Glitter Mania

Sally Hansen Celeb City, OPI Sparrow Me The Drama, Born Pretty Store Glitter

So. Much. Glitter! I finally bit the bullet and ordered some loose glitter from Born Pretty Store. I blame Sammy and her fabulous "glequin" manis. I'm going to borrow Sammy's fabulous name for these things - glequins, because I'm pretty the nail polish world has embraced the word so much that it's now what they're officially known as!

If you hadn't already realised from my previous manis, I am an extreme lover of glitter. I have multiple pairs of glitter shoes (and a pair that's covered in sequins!) that I wear on a daily basis and random tubs of glitter floating around my room. It's not unusual for me to arrive to work and be told there's a piece of glitter stuck to my face. After playing around with my new glittery tubs of fun I settled on this insane glitter Barbie manicure. Hopefully my next glitter explosion will be a little more classy and subtle, if that's even possible. 

Day 19 - Galaxies

Orly Liquid Vinyl, Ozotic 903, Ozotic 908, Ozotic 534, China Glaze Snow Globe, Milani Jewel FX Silver, Sinful Colors Queen Of Beauty

Gosh there are a lot of different polishes in this mani! I was quite excited about Galaxy day, but I think it's a mani that I'll definitely have to try again. I did like how these turned out, and they were a lot sparklier in real life, but after doing them, I think that less would've been more.

Dressed Up Stripey Nails

OPI Fly, OPI Mermaid's Tears, OPI Planks a Lot, China Glaze Electric Beat, Orly Liquid Vinyl, China Glaze Skyscraper

First off... you all must see Whitney's (Dressed Up Nails) stellar manicure which I've shamelessly ripped off here. Click on it! Be amazed! I love stripes, so when her mani popped up on my computer screen as I was having breakfast yesterday I knew I had to do one too! 

Whitney seems to be some kind of nail art robot lady because she had the patience to paint this pattern on all 10 nails. I planned to limit it to six because I had a sneaky suspicion that it would take me  longer than I expected. I'm glad I stuck to six. It took me a lot longer to do than I'm willing to admit but I think it was time well spent!

Day 18 - Half Moons

Orly Glitz, OPI Dutch Tulips, Essence Make It Golden, Essie Matte About You

I'll admit I kind of cheated on this whole half moon thing. I know they're meant to be done with little circular stickers over your cuticles, but every time I attempt it that way they just look really bizarre on my hands (and weirdly not anything at all like everyone else's  Perhaps my stickers are too big?) and I have to change my mani straight away! So, for Half Moon day I decided to go for the skinnier moon and rock it ruffian style. It's still moon shaped so I say it still counts.

I was quite happy with this mani before I added the glitter, but some days you just can't help but add glitter and I couldn't resist! And who doesn't love mattified glitter?

Wacky Space Rocks

Essence Jacob's Protection, OPI Pink Shatter, OPI Pirouette My Whistle

Hello all! Some of you may have noticed that I've added a new little thing just to the right of this post called Today's Nails. Call it an unofficial New Year's resolution, but I kind of want to intensely document what goes on my nails on a day to day basis. 

I like facts and spreadsheets and statistics, and I'm actually quite curious as to how often I really paint my nails, as well as what my most used brands, colours etc are. This led to me deciding to do a 365 of sorts on my nails this year. Every day I will take a photo on my phone (so no excuse not to do it!) of what's on my nails and it'll pop up in that little thing on the blog. 

I'm hoping it will also make me be less of a lazy bones and post my blog worthy manis more quickly, since you'll all be able to stalk Little Nails flickr and yell "Rosie, we know you did this mani two weeks ago! Stop being such a lazy bones!" at me when I'm slacking! 

So, onto today's mani, and yes, this is what's on my nails this very second! 

I'll be honest with you, this is perhaps one of the weirdest combinations of polish I've had on my nails in a long time. Yesterday I wore Essence's Jacob's Protection*. Then, after work I decided to add to it for today. On went a coat of Pink Shatter. Next I added a coat of Pirouette My Whistle because I couldn't be bothered to add a top coat. I was actually very surprised by the end result. They look kind of spacey and kind of rocky. Like fancy moon rocks!

