Spoiled by Wet N Wild: Ants In My Pants!

Hi guys! Hope you're having a great week! I'm having a rough time, but I wont get into that here. Suffice it to say that out of town hubs and sick kiddo plus my own anxiety isn't a good combination. But, lets talk polish, shall we?

Today is the start of my Spoiled marathon, and I thought I would start it off with a bang! I'm up to 29 Spoileds now, and it was tough to choose which one I wanted to share first, but this is such a showstopper that I just had to show it off!

This is Spoiled by Wet N Wild's Ants In My Pants, a veritable plethora of red hex and round large and microgiltters in a sheer black jelly base. It's very similar to Wet AN Wild's Behind Closed Doors, which was one of their LE polishes that I could never find out here. Ants seems to have more glitter than BCD, but otherwise is an exact dupe. Check this baby out!

Ants In My Pants, 2 coats over Black Creme:

Now THAT is gorgeous! I love red glitter, and this baby is just what the Dr. Ordered!

Formula was surprisingly good, a bit thick, but nothing that you can't work with. It is loaded with glitter, so no need to dap around on the nail to place the glitter. Dry time was very fast, and wear? Well, Ive been wearing this for 2 days now with no chips or wear. Impressive! The brush is still a PITA, but I'm getting used to it. I recommend not drinking coffee for at least 5 hours before using this brush, and never try to use this brush while drinking! ;)

I did layer it over Black Creme since it takes a good 3-4 heavy coats to reach opacity since the black jelly is very sheer, and I didn't want to use up a quarter of my bottle on one mani.  This polish is gonna require a backup bottle, and I plan on picking one up as soon as my anxiety chills out and I can drag both kids out to the store without panicking. :) If you only pick up one polish from this line? Make it this one. You won't be disappointed.

Have a great Thursday!

Happy Polishing!
-Kimber

P.S. I can't seem to find the Julep swatch I was going to post, but I have 2 more Julep's on the way so I'll re-swatch it with those.

Classic Color: OPI Yoga-ta Get This Blue and layering

I love blue nail polish. Hands down, blue is my very favorite color to wear, and even when it's not fabulous, it's never a fail. I have so many blues that it's always near impossible to pick one. So why it took me so long to pick up this beauty is beyond me.

Yoga-ta Get This Blue is the most awesome deep, shimmery blue with purple and teal micro-shimmer. I wouldn't quite call it a duochrome, but it certainly morphs a bit with different lighting. I love this color so much that I wore it for a bit without anything over it - no nail art, no layering, nothing. It's rare that I ever wear a polish alone for very long, but this polish is just so stunning that it certainly deserved its time in the spotlight.

Here it is in the lightbox (Sorry, lack of good sunlight these days, and shade does not do this color justice):

*swoons* I LOVE LOVE LOVE this polish! Not only is it the perfect shade of blue, but application was utterly flawless! Complete opacity in a single coat, but 2 coats is sheer, effortless perfection. I can't rave about this one enough. If you don't have it, you must get it!

However, being me, I realized this would be a fab base color for one of my older untrieds, Revlon's Blue Mosaic. I've had this glitter forever and a day, but have yet to actually wear it. It is gorgeous on it's own, but with glitters like this one I prefer to layer over a darker base. The lighter blue microglitter and silver, green and blue hex glitter is just lovely with the darker blue. My camera unfortunately hates any and all glitters, but hey, I tried! It does tend to overshadow the glowiness of Yoga-ta get this blue, but I didn't really expect the base color to show much with this kind of layering.

Yup! That's some stray glitter on my fingertips! I didn't really do any clean up after layering on the glitter since I didn't want to douse my cuticles in more acetone. Besides, it's festive, right? ;)

For pics of glitters like this, I really wish there was more sunlight here. But you get the jist, right? I also love darker colors on my nubbins (and it's almost time to start shaping those nubbins! I leave them rounder until I have enough length to square them off without losing length). They're starting to look better anyway, but the darker colors make them that much more tolerable. I did do my weekly cuticle maintenance last night, so they are a bit puffy and angry (sensitive cuticles do not like cutilcle remover, but they're happier after some overnight babying!), but hey! Theyre healing nicely and I'm much happier with them now than with the giant mess they were even a few weeks ago. It's easy to hide them in pics - lighting is everything - but in person angry, swollen, red, abused cuticles are just scary. I could rant about them all day long since I've always had icky cuticles, but why don't I just hush about it and we can watch them heal up and become normal over the next couple weeks instead. :)

Happy Thursday, I hope you all are having a fabulous morning! It's time for me to pick out my next polish - I'm thinking of letting the dog sniff around and pick one for me since I'm having so many issues settling on one. :)

Happy Polishing!
-Kimber

Purple Nubbins!

