Minions Assemble!

IT'S TODAY, IT'S TODAY!

Ladies and germs, today is the day that Despicable Me 2 hits theaters. And what better way to celebrate than with:

MINIONS!

Minions! Minions! Minions!

I used 3 coats of Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Yellow Kitty for the base colour. As with most yellows, streakiness is an issue. However, this particular one leveled out reasonably well after the 3rd coat. For the minions' clothes, I used Maybelline Color Show Denim Dash, applied like a French tip. The details were put on using a black striping polish and dotting tools with China Glaze Immortal (gray), Sally Hansen White On, and Sally Hansen Coral Crush. (I would show you my thumbs, but they are far less minion-shaped than my other fingernails, and thus are not as cute).

I had a bit of a dilemma with trying to figure out if I wanted to give them hair or not. They were just so cute after I finished all the face details, I was unsure if I would be ruining it with the hair. I figure I'll wear it like this for a few days and then try putting the hairs on. This way, if it doesn't turn out right, at least I've had a few good days with cute, hairless minions. :)

My life goal is to finally get my hands on a giant minion plushie. True story. In the meantime, I'll have to settle for 10 minion fingernail friends.

Indecision in Red and Blue

Can you tell I'm just trying to get all my school-related manicures out of the way? I'm trying to sever the ties, I promise I am.

Remember last year's school spirit manicure? Well, for this year's game (back in April), I decided that I was going to top it no matter what. The only problem was, I didn't know how I was supposed to go about doing that. And as was the case for most of my during-the-school-year manis, laziness was a major factor.

My friends always make fun of me for my indecisive tendencies. It's why I can't eat at the Pickle Barrel without getting an anxiety attack. And it's probably also why I now own 200+ bottles of nail polish. In the end, my indecision led me to do this:

Fun fact: apparently U of T Pharmacy is pretty indecisive about what their colour is as well. This was going to be an all blue number, but I remembered that somewhere in between 2nd and 3rd year the colour had switched from red to blue, and I was unsure if it had switched back since I'd left school in December. So I threw a red nail in there for good measure. 

Thumb: 2 coats of Joe Fresh Indigo, "U of T" drawn on using a fine-tipped dotting tool with Sally Hansen White On

Index: 2 coats of China Glaze Frostbite -- love this colour. I honestly just wanted an excuse to wear this electric blue beauty again.

Middle: 2 coats of Sally Hansen White On as a base, with dots in Joe Fresh Indigo (darkest), Joe Fresh Cobalt (medium blue), Sally Hansen Blue Me Away! (lightest), and Essence Let's Get Lost (aqua).

Ring: 2 coats of Joe Fresh Apple, a deliciously bright red. Dots in a combination of Joe Fresh Indigo, Sally Hansen White On, China Glaze Frostbite, and more Apple. Can you tell I went a little bit dotty with this manicure?

Pinky: we have Nina Ultra Pro in Cobalt, with a coat of Wet 'n' Wild Stars & Stripes. Cobalt is a jelly, so you can still make out my nail line despite the 3 coats that I used. The formula on the glitter polish was a bit thick, and I used an orange stick to place the stars onto the nail because it just wouldn't come off the brush on its own.

In the end, I kind of wished I'd just stuck to alternating red and blue or something, because this mani was hella confusing. And we didn't even win! :(

I Less-Than-Three You

When people stop to ask me what colour I'm wearing, you can bet that I'll always have the answer on hand. Which is probably why I expect nothing less of others when I see them wearing a particularly interesting polish. So when a girl walked into the pharmacy wearing an electric blue metallic number, I needed to know.

**number of digits not 100% accurate

Me: That's a nice colour you've got on your nails.
Girl: Oh thanks!
Me: ...so, what is it called?
Girl: Um...I don't know.
Me: ...
(awkward pause)
Me: Have you used this medication before?

