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

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.