasurably, here as well as in every other aspect of my life. I'm not going to go on and on about it here, because it's just not the place for it, but it felt wrong to continue on here as if nothing had happened. It's been hard to be creative, but I know she wouldn't want me to stop doing something I love so much.
My nails look pretty terrible cuz I just haven't been taking care of them. I broke almost every single one in the last 2 weeks and then got a "manicure" at a salon over the weekend. I use the quotes because she really kind of messed up my nails and the color smudged within 5 minutes of leaving the shop. Bleh, that's what I get for letting some one else touch 'em!
A few weeks ago, I scraped some pennies together and bid
on eBay for a particular polish I HAD to have for my stash. I won the
auction but hadn't gotten around to swatching it yet. Here's what I came up with:
...more after the jump...
