Merlot French Tips with Dotted Flower Accent

This week I did Merlot French Tips with Dotted Flower Accents on each nail. My flowers aren't perfect, but overall I'm very pleased.

I started with a base of Pure Ice "Oh Baby!", a sheer white shimmer with red flash. I think "Oh Baby!" is meant to be used as a top coat on top of blacks and other dark creme colors to create a duochrome flash, but I wanted a sheer color for my base coat. On the French Tips and the Dotted Flowers I used "Iced Merlot", also by Pure Ice. It's a shimmery metallic merlot color. :) Finally, for the dots in the center of the flowers I used Savvy "Chrome", a silver shimmer.

I had originally wanted to do pink tips and flowers, but I found that all my pink shimmers were much too transparent for it. There was one that probably would have made a good base coat for the sheer color, though.

Pure Ice "Oh Baby!", Pure Ice "Iced Merlot", and Savvy "Chrome".

As a side note, when I was doing my dotted flowers I found out not to put the polish on a foam disposable plate. The polish started to eat through the plate and I had bubbles in the dots!

Sunspots

 

Daylight without flash.

Indoor light without flash. The orange isn't nearly as bright in this picture.

This week I wanted to do a fun, sunny manicure inspired by all the great neon colors out there right now. I picked my sunny yellow for the base color, and picked up a couple inexpensive neons for the color spots. Both Sinful Colors and Spoiled by Wet n Wild retail at $1.99, and they often go on sale for $.99.

The yellow is probably not the greatest color for my skin tone, but I like it anyway. I love how bright and fun these colors are, and how casual the lopsided dots are. Excuse my flooded cuticles... I thought I had cleaned up better than this, but it seems to be more noticeable in the pictures. :-/

Designated Driver, Summer Peach, Tip Your Waitress, Snow Me White, Permission to Proceed.

The base color is called "Designated Driver", and it's from the Spoiled by Wet n Wild line, available exclusively (I think) from CVS. The green and pink are also from Spoiled by Wet n Wild. The green is called "Permission to Proceed" and the pink is "Tip Your Waitress". The white and orange are made by Sinful Colors, available at Walgreens. The white is "Snow Me White" and the orange is called "Summer Peach". I think possible both the pink and the orange would have also made great base colors for this manicure.

Lotsa Dots

One Hundred, to be exact.

This week I gave myself a dotted manicure with my dotting tools. The colors were inspired by (and intended to match) the dress I wore to my nephew's confirmation on Sunday. You can see it in the background of my photos. My nails are painted an orange base with puple, white, and pink dots. The pink dots are hard to see in the photos, but they are there!

The base color is two coats of Wet n Wild fastdry "9.0.2.1.Orange". I probably could have used three coats, because in person, in the right light, you can still see some visible nail line. Oh, well. The white dots are Sinful Colors "Snow Me White, the purple dots are Rimmel London "Violet Metal", and the pink dots are from the E.L.F. Cosmetics "Metallic Neon" collection, but there's no name on the bottle of polish.

This was a fun and easy manicure. The dots are really not hard to do. If you don't have a dotting tool, there are a variety of things you probably have in your house you can use instead, like the head of a straight pin.

Dotted Flowers

This weekend I made my first attempt at a manicure using dotting tools. I got a set of 5 dotting tools from ebay for super cheap. Overall I'm very happy with the result, but I don't mind telling you that my left hand looks a lot better than my right hand. Some of the flowers on my right hand look like odd-colored fried eggs instead of flowers. :)

I'll definitely be using my dotting tools more often!

New York Color "Prospect Park Pink", Sinful Colors "Grecian Sun", Spoiled by Wet n Wild "Designated Driver", and Sinful Colors "Snow Me White".

Friday night I started to use the blue "Grecian Sun" as the base color and planned to have pink and yellow flowers, but the blue came out too think for my taste, and I kept dragging the colors. Finally I gave up in a fit of pique and went to bed. I was really disappointed, because I've been on the hunt for a blue in this shade, and I was so excited to find this one. This isn't the first time Sinful Colors has let me down. I have a lot more success with the metallics, frosts, and glitter Sinful Colors than their cremes. I also find that they tend to take a long time to dry.

The yellow "Designated Driver" is a color I picked up at CVS last week. It's a "taxi-cab yellow", hence the name. CVS is the only place I've seen the Spoiled by Wet n Wild line of polish. They had a lot of great colors, but I could tell some of them were dupes for other colors made by Wet n Wild. They have a lot of chunky foil glitters in the line that are very interesting.

"Prospect Park Pink" looks kind of orange in the above bottle photo, but that's just the lighting in my kitchen. The actual color reminds me very much of the color of Pepto-Bismol, and of the color of my dorm room walls my freshman year of college. They were that way when I moved in, I swear!