WingDustCollections: Zambia Missions 2012

Today I have some very special polishes made by the amazing Stephanie of WingDustCollections.  She has an entire collection of beautiful polishes inspired by her Missions trip to Zambia this summer, and I have three of them to show you.

First is HOPE, a soft white jelly base with white, pink, and holographic square glitters, and white and iridescent micro-glitters.  This one is very sheer, but I didn't want to layer it over a white base because I wanted to keep it looking soft.  This is four easy coats of HOPE with one coat of Seche Vite.

Mongu At Midnight is a mix of various sizes of silver and holographic hex glitters and blue bar glitters in a dark blue shimmer base.  This one gave me a lot of trouble at first; my bottle was super thick, goopy, streaky, and near-impossible to apply nicely.  After contacting Stephanie to ask if she knew about this, we compared bottles and the ones she had definitely looked like it applied much more nicely.  She was extremely apologetic about me getting what was probably just a fluke bad bottle, but I didn't want her to have to send me a new bottle so I added a couple of drops of thinner, let it sit overnight, and added a couple more drops before re-swatching. Ta-da! It was tons better than before.  What you see here is three thin coats with one coat of Seche Vite.

I've included a picture from the first time I swatched it with the super-goopy bottle.  The difference isn't as noticeable in the pictures, but was drastic in person!  Just know that it can be easily fixed with some thinner.  This is two thick coats with one coat of Seche Vite. 

I've saved my favourite of the bunch for last, this is Save A Life. It's a beautiful soft lilac jelly polish with light purple, dark purple, white, silver, and iridescent glitters sprinkled throughout.  This was significantly less opaque than the other two, so I put it over a base of Sally Hansen Lacey Lilac.  This one had the smoothest application of the them all.  This is three coats of Save A Life over Lacey Lilac with one coat of Seche Vite.  (Yes, I filed my nails down a lot before this swatch.  They were getting too long for my liking.) 

Without a doubt I love all of these polishes. Aside from the initial thickness of Mongu At Midnight, the application posed no problems.  A real big bonus with these is that the glitters only need one coat of top coat to be smooth!  If you love these polishes as much as I do, you'll for sure want to check out the rest of her collections!  :)

*EDIT* Stephanie had very generously offered 15% off at her Etsy shop for my readers with the coupon code GLOBE15.  You can find Wing Dust Collections on Facebook here, and her Etsy shop here. 

Disclaimer: The products in this post were sent to me for review and my honest opinion. 

Quidditch Nail Art

Mooorning.  (If you said that in George Weasley`s voice, you're awesome.  If not, you've lived a deprived life and need to go watch this right now!) 

In case you didn't know, I'm a huge Harry Potter fan.  Like read-all-the-books-multiple-times-know-all-the-lines-in-the-movies-can-ramble-off-every-obscure-fact-nobody-should-know kind of fan.  

Oddly enough, it's been almost a year since I did Harry Potter related nails (last Halloween.)  For my sister's birthday party last weekend, I made her a golden snitch birthday cake (yes, I decorate cakes too.)  Of course, I couldn't resist doing Quidditch nails to match :)

I just had to take a picture holding the wand that my super-mega-foxy-awesome-hot friend Michaela made for me, A.K.A. Queen Of All Things Crafty.  My sister has one too, and yes, we know all the spells and have wizard duels.  ("THAT'S ABSURD!")

Yea, yea, freehand nail art definitely isn't my strong point, but I think I did alright.  

I used a base of Orly Snowcone, sponged on a little OPI Don't Touch My Tutu for some depth (not that you can tell in my pictures) added details with acrylic paint, glitters that I pulled out of Pirouette My Whistle, and then sponged on some Essie Pure Pearlfection for a little added magic.  ;)

What do you think of my Quidditch nails?  Are you anywhere near as crazy of a fan as I am?  :D

Sally Hansen Nail Prisms Pink Rose Diamond

This was just one of those polishes that spent most of its days lying unused in the bottom of a bin full of polish, and I had no idea of its value until I started getting really interested in polish.  We have Pink Rose Diamond and Lavender Pearl from the Nail Prisms collection, both which I believe came in a Sally Hansen polish gift set that my sister got for Christmas years ago (she'll be mad if I don't mention they're technically hers.)

The first picture is how it looks outside in the shade, as well as most of the time indoors.  This is three coats of Pink Rose Diamond, with one coat of Seche Vite (yea, yea, dulling the holo...)  Since I own a whopping two bottles of holographic polish, you can tell they're my favourite finish. *end sarcasm* 

Being extremely inexperienced in photographing holos, I tried to do my best.  Since I couldn't get one photo that accurately captured how it looks in the sunlight, I've included 6.  So just mush them all together in your imagination and you should get an accurate portrayal of the colour.  This is getting a little crazy; I should stop typing now. 

nailXchange has a great compilation of all of the Nail Prisms, so if you're curious be sure to check it out, it's a great resource!

I'm not a fan of this shade of pink or holos, so wearing this polish kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit... Even if I think it does look pretty in the pictures. 

Do you own any of the hard-to-find Nail Prisms? Do you like the holos or the duo/multichromes from this collection better? 

Orly Electronica Collection

Or, well, half of it.  I picked up two polishes from the Orly Electronica collection sometime in June when they were on BOGO sale at Sally's; I'm really glad I did because they'll definitely be some of my go-to colours for fall!

