I can haz water marble?

So back before Halloween, I mentioned something about me trying to do a water marble. I wanted to do a neat little multi-color glow-in-the-dark one with those Blue Cross pumpkin polishes. It was a spectacular failure. As it was my very first attempt at one ever, I had no idea why. There could have been any number of reasons. And just in case it was the polishes that caused the flop (those pumpkin polishes are cheap, okay) I tried a few Essies and still couldn't really get it working. I had one nail that was sorta done but it was terrible. Dana tried to help as much as she could but as she said herself, it's hard to troubleshoot from five states away. I gave up on it and decided to try another day.

Update: Thanksgiving Turkeys

There's really no update here. They were all good polishes, I would have been shocked if they didn't last. It's also only been four days, but I'm kinda bored with 'em and I gotta get myself back on a regular painting schedule. I've been on vacation, see, hence my laziness. :)

Picture Polish Warning + Ozotic Sugar 903

I took a few days off from the polish. I'd broken a couple of nails and had some issues with peeling so I needed to give myself a little break. In the meantime, Jess and I placed an order with the girls at piCture pOlish and in what must be some kind of around-the-world shipping miracle, I received our order in three days.

A quick note of "Holy cow that's AMAZING!"

Hey y'all! I will have an actual post tomorrow for my mani of the week, but I wanted to say a quick THANK YOU! to the amazing ladies at piCture pOlish. Jess and I decided we each wanted a few polishes so we combined an order to save a little on shipping. I placed the order on Sunday night and received it Wednesday morning. FROM AUSTRALIA. That is incredibly quick response and I couldn't be happier with their response time and the incredible polishes I received. I still have the ones for Jess, packed up and waiting for me to make it to the post office, but I know she's going to love it just as much as I do!

Thanksgiving Turkeys!

First, Happy Thanksgiving to all of our American readers. We hope you had a lovely time with your family, watching football, doing whatever it is you do on Thanksgiving. Even work, we hope if you had to work it was at least a nice quiet shift.

I actually wasn't going to do anything special with the nails for the holiday as I'm being particularly lazy this week. I took that Rimmel off and yanno...lol did nothing. Slathered some cuticle treatments on regularly but didn't paint. Then I saw something on OPI's facebook page that kept eating at me to try.

Update: Rimmel London Lava Red

This one hit it straight out of the park, friends. Great polish, no touch ups needed all week. I did get a tiny bit bored and so added OPI's Gold Shatter, but still. Awesome ending.

Does anyone want to be my nail polish pen pal?

I keep falling in love with nail polishes from other countries!! Tonight it's some of the Ozotics, from Australia, which I have been admiring on the Picture Polish website. They have some beautiful colors and my heart demands that they be mine. Oh yeah...did I mention Picture Polish is located in Australia?

Essie Bikini So Teeny & Sally Hansen CSM Purple Pulse

So...I'm a little slow around here these days! Here it is Friday and I'm only just now getting to my mani of the week. Which was actually only the mani of about 3 days, because I got the bright idea to Franken some polish and I always end up with it all over my fingers. I'm not sure how it happens, but I end up looking like a 5 year old in the finger paints!

Rimmel London Lava Red

Since the Prom Queen was a party pooper, I chose this as the replacement. A nice, dark, rich, creamy red. Oooooh. This color is part of Rimmel's Lasting Finish Pro series and the only Rimmel I own. It caught my eye as I was walking past and reeled me right back in. Shades like this are where my heart lies. As it's my first use of any of their products, I'm anxious to see how it goes. It's one of the less expensive brands and if it's any good, I'll buy like 18 million more.

I also BROKE A FRAKKIN' NAIL almost completely to the nail line which means I went ahead and ripped the rest of them off. It looked stupid with that one short nail, I hate that. So, back to the stubby barely there nails again.

Flash

Update: Etude House Dear My Party Prom Queen

Two days. Yep. Technically it was less than one, I had two very small chips within the first twenty-four hours. But I patched them, and hoped. Nope. You know that seriously unbelievably ridiculously cheap nail polish they market for very little girls? "Now you can paint your nails to match your favorite doll's nails?"

As it's very thin going on, I realized the day after I painted that with three coats I still had visible nail line. You do hafta get up on it to see it, the glitter does a nice job on the camouflage, but it's there. Point is it chips like a thin polish:  it literally breaks right off the nail. Crumbles like a bad plaster job. I could flick my nail and watch pieces of it fall right off. Very brittle.

How my Vegas party mani became my wedding mani

Last spring, my fiancee and I talked about taking a  vacation. It started off as a family trip, my sister and brother in law and their three kids, me and my guy...drive the campers out to Colorado, explore the mountains, maybe do some fishing and some shopping and some panning for gold--you know, like you do when you're being a tourist in Colorado.

Then my brother in law's job sort of dried up along with everything else during the drought. When you own a lawn care company and it's 110 degrees and everything's dead, it's hard to justify mowing the customers' lawns no matter how much it sucks that you're not getting paid. So they decided to be responsible and not go on our family vacation. The nerve! (I kid. My sis and her family are the best.) So my guy brought home an atlas and we tried to figure out what to do with eleven glorious planned days off and nothing to do. Mt Rushmore? Minnesota? Too hot to go south, really, but *maybe* we'd survive Dallas? Ugh, can you imagine how hot it would be in the desert right now? So of course that's what we did. Vegas or bust, baby! in the middle of summer. Why not...can't be any hotter than it is at home!

Etude House Dear My Party Prom Queen

Etude House is from Korea, and they don't just sell nail polish. It's a whole beauty line. I found this one and Pajama Party when doing a search for how to do a robin's egg manicure. I saw an image for one on...I think on Essie's facebook page and thought that would be cute to try, then I figured I'd make it much easier on myself by just buying these.

