OPI Venice Collection and Italian Tribal

If you follow me on Instagram, last night you got a super blurry, tantalizingly taunting sneak peek of today's post. I'm really excited to share the real deal with you now! I've got the full set of swatches for the new Fall/Winter 2015 OPI collection, Venice. 

After looking at the colors from Venice, I realized some of them matched closely to a "nailspiration" picture I had pinned recently (here).  Though it's not exactly Venetian, I loved the print, so I painstakingly duplicated it on my nails.

It took me longer than I'd care to admit.

Click to Enlarge

There's some seriously teeny tiny brushwork that went into this, but it was all inspired by the gorgeous Venice collection. (WARNING: Cheesy OPI names ahead!)

The collection has 12 colors, plus 3 awesome limited edition colors! I was surprised by that...I'd never heard of that before. So here's a look at those 3 first.

OPI - Baroque...But Still Shopping!

Baroque...But Still Shopping! (2 coats) is a brassy gold chrome with a little grit and texture in it, plus hex and square gold glitter. I'm not the biggest fan of polishes like this that embed glitter in a base that essentially envelopes the glitter. To me, it looks like someone got little pieces of dust stuck in their polish while they applied it.

OPI - Venice the Party?

Venice the Party? (2 coats) is a bright teal chrome. It's a little more teal than my swatch shows. You can see that it's still a little bit sheer after 2 coats, but that didn't bother me enough to use a third. It looks nice with 2.

OPI - St. Mark's the Spot

The last limited edition color is St. Mark's the Spot (2 coats), which is an effortless dark blue chrome. It's one of those royal, regal colors you can really sink your teeth into.

As I mentioned, those are just the limited edition colors, so if you're loving any of these colors, act quickly, because when OPI says "limited edition", they mean it! Snag 'em while they're hot! After the jump, you'll see the rest of the 12-piece Fall/Winter collection.

Color Club Safari Garden Collection Review & Swatches

Color Club's undergone a makeover, and to spur the excitement, they released a truly stunning collection of shades, called the Safari Garden collection.

I was immediately struck by the collection's cremes, particularly their off-white, Look, Don't Tusk. It's an amazing base, added to my favorite off-whites (among My Vampire is Buff, My Boyfriend Scales Walls, and others).

The safari theme inspired the nail art as well.

All the colors used are part of the Safari Garden collection, available here. For the swatches of each polish, follow the jump.

Loaded Lacquer - Swatches and Review

Tonight I'm tickled to show you a few glitter mixes from the indie polish company, Loaded Lacquer. After seeing the beautiful work over at Chit Chat Nails, I immediately went online and bought myself the same mix. (The amount of inspiration I draw from Chit Chat Nails is really quite large, so please go check her out if you haven't already!) Then Heather, the lovely owner over at Loaded, contacted me to try and review a few more.

First, check out the nail art I did with one of the shades reviewed below, Fluffy Macaroons.

The colors besides Fluffy Macaroons I used were On Cloud 9 and Enlightenment (Precision Nail Lacquer), Bottoms Up (China Glaze) and Blue Sky's the Limit (Sation). I loved picking out the colors that went so well with the glitter.

Fluffy Macaroons is such a girly, perfectly Easter glitter mix of pinks, blues, yellows and some iridescent pieces. Here I'm showing it over Steady as She Rose (OPI).

Moonshine in a Jar is the amazing color I was inspired to buy Loaded Lacquer for originally. Shown over Chantal (Zoya), the mix is gold and copper, and it's very dense! The ring finger is literally two coats!

The last polish shown today is Steampunked (shown over I'm So Ogre It from Sation). The colors are perfect for the name - copper, gold, black and silver. Just as cogs, gears and all manner of metal trinkets make up the revived steampunk style, so too does the variety of shapes in this polish - square, hexagonal, bar, and even some large circles. It's a little difficult to work with, so you need to apply with a dotting motion.

Loaded Lacquer has plenty of other amazing mixes to choose from, all available from the Loaded Lacquer store. I highly recommend these as toppers to spruce up the most boring manicure in the most exciting way! Thank you Heather for the beautiful polishes to try!

These products were sent to me by Loaded Lacquer. The reviews are based entirely on my experience with the products and were in no way influenced by anyone.

Tribal Beach Gradient

A little afternoon delight for you. Not too long, not too short.

Tonight, I'll be attending my FIRST EVER nail networking event. Actually, it's really my first nail-related event ever. When you don't live on the coasts, you're not exposed to as much, so events aren't as common. Luckily, a reader told me about this event on Twitter a while ago, and tonight's the night!