Okay, so the exchange may not have happened exactly like that. Maybe. But nevertheless, it sent me into a frenzy, as usual. I needed to know. (It's not completely lost on me how crazy I must sound.) Lucky for me, I am a master googler (google-er?) with a photographic memory specific for nail polish.

I narrowed it down to China Glaze Frostbite, a bright, almost electric blue shimmer. I wanted to use the word "frost", but I don't think this polish is quite the right texture to be calling it that. I associate "frosts" with nightmarish brush strokes, and that didn't happen with this. This is 2 coats -- it applied flawlessly.

The index finger is 2 coats of Sally Hansen White On with a heart drawn in with OPI Danke Shiny Red. Funny thing was, I put in the heart nail because I meant to do what I thought was an Asian peace sign showing off this nail in my funny grad photo, but right before somebody informed me that doing the peace sign with the back of my hand facing outward is actually some sort of offensive gesture, so I quickly decided against it. In the end, the most you see of the heart is the top of it peeking out from under the fake diploma they made me pose with. 

Frostbite is definitely one of my favourite blue polishes in my collection, and I've worn it a couple of times since getting my hands on it last fall. I love it when polishes that I have come with a great story attached to how I got it or when I wore it, and Frostbite is definitely no exception.

Don't Stop Beleafing

To kick off what should be the beginning of a blowout summer for me and my nails...

GO LEAFS GOOOOOOOO!

If you're wondering what kind of a genius I must be, painting the logo onto my ring finger, don't. I used a temporary tattoo! I did 2 coats of Sally Hansen White On and waited for it to dry completely before I pressed the tattoo onto it. I sealed the whole thing in with 2 coats of INM Out the Door Topcoat. The other nails are done in Joe Fresh Indigo.

The wear time for this mani was pretty unbelievable. I didn't expect the logo to last that long -- I put it on right after the last game of the regular season, and I fully expected it to be chipped off by Game 1. However, the logo outlasted Game 3, and I eventually took it off myself after more than a week of wear! I credit the 2 coats of topcoat -- the second incarnation of this Leafs manicure only got one coat, and it barely lasted through the day...

My life has been so busy for the last few months, I haven't had a chance to come on here and post about my nails! I'm studying up for licensing exams, so I obviously won't be posting too often in the next 2 weeks, but I fully plan on getting back on track once all that is done! This is my last summer before entering THE REAL WORLD (dun dun dun!) and I intend on wearing the heck out of the wildest numbers in my collection.

If you want to check out my other hockey-themed manis, you can click right HERE.

I haven't been getting too much done in the way of studying with all this hockey madness going  on...OMG OMG GAME 7 CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?? (For real, last time this happened in this city, I was graduating from elementary school.)

-K

Flashback: Happy Halloween!

(EDIT: So I totally just failed at technology -- I wrote this post ON HALLOWEEN, thinking that I had published it, but it turns out that I never did. WHOOPS! Secondly, I actually never had time to post that "more on that later" since Halloween because I've been so swamped with schoolwork and I took a me-day yesterday, so... :$)

I told myself I would never write a blog post in class, but here we are. (I'm bored as f*** right now, but I can't be bothered to do anything more interesting.)

With Halloween being only 3 days after my birthday, I actually did not do a Halloween-themed manicure this year because my birthday one was so labour intensive that I had to keep it on for at least a few days. I did have some Sally Hansen Salon Effects on last week to make up for it, but more on that later. Instead, I'm going to show you what I had on last year. LAME.

Except not, because it was pretty epic.

I used Color Club Almost Famous as a base and then I used scotch tape to mark off the bottom part of my nail before putting on one coat of Joe Fresh Crush. I ended up free-handing the white tips with Sally Hansen White On because I simply did not have the patience to wait for the lower coats of polish to dry enough to stick tape onto them -- I remember trying after a coat of Seche Vite, but even still the polish underneath lifted straight off.

I did this on my birthday last year, as a treat to myself for finishing my patho midterm. Can you guess what it is? If you can't, I hope you know that I'm judging you pretty hard right now.

