A New Beginning

Remember that time when I said I would be posting more?

Okay. So I lied.

But it's for real this time. (Hopefully).

After my last post, I threw myself into studying. And then when it was all over, I figured out that I really enjoyed doing absolutely nothing. Including writing up things for this blog. But now I'm back (again), and I thought it would be fitting for me to open up this "new beginning" with the nails that I had while I was celebrating the end: my graduation from university!

I had gone back and forth in my mind over what exactly I wanted to do with my nails on that day for months. Yes, months. My original plan was to painstakingly paint on the initials of the people without whom I couldn't have survived the last four years. To up the sap factor, I was going to pick out the letters "LOVE" and paint them in a different colour.

I don't know what it was that ultimately changed my mind. Perhaps I didn't actually have enough friends to fill up my nail space. Or maybe I was afraid of missing people. It could have been that I actually do not know anyone who has "O" as an initial -- or if I do, I really don't care about them all that much (LOL, for real, I don't even know). I'm lazy, and that is probably the most likely explanation.

I ended up going with a simple french tip, mostly because I had put off doing my nails until the last second, and also because I figured I would also regret seeing something like neon leopard print in photos 20 years from now.

I started off with 2 coats of Wet 'n' Wild Sugar Coat. For the tips, I used 2 coats of Storm by Zoya, and then I lined them with a silver polish (a really ancient one in my collection whose label has rubbed off) using a striping brush. On my ring finger, I used a dotting tool to create a tiny heart with China Glaze Snap My Dragon from the 2013 Avant Garden collection. Finally, I used my smallest dotting tool to etch on the year of my graduation next to the heart. LOVE!

Sugar Coat is a little bit of a streaky nightmare. Looking back, I probably should have chosen a better base polish -- every other time that I've worn Sugar Coat, I've needed at least 3-4 coats to level it out, and when you're doing other designs on top, it's really not an ideal situation. Zoya Storm was opaque enough in 2 coats, but it would have probably benefited from a third...

All in all, I was pleased with how this all turned out. It had just the right amount of sparkle: classy, yet with that something extra.

Overall, I'm pleased with how everything has turned out, really. Today actually marks 5 years to the day that I graduated from high school, and I can't believe how fast the time has gone by. I'm in a period of my life right now that feels like a transition phase and it's really given me a lot of time to not only reflect on the past but also think about the future. I had a lot of regrets coming out of my first year at university, and I feel like I've spent the last four making sure that I would leave this place with very few. And I think for the most part, I've done that.

This is a really exciting time for me, and I hope that this comes through in my posts from this point forward. I've only got about 9 weeks or so left before I have to enter the real world as a full-fledged adult, so I hope to entertain you all with some pretty wild colours and nail art while I can. :)

Joe Fresh Peacock

Now I'm going to warn you all beforehand. There is an accent nail in this swatch, and you're going to be seeing it more than once. Let's call it the evolution of a manicure.

This is the earliest incarnation, using Joe Fresh Peacock.

 Peacock was the first polish from Joe Fresh that caught my eye. Navy blue base filled with light blue shimmer that turns pink at the most extreme of angles. Unfortunately, the duochrome doesn't translate onto the nail, but if you try really hard you might be able to coax it out. This was 2 coats of Peacock with no topcoat.

As for the peacock feather nail...it was something I'd been wanting to do for ages now. Peacock feathers absolutely FASCINATE me. The colours are so very pretty and the feathers are just so...ethereal. I have a peacock feather hairclip that I've been staring at for days now. I always wondered: do they breed peacocks specifically for making jewelry and home decor? Or is everything synthetic...?

Anyway, the ring finger has 2 coats of Essie Navigate Her. The peacock feather is drawn on mainly using a Sephora by OPI nail art pen that I got for $3.00 on clearance earlier this summer. The green one is called Read Between The Lines. The olive streaks are brushed on using a striping brush in Zoya Yara. As for the "eye", it consists of dots made using a dotting tool in OPI Just Spotted The Lizard, China Glaze Custom Kicks, and Essence Walk on Air.

I was very pleased with the results of my free-handing of the peacock feather, especially with all the comments I've been receiving. Accent nails have been a huge thing for me this summer, and these are some of the best I've done so far. Yay!

