Here’s another great way to use your OPI Sheer Tints…
Start with a white or light neutral base color. Then do some nail stamping over top. When that’s dry, light sweep some OPI Sheer Tints over top of your stamps to get this awesome effect! One of the cool things about Sheer Tints is that they are so translucent you really don’t need to be neat or accurate when you apply them. Yet the finished product makes people go “hmmmm how did you do that?”
Happy New Year!!! Here are my new years eve nails for the N.A.I.L. linkup! I went with a mix-match snake skin manicure. I used two different magnetic polishes in this design and I also hid ‘2014’ in there as well. 🙂
GREEN NAILS- My green nails were painted with Sinfully Magnetic Snakeskin nail polish in a green shade called Force Field. I applied one coat and let it dry. Then I applied the second coat and then immediately held the included magnet over top. The magnet reacted with the polish and created such an amazing criss-cross snakeskin effect (see my other post about Force Field here). This is probably my absolute favorite magnetic polish & magnet of all time! I also applied some pearl-toned studs to these nails for a feminine sexy touch.
BLACK NAILS- These nails were painted with China Glaze Liquid Leather. Then I stamped MoYou Pro 05 snakeskin design over half of these nails using a silver magnetic Orly polish called Paint on Electron. I’m so glad that the silver stamped so well! The puny Orly magnet that came with the polish really sucks…so I’m happy to find another use for Paint on Electron which didn’t even require a magnet. *Another thing to note about stamping with magnetic polish- it didn’t smudge at all when I applied topcoat!
Oh and about the hidden ‘2014’- I placed my studs strategically to represent the year 2014– I put 20 studs on my right hand and 14 studs on my left. 🙂 I also patterned my nails differently on each hand just for effect.
Do you think magnetic nail polish has a fun ‘party feel’ ? I love it and I think it’s just perfect for the holidays. Plus, I did magnetic nails last new yrs eve… so I’m sorta keeping up with traditions by doing another one tonite. These nails are also just in time to say goodbye to the SNAKE. Au revoir 2013, year of the snake! Bonjour 2014, year of the horse!
While we’re on the topic, I’d like to show you a pic of my new horse calendar for 2014. I got it as a Christmas present from my uncle! Isn’t it purty?
View the other N.A.I.L. entries here:
N.A.I.L. December Theme 1 – Snowflakes
N.A.I.L. December Theme 2 – Shopping
N.A.I.L. December Theme 3 – Winter Solstice
N.A.I.L. December Theme 4 – Festive French Manis
N.A.I.L. December Theme 5 – New Year
I already did spiderwebs a few weeks ago, but those were hand-painted. These nails I’m showing you now are stamped! I hope you don’t mind some more halloween cobwebs from Crafty! This is my last mani for the October NAIL Linkup. Oooh that means that the November themes are right around the corner! Do you want to join us in a fun, no-pressure nail challenge? Brijit, Eeeek and I will be announcing the November NAIL prompts soon. But here’s a spoiler:
Alrighty! Well, let’s take a look at my Halloween-themed nails for Oct! I did these nails for a halloween party. I wanted something festive but I didn’t have a lot of time beforehand to do crazy nail art. That’s when stamping comes in handy, for sure! Do you clean your plate in between stamping each nail? I don’t. I get the same results with or without cleaning. So I don’t even bother. I just pound right through and do each nail one right after the other! In just a couple minutes I have a cool stamped mani. 🙂
♥ Sally Hansen Maximum Growth as my base coat
♥ three coats of green ‘no name’ glow-in-the-dark nail polish from Rite Aid
♥ MoYou London Pro Plate 05 XL
♥ China Glaze Smoke and Ashes for stamping
Have a happy halloween everyone! It’s the one time of the year that you’re allowed to take candy from strangers LOL! Here are all the NAIL entries for October-
28th Oct – 3rd Nov Hallow E’en :
21st-27th Oct Treats and Sweets :
14th-20th Oct Things That Go Bump in the Night :
7th-13th Oct Autumn Trees :
30th Sept – 6th Oct Breast Cancer Awareness :
Hey ya’ll- I’m over here having fun with my new MoYou plates! I reviewed one of their plates and stampers in my last post, and I had to pull them out again for more stamping fun. This time, I had double fun! Have you ever tried stamping the same image onto your nails TWICE? Well, that’s what I did and the results look wicked! Check it out!
For this look I am wearing a basecoat, three coats of Blue Flame from Brijits Digits Boutique and seche vite topcoat. I wore this beautiful blue polish for three days (no chips!) until I decided to spice it up with some double stamping effect! On day number four I stamped a shimmery white polish called Ginessa by Zoya using my MoYou London Pro Plate 5 XL stamping plate. Then I used that same plate but stamped China Glaze Liquid Leather (black) over top of that. The designs didn’t match up, which makes it look cooler I think. I like how they overlap! It sorta looks like the bottom of a swimming pool. 🙂
Wanna see what Brijit’s Blue Flame polish looks like before I stamped over it? It has a lovely jelly quality to it and it’s bluer than blue. I love how blue it is! It took three coats to get to this opacity and so far I am very happy with it’s durability. I’m on day four with no chips yet! Look at what a live wire this polish is! Yowzer!!!!!!
