Slow Swatching: A England - She Walks in Beauty

Hey y'all it's Lisl!  Today I'm starting a new feature I dreamed up when I got a lot of new nail polish for my birthday.  It's called slow swatching, and it's where I swatch a single color at a time and dream up a little bit of nail art to go with it!  

Today I'm showing you A England's She Walks in Beauty, which is one of the three excellent polishes Arden got me for my birthday!  My ultimate goal for this swatch was to do a manicure inspired by one of my favorite places in the world, the Metolius River in Oregon, where my family and I have gone camping every year since I was but a babe.

I started off with a coat of OPI On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is, well, gorgeous.

Glitter Gradient

 
Arden: Hey everyone!  I've been on a bit of a space-themed nail art kick recently.  We'll soon be posting a Nail Art Nail-Off where we both tried out galaxy nails, and I think this glitter gradient manicure just screams "Space, the final frontier" to me as well.

I started this manicure by painting on two coats of Zoya Storm.  Such a cool black polish with glitter!  Then I added the glitter gradient (sorry there are no step-by-step pictures, I'll have to do that next time!).  I painted one coat of China Glaze Pizzazz on the top half of my nail, then added a second one on only the top quarter of the nail.  For good measure, I painted on an additional layer of NYC Starry Silver Glitter on about the top third.  (All of these fractions were totally arbitrary, just so you know.  I just did whatever looked good!)

I finished it off with a top coat of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Anti-Chip Top Coat (because Essie top coats don't agree w/ Zoya polishes) and was good to go!  This was a quick and fun manicure that doesn't require a lot of pain-staking detail work.  I would recommend it to everyone!

It also was so sparkly that I think it could be a good option for bridesmaid (or even bridal) nails if black is one of your wedding colors!  (I know people have found this blog before by searching "black bridesmaid nails" so I KNOW at least one person is looking for black bridesmaid nails out there!)

Let me know if you try it out!

Green Worm Nails

Arden: Ok, this manicure is going to require some explanation.  You see, today is my boyfriend Biff's birthday.  (Happy birthday, Biff!)  To celebrate, I wanted to paint my nails with something to honor him.  Biff is a geneticist who works with little bitty microscopic worms all day.  Sometimes, he makes them glow green.  This leads to awesome pictures, like these:

I got this one put on a mug for Biff for his birthday last year.

So, to honor Biff's work, today I am rocking green worm nails!  My method for creating them was basically the same as my colorful feathery nails from a couple weeks ago, except with these I tried to make them more wavy so they could better resemble worms.  (You may remember that that manicure was inspired by a post by the Nailasaurus.  She's now posted a tutorial on how to do her striped nails that's really helpful if you're looking to try these out yourself!)

Ocean Gradient Nails

Arden here!  Today's manicure is in honor of the summer.  My family isn't going to the beach together until October, but I found myself thinking about the beach the other day and decided to try out some ocean gradient nails. 

I started with two coats of Sally Hansen Barracuda (as you can tell from the sticker on it in one of the pictures below, I snapped up this polish when it was recently clearanced at Target).  I then sponged on a 3-color gradient using Barracuda, Nicole by OPI Khloe Had a Little Lam-Lam (guess that one must've been part of some Kardashian collection), and a navy blue from the 3 piece Trendsetter Chic set by Physician's Formula Endless Color (unfortunately each individual polish in this set doesn't have its own name).

I finished by dabbing on some NYC Starry Silver Glitter on the two darker colors (leaving the lighter tips without glitter) and adding a top coat.

Sally Hansen Fuzzy Coat Swatches and Review

It's Arden!  A couple of weeks ago I was strolling through Target (which my boyfriend calls my "happy place") and I spotted this new Sally Hansen display:

I was instantly drawn to the fuzzy coats!  Each fuzzy coat is composed of a clear base with one or two different colors of rectangular glitter.  After weighing my options VERY carefully (read: for a very long time), I ended up picking out these three shades:

As Seen on Pinterest: Glitter Sandwich

Arden here: Oh my goodness, I had wanted to do a manicure like this for MONTHS and I'm so glad I finally was able to!  I spotted this manicure on A Girl and Her Polish a while back, and instantly pinned it to my Pinterest board because I wanted to try it some time.