*Ugh, it kind of annoys me that this is a Twilight themed polish. It was purchased on its own glittery merit, not because I'm "Team Jacob" or anything like that! 

NYE 2013

China Glaze Grape Pop, Essie Silken Cord, Sally Hansen Celeb City, Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty, Orly Liquid Vinyl, Glimmer by Erica Drizzt

Happy 2013 everyone! I hope you all had a fabulous New Year's Eve. I celebrated my first NYE in Sydney with a bunch of friends in a park overlooking Sydney Harbour and the Sydney Harbour Bridge (where the greatest NYE fireworks in Australia are!). Our park had a view of the bridge to the front of us and cliffs that overlooked the ocean behind us and it was so beautiful! 

Of course I needed a glitter fest on my nails for this amazing event! I based this mani around Drizzt, which is one of my favourite glitters. I even attempted to write 2013! After a lot of touching up with black polish I was quite please with how it turned out. I have even more respect now for people who do insanely intricate nail art with little bitty brushes. I think I'll stick to my dots and stripes!

piCture pOlish Gene Doll

piCture pOlish Gene Doll, OPI I Eat Mainely Lobster, OPI Ate Berries in the Canaries

I love a good glitter. piCture pOlish's Gene Doll is a lovely fuchsia glitter polish. I've been obsessed with feature nails lately, and Gene Doll matched perfectly to OPI's Ate Berries in the Canaries. 

Summer is in full swing here in Australia and I love being able to wear super bright, colourful nail polish. And what's better than bright polish? Bright glitter!

piCture pOlish Gene Doll can be purchased online from piCture pOlish.

This polish was sent to me for review.

Day 17 - Glitter

China Glaze Riveting,  Glimmer by Erica Muy Caliente 

I am a huge fan of glitter. Glitter nail polish, and just glitter in general. To give you an idea of my love, I currently have a 250g tub of glitter sitting on my desk. It's just my general, everyday use glitter. 

For Glitter day I couldn't resist Muy Caliente. It's super sparkly and amazingly bright and summery! I layered it over China Glaze Riveting, which is also a sparkle fest. These were just the most epic glitter overload nails. They were awesome!

Day 6 - Purple

Deborah Lipmann I Know What Boys Like, Glimmer By Erica Drizzt

Day 6 was purple and another Glimmer By Erica glitter explosion. I popped Drizzt over DL I Know What Boys Like (which looks super purple in these photos). It's another amazing glitter and I couldn't stop staring at my nails the whole time I had it on! I can't wait to try it over other colours. 

Day 5 - Blue

Kink Ink, Beneath The Blue Glimmer by Erica

This is seriously one of the most beautiful glitter nail polishes I've ever seen. A few weeks ago I couldn't help but buy some of Erica's amazing nail polishes on Etsy (check out her Etsy shop here). Day 5 of the challenge was blue and I couldn't wait to try out Beneath The Blue. It was even more beautiful in real life!

This is also my 100th post (woo!). I'm glad it's celebrated with such a lovely glitter! 

Day 4 - Green

Essence You Belong To Me, China Glaze Aquadelic, OPI Fly, Milani Gold

Day 4 was green, and I was originally going to try and do some kind of leaf themed elaborate mani. I had planned to add more lines (little tiny perpendicular ones between these lines, like the veins on a leaf) but when I got to this point I liked it so I stopped. I did however add some glitter from Milani Gold to the corners for a bit of fun!

piCture pOlish Blog Fest 2012 - Tease

Happy piCutre pOlish Blog Fest Day! I was lucky enough to get the chance to participate in this year's piCture pOlish blog fest. I was super excited about just being able to be a part of it, but also slightly worried about possibly not liking the polishes I ended up with, or getting ones that were similar to ones I already had. Sometimes I can be quite fussy with my nail polish. Luckily, I didn't need to worry. Both polishes I ended up with were ones that definitely would've caught my eye (and probably ended up in my little stash eventually!)

piCture pOlish Tease

Tease is a new Mesh shade from piCture pOlish. Tease has a gorgeous pink base with teeny tiny silver glitter and it's just so sparkly! So sparkly that I felt the need to show it in motion...

