Spot Overload

OPI Dating A Royal, OPI Dutch Tulips, China Glaze Electric Beat

Sarah, from the amazing nail blog Chalkboard Nails is having a little bit of a dotty contest! If you've checked out my blog before, you'll know that I am quite a fan of the humble dot. There's just so many things you can do with a dot! Turn them into flowers, make patterns, make crazy mermaid nails, robotic dots, Christmas trees, the possibilities really are endless! 

I had dots on the brain when I did this mani (obviously) but I wasn't all that happy with how it turned out. Not sure if the two dotty patterns go all that well together, or even go together at all!

And here's some proof of how much I love dots!

 

After this slight fail, I decided to use my Girly Mermaid manicure as my entry for Sarah's competition. 

I highly recommend checking out the entries so far and submitting your own awesome dotty manis. There are some super cool dots in there!

Blue Moon Manicure

China Glaze Devotion, China Glaze Electric Beat

This is the perfect mani for when you want something awesome looking with not that much extra effort. It's just like painting your nails twice! Super easy. The Ruffian/Moon Manicure has been around for a while now, but China Glaze Devotion was just begging to be used in this kind of a manicure and I was inspired! 

Can I just say again how much I love these blues from the new CG's Electropop collection. I think I've had at least one of these colours on my nails at all times since I got them. I just can't resist them!

Electric Kinetic Keen Flowers

China Glaze Kinetic Candy, China Glaze Electric Beat, China Glaze Peachy Keen

Just some simple little dotted flowers today. I loved the colours together when the bottles were lined up next to each other, but on my nails, not so much. Perhaps if I had've swapped the blues around it might've looked better. 

Kinetic Candy & Rock It

China Glaze Kinetic Candy

I was quite excited about China Glaze's Electropop collection. I am such a sucker for blue and green nail polishes that I had to get all three blues/greens. Kinetic Candy may perhaps be my new absolute favourite colour! It's just the loveliest blue, with a gorgeous dusty sort of hint to it, and I think it goes really well with my skin tone. I got so many comments on what a lovely blue it was when I wore it. I can't wait to wear it again! 

And because I feel bad that there's no nail art you get two swatchy photos! I normally try to avoid just doing regular swatches because there are so many other bloggers who do it so much better, but sadly, I have had boring one colour nails ALL week this week. It's been tragic really. 

Orly Rock It

Here's Orly Rock It from the dazzling Mineral FX collection. The more Orly polishes I buy the more I wish I owned! Rock It is super gorgeous, and has a lovely orange flash to it, which was really quite tricky to capture on camera (you can see it most in the bottle in the lower picture) but was lovely in real life. And it had fabulous staying power. I put this manicure through a lot at work today, and all I ended up with was tip wear. Impressive, Orly.

Ozotic 513

Ozotic 513

I don't have much to say about Ozotic 513, apart from the fact that it is AMAZING! It's a little bit pink, a little bit purple, a lot of awesome! Look at that holo! And sadly, this picture does not do it justice! It's even more amazing in real life. Another great thing about it is it's actually quite a lovely colour even when it's not being all sunny and holo-dazzling.

In other news, I may be posting slightly less over the next 3-4 weeks (by less I mean twice a week instead of three times a week). We're coming up to an excruciatingly busy part of the year at work, known to staff as "Rush". Pretty much says it all. To give you guys a bit of a scale of the whole rush factor, we'll go from having about 100 customers a day to 5000 a day for a solid two weeks. Yep, it's called Rush for a reason! So, I'm guessing (since I've never actually experienced Rush) that I'll be pretty tired of an evening and might not be the chirpy bloggie lass you're all used to. I guess we'll see how it goes!

The Girly Mermaid

OPI Ate Berries In The Canaries, OPI Planks A Lot, China Glaze Light As Air, China Glaze Heli-Yum,  Barry M Gold

I felt it was high time I did another mermaid style manicure and I was in the mood for a bit of therapeutic nail polishing last night so this was what I ended up with! After seeing all the Valentines Day inspired manis that have been popping up I was in a bit of a pink and purple mood! I really should do these mermaid style dotty nails more often! They're so easy (even if they are a bit time consuming)!

Cyberspace Mind Control

Milani Cyberspace, OPI Black Onyx, Bundle Monster BM-221

I sadly had a horrible afternoon at work today, my first not awesome day since I started my new job in January. It was insanely busy all day and ended with a potential disaster that had to be time consumingly averted so unfortunately I wasn't much in the mood for nails this evening when I finally made it home. Usually in cases like these when I've got boring nails happening I'd almost always have some photos of a mani I'd done earlier in the week that was waiting to be posted, but alas, today was not one of those days. 