Sally Hansen The Real Teal vs. Zoya Zuza

The year I spent thinking that Sally Hansen's The Real Teal and China Glaze's Custom Kicks were the same colour was spent amassing a whole lot of teal and teal-related colours. I love teal, (and blue, and green, too) in case I didn't make it clear enough in my previous posts.

Anyway, when I painted my nails with Zoya Zuza, my bottle of The Real Teal was nearby and I had a crazy thought. Are Zuza and The Real Teal the same colour? They definitely seemed so in the lighting that I was working under. So, I did a comparison:

As you can see, they are definitely NOT the same. The last picture kinda sorta shows that there might be an off chance that somebody might think that maybe the two were the same colour, but hardly. Obviously I need to get my eyes checked, I don't know why I ever thought they could be dupes of each other.

Zuza is a much warmer colour, leaning more towards the green side of teal/aquamarine. The Real Teal is, as advertised, a real teal. The shimmer is, obviously, different. The Real Teal has a more subtle shimmer, whereas Zuza has a grainy, almost fleck like golden shimmer.

Verdict: YOU NEED TO HAVE BOTH.

Duh.

Zoya Zuza

My restraint with new collections this summer has been pretty good. I'm averaging about 1 bottle from the new collections, even though I tell myself that I want more when the initial promotional pics come out. Zoya's Zuza was the first of such summer lemmings.

Natural Light

Flash

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Zoya seems to be coming up with more and more outlandish "women's names" for their polishes. Zuza? I mean, it's not completely unbelievable, and I guess there are only so many girls' names that they can use, but it seems like maybe now they are just making random noises in the boardroom and seeing which ones stick...remember Breezi?

This colour was really interesting. I wouldn't quite say that it is teal, though that was the first word that popped into my head. I would probably label this more as an aquamarine, a name that fits more with the ocean imagery that comes to mind when I look at this colour.The shimmer appears to be silver in most lights, but I found that occasionally the shimmer would shift and appear more golden...maybe it's just me. The shimmer is more chunky, but I wouldn't go as far as to call it glass flecks -- it sort of makes the finish look grainy, which was interesting and beautiful.

As usual, the formula on this one was a beauty, smoothly applied in 2 coats. I did experience some staining on removal, on the skin more than on the nails. I doubled up on base coat, though, so the story might have been different if I hadn't.

These pictures were taken when my nails were really long, and my posting is a little bit out of order these days, so do not be alarmed if I happen to post a picture of nubbins, immediately followed by the usual talons. You have been warned. ;)

Nail Art Is the Best Medicine

This specific attempt at something resembling nail art has been cooking in my head for awhile, ever since a coworker at the pharmacy mentioned that it would be awesome to have a nail polish that was the same colour as the capsules she was currently counting out. Sometimes I think my friends support me and my addiction too much. BUT THANKS GUYS, I LOVE YOU ALL!

Considering that I spend most of my time in the summer working around prescription drugs, and most of my time during the school year [pretending like I'm] learning about prescription drugs, it was only a matter of time until this found its way into my nail obsession.

It's an idea I've had for a VERY long time, but I wanted to wait until my nails were the right length/shape for them to resemble capsules. I did these by painting on 1 to 2 coats of the lighter or least opaque colour of the capsule on each nail, and then painting on the second colour on the other half. I was going to use scotch tape to guide painting on the other half, but I was much too impatient for  that and ended up free-handing them. The numbers were put on using a toothpick.

I also had a ridiculously hard time deciding which capsules should be represented. I wanted to have those which were common enough to recognize, but also something unique enough that one who knew what these were would be able to distinguish it as such. A few of them could be a number of things...but I tried.

I'll let you guess. Don't scroll down just yet...here are some lolcats to entertain you while you scroll.

