Nicole By OPI: Carnival Cotton Candy. The Carrie Underwood Collection.

Hello lovelies! Its the middle of the week, I cannot wait to get today over, as you are reading this I will be at work, fun fun.

Today I bring you a swatch of one of the Nicole By OPI Carrie Underwood Polishes. I have only seen this collection at my local Walmart and they only have five of the colors which makes me sad.

Today I bring you Carnival Cotton Candy! I adore this polish so much! It is just the perfect girly pink creme. I wore this on my first day back at school this past spring semester but did a crappy job of applying so I never took photos.

Holy crap, Its my 3rd blogaversary!!?? Also its my 250th post!

Good afternoon lovelies!!! Its an exciting day here on the blog! Today My Nails. My Polish. turns three!!

I cannot believe that I have been blogging that long! I just wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to all of you from all over the world who come to this little blog and take a look at it. It means so much to me. 

I have made so many friends in the nail polish/beauty community its been so incredible. I also want to say thank you for sticking with me even when I wasn't posting due to school or otherwise. I am hoping that in the future that I can put a lot of focus on this blog, I have come to realize that I love writing this blog and I love nail polish and makeup and all things girly and I find enjoyment by sharing my thoughts about it with all of you!

One other cool thing today is that this is my 250th post!! How cool is that?! 

So for today's post I have some nail art to share. Its not spectacular because I think I personally suck at nail art. However I wanted to do something, I originally planned a galaxy manicure but it came out looking horrid, so I attempted to redo it last night and the redo came out even worse. I think we can say I suffered through two disasticures! So I settled with do some bright nails in hopes that it would get spring here a little quicker. 

Its actually in the 40s today and sunny, I'm hoping it will stay this way! 

On to the manicure! 

I started off with painting my nails a base color of Honeydew from Fresh Paints, a brand that is available through Five Below. Like I have said in the past that their nail polish choices change up every so often so they may not have this color, or they may come out with a variation of this color later in the year. 

Honeydew is a bright neon pastel green.  It is streaky and takes about three coats to get a nice even coverage. Just make sure you let each coat dry so you avoid dragging and smudging of your nails! 

Then I took Nicole By OPI and created some dots for leopard spots. It has a nice contrast against the bright green and kind of makes me think about Summer and being outside and wearing bright colors. All the good things that come with warm weather. 

I even did a thumb accent nail too. My other hand didn't come out as well and I even debated about how much I liked this manicure. I almost took this one off too! Its slowly growing on me. I then topped everything off with a new quick dry top coat I bought from Jesse's Girl Cosmetics, its from Julie G.'s line called Jet Set. Its really nice, doesn't smear my designs and dries just as quick as Seche Vite. 

So that's if for my 3rd blogaversary post! I hope that you guys enjoyed it and stay tuned to the blog for more nail post and beauty posts! 

Once again I want to say thanks to everyone who comes and visits the blog, follows on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook! Oh and also Bloglovin! 

If you aren't following me on Social media you totally should! I most active on Twitter and Instagram! The links to all of them should be up on the right hand side of the page! 

THANK YOU I'll talk to you all soon! 

<3 Nicole

Sugary Sweet for Valentines Day!

Good Morning!

Today I bring you another Valentines Day nail art manicure!

I have always wanted to try ' Sugar Spun' Nails. I had seen a few other bloggers try it out and I thought that is nifty how it really looks like threads of sugar over their nails! So sitting on the couch one day surfing Instagram as I do on occasion ( ok who doesn't do that?) I saw that one of the Instagramers I follow ( sorry I don't remember who) had done some sugar spun nails for this past NY Fashion Week.

I was sort of in a funk on what to do for another nail art manicure since I wanted to have some leading up until V-day, and this was just the thing I needed.

First off if you are not a fan of bright colors for Valentines Day or your Anti Valentines then maybe this isn't for you or you can do it in colors that suit your current mood!

For my base color I decided to finally try out Cover Girl Stay Brilliant Nail Lacquer in Vio-last. Vio-last is a vibrant purple crème, it is absolutely fantastic and I will have swatches and a review up of it soon! I have to say it comes pretty close to my all time favorite purple!


Once my two coats of Vio-last was dry I quickly YouTubed a how to on 'Sugar Spun' nails just to make sure I had it right on what I was doing. For the 'Sugar' part I used Nicole By OPI Still Into Pink, which is new to their core collection. I'll have separate swatches of that up too!

