31 Day Nail Art Challenge! Day 9: Rainbow Nails

Hi there! ARE YOU READY FOR SOME RAINBOWS?? BECAUSE I AM. LOOK AT THESE BEAUTIES:

Wooooo, aren't those fantastic and wonderful? They were so fantastically bright and busy and I JUST LOVED THEM SO MUCH. So I started off with a base coat of Sally Hansen White On, and then carefully sponged on (because my nails are tiny and I used 6 colors) a gradient of, in order of the rainbow, China Glaze Surfin' For Boys, Orange You Hot?, Sun-Kissed, I'm With The Lifeguard, Towel Boy Toy, and Beach Cruise-r. Then over that, I painted one coat of Sonnetarium Samurai Princess, which just gave it the most spectacular finish. I wish I could think of ways to describe them more, but honestly, they speak for themselves. I think I'll paint these on my nails again someday soon, because they were so incredible. So I hope you like them as much as I do!

Thanks for reading, have a great day, and happy painting! :)

Pink and Yellow "Snowfall" Nails

Hey there! Yeah, I don't know what I'm thinking. Snowfall nails? It's summer, and I live in the deep south. There isn't any snow. But I do happen to have a polish called Snowfall, and it seemed like a good idea. So this is what I came up with:

See, it's summery! But the glitter polish is Sonnetarium's Snowfall, which is great for a lot designs, not just for snow/winter. You could also recreate the look with a white polish and a dotter tool. Pretty simple! The gradient was done with Sinful Colors Unicorn and China Glaze Strawberry Fields. It was super pretty, but it was a little thick for my liking. I put too many coats of the gradient polishes on. But it was pretty and bright! So I hope you like it as much as I did. Thanks for reading, have a great day, and happy painting! :)

Blue Galaxy Nails

Hey there! :) So, for this post I have some galaxy nails for you! Yes, they've been done a million times before. I know. There's nothing new about galaxy nails. But I, for one, think they are still beautiful and never get old! So I went ahead and did some. THEY ARE GORGEOUS.

(outdoors - direct sunlight)

(outdoors - shade)

So pretty!! I usually don't do blue-toned galaxy nails, they're usually pink and yellow. So this was new to me! And they are pretty labor-intensive for galaxy nails. So I'm just going to list the steps and colors I used for you:

1. My base color was the blue polish end of the Revlon Moon Candy nail art double-ended thing in the combination Galactic. It's really opaque, plus I'm going to add a ton of extra colors and glitter, so I did one very thin coat. You can substitute a black polish, because this one pretty much looks black.
2. I sponged some white (Sinful Colors Snow Me White) using a small piece of makeup sponge in a random pattern on each nail to create the "nebula."
3. Then I took a shimmery dark blue (a nameless BonBon polish) and sponged around the edges of the white to blend it into the blue/black base color.
4. I then used China Glaze Ahoy! and lightly sponged it in a few places. I just wanted a hint of the rosy pink, but nothing too overpowering. 
5. Then comes the fun part. GLITTER!! I used three different glitter polishes for this. Can you spot them all? First I used one of my all time favorite polishes - a nameless BonBon polish. Yep. One of those teeny tiny bottles of polish from Walmart. It's one of the few that are still left in stores, as far as I know. I picked up three new bottles just in case they stop making them! It's a shimmery clear base with multi-colored iridescent glitters of all sizes in it. So lovely. Then I dabbed on some Pure Ice Look My Way on the shimmery blue I sponged on earlier. Look My Way is a jam-packed glitter polish with purple and blue glitters in it. It actually didn't show up too much, but it did give a nice spotted effect over the white. Then I topped it off with a few dabs of Sonnetarium's Snowfall for the white stars. Combined, it gave a beautiful effect! I LOVED these nails so much. Of course, if you want to recreate these, polishes and dotting tools can be used to substitute the glitter.

I hope you like this as much as I do! Let me know if you want to try them or if you have any questions! Thanks for reading, have a good day, and happy painting! :)

Glowing Samurai Princess Nails

Hello again! :) I have had a busy week and couldn't finish catching up on my posts, but now I'm working on it. I guess we'll just never hear the end of me having to catch up on posts.

Anyway, after my last manicure I decided I wasn't done wearing Samurai Princess (for more info and a semi-review on it visit my last post), so I switched it up and used a different base color! One that GLOWS!

(indoors - sorry for the blur in the first picture!)

My base color is Bright Night by Blackheart Beauty. You may have seen these polishes if you visit Hot Topic regularly - they're the skull shaped bottles! Freaking awesome. I don't actually go to Hot Topic all that often, but I have wanted some glow in the dark polish for a really long time and they have a bunch of colors. This one was my favorite - bluuue! It's not the standard green or clear glow in the dark. This polish has a weird formula. It's pretty sheer - I used three coats. But it's kind of a thick jelly? It's really strange. I'm not sure if you can tell in the second picture, but after a day (I had to wait for daylight to take a picture) it starts to peel back a bit? But not entirely - just the pigment. There was still polish on the tips of my nails. Like I said, it was really weird. But fantastic anyway. Here's the glow:

SO COOL. My camera doesn't do it justice. It's waaaaay brighter in reality. And it charges under a lght very quickly, and lasts so much longer than you'd imagine. After experimenting, I even found that I could hold the flashlight on my iPhone right over it for a few seconds, and you could literally see my nails glow in full lighting. They looked radioactive! Freaking awesome.