Tease applied beautifully and looked awesome with just two coats. It's one dense glitter and I like that! I have quite a soft spot in my heart for glitter, especially glitter that doesn't need a base colour to cover your nails. 

piCture pOlish is available through their website (check out the piCture pOlish Network if you don't live in Australia). You can also check them out on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest!

Check out all the other bloggers participating:

I nabbed the Inlink code from the lovely Cathy at More Nail Polish

Lush Lacquer Birthday Cake

Lush Lacquer Birthday Cake

I've been a bit lazy this week, no nail art. To make up for it, I've been using glitter nail polish! This mani is Lush Lacquer's Birthday Cake. It was a tricky one to photograph (it didn't help that it's been miserable and raining here in Sydney with dreary light). The glitter is so much more obvious and bright in real life. 

One amazing thing I noticed about this nail polish is that it was strangely very easy to remove. So much easier than pretty much every other glitter nail polish ever. I wish all glitter nail polish was this easy to remove. 

Cookies, Cream & Stripes

Kink Ink, Essie Marshmallow, LA Girl Uninhibited

While perusing the nail polish section of the interwebs this week I saw Sarah's (of Chalkboard Nails fame) cookies and cream manicure and I thought, finally a use for the mess of a polish that is Essie Marshmallow! 

Because I've been a bit slack (actually quite slack) lately in the nail art department, I thought I'd go all out with the cookies and cream theme and do some stripy nails using tape, as well as black glitter sandwich accent nails. I love how the glitter sandwich looks like cookies and cream ice cream, and the stripes look like stacks of Oreos (yes, we do have Oreos here! I was slightly obsessed with them last year, eating packets upon packets!). 

I'm in the middle of making batch of chocolate chip biscuits at the moment, so this mani is quite fitting! (Here in Australia, we call cookies biscuits, although if people say 'cookie' we know they're talking about)

Are you blue? Purple? Green? Or just plain amazing?

China Glaze Rodeo Fanatic, Ozotic 505, Ozotic 528

As I mentioned in my last post, I bought a few new Ozotics last week, one of which was Ozotic 505. This is a damn awesome nail polish! It's blue, it's purple, it's green! And it changes completely depending on what you layer it over! I'd painted my nails with Rodeo Fanatic (because it's one of my all time favourite nail polishes and I love applying it!) and since it's a similar sort of colour, I thought I'd see how 505 went over it, instead of layering it over black like I do with most Ozotics.

For a bit of extra multi-chrome fun I added a coat of Ozotic 528 over the top. Ozotic 528 has the same colour shift as 505, just in glitter form. I nabbed this combo idea from Cathy of More Nail Polish fame (and general Queen of Holo & Ozotics). I was a bit lazy though and didn't do that many coats of glitter as she did. Check out her mani for 528 glitter awesomeness. 

And sadly, if you haven't heard, Ozotic is discontinuing a bunch of their polishes, including both 505 and 528 (most of the 500s in fact), so if you were thinking of getting some Ozotics, do it now before it's too late! Picture Polish (the distributors of Ozotic) also said on their Facebook page that the availability of Ozotic polishes in general is a bit unknown at the moment. Best to get the ones you want while they're still around!

Cake, Nails & Glitter!

OPI Black Onyx, Ozotic 528, Ozotic 529

I was in a glittery Ozotic mood on Friday, mainly becasue my Friday afternoon was spent looking through swatches of Ozotic nail polish and Picture Polish nail polishes. The lovely ladies from Picture Polish were having a great little sale on a bundle of Ozotics and PPs and I was trying to figure out which colours to get. 

Ozotic 528 and 529 are both multichrome glitters and they are just amazing! It's so hard to get a photo that shows the real life awesomeness of these glitters! 

