GOT Polish: Purple

I did my golden oldies purple manicure to honor the greatest purple polish on the surface of earth: Zoya Aurora! 

It's special for me, because bought this on a trip to Chicago - where I landed a day late being at first stranded to the Netherlands, and had a room booked in a 12-bed dorm at a hostel.... Oh, those sleepless nights... But it paid off when I could haul both Storm and Aurora released in the same collection!

You may disagree, but I just love the holo glitter on this, the application, the opacity.... all of it!

The base in this manicure is two coats of Astor Pop Color 141.
Over it I used China Glaze Crackle Luminous Lavender - plus some tape and Zoya Aurora - the awesomest purple polish there is..

An InLinkz Link-up

The Vampire Bat

Here's another Halloween manicure for you - although I still don't celebrate halloween. Maybe I should start some year...

With this one I got a polish out from my box-o-untrieds again: China Glaze Lubu Heels featured here on ring&index fingers. The other fingers are sporting ChG Mummy May I. Two coats of polish in all of them, I think.

These differed a lot on the nail, although when I first picked them up they seemed almost like twins in red and purple. They have different shapes of glitters, for starters (round in Lubu, square in Mummy). Well, it was dark when I planned this mani...

I painted on some drips with alessandro Virgin Temptation and Astor Pop color 139, both based with Mavala White. The stamping is from BM-301 (isn't that the cutest vampire bat ever?), stamped with my best silver stamping polish Gosh Silver. Geez, it was hard to get a near decent picture of the stamp. It's just in the part of the nail where reflection always inevitably sets. Grrrr.

That's the bottle pic - the official 'That's all, folks' of this blog. Please stay safe, no matter under which storm you're under!

Blueberries

Today I've got some more dotting for you.

I was playing around with my dotting tools and noticed, that if you plug the dotting tool on a dot that's not completely dry yet, you get a crater. And somehow those craters started to look like the blueberry "belly buttons" - you know, the opposite side from where the berry is attached to the twig. You don't? Oh well, never mind. You do? That's great - I bet you've been picking them sometimes.. Anyways, here is my blueberry mani.

The most fun part in this was definitely choosing the colours and getting to spread out my swatchsicles on my desk!

I started out by painting the base, which is three coats of Catrice Khaki Perry (was disappointed by the opacity of this one..), and adding the lightest purple and green dots.

Then I made a kind of a gradient by dotting the centres of these base dots with darker colours. Oh heck, what am I babbling here. You can propably see everything from the pics yourself..

You see the "craters" or "belly buttons" in my blueberries? I made them by poking the dotting tool in a semi-dry dot, and turning it around a little. I finished the look by adding a tiny dot in contrasting colour. And a coat of Seche Vite, of course!

And here are the bottle pics along with some clutter on my desk:
greens:
China Glaze Westside Warrior, Essence Show Your Feet In The Jungle, Catrice Sold Out Forever, OPI Stranger Tides

purples:
Essence Multidimension Found My Love, OPI Planks a Lot, Astor Pop Color 139, China Glaze Loft-Y-Ambitions

GG Challenge Day 4: Runway Splatter

Today in the Girly Girl challenge we were encouraged to get inspiration from the runway. As much as I love shopping for clothes and playing with my outfits, I don't follow fashion at_all. So I had to google. (I was sooo relieved when I read that's what some others did with today's challenge, too...)

I looked through an array of pics, and this one from Ladylux was an instant hit. I was debating  between the middle pic (imagine various greys and a dotting tool) and the one on the right, and the latter won.

The base I used to achieve that silver brocade look was a sandwich of Primark no name silver Base coat, Essence Nail Art topper Mystic Mermaid and OPI DS Original.

Not much of a holo effect, but wait and see... On the ring finger I added a coat of Lacquistry Silver Holo Shredded, which is like shards of a tiny cd on a clear base. (looove!)

On the other fingers I did my first ever splatter "design" (I mean, I had no control on the splatters whatsoever. Do you still call that a design?) with Catrice Lucky in Lilac, Astor Pop Color 141 (I do hate polishes without names!!) and Essence Show Your Feet Caribbean Sea. All three were from my untrieds - yay!

 Here's a few pre-cleanup pics..

I think the left thumb turned out quite nicely. I somehow liked the mani more before cleanup - maybe becayse the splatters are more clearly splatters when you see the whole splatter. (Try yourself putting "splatter" three times in a phrase..)

That's the final mani once again and here are the polishes:

Now I'll rush to see what the others have been up to:
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road
Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of Devilish Polish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Polish. Glitter. Rock & Roll!
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Johanna of Neues vom Kellerkind 

Amanda of Nox Nails 

Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch 

Emily of The Lacquerologist 

Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail 

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Day 20: Water Marble

Today's challenge was the one I'd been dreading the most... the big bad water marble!

The base was Astor POP color 139 - a supermarket polish for 2 euros that really exceeded my expectations. It could have been one-coater even on my long nails, but I did two coats just in case. Amazing brush, opacity and formula. I'm definitely going to haul more of these!

The marbling was done with the Astor, plus China Glaze's Ahoy, Senorita Bonita and Thistle. I'd read in other blogs these polishes were okay with marbling, and I wasn't going to take any risks.

So, how was it, water marbling for the first time? Well, bad, to be honest. After the first nail I thought "Hmm, this wasn't so hard", after the second "What the f*** is happening here" and after re-doing the second for the third time "I'm not going to make this". Just look at this mess!

But after all, I managed to finish the mani and marbled both hands. I'm not too proud of the result, but I'm definitely proud of my resilience. I know only few other persons who could possibly think spending hours on a manicure is not a complete waste of time, and in times like this, I'm extremely happy to have them somehow around me.

Here are all the polishes I used. I hope I'll gather the guts some day to try the water marble again. It was still kinda fun. I enjoy doing things I'm simply not good at - a kind of perversion, I guess...