Basically the concept of 'Sugar Spun' Nails is to let the polish you are using to create the sugar get sticky and thick enough so when you take a toothpick to it, it creates  strings that you drag over your nail and you do this over and over until you get the desired look you want. You are limitless on the amount of colors you can use!

I found while doing this is that one little puddle of polish will help you cover one nail maybe two if your nail beds are small. But after a while the polish dries up or gets too goopy to make anymore strings, so do expect to use a little polish to accomplish this look.

One note to take is after dragging the sugar pieces on to your nail make sure you let them dry well and I don't mean just a few minutes, some of the more bumpy parts will still be squishy and if your not careful you will push them down. As you can see I did that to my ring finger slightly down the center where the polish had built up.

The feel of my nails after letting my sugar pieces dry, was very textured and bumpy, so if your a fan of smooth nails its not going to happen here. These photos are taken after one coat of top coat and in natural light. I do have a little tip wear since I took these the day after I did them. For the few days I did wear them, they wore pretty well.

So if you want to be all sugared up for Valentines Day then this manicure is right up your ally!

Hope you guys enjoyed and I'll talk to you soon!
<3 Nicole.

My first adventure with Bundle Monster!!

Good Morning!!! Hope you all are well where ever you are.

Today I bring you my first experience with my new Bundle Monster plates! I have been lemming the Bundle Monster plates for a looooonnnnngggg time, I always was looking at them on Amazon and on Bundle Monsters own website wishing for them to be mine. That wish came true this Christmas when my Aunt and Uncle were very kind and gave me a gift card to amazon. I immediately knew that I wanted to buy nail art related products, I narrowed it down to the 2011 BM set and 2012 BM set, both sets I had designs I knew would be useful for up coming nail art.

First off I want to talk about my experience with Bundle Monster as a company. I have always been leery about buying off of Amazon due to the sellers; who can you trust who can't you trust, same with EBay and Etsy. I have heard some stories and it just made me a hell of a lot more cautious. So when buying the stamping plates I was pleased to see that the plates shipped straight from Bundle Monster and not a third party seller.

Each set cost $21.99 each which is not a bad price point since you get 25 plates and at least five-six designs per plate. Shipping was fantastic too, if you chose the standard shipping which was 3-5 business days it was free. Now I know that sometimes Amazon will offer free shipping with qualifying items but this free shipping was straight from the seller! So of course I chose the standard shipping and placed my order. I waited patiently for my shipping conformation email ( which means me checking my phone once an hour) and I saw the plates were being shipped from Hawaii which is where BM is located, I seriously thought it would take the 3-5 days or more to get to me since it was on the other side of the country. 

I placed my order on a Friday morning and it got to me by that Monday night! How Crazy is that!??? I have nothing but praises for the Bundle Monster Company and will definitely be placing an order for more stamping plates if they make any!

Ok so on to the manicure that I tested out my first plate with.

I started off with a base color of Nicole By OPI Selena. I love this color it most certainly helps me get through the winter blues.

Once my base color was dry I was unsure what color to stamp with so I pulled out all the contrasting colors I thought would look nice over Selena. The final two were Essie Penny Talk and Sally Hansen Ruby Rush. After stamping some on to a napkin to see what looked better I thought Penny Talk would be nice, since it is metallic color and the stamper really picked it up well from the plate.

 

 

 

 As you can see I used BM plate 201 and the swirly design in the close up shot. I wanted a delicate print and this one fit the bill well. It would cover the whole nail but not take away from the base color. Now looking at the plate I even think the sweeping lines on the left side of the plate would of been nice too.

Here is how the manicure came out.

I did come out really light and you could only see it if you got up close or was in the sunlight. But since I usually suck at full nail stamping designs I was pretty pleased how this came out. I do think next time thought I will use a slightly darker color that will contrast a bit better I also think that I might invest in a Konad Stamper since the only one I have is from the Salon Express kit and sometimes it doesn't pick up the designs well unless I give it a good file with a emery board. I would say these are office appropriate nails since no one will notice the design unless they shove your hand in their face.

If you want to invest in either your  first set of stamping plates or just add to your collection than I suggest ordering the bundle monster plates plus a Konad stamper ( if you don't already have one) , which all can be found on Amazon. If you want a quick fix for some stamping the Salon Express stamping kit by As Seen on TV is available at quite a few retailers. If you want to see my post about that kit click HERE.

I hope you enjoyed today's post and I will talk to you soon!

