Blog Awards!

The Adorable Blog Award rules are as follows:
--Include the logo in your blog or post
--Nominate as many blogs which you like
--Be sure to link your nominees within your post
--Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog
--Share the love and link to this post and to the person from whom you received this award.

Today I received this award from Brooke over at GETCHA NAILS DID ! Thanks so much! It's my first award. :-) Gosh, I don't know who to give one to, I love so many blogs! Hmm, I wont drag on but here are some nail and beauty blogs I want to nominate:
Clumps of Mascara The first beauty blogger I reached out to, she's amazing!
Bella in the City She's hilarious, down to earth and has some beautiful nails!
What Katie Did Her Polish Love the name of her blog and her nails are gorgeous!
Gettin Nailed Love her blog and nails!
My Simple Little Pleasures Her nails make me jealous and I love going to see all the detailed pics of her polish.

Its always great here in the blogosphere :-) Thanks, ladies!

Clean Up Method?

Okay, I don't know about you, but I have not perfected my clean up method and the nail polish around my cuticles is driving me insane! Usually my nails end up looking like this:

Do you see the polish pooling around the cuticles? Never mind that this magenta looks red on me, but the cuticles!!! So last night I was reading Getcha Nails Did and Brooke did a post about how she cleans up after her manicure. I think the cotton on the orange stick method is great, but I still have problems. Then she said something about not painting the whole nail, just getting as close to the sides and cuticles without touching them. A light went off in my head and I tried this with last nights manicure. Plus I added a little bootleg method of my own. Haha. Check it out:

Yes that is scotch tape! I didn't have any Vaseline to put around my cuticles, so I used tape and the orange stick method. My Zoya Barbie( a color I absolutely adore!) manicure turned out like this:

Okay, that's only slightly better, but now the space between my cuticles is too wide. One of these days I'm going to get it. I promise. Trial and error, trial and error.

-Lachelle

My First Dupes?

L to R: Pinky and Middle finger: OPI Eiffel for this Color, Ring and Index finger: Nicole Show You Care

While going through my polish to find something to wear for today, I came across an old favorite, OPI Eiffel for This Color. I picked it but only to have Nicole Show You Care catch my eye. I held both of them up and I figured they must be dupes. I mean it's possible since OPI makes Nicole polishes and everyone knows that Eiffel for This Color is a Lincoln Park after Dark dupe. Meanwhile, while I'm comparing polishes, my boyfriend is looking at me shaking his head. "They're both the same color!" He thinks its funny because I finally have enough polish in my collection to have a dupe. However, I see a subtle difference though. EFTC is a slightly more blackened purple than Show You Care. I think this would be more evident in a picture without flash or outside but I didn't have time to do that. For my NOTD I ended up picking Show You Care because my bottle of EFTC is getting very low and it doesn't apply as smoothly anymore. Also, a difference between the two polishes that has nothing to do with the color is the brushes. I don't know why Nicole doesn't have those awesome Pro-Wide brushes like OPI.

Oh well, I don't mind having a dupe of this gorgeous color. It was my first OPI and possibly my favorite vampy polish of all time.

Black Manicure + Nail Art?

Okay, this weekend, specifically Sunday, I had lots of errands I wanted to get done. One of them was to give my self a new manicure and pedicure. Well, those two things took up a lot of time because I kept messing up the look I wanted. I was inspired by a Twitter picture that the lovely Brittany from Clumps of Mascara tweeted of her gorgeous, funky blue and green manicure. So I said to myself, I think I'll try that. Well, I tried. For at least 2 hours. I used lots of nail polish remover and black nail polish to end up with this. Nothing like the picture of B's nails! Also, for some reason my Sally Hansen Black Out nail polish was the consistency of stringy, clumpy glue; so imagine trying to do your nails with Elmer's quick drying glue. Yeah. No bueno.

I'm not sure why the pink on my nail looks red, but I took a picture of my nails + the nail art polishes I used to prove it's pink. This is the same look I did for my pedicure. It turned out okay, I guess because I can see it from far away. By the fourth episode in a row of The Nanny on Nick at Nite(why?) that I was watching while the polish dried I was frustrated, so this is what I ended up with.

Oh well, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

-Lachelle

LA Colors Phenomena

I went here before with Essie Pool Boy. That is a color similar to this one and I hated it so much on me that I mailed to my mother. When she got it, the bottle had broken :-( but the OPI Mod-ren girl that was in the same package was okay.