As I mentioned in my last post, Marisa and I decided to do a polish swap, and I now have a ton of new polish to try out! Some of them I'm trying to wait to show you until I have some free edge, since my nubbins don't do any polish justice, but I guarantee I'll wear them within the next 2 weeks and then re-swatch them when my nails grow out.  Last night I was in a purple mood, and I have had this Savvy polish sitting in my untrieds for months and months, and finally was inspired to try it out. I paired it with this awesome purple glitter from Love and Beauty that Marisa sent me, and the result is pretty cool! You can't tell in pics, but in person it looks almost like my nails have droplets of water on them! Very cool!

Anyway, I used Savvy Nail Lacquer in Gotcha Grape. This little beauty is a lovely medium purple with flashes of blue and some lovely subtle pink shimmer. This is the first time I have used a Savvy polish, and I really dig it. Application was perfection, very smooth with zero thickening, bubbling, or streaking. Here I used 2 thin coats for opacity, but one coat was actually very cool looking! Reminiscent of Sally Hansen's Virtual Violet. Dry time was also impressive; by the time I had finished my second coat, my left hand was almost completely dry. I'm definitely going to pick up some more Savvy colors next time I am at Sally's. Their selection is a bit limited, but there are some gems hidden among the usual colors. But enough babble! Pictures!

Here is Gotcha Grape all by herself in my battered light box:

NOTE: I apologize PROFUSELY for my insanely dry, angry cuticles and fingers. That's what happens when you realize that you didn't get all the damned nail glue off previously and spend a good hour soaking in acetone and scrubbing like a mad fiend to get that sh*t off! Yet another reason to NEVER WEAR FAKES AGAIN!! Thankfully my skin and cuticles is much happier after some intensive overnight moisturizing.

So let's pretend my skin isn't uber dry and angry about being scrubbed like mad and just look at the polish, isn't this a beautiful color? My camera actually managed to capture this color beautifully (although I have no idea wth is up with my pinky in that last pic....it isn't smudged...I think maybe I managed to get something on my lense..), which is a very rare occurence with purples.  I love, love, love the pink shimmer in this girl - I don't have any purples with this kind of pink shimmer, and since I love pink and purple together this is kind of a no brainer for me. 

I love this color all on her own, but I was dying to try out the Love and Beauty Dark Purple glitter polish that Marisa sent, so I layered that over Gotcha Grape. In person, it really does look like I have little water droplets on my nails! So neat! However, I think that Gotcha Grape is really too dark to show off how gorgeous L&B's Dark Purple is, so I'll be wearing it again with a much lighter base soon.

Dark Purple is my first Love and Beauty polish, and combines 2 of my favorite things: Purple, and Glitter! It's a very sexy deep purple glitter with larger hex glitter in a clear base. It applied like a dream, I had no problems getting the hex glitter to stay where I put it and there's enough of the hex glitter that I didn't have to keep dipping and digging around the bottle to pick some up. Top coat is an absolute must though, since for some reason this dries rather dull. I never go without top coat unless I'm using a matte (and even then I sandwich), so that isn't a big issue for me.  Again, please forgive my horrible dry skin and angry fingertips and cuticles.

Love and Beauty Dark Purple Glitter over Savvy Gotcha Grape, Lightbox:

This combination really doesn't show just how beautiful this glitter is. I think I may pair it with SH Virtual Violet later this week and hope for some good sunlight for pics. Also, a huge thanks to everyone that has been supportive of my poor little nubbins! It makes me feel much better about continuing to blog while I grow my nails out to their former glory. I really hope none of you ever have to suffer this strange ordeal!

In case you guys missed it, I kept breaking nails due to some overzealous buffing (at least that's what I think happened. I can't think of any other cause for how paper thin my nails became, and now that I have cut them back they're already looking much thicker.), and I finally had to just give up and cut them all back. I was also having some issues with my free edge curling toward each other at the corners, which was aggravating, confusing, and concerning. Nothing is wrong with me healthwise, but my doc did remind me that since I have lost a lot of weight (When my son was born in My of 2010, I weighed 168 lbs,  I was 143 when he was conceived and a size 8 or so, for a total of 25 lbs gained during pregnancy. Since his birth, I have dropped down to 124lbs and a size 3/4), and my hands have obviously changed since I've lost all the weight, a fact that hadn't crossed my mind for some reason! Still, that didn't really explain the strange curling free edge. Combine both those issues and you have an OCD nail blogger's nightmare. I told myself that since they will grow back, it's not a big deal, but whenever I see pics from even a couple months ago, I want to cry. I miss my nails! My hubs and a few friends have told me that they think my nubbins are cute, and that means a ton to me. And like I always say, it's about the polish, not the length/shape of my nails, right? Plus my MASH plates are very small, and with the nubbins I can actually use the full nail images without having to try and double stamp.

Ok, enough out of me! It's time to go and change my mani. I have this strange need to wear a creme polish tonight, so I pulled out one of my untried Essies and am going to rock that baby! I'm debating stamping them as well. Let's see if I can't make these little nubbins shine! ;)

Happy Polishing!
-Kimber