Over the weekend I caught up with my friend Julia, who is getting into nail art and wanted to have a little nail art, nail polish play around afternoon. We got out a rainbow selection of nail polishes out and played around. While Julia mastered the dotter, I painted my  housemate Lucy's (AKA The Giver Of Chanel Peridot) nails. I liked the colours she picked so much I thought I'd do my nails the exact same!

Also over the weekend, we celebrated Lucy's birthday with a lovely pie and an epic cake (my other housemate Anna is a genius baker!) Lucy's nails (OPI Panda-Monium Pink & OPI Pirouette My Whistle) matched her cake so well I insisted on a photo! 

Afternoon Picnic Glitter Bomb

China Glaze Rodeo Fanatic, Kleancolor Afternoon Picnic

This began as a a plain ol' one colour manicure. Rodeo Fanatic is one of my all time favourite colours. I thought I'd jazz it up a little and add some glitter to one nail, just one coat of Afternoon Picnic to just one nail. Somehow this was what I ended up with. 

I kind of dabbed on the glitter and used the little end of my dotter to move them around and place them so I had good coverage. Two coats of Seche Vite later and I had the bling-iest nails of my life! 

China Glaze Prism

China Glaze Prism

It's so sparkly! This is one of the nail polishes that I bought after my self imposed ban ended. It was really hard to photograph actually, you can already see how different it looks just from the sun to the shade. Anyway, I think I'll leave the swatching of colours to the more professional peeps. 

I also just wanted to show why I have  to change my nail polish so often. The first photo in this post was taken this morning, just before I left for work. This photo here however, I snapped on my phone just as I got home this evening. Glitter DESTRUCTION! I am quite the fidgeter/picker of nail polish, and with glitter being so thick I just can't stop scratching it off. At least I have less glitter to remove at the end of the day!

Glittery Jelly Goodness

OPI Dating A Royal, OPI Rainbow Connection, OPI Houston We Have A Purple

Lately I have been a little bit uninspired (coughlazycough) when it comes to nail art and doing manicures I've seen online, or tutorials I've come across, and even just having plain ol' regularly painted nails using only one colour (the horror!). In my defence, there has been so much epic nail art around lately that I just haven't needed to think about what to do on my nails, because I've always seen something amazing that I want to try. 

This manicure was inspired by the AMAZING glitter jelly mani by Eugenia from Ommorphia Beauty Bar which was a guest post over at Fashion Polish. After seeing so many pastel pale pretty glitter jelly sandwich combinations I was amazed by Eugenia's version of it. One of the few jelly polishes I own is a lovely purple colour, so of course I had to try out a similar manicure! 

I definitely recommend checking hers out, she does the tricky glitter at the cuticle end glitter gradient and she even mattified the whole thing, which is just great! 

Perhaps I should try one of those challenge things, so I have a nice tidy nail art to do list for when I can't think of stuff to do!

P.S. My nail polish ban is over!!! Am going to try and keep it under control, but there may already be a package of 9 polishes on its way to me...oops (C'mon, I can't not have any Hunger Games nail polishes, or miss out on the Prismatic glitters, or the New York Ballet glitter. Plus, they're not all for me, a few are for my housemate!)

Effie Trinket - Nail Polish Queen!

China Glaze Strawberry Fields, Barry M 289 Gold, Essence Make It Golden (and a tiny hint on the very edge of the tips of Ulta3 Gold Rush Fever)

Like every other person on the planet I've seen the Hunger Games at the movies in the past week and read the books. And like every other nail polish addict on the planet, I've done a HG manicure! Hooray! 

Because I am not all that skilled with painting intricate designs like Mockingjay birds, or tiny bows and arrows, I did something different. When I saw the movies I loved Effie's nails. I love Elizabeth Banks (they need to bust Avery out of North Korea on 30 Rock so she can be a regular again on the show!) and honestly, Effie was my favourite part of the movie! These nails are inspired by the awesome gradient mani she rocked in the reaping scene:

(hardest thing to find a photo of on the interwebs. They were much more impressive in the movie but you get the idea)

Anyway. They were awesome so obviously I had to have them too!