Here they are, if you were actually attempting to guess instead of attempting to care. :P

Colours used:

• Orly Mint Mojito
• Zoya Cho
• Joe Fresh Crush
• Orly Wild Wisteria
• Color Club Almost Famous
• Wet n Wild Black Creme
• Wet n Wild Through the Grapevine 

Colours used:

• Orly Mint Mojito
• Sally Hansen Wet Cement
• Wet 'n' Wild Candy-licious
• Wet 'n' Wild Black Creme
• Color Club Almost Famous
• Sally Hansen Cherry Red
• Sally Hansen White On
• Zoya Breezi

Now, I'll be completely honest. As much as I enjoyed this manicure, I only wore it for about 2 hours before I decided that having all these colours together in one manicure was just...ugly. It was a novel idea and something that has been on my mind for awhile, so I was glad that I did it no matter how brief  the wear time was. :)

Flashback: Iced Tea

When I was a little kid, I used to see these at the local Asian grocery store:

I would only ever see this flavour, and I would never see these anywhere else. So, being four, I assumed it was some weird imported drink that would taste disgusting, like the Chinese medicine my grandma used to give me. 

Fast forward about 14 years, and I again encountered an Arizona beverage:

I don't know if you can see it, but there is a little 99 cent price tag printed directly on the can. My first summer job was as a cashier at the now defunct Dominion grocery store. The first evening I worked the express lane, a man in a hurry dumped 2 of them onto my register. The bar code wasn't scanning, so I told the gentleman I would need to do a price check.

"It's 99 cents." He insisted. 

"I still have to do a price check, since it's not scanning." My 17-year-old self explained, grinning smugly at how knowledgeable I was on the procedures of being a  grocery store cashier. 

"It says, right on the can." He jabbed his index finger into the little purple square on the can. "99 cents."

"I know that, sir, but that could be an American price."

"Ridiculous." He sighed in exasperation. 

The stock manager arrived. I held up the can triumphantly. "How much is this?"

The stock manager frowned. "99 cents. It says on the can."

 Needless to say, I never worked the express lane again in the 3 months that I worked there. Finally, a year later, I experienced my first actual taste of an Arizona beverage (don't worry, this is all going somewhere, not just telling random stories about tea...or maybe I am. So what, sue me.):

I am obsessed with these things. If I see a rack of them, I will buy one, whether or not I am thirsty at the moment...I will eventually get thirsty, so why not enjoy an Arizona iced tea? One day, I had a craving for them at home, my laziness keeping me from walking to the nearest store to get some. Out of that laziness, this was born:

It was also born partially due to my contempt for the overpriced nature of the newly introduced Sephora nail art tools. I would show them, recreating the manicure on the front of their brochure using nothing but a small paintbrush and some toothpicks! It shows, I know, but we need to give past me some credit...for a couple of blunt toothpicks used as nail art tools, it's not half bad, no?

The base colour was Avon's Jade, which was something I had been lemming for quite awhile after seeing it on some blogs. It serendipitously came into my possession when my mom left an Avon catalogue on the kitchen table, advertising that select shades were to go on sale for $2, including Jade! I love this colour. It's the perfect shade of jade green and goes on smoothly in 2 coats (I bet you could even do one if you were really careful). The flowers were Zoya Areej for the petals and Sally Hansen White On for the middles.

I loved this when I put it on. I might try and recreate a better version of this manicure this summer. Time will tell.

Zoya Apple

While doing my toenails, I flip-flopped between a number of different candidates for my new mani. Like I said before, I was kind of disappointed in Seductive Berry, but everybody really liked it so I kept it on a little longer than I planned to. I was going to get a start on my summer nail art, but I didn't have a chance to sit down until it was almost midnight and I really wasn't in the mood to do anything too elaborate. In any case, it was time for me to pick a more summery colour in honour of the start of summer!

The colour that eventually won out was Zoya Apple, a colour that I debated buying all of last summer and eventually got my hands on it at 50% off a few months ago.

Apple is an apple-green with chunky gold shimmer. The finish is a bit frosty, which I'm not digging at the moment, but it's slowly beginning to grow on me. 

After 2 coats I still saw some visible nail line, but it might have just been the bright light from my desk lamp. In any case, 3 coats will do the job. I had lobster hands when I was doing my stretches this morning, which was odd, since my skin tone does not usually lend to lobster hands, but nevertheless, it happened. The picture definitely makes it seem like I have lobster hands, but trust me, in real life my skin is yellow as can be!