I ordered from eBay, of course, and I actually chose three from the Dear My Party line but the seller mildly screwed me. The third one I wanted was one called Halloween Day, which is a purple glitter (no idea how that relates to Halloween), but the seller decided I didn't need that one and sent me a purple from another collection that I can't remember. They have the best names for polishes and I'm being serious--that's totally not an Engrish joke. Look At My Cotton Candy Nails!! That's the name of the collection the wrong polish is from! Tell me that's not a great name. Anyhow, the seller never even bothered to send the correct polish, I got my money refunded, so I got a free bottle of nail polish. Even though it's not the one I wanted.

Pimpin' the China Glaze!

Just so you can't say no one told you, ULTA is having a Buy 2 Get One Free on China Glaze til November 17. (Psst! So is Orly!)

...and go!!

Update: Wet N Wild Blue Moon

I really liked my Wet N Wild Blue Moon mani. The color was really nice and was easy to use. Went on easily, not too thick, not too thin, and color I wanted to stare at whenever I could. I had devised an experiment in which I painted every other fingernail with Orly Bonder, then painted my nails with what I expected to be a cheap polish.

DLC Polish 2G1I Comparisons

So the whole week I wore the 2G1I, I was thinking of all of the other polishes I bought to try and fill the SSN void. I thought I'd dig them out and swatch them beside the 2G1I just as a base of comparison. The only down side was that LOL I did it at night so the light isn't great.

But before I get started with that, I want to talk about another aspect of this polish that I briefly touched upon in the original post. When it dries, it's not that shiny. It's almost trying to be a matte finish. And that's not really a bad thing at all.

Update: DLC Polish Two Girls, One Imitation

Never did get around to that full sunlight picture. Uncooperative weather. But here's another end of the week natural light shot, just because I like you.

That was as the sun was going down, so a starry night was about to occur. Fitting.

Sally Hansen Lustre Shine Azure

I'm posting a little out of order by skipping my Wet N Wild Blue Moon update and Orly experiment, for the moment. But I got excited about this polish so I'm jumping the gun a bit :) The Sally Hansen Lustre Shine collection has been out for a month or so, but every display I've seen of it has 6 colors in a display built for 8 colors. Before they came out, I saw there was going to be a blue (Azure) and also what I think was a purple in the collection. Those were the two I was most looking forward to, so of course they're nowhere to be found.

Wet N Wild Blue Moon

I chose Wet N Wild Wild Shine in Blue Moon as my mani of the week for a few reasons.

One, the color is gorgeous. Night sky blue shimmer with occasional flashes of a deep dark teal green that doesn't show 99% of the time. I was surprised the first time I saw it happen.

Two, I wasn't done with dark blue. You read my SSN dupe update, right?

Third, I'm conducting a little experiment on the holding power of Orly's Bonder, a rubberized base coat. The first time I used it, my polish went for 7 days with no chips or damage of any kind. So I wanted to use a cheap polish (and this one was cheap--a mere $1.98) to encourage chipping. I know, how unlike me to want a ruined mani!

DLC Polish Two Girls, One Imitation

Every polish maven's dream is to have a bottle of Essie Starry Starry Night. Even if you're not going to use it, it's such a high demand polish that you want to find it just to sell it to some fool like me who'll pay out the nose for it. What is it about that polish? For me personally, it's three things.

One, I'm a dark colors kind of girl, especially on the nails. I wear the lighter shades but they're not what I gravitate towards. OPI's Ink was the first color with which I can remember falling deeply in love. Dark red, dark blue, dark green, straight up black, those were always my heart's desire.

Two, I love anything about space. I would have been an astronomer but the math killed me. I really enjoy the beautiful visuals that come from the telescopes we have aimed out there; I can remember cheering when Hubble was finally fixed and when the photos started coming in, specifically the Pillars of Creation, I was awestruck. Not just that, but all of the neat things we've found out there! Other planets! Black holes! I cheered and cried when Curiosity landed, I was totally one of those.

Three, and I'm not going to lie to you, it's the prestige of owning such a hard to find polish. I would never shell out $300 for a bottle (or even $150 for the half bottle that was my first spotting of it on eBay), but I never give up hope of stumbling across it somewhere while shopping around.

Update: Two Girls, One Imitation on a Starry Starry Night

Just so you guys know, it was SO HARD removing this manicure. Not physically, though-emotionally. It's my first Franken baby, after all. I had some tip wear and growth at the base, but otherwise? Still perfect. Nary a chip to be seen. And I'm not bored with the color yet. I KNOW. Who am I, and what have I done with Dana, she of the short attention span and new nail color two or three times a week??

Ah, the things we do for love, and the blog.

Update: Cat's Eyes

This was one of the most traumatic manicures I've ever had, I tell you. It was all kinds of love and all kinds of hate rolled into one.

First of all, for as much as I was worried that it looked very childishly drawn, tons of people commented on it. Maybe they were just being nice to me. Who knows. I'll have to practice my line work, though, I think I can do better.

Second, it lasted FOREVER. Truly. I didn't get a single chip until four days after I painted it. You read that right. Four days! It is a China Glaze mani except for those white spots, so I expect it to last, but I did not expect it to go on this long.

A Whole Stinkin' Month!

Hey! Guess what! Go on, guess! Nope, guess again. Okay, I'm pretty sure the title of the post should give it away, yanno. Sheesh.

It's our one month anniversary!

Go on, us! Self high fives all around! You know what you could do to help us celebrate? It would be totally awesome of you!