Before you go off and get these polishes (because they are awesome and inexpensive), there is one more thing I want to mention. According to Hot Topic's website, these polishes contain lead. I don't want to alarm anyone! They are safe to wear, trust me. I wore it for a long time (and I also have worn some of their other polishes), and I haven't had anything happen to me. I just wanted to warn you in case you bite your nails, or you don't want to wear anything with lead in them (especially don't get this for kids). But the polishes contain a very small amount of lead, and they are safe to wear. I used a top coat over them, and I was able to eat and everything. So don't let that discourage you if you're interested in them, I just want you to have the facts. Because I did not know this before I bought and wore them.

Anyway, thanks for reading, have a nice day, and happy painting! :)

Sonnetarium Samurai Princess Nails

Hello! I don't know about you, but I am ready to be caught up with these posts!

Anyway, I have another super special amazing swatch for you! It's Sonnetarium's Samurai Princess. The prettiest of all the pretty glitters. I don't have a picture of the bottle itself, so I'll just jump right in to what I wore it over.

(indoors)

Samurai Princess is so freaking awesome. You can wear it over any color and it just gives it a fantastic effect. I tried to get a close-up of one nail, but it wasn't successful. This was my first time wearing it since I bought it, so it was really hard to decide what colors to use it over. I knew I wanted a gradient, but I don't have very many colors that just look absolutely great together. I ended up using L'Oréal Now You Sea Me (the teal) and Sally Hansen Pacific Blue (the bright blue) - they don't really go together either, haha! But I liked it well enough! Here is what they looked like without the coat of Samurai Princess:

(indoors)

I did have to use a couple of coats to get it that opaque and graduated. I don't really know what color scheme I was going for, I just knew I wanted some blues and greens. But afterwards, I did find myself wishing I had just painted them Pacific Blue, because it and Samurai Princess really complemented each other and Now You Sea Me was just kind of out of place.

As for the formula of Samurai Princess and where you can get it: The formula is fantastic. As I mentioned earlier, I'm wearing one coat in these swatches and it has a crazy amount of coverage without being thick. It's so lovely. It looks like paint splatters! It's really unique and looks good over any color (save maybe black and white) - I would suggest wearing it over neon colors. It only makes them look even more amazing. If you like Samurai Princess and want to buy it, you can get it from Sonnetarium's website. The 9mL bottle costs $6, the 15mL bottle is $8.50. I bought Samurai Princess with my own money and am in no way being compensated for this review. My opinions are honest - this glitter polish is amazing and I would recommend it to everyone! So if you love it as much as I do, go and support Sonnetarium! :)

As always, thanks for reading, have a nice day, and happy painting! :)

Sonnetarium Snowfall Nails

Hello there! Today I have a super special awesome swatch for you! Trust me, it's super special. It's an indie glitter polish by Sonnetarium called Snowfall!

(9mL bottle)

Snowfall is a beautiful glitter polish with 4 different sizes of white hex glitter and also iridescent transparent glitters that usually shine orange and blue - it looks just like a snow globe! So pretty. And since it's white glitter, it looks good over everything and is nice and delicate. It looks so good, I had a really hard time deciding what color to swatch it over. It came down to China Glaze Spontaneous and China Glaze Secret Peri-Wink-le. In the end, Spontaneous won because I actually had not worn that one before, so why not wear it with this beautiful glitter?

(indoors)

(natural lighting - you can see how much I loved this manicure because I retouched the tips where the polish was wearing down! This photo was taken several days after I painted them.)

I loved this manicure. LOVED IT. Spontaneous was the perfect base color for Snowfall, and the iridescent glitters just gave it a small pop of color. The formula of Snowfall is fantastic - in my pictures, I'm wearing one coat of snowfall. And not even a thick coat! It is really jam-packed with glitter. And as far as having to place the glitter on my nails, I didn't really have to do that too much. Occasionally with the bigger glitters, but not so much that it got annoying. It's almost a perfect polish. The only qualm I have with it is actually the bottle; The bottle is small (which is fine, because a little of this polish goes a long way), but the brush is even smaller. It's too short for the bottle, which makes it extremely difficult to get a good amount of glitter on the brush in the first place. I'm afraid it'll be impossible once the bottle starts to run low (it is important to note that this is not the case with the 15mL bottle, I also have that size in another polish from them and it is perfectly fine). But overall, Snowfall is worth the money ($6 on their website for the 9mL, $8.50 for the 15mL) and is so pretty. I loved it. I can't tell you how many times I went back and retouched this manicure so I could keep wearing it. 

So, if you love Snowfall, definitely get it. I've seen other variations of this kind of glitter, but Michelle (the creator of Sonnetarium polishes) does such a fantastic job and she cares about her customers first and foremost. So please, if you like it, go support her and buy it! Pretty much all of the glitter polishes she creates are absolutely gorgeous. The website is www.sonnetarium.net. 

Thanks for reading, have a good day, and happy painting! :)