In other news, I called my bank today to figure out why my credit card wasn't working. I thought it was because I used it in NYC and they thought it had been stolen. Turns out I missed my minimum payment of $10.00. Whoops. I could hear the judgement leaking from the voice of the lady on the other end. I guess it was for the best that my card wasn't working, otherwise I would have bought the entire Zoya Surf collection...

Flashback: Scotch Tape Mani

To close out the first week of summer, I thought I would go back to the manicure that I had during the last week of last summer.

The idea mainly came from browsing the internet after hearing about an article on nail trends in Vogue from the pharmacist I worked with. I cut little thin strips from pieces of scotch tape and stuck them in random patterns on top of nails painted (and completely dried) with Sally Hansen Celeb City. Most of the versions I'd seen had white underneath, but I felt that the silver added something special. The other colours used were Zoya's Mira, Areej, and Breezi (all from the Zoya Summer 2011 collection) and China Glaze Entourage.

This is currently the cover photo of my facebook album for my nail art, and it's definitely one of my favourites. I haven't done any nail art yet this summer, but I'm excited to try out a bunch of different things!

My Greatest Creation...

No, I'm not talking about a mani, at least not in particular. This is my friend Susan:

I didn't know if she was ok with a face picture, so I settled for a Times Square jumping shot

I made her into a nail polish addict. Like, standing in the middle of a drugstore debating between two shades of almost-identical red at 11 o'clock at night on your vacation while 12 other people waited addicted (I was about to say 13, but I was clearly doing exactly the same thing as she was). Or like, I-didn't-study-for-two-hours-because-I-was-shopping-for-nail-polish addicted. I've created a monster, and I'm damn proud of it.

Anywhooooo, this is a joint project of ours, that we were supposed to wear to New York together, except that we did it too early and quickly tired of it. Here was my contribution:

Mind you, I did this in an hour after I gave up on studying. I tried using hole punch reinforcements to help me with the sweetheart neckline of what was supposed to be a dress, but it was far too time consuming so I free-handed it. The dress is Sally Hansen's Save the Date, the skin tone is Zoya Cho, and the pearls are Barielle Love. It honestly looks kind of crappy. But...

Seriously, is that not the cutest? Almost makes up for my crappy free handing. I'm kind of bummed that we didn't keep them on long enough for the cute nails couple to go and see Phantom of the Opera. They would have been so much more well dressed than we were...

I'm so glad we've recruited another one over to the dark side. So glad.

Cho-Millionaire

If you recall, from a previous "Flashback" post, I swatched a shimmery little number called Faye from Zoya. It was during one of the first weeks of the school year and I had mentioned that I got a kick out of how it shared a name with a fellow member of Team Awesome, the name that we gave our case writing team.

Well, last week I went over to Trade Secrets -- now that my ban is done -- and saw that certain polishes were 50% off. Cho was one of them. The first name of this very special person is also represented by a Zoya polish, but I don't care for the sheer-ness of that other colour so I left that one behind. The final exam for the course that Team Awesome works together for is on Monday morning, and in honour of that special occasion, I thought I would wear the final polish in my Team Awesome "Collection".

I originally thought that Cho would look terrible on me, since it leans a little bit more yellow than the neutrals that I usually go for. I would describe it as a French vanilla colour with subtle shimmer. I swear my cuticles were a lot less dry-looking in real life:

A lot better than I expected, definitely. My skin tone does not usually agree with yellow.

This is the 2nd week of final exams and I felt like I needed to spice up my life a little bit, so I tried adding some glitter.

This is one coat of LA Girl Glitter Addict Explosion. You can see how those glitter pieces are like little mirrors in that top picture. Can you guess what colour shirt I was wearing?

Beauty. I tried using a light pink glitter, a hot pink glitter, and a black glitter on top of this colour, and none of them really did it for me. But this...This is gorge!

Hopefully once exams are over I can get back to swatching more untrieds. :)

Ballin'

But not really. That's just me trying to be much cooler than I actually am.

At this present moment, I'm sitting on the 3rd floor of the pharmacy building, trying so very hard to postpone studying for finals. It needs to happen. It's just way too easy to keep it from happening.