Can you at least guess what (or who) my thumb was supposed to be?

I couldn't resist. .Cute little Frankenstein thumbs? Be still my beating heart!

I used China Glaze Entourage which is a light lime green with green shimmer running through it. The hair was painted on with a black striper in no particular pattern over the tip of my nail. The eyes were done using the end of a paintbrush, as this was my pre-dotting tool era. (Can you tell?)

Here's the whole hand:

Pretty!

Needless to say, I didn't go out that Halloween. Can't remember exactly why not, but it was probably some BS (cPhm) midterm or another. My cuticles were looking pretty awful...must have been my pre-body butter days, as well.

This year, I totally copped out. I only wish I had the time to do an epic design, but...oh well. Nail strips next?

Pretty Plumerias

When I was 14, I went to the Philippines on vacation with my parents. There were these cute white flowers that I would pick off trees and magical stuff like that, just collecting them and putting them in my hair.

These flowers are just so darned pretty! I hadn't thought much about these flowers until I saw them when I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens at the beginning of this summer.

And then again when I bought these really cute earrings at the CNE!

Obviously, the last step was to put them onto my nails.

If you notice the black spots underneath the pinky, that was simply an experiment to see if permanent marker would mark my nails permanently. They did. But the focal point is really the flowers, so please pay the spots no mind. (They also spell out OMG, which is kind of embarrassing, so...don't look at it, LOL)

The base colour is Coral Reef from Sally Hansen, and the flowers were painted in white and yellow acrylic paints. I would have wanted the flowers to be more white, but I only had slightly off-white acrylic paint left, and since I did this on Labour Day I could go and get some. 

It turned out just okay, but I have to work on my art skills, clearly. I really liked the white on this pink, though. PRETTY.

What What, in the Bu...bblegum-Scented Polish

This is my friend Angel:

This is what Angel looked like 3 weeks ago:

 This is what she looked like when I met her:

Besides the colour-changing hair, she also happens to have colour changing nails. Sometimes this happens while we're working 8 hour shifts together. It's a mystery. ;)

Anyway, there was this one time when she had a pretty awesome colour combination on and I really wanted to copy it. This want was pretty bad. But I didn't want to be matchy matchy. (Okay, maybe I sort of wanted to be matchy matchy. A little.) Also, I didn't want her to start thinking that she was any more awesome than she already thought she was. (Okay, she might actually be pretty awesome. Maybe.)

She said some random creep bus girl kept staring at her hand. So I definitely had to try it out.

The light blue polish is from a set of unnamed mini scented polishes from Old Navy. This one was bubblegum scented, which was a departure from all the berry-scented ones that I already own. The scent was light and sugary, not the scent that I would associate with bubblegum, but nice and light enough that it didn't bother me to be wearing it. On my ring finger, I did a single coat of American Apparel Mount Royal followed by a coat of Sally Hansen Crackle Overcoat in Snow Blast.

If you're interested, this is what Mount Royal looks like without the crackle:

The formula on both polishes was good. Mount Royal could have been a one-coater, and the bubblegum polish went on in two coats. There was a bit of a bald spot on my thumb, but nothing another thin coat couldn't fix.

So that's the manicure that I badly wanted to copy off my friend. I have to say that I don't really enjoy crackle as much as the general population does. What's with it, anyway? I have an obsession with nice, smooth, cleanly lacquered nails. Crackle is neither of those.

But...I enjoyed this combination anyway. And I hope you enjoyed it too!

Another Avonspiration

Remember this picture?

The nails in this picture have some pretty bomb colour combos, so I had to try and recreate another.

I was going to do the white line/colour blocking on all the nails, but I honestly just did that first one and got lazy. The ring and pinky fingers are in Wet 'n' Wild Club Havana, and the index (and thumb) are in Color Club Warhol, a neon shade of deep pink that had a much better formula and opacity than I expected it to have.

