Witchy hypno nails!

Practice makes perfect! A stamping success! For those of you who visited my blog yesterday, you might remember that I was quite disgruntled about my stamping skills. I did however vow that I would practice until I got better at it, and I'm not one to procrastinate indefinitely (well, not when it has to do with nail polish anyway). Here is another attempt at stamping. I think it went better this time! What do you think?

I really like this look. At first I wanted to stamp that design with matte top coat, but it didn't really work out. Nothing showed up at all! So I decided to do another stamping/taping combo and ended up with this look, because I really wanted to include matte effect. I love matte... have you figure that much out yet? :P

The colours are a bit Halloweeny/witchy and the pattern is quite hypnotizing... I really like the matte/shiny contrast, too. Overall I'm pretty happy with this mani... too bad I'm going to take it all off because I just love doing my nails! Haha.

Also: NEWSFLASH! I would like to say that yesterday, my blog hit 5,000 page views! I'm so excited! Thank you all for checking out my nail art, it really makes me quite happy! I have therefore decided something pretty awesome. This is an official announcement!

When my blog hits 10,000 pageviews and 20 followers,

I shall host a lacquertastic giveaway/contest!!!

Ain't it awesome? I can't wait! :D

Stamping: not for the faint of heart

So I tried my hand at stamping again, with mediocre results. I was debating whether I should post this mani or not, but I like the design itself and I'm sure someone with better skills could make it look nicer. If you have any tips to help me get better, please leave them in the comments!

As with any other thing, practice makes perfect. So I made sure I got tons of practice by stamping each nail not once, but twice.

I like the colour combo and the idea of using two different stamps on the same nail. I also thought it was fun to mix two techniques, the taping and the stamping. However, I'm not too happy about the quality of my stamping. Some designs sort of double-stamped or simply didn't completely transfer to the nail, leaving holes in the stamp. I haven't tried this technique many times so I guess this is to be expected but still, it's a little discouraging. I'll just have to keep trying and hope I get better.

One thing I have decided though is to get more stamping polishes. The black stamping you see here was done using a bottle that is simply labeled "nail paint" which contains the thickest, blackest stuff you can find. It worked much better than the pink, which was done with a Sally Hansen Insta-Dri polish. I've heard good things about Insta-Dri for stamping, but I'll need more experience to get good results with those.

Are you great at stamping? What do you think I should do to improve my skills?

Mecha Shimmer

I've been racking my brain trying to decide what sort of nail art I should do with these fantastic colours, but you know what? I'm just going to show you the swatches. These two polishes made me go "Ooooo" like you wouldn't believe. I think it's only fair that I would share the joy!

First, here is a colour that I've been dreaming about forever! It's by a company called Nfu Oh. These little goodies are so hot, even the bottles make me squee. This is Nfu Oh 51. I'd seen it online here and there and just fell in love. When I realized that NailPolishCanada carried them, I didn't think, I just ordered. You see, it's sometimes hard to get less popular polishes in Canada without paying ridiculous shipping fees.

Here is what it looked like when I applied two coats of Nfu Oh 51 over Julep Morgan (swatched below) and topped it with Essie's Good To Go top coat. There are one million photos because this polish has one million colours!

Isn't it wonderful? I mean really, I can't stop staring at my nails. It looks a bit like a discontinued polish by Clarins called Unicorn Pee (of all things), but with added flakies. Unicorn Pee had super fine flecks that looked like the finest sand you could find. Nfu Oh 51 has the same colour and the same tiny flecks, but also has big bits of flakie goodness. Its colours range from bright purple to almost orange/brown, with flakies that shine in bright pink, yellow, orange, blue and bright green. It's just delish!

And now, here is Morgan, by Julep. No glitter or flakies, but this one really got me because of its beautiful pearly shimmer. Even in the bottle it screams out "WEAR! ME!" The shine really is... rather distracting.

Morgan is at once bright and deep, a wonderful dark purple that shines almost fuchsia in the right light. If you look closely, you'll see that there are a few blue flecks here and there, too, giving the colour more richness. It looks just like a satin ribbon. Truly a wonderful polish.

I actually got this bottle for one third of one penny. That's right! This promotion is a part of the Julep Maven program which sends brand new nail polish releases to your door for 20$ a month. It's the sort of thing I don't like to sign up for, but they have this promotion going where you can get your introductory box for 0.01$, containing three polishes (if you choose the "It Girl" profile) or two polishes and one nail/hand treatment (for all the other profiles).

You can cancel your subscription at any time after that, so I thought, what do I have to lose? It's just one cent, shipping included, everything. I'll just take advantage of the promotion and cancel after. And that is entirely possible, it's just a matter of doing it.

But after getting this lovely shimmery purple in this months's box I'm not so sure anymore, ha! I mean, I find the bottles to be a bit small (8ml) but I rarely use more than half of any nail polish because... I just buy more. I know, I'm terrible. I've got over 110 bottles in my still-growing collection

I had heard that Julep's polishes have a gloopy formula, but I find it applies really well! Two coats of Morgan gave me this wonderful finish.

I wasn't asked to say any of this, I'm just sharing because I'm genuinely happy with my haul (come on, 3 bottles for a penny!) and I want to share this with you guys. If you want to take advantage of this promotion, you can follow this link here:

Subscribe to Julep Maven and get 3 polishes for 0.01$

When you subscribe, don't forget to enter coupon code PENNY at checkout.

I want to be transparent about one thing though: this is a referral link, meaning that if you subscribe through this link, I'll get some sort of reward, I'm not sure what. I think for every two people who sign up, I get one free month. If you're not comfortable with that, you can still just go to the Julep website and subscribe regularly. The coupon code will work anyway.

I don't know that it matters though because I'm not 100% convinced about keeping my subscription. It's not that I don't love the polishes, I just don't like the recurring fees. But I love surprises… Oh, decisions, decisions.

There you go! Hope you enjoyed!

Meet the Reddit alien!

Last time I posted, I told you about r/redditlaqueristas, the nail art community I like to call home. In honour of this amazing crowd of polish-crazed badasses (and as a part of our 52 week nail art challenge), here is my reddit inspired manicure.

The little guy you see on my thumbs when I put them together is known as the reddit alien. Here he is... Isn't he cute?

(This image belongs to reddit, etc., etc.)

I also drew the small envelope that shines an orangey red when you have unread mail in your reddit account. I even tried to reproduce its pixelated aspect with a tiny paintbrush.

I'm not perfectly happy with this manicure because the dark blue stripes turned out way messier than I thought they would. I used a new striper polish I just bought and I am very disappointed with its brush! It's called "Instant Artist" in the Quo by ORLY line, which is exclusive to Shopper's Drugmart (Pharmaprix) in Canada. Their regular polishes are good, but the stripers are not worth it. Instead of a brush with actual strands that pick up the polish, it has something like a long, thin piece of hard plastic. This piece of plastic doesn't bend at all, making the task of drawing with it rather difficult. Also, the polish doesn't distribute so well along its length, so you end up with one huge drop at the tip of the striper and nothing further up. So, forgive the messy striping job, and learn from my mistakes: don't buy this striper! Even for its cheap price of 4$, it's not worth it.

The whole thing was a lot of work and didn't look as neat as I wanted it to, but I still thought it was a lot of fun to plan out and to create. I even got my boyfriend to help me with the design! I swear, he actually gave me his opinion while I was deciding which elements to place where, which I really appreciated because I felt a little lost when faced with this week's challenge. I didn't keep it on my nails so long though because there were many more manis I wanted to try! Stay tuned to see what else I have in store for you this week! :)