Catrice - Pool Party at Night & Snow-Man Of My Dreams!

Hey guys!

Today I have a gorgeous gorgeous polish that I received in my swap I did with Polish Sis! It is a beautiful blue, Catrice - Pool Party At Night! This is actually from the beginning of December, haha! My nails are much longer now :)

It appears a little darker in this picture than it is in real life, but it is a lovely deep blue creme! Two coats was plenty to achieve opacity. For comparison, it is definitely lighter than China Glaze First Mate.

I don't know why my pictures are sideways today....well, it's fun to switch things up every now and then!

Here it is with flash! So pretty!

But y'all know I love my glitter, so I added a new one I just picked up - Nicole by OPI Snow-Man of my Dreams, from their 2011 Holiday collection! You may have seen my facebook rant about my camera, which was supposedly fixed, and how the macro focus function doesn't seem to work anymore. As you can see...it is blurry here, so clearly my macro function is broken. *sigh* So I am going to buy a new camera...but not for a few months, I'm going on vacation in July so I'll buy one before that trip! This camera works fine as long as I'm not trying to zoom in too close like I was in this picture.

Let's try an iPhone picture instead... 

As you can (kind of) see, Snow-Man of My Dreams is a packed glitter polish, with glitter of every color! It does lean towards blue, although there are all sorts of colors in here, so I thought it would go nicely over Pool Party At Night. It is a clear base, though, so I think you could layer it over anything :)

Well, this was my first Catrice polish and I have to say, Inge picked a great one! The formula and shade were wonderful, I hope this won't be my last Catrice! Do any of you own Catrice polishes?

Have a wonderful day!!

HARE Polish - Archipelago

Hey y'all! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Today I have another lovely HARE Polish to show you - Archipelago! I am so happy I was able to pick up these two polishes! Nikole makes some lovely polishes and they fly off the shelves every time she sells them on her Etsy page! (HERE)

Archipelago is a juicy deep navy blue with a couple sizes of copper glitter mixed in. The glitter easily shows through, thanks to the jelly consistency. The glitters look kind of gold here, but they are more of a copper shade!

I normally shy away from dark colors, but this is still obviously blue in all lights, which is great!

See the larger and smaller glitter pieces?

With flash it's a lovely dark denim color! See the nice jelly consistency! 

I think I did 3 coats of this polish to achieve opacity. It has a little bit of a stinky smell to it, as does A Positive, but they both look amazing so I don't mind! :) Thank you again Nikole for making these wonderful polishes!

China Glaze First Mate + Shatter!

Hey y'all, I bet you thought I forgot about you! Welp...I didn't! I'm back from my trip and had to work all week, then Friday one of my coworkers walked out on the job so...needless to say next week just got kind of hectic too! I'm now working on one of my days off and on the other day off I have to go do our tips. So I kind of have one day off next week...but not really if you get technical! We normally do our store tips on Fridays, but the bank is closed this Friday thanks to Veterans Day so I'll have to go do them Thursday! Enough about real life, let's get down to nail polish business!

Here is a fairly old swatch that I never uploaded - it's China Glaze First Mate! I bought this when I went searching for my swap goodies for PolishSis, it just called out to me! First Mate is a gorgeous navy blue creme, wonderful formula and didn't stain my nails!

Two coater! You could probably even do one if you're good, but I like to do two anyways.

Such a lovely shade!

One more pic for good measure :)

And now on to the best part! My new OPI White Shatter which the lovely Krystal from Polish Galore sent me (along with OPI Spark de Triomphe! *love*)

My other hand. Not as good of a picture because I am not good at being left handed! But FINALLY a shatter polish actually worked well on me! I was thrilled, needless to say. I was starting to think I was just terrible at applying them or something, they never crack fully! But this one was nice and smooth and did it's crackly thing just wonderfully!

And a sunlight picture for good measure!

Hope you guys love this manicure as much as I did! I thought the blue and white was so nautical and wished I was on a cruise!! Enjoy your Sunday!! :)

Sky Blue :)

After a few days with Kieko I was ready to move on to another color. Recently I bought Sally Hansen's Insta-Dri nail color in Blue-Away, a pretty robin's egg blue/sky blue color from Target for like $4.50. It's a really pretty blue so I decided to do that, and a layer of Sally Hansen DVD over it, since it has that great blue/purple sparkle. The sparkle appears purple when it's over purple polish, so I figured it would appear blue when it's over blue polish - and I was right! Although it is very easy to see lines, since the glitter polish is darker than the base color.

Here is just plain old Blue-Away. I was a little heavy handed with the application so it's not the prettiest but it looks much nicer a couple days later now that it's been cleaned up!

Then I layered DVD over the top:

And finally topped it off with a generous coating of Seche Vite as usual! I LOVE this top coat! It adds an extra 3-4 days to my polish life and even then there's usually like one tiny chip at the very end of my nail, nothing too noticeable! I see people with nail polish all chipped up halfway off their fingers and I'm like, how is that possible? I mean I would be like madly scrubbing to get the polish off my hands because I hate that badly chipped look, but clearly these people don't use top coats!! I was at Ulta and the cashier and I were talking about nail polish and I said how I love Zoya and it's long-lasting self, and she said she had put her polish on two days prior, and it was beyond chipped up! Like half the polish was missing, meanwhile my Zoya manicure + Seche Vite topcoat had one TEENSY chip after like 4 days of wear PLUS being filed!! 

Anyways...enough ranting! I think this mani looks nice but not my favorite. I think Blue Away would look nice as a pedicure! Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Zoya Mira!

I had an absolutely ridiculous time trying to decide which of my new Zoya colors to use first! My indecision was absolutely pathetic, haha! I even had a deadline - my fiance was on his way to pick me up, that just made it worse! I hurriedly took off my silver tips mani and threw some of each color on each finger on one hand.....which didn't help at all. My best friend said "Pink! The answer is always pink!" when I texted her to see her opinion, but in the end, I went with my favorite color, purple, and Mira!

Mira looks gorgeous, a true dark (but not too dark) purple, the color I think of when I hear the word grape! Unfortunately it photographs some weird blue-ish color, but here's a picture anyways!

See what I mean about the blue-ishness? It doesn't look blue at all, it is my new favorite grape color :)

So then I thought to myself, hmmm, I wonder how Sally Hansen HD color in DVD would look over this? I bought that bottle about a month ago when it lured me in at a Target display. It is this gorgeous sparklyness that appears either blue or purple, depending how it catches the light. Now, I also do gymnastics (well, not right now thanks to the dang ACL reconstruction.....which was actually thanks to gymnastics. It's a vicious cycle!) and before I hurt myself I had JUST ordered a new leotard which is this great fabric that is purple with blue sparkles over it - JUST LIKE THIS NAIL POLISH! I put a picture of the leo at the bottom for reference!! So you can see why I bought DVD, right?! Anyways, when I put DVD on my fingers, it was so translucent, I was kind of sad. 3 coats made a beautiful purply blueness on my finger, but I thought, Oh well...it will make a good layering color. Enter Mira, and behold:

I love it! You mainly get the blue sparkles, as the purple is hard to capture on camera, but you can kind of see it at the very top of the bottle and about the top third of each nail shows a little purple. I love it! Mira is the perfect backdrop for DVD! :)

And of course, Revlon basecoat, and Seche Vite topcoat perfect the look!

And here's my beautiful new leotard, which I have no idea when I will get to wear. Boohoo :(

Doesn't it match DVD perfectly?!