I've been rocking my new holos all week and not really doing nail art because they're just so amazing on their own, but unfortunately because of this sad sunless weather I haven't been able to get any photos of their amazing rainbowness! Today I had on Milani Cyberspace from the 3D Holographic collection. Man are they sparkly! To jazz it up a bit and make up for not being able to capture the awesome holo in a photo I decided to stamp over it. I'm pretty sure I've seen black geometric patterns over holo polishes somewhere around the interwebs and always thought they looked amazing! This particular combination reminds me of something you'd see on a sci fi show. Or perhaps I just had aliens/outer space on the brain because the polish is called Cyberspace! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out in the end!

Ikat Nails a la Mr. Candiipants

Most people would've seen this photo from Lucky Mag's tumblr where they were all "In our next issue we'll show the tutorial for these nails!"

We nail polish and nail art lovers were all "Hooray! They look so cool! Let's do this!" Then it turned out they were just nail wraps. Sadness all round, no tutorial. It's like showing someone an amazing plate of muffins, saying I'm going to show you how to create these, and they get all excited, then you just hold up a packet muffin mix, and they wanted to make those muffins from scratch and show off their madly cooking skills! A little bit disappointing.

Candice, of Mr.Candiipants, nail art genius on Tumblr decided that she'd do what we all thought Lucky Mag would do and make a nail art tutorial for these nails. And man did she do a good job! Check out her amazing YouTube tutorial here. Here is what I ended up with after watching her tutorial. Aren't they cool!

OPI Fly, OPI Alpine Snow, China Glaze Heli-Yum, BYS Black Nail Striper

They were super easy too, apart from a nail striper, you don't need any kind of special tools or anything like that. You don't have any pesky drying time to deal with, like tape manicures, you can just paint your nails, blob on some white, blob on some other colour, and stripe away, as messily as you please and they'll still look pretty super! I realised after I'd put the top coat on that I forgot to do the black bits in the middle, but oh well, they're still cool without it. And, they look even more amazing from a bit of a distance!

And another nail polish haul update... My order from piCture pOlish arrived today! I got piCture pOlish Heavy Metal and Ozotics 513, 531 and 534. Man, are they sparkly! Now if only the sun would show its face here. Seriously, it's meant to be summer! Come back sun!

Black Glitter Gradient

OPI Skull & Glossbones, LA Girl Glitter Addict Uninhibited, OPI Black Onyx

Black glitter! So epically amazing!!! I recently received one of my massive hauls of nail polish and one of the polishes I was quite excited about was this LA Girl Glitter Addict one. I love all kinds of glitter. It's one of my favourite substances, especially when it's in nail polish form. So of course I just had to have this one. Black glitter! I just can't get over how cool it is! 

I had to do something special with this glitter in honour of its awesomeness so I attempted a glitter gradient over OPI Skull & Glossbones (you know how I love it!). On my first attempt I actually tried to do the much cooler gradient mani where the glitter is the most dense at the cuticle end instead of the tip, but it was quite the failure. So I went back to the easier version of the glitter gradient and was quite impressed with the results, if I do say so myself! To make the tips that little bit extra black I kind of dabbed on some Black Onyx to fill in some stubborn gaps.

I actually still have this manicure on, and I did it on Wednesday night, which is a really long time for a mani for me! That's how much I loved it!

Anyhoo, back to the haul... I got:

• LA Girl Glitter Addict Uninhibited
• LA Girl Glitter Addict Celebrate
• LA Girl Disco Brites Strobe Light
• NYX Girls Carnival
• NYX Girls Robotic
• Kleancolor Metallic Red
• Kleancolor Blue Satin
• Kleancolor Disco Ball
• Kleancolor Holo Chrome
• Milani 3D Holographic Digital
• Milani 3D Holographic Cyber Space
• Milani 3D Holographic High Res

I think that was it. I couldn't wait to try Kleancolor Holo Chome... look how sparkly it is! So amazing. And this wasn't even in proper sunlight! It was a dodgy flash photo. Sydney has been depressingly rainy for the past week, so this was as good as I could get. Excuse the lack of clean up, I was just too dazzled by all the colours of the rainbow coming out of my fingers to bother with any of that!

Mattified Pointy Moon Thing

OPI Skull & Glossbones, OPI I Eat Mainely Lobster, Milani Gold, Essie Matt About You

Whoa, am I obsessed with Skull & Glossbones or what? I've only had it a few weeks and already I've used it at least twice a week! Which is an amazingly massive amount of usage for one nail polish! In fact, I'm using it for the mani I'm doing tonight! I just can't get enough! 

I've been seeing these triangular reverse french manicures (does anyone know what on earth these things are called???) on the interwebs and finally got around to doing one. My lines aren't all that crisp because I was a little impatient, but from arm's length they looked pretty cool! 

For a bit of bling I used my dotter to pick one piece of glitter from Milani Gold and stuck it on the point. Then I mattified the whole lot!