So, tonight I am going to a basketball game. Truth be told, I only wanted to go to see what all this Linsanity business was about. However, I could not bring myself to do Jeremy Lin-themed nails. I've seen people do it before, and it's cute, but...NO. Besides, I always cheer for the home team.

Now, I know what you are going to say: "Silly Kristine, purple is no longer the colour of the Raptors." And, you would be right. BUT it was their colour when I liked them back in the day, and there was no way that I was going to pass up an excuse to wear purple.

This is 2 coats of Zoya's Mira. Pretty much the minute I saw this colour at Trade Secrets, I knew that I had to have it. It's a bit lighter and more red-toned in person. Another big plus was that the name of this polish happens to be a nickname of pretty much my most favourite person ever (bfflsomgwtfbbq).

I did the silver and red dots first using Sally Hansen Celeb City and Caribbean Coral with a dotting tool. I was originally going to do it on all the nails, but decided that it would have been too busy. I was also going to do dots on the thumb, as has become my custom with accent nails, but I decided last minute that stripes would look cool too -- so I broke out the striping brush. I'm kinda wishing I had just gone with one or the other, but it's much too late for that now.

This colour combination is not something that I would probably pick out on my own, but it is interesting nonetheless. I just hope we don't lose too badly tonight. :P

30 days down, 16 to go!
(I figured out just now that I'VE BEEN COUNTING THIS WRONG. In actuality, I shouldn't have been counting the Sundays, but since I have been, you will notice that the days now add up to 46 and not 40...my bad!)

Flashback: Zoya Faye

Happy Leap Day! (I know the date on the post is March 1st, but I wrote this minutes before midnight, so it still counts!) Did you know that we have leap years because the actual length of a year on Earth is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds? I learned a bunch of stuff that I found interesting from the following video:



Interesting, huh? Today also marks the 1 week mark on my Lent no-buy and it's been going great so far, except for the fact that I seem to always have the thought of what colours I would like to get lingering somewhere in my head. Sign of a true addict. In any case I'll get back to swatching my untrieds soon -- I wanted to keep the galaxy nails for as long as possible.

I have another flashback post instead, of the very first Zoya polish that I bought. I actually bought this together with Zoya Reva, but I wanted this one more, and since it was a buy one get one free sale, I consider Reva to be the one I got for free (though it is no less of a beauty). I bought this at the beginning of last summer. This is Zoya Faye.

I didn't have a chance to wear it until the beginning of the school year, of course, since my ever growing untrieds pile tends to hide beauties like this from sight for months at a time. Faye is a sort of rosy purple colour with gold shimmer. The picture makes it look a lot more purple than in real life. In fact, in some lights it turns an almost copper shade. Excuse the mess, this was done in the middle of doing a pile of readings for Therapeutics, which is actually the reason why I decided to wear this colour. Faye is actually the name of one of my PICs (partners in crime) for this awful, awful course (not content wise, just...ugh-wise) and I thought it would be great to kickstart the year with a little manicured tribute. It was also the reason that I even contemplated getting Zoya Cho, even though it is a yellowed-out neutral that would clash with my skin tone -- I've put it out of mind for now, but you never know...I might want to go for the complete set. ;)

I hope to get some new swatches up soon!

Oh, Canada!

Happy Canada Day! This will be a pretty short post due to the two barbecues I'm going to today! YAY, SUMMER!

CANADA DAY themed manicure! I'm actually pretty surprised by the way this turned out, what with the lack of nail art pens...the leaf was done with the aid of only the brush that came with my Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Cherry Red nail polish. I was going to do all the fingers like the thumb, but decided not to because it would be both time consuming and too busy to look at.

The other fingers were done up in Zoya Reva from the Summertime collection, a deep red with lots of gold shimmer. It kind of reminds me of China Glaze's glass fleck nail polishes -- which I'm totally going to buy more of, btw. I renewed my Sally's card for $5 and got a $5 off coupon for my next purchase! SCORE!

Last, but not least, I thought I would post a quick picture of my latest satisfied lemming: Color Club - Pucci-licious. I usually don't approve of feet pictures, but I adore this colour!!