I'll admit that this wasn't my favourite mani. It sort of looked like I couldn't decide what colour to paint my nails and then used the white line to make that painfully obvious to anyone who cared to look. Especially since it was right in the middle of my hand.

I really enjoyed the spread from the Avon catalogue, so I will probably be replicating more of those manis in the future. Keep an eye out for those!

Wishful Pinking

Now that summer's over, it's kind of a bummer. :( At least we still have the warm weather for a little while longer. I, for one, am not looking forward to the chilly winter air and slush in my boots! 

I'm going to show you the last colour I did a full mani with before school started. It also happens to be one of the many colours that proved hard to find for me, even though this is probably the least hard to find colour!

Coral Reef is part of the permanent line of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear polishes. I believe it's a colour that was added to the line more recently, since I haven't noticed its existence prior to this summer. I saw it at the beginning of the summer and thought, it's just pink. The usual first thought on pink polishes. So I passed it up. 

Of course I wouldn't see it again until summer was over, and though I thought it's just pink, I sure am glad that I picked this one up. It's not coral, as the name suggests. I would describe it as a not-quite-bubblegum pink. It's about the same colour as the container for my favourite Pink Grapefruit body butter from The Body Shop:

I don't have anything else like this in my collection (I think). It's not quite neon, but it sure is bright enough to be in that same vein. It was my last colour of summer, and it fit the bill perfectly.

On a related note, has anyone seen the new apparently "limited edition" shades from Sally Hansen? I saw it at the Superstore yesterday, but my phone was running low on battery and wouldn't let me snap a picture of it. It seems like they are just re-releasing a bunch of already released colours under a different name as limited edition releases. As far as I can tell there are a few of the shades which are dead ringers for already existing ones, but they could have different finishes for all I know. Anyway, not different enough for me to have bought any of them. 

Anyway, back to stressing. Have a nice day!

Back To School!

It's happening. It's really happening.

This will be, as far as I can tell, my last first day of school. I think it's kind of ridiculous, to be honest. I feel like I'm five. I can't have possibly gone through 19 first days of school. That shit cray.

For weeks, the plan was to go all out for today and do rainbow leopard print to inject some colour into an otherwise miserable day. That changed when I realized that this might be (probably will be) my last first day of school and I won't ever have the chance to do another first day of school themed manicure! So the leopard print was scrapped. And I did this:

This definitely is not an original idea. The pencil was from cutepolish (who apparently got the idea from a magazine), and the lined paper has been there and done that all over the interwebs. Most of my notes are taken on my laptop these days, and I haven't used a non-mechanical pencil for years, but these made for some pretty cute nail art. I also hope you've noticed that I'm holding pens instead of a polish bottle. (Tee hee.)

I've seen versions of the lined paper mani with doodles all over them, but I liked the look of the plain lined paper so much that I left it alone.

The white base I used was Sally Hansen White On, the lines were Sally Hansen Coral Reef and Tip Toe (Old Navy) Bubblegum scented polish. The pencil top is Joe Fresh Caramel, the orange is  Wet 'n' Wild Sunny Side Up, the ridges are Joe Fresh Crush, the erase is Coral Reef again, and the silver part is Sally Hansen Celeb City.

I did end up doing one doodle, on my thumb, which is not visible in the above pictures:

So, to everybody going back to school, I wish you good luck and a wonderful year. And, to the future Class of 2013: let's kick some ass this year, huh?

Pacific Blue

I'm trying pretty desperately to catch up right now with my swatches. I had been posting them every other day or whenever I had time to do so, but now that school is starting up again tomorrow (BOO), I  figured I should get a move on with posting some of these before they fall into the black abyss.

This particular polish is an oldie but a GOODIE. I've worn this polish at least 5 or 6 times on separate occasions, which makes it one of the most frequently used ones in my collection. The bottle is about half to two-thirds empty (though it doesn't look it in the pictures since I'd just shook it), and I feel like maybe it's time to be getting a backup bottle. 