<3 Nicole

A lil bit of nail art and a story.

Good morning! I hope you all are well!

So this new year isn't starting out the best for me. About two weeks ago I got sick, which you guys know took me out of commission for a week. Now something else happened that took me out of commission this past weekend.

I had my cat Binx  since I was about 11 years old, she had been my constant companion. Back in May she got sick and had to have emergency surgery which was an hysterectomy , we never had her fixed because she was an indoor cat, she survived the surgery and I thought all was ok. After her surgery she had a major personality change, she became mean and would attack your feet if you crossed her and she lost the part of her that showed any affection. This made me sad and I always played the 'what if ' game, (its not good to do that b/c you just make yourself crazy). Binx had always had some sort of neuroses about her since she was a kitten but now it had just gotten worse, she started to pace all the time walking from one end of our apartment to the other, or just sleeping.

 On Thursday I noticed she was different, she was pacing a lot more than normal, she wasn't sleeping at all and her walk was off. My mom could even pet her and pick her up and there would be no fight from Binx. She was also trying to hide throughout the day, which I know is a signal from a cat saying that its almost their 'time'. Thursday night I laid Binx in her cat bed and she didn't move for a couple of hours, when I got up in the middle of the night I saw she wasn't anywhere to be found. At that point I came to terms that if it was her time to go it was okay and I would accept it. Friday morning when she still didn't make an appearance we found her stuck behind some boxes just standing there, its like she didn't know how to get out. I thought maybe she was going blind but her eyes were fine. When we got her out from behind the boxes her equilibrium was way off she could barely walk. We took her to the vet imeditetly. The vet told us that there was definitely something bothering her nervous system, but her one ear was clogged with wax and it could be an inner ear infection that was causing it all. Upon further check of her eyes, that's where we saw the problem and that maybe this wasn't going to be an easy fix. When the vet brought his hands close to her face she had no reaction and when they shined a light in them her pupils didn't dilate like they should when a bright light is shined in them.

The vet told us to give it 24 hours and see what would happen, they gave her an injection of steroids and antibiotics and some ear drops. I think that the vet was trying to give me some ray of hope that Binx would get better, because if there was no change then it was something with her brain or the brain stem. At that point there wouldn't be anything that we could do. So as Friday went on we watched Binx deteriorate, she started walking through her food and water and just never stopped walking around. We had to keep her in carrier just to get her to calm down. Friday night my family and I decided to bring her back to the vet Saturday morning. In doing so the vet saw how much worse Binx had gotten, at this point Binx was shaking and panting and not even responding to touch anymore. The cat I had grown up with was gone, and as much as it tore my heart apart we had to do what was right for her and end her suffering her suffering was tearing my heart apart even more. Sadly we had to put her to sleep. It was the hardest most heart wrenching thing I have ever had to do in my entire life. As I write this I am fighting back tears.

*** I APOLOGIZE TO ANYONE I JUST MADE CRY BY READING THAT STORY***

So that explains my absence from twitter and here on the blog this weekend. But I am back and ready to continue on.

Today's manicure was inspired by an outfit I bought my niece, I purchased a onesie for her that had a cupcake on it and said "I take the cake" because my niece is a little chunky monkey I so desperately wanted to write on it with fabric paint, "and eat it too".

So my nail art was inspired by that cupcake on the outfit.

I started off by doing a gradient on each nail with L'Oreal Royalty Reinvented and Nicole By OPI Selena. The L'Oreal polish is really good for sponging, the NOPI not so much, it didn't stick to my white base well and I had to go over it many times, and if I dabbed too much with the make up sponge it took the polish off. It was so friggen frustrating. Once I got the gradient the way I wanted it I started on the cupcake on my accent nail.

I used:

Sally Hansen Celeb City for the cupcake 'tin'

Pure Ice Superstar for the frosting

Pure Ice Stunning for the sprinkles

Sinful Colors Ruby Ruby for the cherry on top

Sinful Colors Black Striper for outlining the tin.

Once I finished the cupcake I did add Sephora Chaotic to the rest of my nails to help the gradient look better.

So I hope you guys liked today's post except for the beginning part. I will talk to you all soon with a brand new post. I'm thinking also about doing a post on my nail care routine!

Talk to you all soon!
<3 Nicole

Nicole By OPI Selena.

Good morning my dears! I hope you all are well and not suffering from a cold or the flu like myself last week!