From http://www.agirlandherpolish.com/2013/01/new-31-day-challenge-day-26-inspired-by.html

Doesn't that look so cool?  I hadn't been able to try it earlier because I didn't have a good sheer polish to use as the "bread" in my "glitter sandwich," but I finally scored one and was so excited to try it out!

I started out with a coat of OPI Don't Touch My Tutu then I added a coat of Lush Lacquer's Clowning Around.  (For more swatches of Clowning Around, see our Lush Lacquer post.)  To complete the sandwich, I added another coat of Don't Touch My Tutu.

Then, to finish off the look, I added a bunch of brightly colored dots like confetti at the tips.  Initially I was only going to do a few colors, but then I got really excited about it and used a bunch of different ones to match all the colors of glitter in Clowning Around.

As Seen on Pinterest: Gold Reverse Manicure

Arden: Hi, friends!  Today, I'll be basically directly recreating an amazing pin I found on Pinterest a couple weeks ago.  Sadly, it has no attribution-- as always, if you know where it originates please let me know!

Here's the picture directly from Pinterest:

picture from http://25.media.tumblr.com/2e64a12603189eb49d0b3b0964cec791/tumblr_mh4kicdDNI1qfye3lo1_500.png

Now the way you classically do a reverse manicure (also known as a half-moon manicure) is to paint your nails the color you want at the base of your nail, apply a hole reinforcement sticker at the base, paint the top color, and remove the sticker.

NOTD: Sunshine Nails

Arden: I've got a quick nail of the day post for you today.  It was a beautiful spring day, and I just wanted something happy and sunshine-y on my nails!

I started by painting my nails light yellow (L'Oreal Creme Puffs).  Then I sponged on a 3 color gradient using Sally Hansen Insta-Dry Lightening, Cover Girl Outlast Stay Brilliant Coral Silk, and Sinful Colors Big Daddy.

But I worried that they looked a little too much like candy corn, so I decided to turn them into sun rays.  Had I been thinking of this in the beginning I would've used striping tape, but it was too late for that!  So I borrowed Lisl's white Color Club striper polish.

 And then I made it sparkly by adding a coat of the gold flakie polish from the Revlon Moon Candy set "Universe" and followed it up with an additional coat of Revlon Snow Flurries.

I wasn't crazy about the finished product (all of the glitter coats on top made it kind of bumpy, even after I added a clear top coat), so I think I will definitely try a sun-themed manicure again in the future!

Springtime Gradient Nails

Arden here: Friends, I have a confession.  I ultimately ended up doing two Easter manicures.  After I painted on my cute Easter egg mani, I ended up destroying one of the nails in the shower!  It was slightly devastating.

For my second attempt, I went slightly less specifically Easter, so I could wear it for a few days after Easter.  (I don't know about you, but one of my least favorite things about a holiday-themed manicure is waking up the day after and being like, "UGH, my nails are so out of date now!")  I ended up deciding on a sparkly pastel gradient skittle manicure!  (That was a lot of adjectives all together!)

Nail polish swatches: Lush Lacquer neon polishes

Arden: A couple of weeks ago, Lush Lacquer was having a sale and we bought four mini bottles of their polish, three neons and another glitter.  They are so unique!  I love their neon pieces of glitter.

But before we get to the polish, let me just stop and tell you about the great customer service we received from Lush Lacquer.  After we Gchatted for over an hour about which polishes we wanted to buy, Lisl asked me to place our order.  As Julia Roberts says in Pretty Woman, BIG MISTAKE.  HUGE. Cause I'm always doing things like referring to our blog as "Casa de Nails." (Or, y'know, setting up our Facebook account under that name.)

But in this case, what I did was set up our order, hit "send," and then in the next instant realize I forgot to use their coupon code.  I messaged Lush Lacquer asking if they could cancel my order so I could re-submit it with the code, and they responded within an hour telling me there was no reason to re-submit, they'd go ahead and apply the code and send me a refund.  How great is that?

And now, onto the polish!