In attendance will be nail techs and students from the area interested in networking about all things nails. Sponsors for the event include Elegant Glass, Famous Names, Frenchies Modern Nail Care, and Nail Talk Radio. 

If you're going, you can find me by looking for these nails!

The colors for the gradient are both OPI - Where's My Czechbook? and My Vampire is Buff.

Soft Tribal Gel Quickie

This past Saturday, clients were flowing in, but with so many new nail tech students, most were being assigned to their services. So I had the pleasure to do a Gelish mani on one of my fellow students.

She let me have free reign over her colors and design, so I decided to do a tribal look using my tribal tutorial, which you can try out yourself here!

Apologies for the somewhat blurry picture.

I love the way it turned out, and she told me she's been receiving lots of compliments on it.

Have you tried nail art with gel polishes before? Do you have a favorite gel to work with?

Copper Snowflakes

Is it fall? Is it winter? Will it snow or will the yellow and orange leaves hit the deck first?

This copper conundrum happening all over Colorado can be captured in one polish from Born Pretty Store. The polish I'm talking about is a lovely mix of copper and matte white hexagonal glitter, and some feather white stick-like glitter. Just like the leaves and snow!

Here's the nail art I came up with for the polish:

And here's what it looks like in the bottle.

This was a good glitter, easy to apply. It also had pretty even coverage, surprising enough. Glitters are difficult to lay evenly, but this one was fine. At least in the amounts I used it for.

The other colors used in the nail art were A-Piers to Be Tan (OPI), Decoded (ORLY) and Mermaid (Tammy Taylor). Seems tribal, which was what I originally thought the polish was called.

You can pick up this polish (called #5 in this link here) for under $4.00, and don't forget the 10% unlimited coupon code, C10X31.

This product was sent to me by Born Pretty Store. The review is based entirely on my experience with the product and was in no way influenced by anyone.

Tribal Nail Tutorial for Online Fashion Week

This year, for one week only, there's a mad dash of coupons, fashion posts, and discounts over at Online Fashion Week. They've asked me to be a part of a few of their posts, getting the nail side of things covered. I'll be doing a few tutorials for this one-time gig, and my first is the tribal tutorial I promised you yesterday!

Make sure you check out the tutorial over at Online Fashion Week for the tools of the trade. I also highly recommend snagging some of their discounts before the week is out!

Center of the Tribe

So this design was originally meant for a tutorial, but after trying to recreate the steps I did on paper, I realized it wasn't as simple as I'd hoped. It took a lot of retracing steps to make the lines look nice, and even still, it was a bit of a pain in the ass, so rather than a tutorial, here's some tribal eye candy instead! (Don't worry, another tribal look is on its way!)

I used four colors for this. Ali from Zoya, Sand Tropez from Essie, and two stripers from Color Madric in black and white.

Tribal Tutorial for Lulus.com

Another installment of fetching fashion and tasty tutorials? Why yes of course, I'd be happy to!

My relationship with Lulus.com continues today with the second tutorial inspired by fashion from their site. This tribal look was inspired by this Billabong "Take Me There" Purse.

Though this look is a bit more complicated to achieve, I think it's awesome and bold! You can read more about the tutorial and its inspiration at the Lulus blog.

Winstonia Nail Art Tools Review

An essential piece of any aspiring nail artists' arsenal in my opinion is a good brush for detail work and something to use as a dotting tool. When asked by a company called Winstonia to review a set of tools including two of these, I jumped at the opportunity.

This is now my new favorite set of tools, and I highly recommend it for anyone wanting a set.

The set is 8 pieces: a satin bag to store everything in, a two-sided nail file with a 100 and 180 grit strength, 5 dotting tools with two different size rounds for dots (for a total of 10 different unique sizes), and three detailing brushes, also ranging in different sizes.

The whole set retails on the Winstonia website for $8.95, which is an insanely good price! I pay more for lunches when I make runs at work! For those of you with Amazon gift cards, there's also a Winstonia store at Amazon that also sells the set.

I would recommend buying from their actual website though, because they've given me a coupon to share with you all! For 10% off this nail art tool set (not your entire order), use the coupon code NAILEDIT. (This expires February 28th.)

The quality of all the tools and the bag they come in is very high-end. The dotting tools are all solid, no wiggling of the dotting heads against the surface of your nail as you place your dots. The sizes of each side of all five tools are different too. So you're literally getting 10 different sizes.
 

