Sunset Stripes

 I was originally going to do a bit more with this design, but I ended up having an awful time with this manicure. The adhesive on the nail vinyls that I used stuck to my nails and made a huge mess. It drove me crazy, so I decided to clean up as much as I could and call it a day, and thankfully the camera was actually pretty forgiving. I used Xtreme Wear Purple Craze, Vibrant Violet, Raspberry Rave, For Sher-Bert, Red Rebel, and Sunny Side. I love the gradient these polishes made, so I'll probably use them again, hopefully with more success.

PNMC: Geometric

 The prompt this week is geometric! I made a bunch of triangles with the help of striping tape. The base is Xtreme Wear Tickled Pink, and the triangles are Xtreme Wear Big Teal and Xtreme Wear Babe Blue.

Random Dotting

Hi! Recently one of my favorite lines of nail polish, Sally Hansen Hard As Nails Xtreme Wear, came out with a new collection. Obviously I picked up some of the colors and immediately had to play around with them. For this manicure I grabbed a few of my favorite of those polishes and went to town. I really had no plans when I started this manicure, but I ended up loving it, and wearing it for nearly five days! It' been a while since I've done some crazy dotting, and who doesn't love a good dotticure? The base color is extremely tricky to photograph, but I did my best!

The base is Xtreme Wear Pefect Pear-Ing. For the dots I used Xtreme Wear Berry Juicy, Razz-Berry, and Peach Beach.

New31DC: Day 18

Hello! Today calls for my oldest untried! I mentally looked through my collection and almost immediately knew which polish I was going to use. Xtreme Wear Strobe Light is my oldest untired, at least I think so.  I got it Christmas of 2010 I think. I never knew what to layer it over, so it just sort of got lost in my collection. I really love this polish though! Strobe Light has small multi-sized light rose glitter, and larger holographic glitter. My bottle was messed up from the store, so the formula was a little goopy and a bit hard to work with, but that's nothing that a little thinner can't fix.

I layered Strobe Light over a black, Essie Mint Candy Apple, and Zoya Shelby.

Things Of Similar Nature

Recently, browsing about my nail polish collection, I noticed a couple of polishes that have a lot of commonalities. I knew they weren't all the same, but I wanted to see just how different they are. The colors I grabbed are Xtreme Wear Midnight Sky, China Glaze Haunting, Stone Cold, and Zoya Dovima.

Midnight Sky, Haunting, Stone Cold, Dovima

Haunting, with its dark black base and and distinguishable silver glitter, is bar far the most different of the group. Dovima is a dark grey with very micro silver glitters. It's a matte color, but in these photos I'm wearing a glossy topcoat. Midnight Sky and Stone Cold are near identical, with the exception that Stone Cold has a matte finish. They both have grey bases, lighter than Dovima, and are packed with noticeable silver  micro glitter. Midnight Sky is just a tad shinier, and the formula is slightly better, just because it's not a matte formula. I love all of these colors and am glad that I'm now reassured that they are more different than I originally thought.

Gunmetal Scene

Here are two of the oldest polishes I own. Today I swatched Xtreme Wear Gunmetal, and Marine Scene. Before I get into the polishes I just want to say that I think these two colors make a very good combination. 

Gunmetal is dark shimmery grey with a blue tint to it. Marine Scene is a turquoise blue, a perfect mermaid color. I can't really judge the formula on these, because they are both many years old and have been used countless times, causing the formula to thicken up. I can however say that, as an avid user of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear polishes, the formula is very good for the brand overall, especially for the price you pay. Both these polishes were opaque, and matched bottle color, in two coats.

In The Spotlight

Today I have Sally Hansen Hard As Nails Xtreme Wear In The Spotlight. It has quite the title. It's also quite the polish! It simply consists of holographic bar glitter in a clear base. The holograph is very strong, so it actually looks like you have glitter on your nails rather than just odd rectangles. To get a good coverage you kind of have to place the glitter, but only a bit. Something I really like about this polish is that all the glitter lies flat so it doesn't hang off the nail and snag on things, which I usually experience when using bar glitter. It's a simple polish that provides a very interesting touch to a plain color.

I layered ITS over Xtreme Wear Emerald City, Hot Magenta, China Glaze Frostbite, Coconut Kiss, and Cross Iron 360.

Midnight Blue Sea

Today I used Xtreme Wear Midnight Sky and Deep Blue Sea. Their finish is very similar to the polishes I posted about the other day. Midnight Sky is very opaque, while DBS takes three coats to reach full opacity. I just did a bit of a design on each finger.