Decoded is a dark grey creme, which you saw a couple of days ago in my Grey-dient.  In the pictures it's leaning much more blue-toned than it is in real life, it really is a true grey.  Two coats, flawless formula, stunning colour.  LOVE.

Shockwave is a rich dark royal blue which you saw in my review of Tough As Nails Lacquer the other day.  Pictures were taken outside, and it appears quite a bit darker in indoor lighting.  It's one of those blues that looks navy at times but never looks black; love that!  The VNL you can see in the pictures wasn't visible at all in real life.  Same thing: two coats, flawless formula, amazeballs colour.  DOUBLE RAINBOW.

Gosh, how I love Orly.  Every polish I own is so freaking fantastic (despite the near-inevitable SV shrinkage!)  Luckily I've learned to mostly avoid it with very careful application, and it's sooo totally worth it! Orly FTW! :D  

Do you guys love a good fall-coloured creme as much as I do?  Do you own either of these polishes?  Which one is your favourite?  Comments make me happy :)  Thanks for reading!

Tough As Nails Lacquer

Today I've got a couple polishes made by a lovely fellow blogger, Elizabeth of Tough As Nails Lacquer.  I have two glitter toppers to share with you, 43 Quintillion and Not A Plain Jane.  

First off, I'm just going to mention that Elizabeth has the most amazing product descriptions in her shop; take a look at this one: "43 Quintillion is a topcoat lacquer. It contains hex glitters all of the colors you might find on a certain cube-shaped game from the 1980s, which happens to have forty-three quintillion combinations. 43 Quintillion is the life of the party -- she's a little bit wild, a little bit mixed up, and is always working to see how high she can get her bangs and how crimped she can get her hair."

How great is that?  In my eyes, her greatest feat with this one is that she managed to make multi-coloured glitter not look obnoxious, which is what I find with most others.  I love the mix of black and white glitter peppered throughout the base, it adds so much more visual interest to set it apart from all the other multi-coloured glitters. 

Most of the swatches I've seen of this have it layered over brighter colours, so I chose to layer it over more neutral colours to let the glitter stand out.  Here I've shown it over my Grey-dient of Orly Decoded and Zoya Dove. 

I did have to dab this one on, but I didn't have any problems getting glitter out of the bottle; this was one coat.  I used one coat of Seche Vite for the pictures, but I think you'd probably need two to get a completely smooth finish.  Overall I really like this one and think it's a really versatile polish with endless layering combinations! 

Here is how she describes Not A Plain Jane: "Not A Plain Jane is a topcoat lacquer, containing hex glitters in varying shades of white and pink, along with a few white hearts. Not A Plain Jane is named for one of my favorite people. She is sophisticated, feminine, completely fun, and known to sprinkle fairy dust in the lives of those she loves."

I layered this one over Orly Shockwave (swatches of that soon).  I noticed that, not mentioned in the description, there are also quite a few of what look to be light pink shards.   I didn't get any hearts on my nails, but I saw a couple in the bottle.  Maybe the shards are just ripped up hearts... I'm sorry, that sounds awful.  Either way, I don't personally care for heart glitter so I actually prefer the shards. 

Here I've dabbed on just one coat of glitter; this one is a little more packed with glitter than 43 Quintillion but I think but they are both just about right coverage for glitter toppers. 

Same as 43 Quintillion, I've pictured one coat of Seche Vite but you'll probably need two for a completely smooth finish. 

Be sure to check out Elizabeth's Tough As Nails Lacquer blog, Facebook page, and Etsy shop where her polishes sell for $9USD per full-sized bottle, and she ships to Canada! Woohoo!  :)

Disclaimer: The products in this post were sent to me for review and my honest opinion.  

Glequin Ruffian

Inspired by all of the glequin manicures I've seen around lately, I finally caved and bought some for myself.  I used gold glequins on a base of Orly Prelude To A Kiss for this ruffian(ish) look.

I'm really happy with how this turned out, it looks very elegant and classy, with just a little bling ;)

The glequins held up pretty well on my left hand, but they started falling off my dominant hand after about a day.  It's probably because I only used one coat of Seche Vite, (always shrinks like crazy when I put it over Orly) so next time I think I'll use two coats and it should last longer.

I got the glequins from the Born Pretty Store.  Here's a code to get 7% off your order; click on the picture to be brought directly to the website! :)

Grey-dient

Puns aside, here's a fall-appropriate gradient that I'm absolutely loving!  I started with two coats of Orly Decoded, (swatches soon) and sponged on Zoya Dove. 

I didn't realize until after I was done, but I did the opposite of what I normally do for gradients.  Instead of starting with a lighter colour and sponging on the darker, I started with the dark and sponged on the light.  I guess that Dove was opaque enough, because it obviously worked alright. :P

The colours are showing up really blue in my pictures, but in person they are both true grey colours and blend together beautifully.

Hate to toot my own whistle, but I felt like a freaking genius when I thought of this grey-dient thing.  Not gonna lie.  (Super awkward for me if its been done before and I didn't know...)

Anywho, I've also done some layering over this which looks super awesome, but you'll have to wait for another post for that ;) 

Recently we've been seeing gradients done more often in pastel and bright colours, but how do you like the gradient with more muted fall colours? :)