This is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Pacific Blue:

Light box, normal bulb

Light box, full spectrum bulb

Indoor lighting, with flash

Pacific Blue is a bright blue cobalt creme. It's a part of the Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear permanent line currently, and I sure hope they won't be removing it any time soon, since it's gorgeous! The formula was good; the pictures above are using two coats.

I originally bought this colour on a whim and put it into my purse, only to bring it to school the following day. I asked a good friend of mine if she liked the colour as I happened to discover it while rummaging through my purse and she commented that it was very bright and was probably best suited for pedicures. Needless to say, I wore it as a pedicure for the next month or two! I wore it as a pedi on my vacation to Florida earlier this month:

The excuse for this foot picture is that it has the ocean in it, and the beauty of the ocean cancels out foot ugliness.

The love for this colour just keeps on spreading, too! My newly nail-obsessed friend Susan asked me to pick a bottle up for her a few weeks ago. I hope that she, and anyone else who owns this beauty, is enjoying it as much as I have over the past few years!

Avonspiration

 For as long as I've been into nail polish and cosmetics of any sort, my mom has been bringing home Avon catalogues from work. In fact, there was a brief period where she was trying to become an Avon lady for some extra cash (for shopping, of course!). It didn't happen, and I continued with my limited purchases of mail order cosmetics.

However, the latest catalogue made its way into my hands at the beginning of last week and I saw this picture:

I only own one Avon nail polish (Avon Jade, which is...perfection), since the colour selection in past campaigns left a little more to be desired. BUT, this display of nail art really caught my eye and I knew that I had to try and replicate at least one of these. The pinky nail on the topmost hand struck me as both the simplest and the coolest looking combination.

I would have never come up with this colour combination on my own! I started with 2 coats of Essence You Belong To Me, a light, Tiffany blue nail polish. I tried to make the diagonal line precise by using scotch tape, but I was too impatient to wait for the Essence to dry completely, so I ended up lifting the polish right off with the tape! 

I ended up free-handing the diagonal with the brush on Sally Hansen Chartreuse Chase, a light green/yellow quick drying polish with blue shimmer. It's a nice colour, but I didn't like it when I wore it on its own, so I had my reservations about using it in this manicure. Luckily, it went well with the blue and this mani turned out amazing.

I got so many compliments on this look, which was especially pleasing considering how simple the design was.

 Loved it, loved it, loved it!

Not-So Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny Black Polka-Dot Tankini

Most hyphens used in my entire life, ever. True story.

I want to tell you that this mani was some genius idea that happened before I went on vacation: matching with my new bathing suit!

However, this is not the case, as I came up with the idea somewhere in between the plane ride from balmy Florida and the car ride home to rainy, unseasonably chilly Toronto. Although I loved the look of my bright blue toenails against the white sand beach, not to mention my neon green fingernails against the blue of the ocean, I couldn't help but feel a bit of my tacky side crave matchy-matchy fingernails.

Here is a picture of my bathing suit:

 

 

This is not me. I am far too insecure to post a picture of myself wearing it. But the visuals brought to you courtesy of the Sears catalogue were merely for you to understand what is coming next.

Cloudy Day :(

I originally wanted to do just black with polka-dots to reflect the pattern, but I thought that doing that would be far too predictable and boring, so I decided to do the matte triangle. I like both how the matte area contrasts sharply with the shiny area and how it reflects the very top part of my tankini top. :D

I used Wet 'n' Wild Black Creme for the base, Sally Hansen White On for the dots with a dotting tool, and Joe Fresh Matte Top Coat. I freehanded the lines between matte and shiny, so the triangles are not all the same size, but you get the idea.


In elementary school, and in the first part of high school, I was notorious for being very matchy-matchy. Thankfully, that has toned down a bit, but I just could not resist doing this fun design!