This is two coats + Zoya Armor. It's too berry-ish for me. Almost too close to red. And red makes me feel some kind of way. :-( Since it was only a dollar, I don't feel too bad about it. Maybe I can put it on my toes or mail it to my mother to replace her never was bottle of Essie Pool Boy.

-Lachelle

LA Colors Electric Charge

(The pictures of this one look dramatically different with the flash. The real color is best represented by the pictures indoors + no flash. Its more of a salmon pink in my opinion.)

Another one of the polishes I found at the drug emporium. What I like about these colors is that for a 99 cent nail polish they stay on pretty well with a coat of Seche Vite. My Atomic manicure stayed on for about 4 days with only small chips on my thumbs until I decided to change it to this. Electric charge is not unique color but it's a shade of pink I don't think I had in my collection yet. This is three coats + Seche Vite. While I was at it, I decided to do a pedicure with this color and I did a white flower on my big toe on both feet. I don't know why I don't soak my feet more often. Putting my feet in warm, vanilla scented water was relaxing and that combined with pushing back my cuticles helped me to have better results, in my opinion.

I wanted to do polka dots but I did a messy job on my left thumb and was discouraged. Oh well.

-Lachelle

LA Colors Atomic

Outdoor + No Flash (above)
Indoors + Flash

Now, this is the green I need in my life. This is everything I wanted my first green polish to be but wasn't with Form One Lime ( I knew I should have followed my instinct and gotten a creme instead of shimmer). I fell in love with this one on the shelf and I knew I had to have it. It even made me feel better about my new short nails. Oh yeah, as evident in the pictures, I have short nails now and it isn't even my fault! I was helping to fix a mistake of my coworker's (she knows who she is, grrr) and I broke my left index fingernail. I was really upset! Just because I felt like they were at a length I liked. So instead of having one silly looking nail, I had to cut them all. So back to square one. However, I told my coworker that there will be revenge. And it will be epic. Then I told her that she did it just because she wanted my hands to look like sawed off mitts like hers. Oops. That was mean. I guess we're even now?

Anyway, back to this polish. It went on smooth and this is two coats + Seche Vite. I also wanted to use my new nail art polish and I did a design on my middle finger on both hands. It was late at night and I knew I had to get to sleep, but I wanted to do something to this manicure.

Happy Friday everybody :-),
Lachelle

Nail Polish Finds-LA Colors

Today, I stumbled upon a dusty treasure chest of awesome nail polish. Let me tell you about it! Okay, I checked my e-mail at work today and saw that I had spent 25 dollars at Sally Beauty Supply in May so they sent me a coupon for 15% off my entire purchase. Cool, so then the plan would be to go there after work and get one polish. When I got home after work, I decided to take a short 30 minute nap :-) and then go to Sally's. After waking up and getting on the road, I decided to stop by the Drug Emporium which was in the same shopping center. Wow, I'm glad I never stepped foot inside Sally's because this place hit me upside the head with their selection! It looks like a innocent, old dusty little grocery/drug store but when I found their "professional nail care" aisle I had to stifle a shout of joy. Old (I'm talking Chicago collection) and new collections of OPI, including that Colorama one, China Glaze, Orly, CND nail treatments, Seche Vite, Sally Hansen, NYX and LA Colors....and I'm probably still leaving out some stuff. And all of it is fairly cheap! I got three polishes from LA Colors for 99 cents apiece, those LA Colors nail art polishes I have been wanting forever for 1.71 and some cuticle sticks. All for the price of one polish at Sally's. My total was 5.71! I'm heading back to that place soon, what I got was just the tip of the iceberg hopefully.

Petites Pink Crush (Quite possibly the ugliest polish I own)

Indoor + Flash (above)

Outdoor + No Flash

Here's something I picked up grocery shopping at Wal Mart this weekend. It was cheap, the color was cute and it dried fast. That's where the good qualities end. The brush strokes in this polish drive me crazy! I know this is not the only polish that does this, but its the only one I own that does this. I could deal with that if it were not for the polish itself. I don't know if its the formula or the brush but when I was applying it, it kept making gaps in the polish as I went back over it. I don't know what was up with that but I am mad I even spent 1.50 on this. It wasn't even worth that. Good color concept, bad execution. I'm not happy with this manicure at all.

These pictures are after 1 day. It's already chipping and and it made me want to gag all day at work. I couldn't wait to take it off. Even with Seche Vite, the finish looks like the dry side foil paper. Ewww. Don't let the pictures fool you, that is not even close to what I see when I look at my hands. Never wearing this again.

-Lachelle