I cannot imagine the last time I was that sick. I hope it all I get for the season because I hate being sick! I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for hanging in there while I was recuperating on the couch. Turns out being sick got me addicted to The Vampire Diaries, darn that Netflix.


Anyway on to today's post! Today I bring you Nicole By OPI Selena, from the new Selena Gomez Collection. I found the entire collection at my local Wal-Mart. They had a huge end cap display that was all nice and clean one day and then when I went back a few days later to actually buy one of the polishes the idiotic people that live in my town wrote all over it with the nail polishes and drew all over Selena's face. I hate it when people deface things, so what if you don't like the person on the display do you really need to use the product in the display to deface it? People may want to buy that product! My other thought was how they got up to the top of the display since its pretty tall.  Luckily I found one that didn't look used in the back of the display.

Selena is a polish that I don't have anything like in my collection. The closest thing I have to it would be Pure Ice Twinkle, and it is way more orange toned and contains shimmer, Selena does not.

Selena is a soft peachy crème, a color I love to wear in the spring time.

Application was pretty awesome with this polish. Two even coats and you can reach opacity, with three thin coats you can achieve it as well, the choice is yours :)

This is such a fun color to wear, its very much work appropriate, so if you work in a stuffy office you should be able to get away with it.

As you can see from my photos it looks a bit more pinker, but its really not. I tried to correct it in the photos but it wouldn't budge. I do have to say the shape of the NOPI bottle is an odd one, I don't hate it but it is so hard to photograph my hands on it. If your looking to purchase any of the Selena Gomez Collection than you can find it at Wal-Mart, and I've also seen it at CVS, but my CVS only had a partial display so if your looking for the whole shebang than I would say Wal-Mart is your best bet. They retail for: Wal-Mart $7 and at CVS $7.99. These prices are local to me and I paid the $7 at my Wal-Mart. Remember they maybe different where you live.

Did you purchase any of the Selena Polishes??

<3 Nicole.

L'oreal Paris: Royalty Reinvented.

Good morning!

Hope you all are having a fantastic start to the weekend!

Today I have to show you a new L'Oreal Nail Polish! L'Oreal recently launched a line called " Le Nouveau  Riche   TRENDsetter collection. It consist of six to eight new shades of nail polishes. The display at my local CVS only had the six. That kind of disappointed me because I really wanted to see the three metallic shades included in the set. Guess I'll be hopping over to Walgreens soon to see if they have it. Usually I go to Rite Aid for the newest collections but my local one is slacking lately. :(

So this collection like I said above has three metallic shades and six pastel crème shades. If you want to read more on the collection you can head on over to Nouveau Cheap's blog for all the deets.

Out of the six crème shades available to me I picked out the purple crème called Royalty Reinvented. I wanted to grab more but at $6.49 a pop I had to say no, I did however have $1.50 in extra bucks so it knocked it down to $5.51(including tax) in the end.

The reason I bought yet another purple nail polish is because I don't have many pastel purples, the only one this is even remotely close to was my very first pastel purple from OPI when they released their Shrek Collection. Funky Dunky is the name and its actually darker than RR and matches my winter jacket perfectly.

I'm always cautious when wearing a crème polish due to brush drag, spottiness, the usual. This polish is most certainly among the average crème colors, the first coat was sheer but by the next coat the opacity quota was met making Nicole a very happy girl.

Immediately wanted to layer something over this and with it being the start of the new year I grabbed for my Tasmanian Devil Confetti Polish and added one layer over top. Who doesn't like colorful sparkly nails?

*All photos taken in indoor lighting. No flash. Two coats with top coat and glitter. The last photo is the more IRL color.

 

This combination reminded me of a robins egg. Now I know usually robin's eggs are blue with black splotches, but we can say this is its oddball cousin who is the wild child of the family.

The one thing that I did notice today while I was out killing time in Wal-Mart while my mom was doing laundry was that the pastel purple from the NOPI Selena Gomez collection look awfully similar to Royalty Reinvented, and one of the glitter polish which is multi-colored is an exact dupe of the Confetti Polish in these photos! And to mention price point, usually at Wal-Mart L'Oreal polishes are $4.97 versus the $7 dollar price for NOPI.  I was kind of excited to buy some of the Selena polishes and did buy one of them today and I'll feature here soon.  Is it weird that I'm glad there were dupes in that collection from what I have so I didn't have to buy? ( As I type this I hear my wallet's cries of joy).

Do you own any of the new L'Oreal Nail Polishes
Nicole.