The brushes are AMAZING. They're brush tips are the perfect length, and the actual brush handle is round and thick, making it really easy to hold. It's also a less plastic-y feel, so I am hoping it doesn't melt in my acetone as quickly as my other brushes did.

I was really inspired to try something with a lot of detail for the nail art design tonight, so I chose to do a Native American design using the smallest brush. (I actually got this idea looking a a license plate on the road one night. I don't know what state it was, or if I was seeing things, as it was during a road trip, but I'm glad I finally got the chance to get it down on nails.)



The colors I used, starting from the darkest blue down to my cuticle are:

• Man Hunt (China Glaze)
• Ride the Waves (China Glaze)
• Blue My Mind (H&M)
• Blue (Zoya)
• My Boyfriend Scales Walls (OPI)
• Jacqueline (Zoya)
• Arizona (Zoya)
• Desert Sun (China Glaze)

Again, I HIGHLY recommend picking up a set of these as your first nail art set! I rarely use any other size brush besides a detailing one, so that, coupled with some awesome dotting tools is perfect.

You can buy this set at the Winstonia store here. Don't forget, enter NAILEDIT for 10% off! Please note: This coupon code only applies to the set of tools, not your entire order.

You can also get 15% off your order of $30 or more by entering EVERYTHING15.

They also sell other brushes and dotting tools, stamping plates, glass nail files, studs, false nails, fimo, stickers, microbeads, striping tape, rhinestones, and other 3D nail art decorations. I've added them to my Where to Shop page.

These products were sent to me by Winstonia. The reviews are based entirely on my experience with the products and were in no way influenced by anyone.

Guest Post from Nails at 2am

Tonight's guest post, while getting to you a bit late, is awesome, and comes to you from Christine at Nails at 2am. I'm excited to post Christine's beautiful nail art, and more excited to show it to you. I had never seen her blog before, but I'm a loyal follower now! Check it out!

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Hey y'all! My name's Christine (I live over at Nails at 2am) and Katy has generously allowed me a guest post on her blog. I started nail art around May of this year, and Katy's blogs were one of the first nail accounts I followed on tumblr, so I'm pretty darn ecstatic to be on here :P

Anyways, back to the nails at hand, this design is one of the first detailed works I did. It's a design I really really liked but thought I wouldn't be able to fluke again (I tried a couple of other times and failed miserably). So for this guest post, I thought I'd give it another go, and see if I could recreate it. Also, I finally got my lightbox in the mail the other day, so this would be an opportunity to see the details of the mani in a higher quality than that of my camera phone.

The mani starts with 2 coats of a white base and a quick outline of the basic pattern in black. Then with the range of orange polishes, (I used L'oreal Chop Chop, L'oreal 187, Ulta3 Tangelo and BC Co. Shade 13 - Ulta3 and BC Co are Australian brands in case you didn't recognize them) like a colouring book, I painted the panels in on the nail. Finally with black acrylic paint, I painted the black outlines and sealed it off with Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Top Coat. Et voila, neon tribal-esque nails!

T'was a bitter-sweet moment at the end: after at least a couple hours of painting, rubbing it off with acetone, painting, acetone, painting, acetone and finally painting it on right, did my left hand get finished. Photographing them was just as difficult a task! Apologies for all the glare! I couldn't seem to get rid of it *grr!

All in all, I still love how they turned out!

And now, I'd like to thank Katy again for having me here: Thanks Katy and I hope you're having an amazing time on your vacation!!

I'd also love to invite you all to my homepage: Nails at 2am on Blogger and on Tumblr! I'm also on Instagram!


Finally, I'd like to wish everyone Seasons Greetings, all the way from Sydney, Australia!

xx Christine

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Thank you Christine, for such awesome nail art!

Merry Christmas Eve everyone! Stay tuned for more fabulous guest posts by fabulous nail artists like Christine.

China Glaze Color Blocking

Inspiration for a manicure can come from the strangest places. You'll never guess where I was inspired for tonight's.

It was actually a commercial that briefly showed a girl riding a bus. Her bus seat had a pattern similar to this:

The colors were close too. I recently organized all my polishes, so I knew I had colors that would perfectly to recreate the bus seat I had seen. Most are from China Glaze, including Exotic Encounters, Igniting Love, Ride the Waves and Desert Sun. The only non-China Glaze is Black Onyx, an OPI.

Now that you know the manicure was based off of a bus seat, you can't seem to get that image out of your head can you? Sorry about that.

Where's the most random place you've seeked out inspiration?