Cosmic Dot Meltdown

For this week's manicure, I finally decided to dig into my Urban Decay polishes (released last fall). I decided on "Meltdown", with a top coat of CND's new "Effects" polish in Raspberry Sparkles. This was incredibly difficult to photograph with the micro-glitter and foil effect. Hopefully you can get the gist of it.



I made it thorough most of the week without polish, and my nails made it through with only one bad break point. As you can see below, my middle finger ended up with a pretty bad break across it below the smile line. Needless to say, I had to put some clear top coat over it to protect it over the weekend. Not that it helped - the Lippmann "Addicted to Speed" top coat peeled off the next day. Huh. You might notice my thumbnail grew back out to the edge of my finger, which is nice, and the staining is mostly gone.

In any case - I was happy to polish these up again last night, and provide some good protection for that break until it grows out enough to cut off. I started with my normal Zoya base coat, followed by two coats of "Meltdown".

I topped that with just one coat of "Raspberry Sparkles", which added sort of a metallic pink foil look to the top. I know the photos didn't turn out well - if any of you have tips for capturing metallics, I'm all ears.

Then I added flat-backed beads...white iridescent and purple with an interesting pattern in them. Some nails have three, others five. I was going to do dice, but decided to go random instead. These numbers are actually symbolic this week - anyone want to guess why?

Two coats of top coat, some clean up, and voila! I think the color of these is almost "cosmic" looking - I feel like my nails are kind of "space age" this week.

I'm not sure what's up next - I have some serious glittery polishes from Zoya to try, some Essie colors from last fall and more of these Urban Decay colors all unopened just waiting for their turn. Any suggestions?



What's on your tips this week?

Simple Gold Squares

This week I wanted something with fall colors, and the combination of gold and burgandy always seems "fallish" to me. I recently bought the new "golden" colors that Avon put out for fall/winter (yes, they finally put out some new polish colors!), all of which have golden mica in them to make them shine. This one is Golden Wine, a lovely dark red wine color that has all that nice shiny gold mica and some tiny red glitter that really makes it pop.

I got these great metal gold squares from Dollar Nail Art awhile back, and immediately thought "argyle!". I wanted something simple and classy this time though, so decided to just hint at the pattern, rather than cover a couple nails with it (that's probably coming eventually).

I started with a base of Golden Wine - two coats were opaque, but I used three just to even it out a bit. Love this color, it's dark, but not so dark it could be mistaken for black.

Then I slathered on a coat of top coat, and stuck the squares down along the smile line. I used three squares on my thumbs, two on my index, middle & ring fingers, and one on my pinky. I think I could have bent them to follow the natural curve of my nail, but should have done it before I got started. So this time, they're just straight.
A couple more coats of top coat to secure them - the squares are very flat, so the profile is very low. Clean up the edges, and I had a simple, classy (I think) manicure for the week.
I took most of these photos with flash, to show the glitter. The small photo up in the corner of the blog is what it looks like with no flash.

I'm looking forward to using more of these glittery Avon colors...next week, I need to get the glitter off my toes and do a pedicure too.