French Tip

Here is Xtreme Wear Cherry Red, and Teeny Greeny Bikini. They are very similar in finish, with silver micro glitter. I've swatched Cherry Red before, but  this is the first time I've used TGB. It was pretty sheer, especially compared to the formula of CR, and required three coats.

I also did a french tip! I don't think I've ever actually done one of these before... I'm not really a fan of them, but this is pretty cute. My friend said it looked like Christmas, I thought it looked more like a melon.

An Xtreme Xperience

Hello! Today I'm wearing two colors from what I believe is the latest Xtreme Wear collection. I got them in August, but just finally got around to wearing them. The base color is Deep Blue Sea. It's a denim like blue with silver micro glitters, it's almost like a foil.

On top of DBS I layered Twinkle Twinkle. It has sparse large holographic hexagonal glitters, and deep blue and silver glitters. I initially thought that the blue glitters were grey, until I compared it next to a blue. Twinkle Twinkle's glitters are not dense at all, but I don't mind, it adds a nice accent.  

Lady Luck

I couldn't believe it when I saw the new Sally Hansen collection, Gem Crush, at my nearby Bed Bath And Beyond. A lot of the polishes caught my eye, but I just decided to just get one of them for now, Lady Luck.

Pointer and Pinky- LL Over Xtreme Wear Flirt

Middle and Ring- LL over Xtreme Wear Posh Plum

Lady Luck is purple burgundy micro glitters with big circular holo glitters in a clear base. I had this by itself on one nail ( it got destroyed before I could take a picture) and it was a bit patchy, and almost looked kind of dirty in a way. But on top of similar colors it's amazing! I hated the brush though. I don't know why polish brands keep making paddle brushes. Other than that I really liked the color, and from what I saw, the rest of the collection has nice colors too, a lot of dupes though.

Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Pumpkin Spice

Pumpkin Spice was all the rave around Halloween. I felt like it was more of a late fall/ Thanksgiving color than a Halloween color, so I've been saving it for now.

Pointer and ring: Pumpkin Spice

Middle and pinky: Pumpkin Spice over black.

Pumpkin Spice is a brown/ black sheer jelly base with orange glitters throughout. I prefer the way the color looks by itself, except it took four coats to get to that opacity. Over black it's pretty boring, nothing special.

Week Of Glitter: Xtreme Wear Set The Stage

Day 3 of my Glitters Week! Since Set The Stage is part of Sally Hansen's Extreme Wear line, obviously I had to have it. I was excited when I originally purchased it because it was unique to my collection, but upon further inspection, I realized that the glitter isn't very dense, and therefore lost all desire to use it.

Set The Stage has gold micro glitters and hexagonal glitters in a clear base. At first I was less than thrilled about how sparse the glitters in this polish are. It's not a very buildable polish, but I kinda like how the gold looks all scattered on the nail.

This is Set The Stage layered over Orly Sweet Peacock. I've been really into the blue and gold combination lately, so I'm digging how this manicure looks.

Sally Hansen Salon Effects: Spun For You

This is my last Halloween manicure for the year! And I hardly even had to do anything! For my last Halloween manicure of the year I decided to give Sally Hansen Salon Effects another shot because they came out with the cutest designs for fall! I originally was going to resist buying these, considering the miserable results I got last time, but I caved.

I have to say, I cannot get these things to work for me! I don't know what I've been doing wrong! I've tried it with and without topcoat, and they peel up right away! They have a new collection coming out for winter, and as adorable as those are, I don't think I'll be buying any of them. They are too expensive for what they are, especially if your somewhat good at freehand nail art, and, for me at least, they don't come even close to lasting even 5 days, let alone 10.

Despite the lousy outcome I had with them, I really like the look. I just wish that they were either a little cheaper, or had better lasting ability. I got a lot of compliments on these and I hated having to say that they were, in fact, not freehand.

31 Day Challenge: Day 1

I recently came across a certain post by rebeccalikesnails , a fellow blogger, whom I highly admire. She has begun the 31 Day Challenge. It seemed like a lot of fun, so I couldn't resist doing it myself.

So here we go!

Day One: Red Nails-

Ignore the awkward lighting, I had to change my camera settings to capture the color better.

Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Red Carpet is one of my favorite reds. Its supposedly a dupe for China Glaze Ruby Pumps, but I've never tried that, so I don't have much input. Red Carpet is blood red packed with small red glitter.

Mismatched

I've really been into the "mismatched" nail looks recently, when no two nails are the same. So I decided to try my hand at it. Here's what I came up with.

I used Xtreme Wear The Real Teal on every nail. The flowers are White On and Bubblegum Pink. On the ring finger are a couple coats of Teal-y Cool over The Real Teal. The base color for the other nails is Wet Cement.