Blue Flame is on clearance now at Brijit’s Etsy shop!
Have you ever tried double stamping? If not, do it to it!
*these products were provided to me by MoYou London for review
My nails are long at times so the sizing of nail stamping images is crucial to me. I’m happy to show you a plate today that’s perfect for long nails! It’s called MoYou Pro Plate Collection – 05 XL. It’s important to know that there are two versions of this plate. The original plate and the new-fandangled XL plate. From what I hear, customers were asking for larger designs which prompted MoYou to re-create some of their products. Hence, my pro plate XL was born! I also chose to try out their large size stamper and scraper set since it was designed to work great with the XL plates.
Let’s look at the large size stamp & scraper set first. It comes with two plastic scrapers. This is new for me since I’m used to using metal scrapers which seem to scratch up the surface of my plates. I really like the idea of plastic scrapers instead. →UPDATE 5 months after writing this review: I never use the plastic scrapers anymore. My old metal konad scrapers work better in my opinion. Yes, the metal scratches the plates, but they make for cleaner scrapes.
As for the stamper, it’s two-sided. The small pink side is hard which is good for small intricate stamps. Whereas the large white end is nice and big and squishy. It’s definitely a lot larger, softer, stickier and more cushy than my old trusty Konad stamper. In fact, it’s so sticky you can see some fuzz and cat hair stuck to the stamper in my pics. This initially annoyed me a lot. But after cleaning it with an acetone soaked pad I found that any little residual pieces of fuzz did not deter from the stamping quality. I will have to get over the fact that the squishy end is hard to clean all the way. BUT, on the bright side, it grabbed the designs off my XL plate like a real champ! You won’t have to press down hard to pick up the design, or to transfer it to your nails. This is handy for two reasons: 1 its less effort and 2 you can stamp on top of a base color that isn’t necessarily dry yet! I tried two different manicures with this plate and stamper and both had two coats of color that were not entirely dry… but no worries. The nice squishy stamper dropped the design onto my nail with ease. Usually with my Konad stamper I have to press real hard to get the design to hit the far edges of my very curved nails… and when you press hard like that you hafta make sure that your base color is dry or else the mani will get all flubbed up. Well, with my large MoYou stamper I barely applied any pressure, the design reached all areas of my nail with ease, and my still-wet base colors were unharmed. One thing to note- save the big squishy end of the MoYou stamper for large designs, and use the small end for smaller designs. I had better luck that way since the big end didn’t transfer tiny designs well. Overall, I’m very happy to have this new large size stamper. It is my go-to stamper for full-nail designs now. Don’t press hard and you’ll see it works well.
Moving on to my Pro Plate 05 XL. It comes wrapped in a plastic sleeve and has the typical blue peel-off film to protect the surface. I really love the designs on this one. They are well etched and sufficiently large enough for long or wide nails. I measured them to be 15mm x 21mm which is bigger than any other brand plate that I own (see my size comparison of other brands right here). Each plate also has a hard plastic base attached to the back of it which makes it feel nice and sturdy and gives the plate nice smooth corners. Shown below is pro plate 05 XL before I removed the packaging.
You can see that this #05 plate gives you 12 XL images. The comparable non-XL plate is labeled #03 and has 18 designs on it. So by choosing the XL you lose a few images, but if they fit your nails better then it’s probably worth it.
So are you ready to see my first attempt at MoYou stamping?
It’s a mixmatch/skittles mani so you can see some of the different stamps from the plate. I really like using a cream base with a shimmery stamp, or a shimmer base with a cream stamp just to pump up the level of contrast a little bit. I think the peacock nail may be my fave. I applied two different blue Butter Londons to that design and when I scraped it off they blended a little bit, but for the most part it worked well to create two different colored feathers. As for the other nails, the green snakeskin was stamped on using Sinful Colors magnetic nail polish, and the zebra was stamped with black konad polish. All of the polishes I used seemed to stamp well with this plate. Since I usually stamp with Konad special polish… I was happy to see such great results using MoYou plates and regular ol’ nail lacquer.
My second manicure is a wood grain design. This wood stamp is what really excited me when I saw a pic of the plate online. I just love the idea of making my nails look like organic materials… plus, my dad is a woodworker so I have a fondness for that kinda stuff. I’ve been wearing this manicure for three days now and I just love it. The brown hues are muted so you don’t even notice the design at first glance. But if you do a double-take you’ll see the cool wood grain appear.
I used two coats of Zoya Pandora which is a nude shade and while it was still pretty tacky, I stamped some black Konad polish and regular brown polish over top. Again, I was thrilled that my wet polish didn’t get smushed by my nice new stamper. The black looked kind of stark against the nude though, so I sponged some brown over top to mute the appearance of the grain. The results are a subtle but unique manicure and I love it.
I’m thrilled with my XL pro plate. I didn’t have any issues with application and I never messed up even one of my nails. I also received another plate called Back to the 60’s -01 from the Time Traveller Collection. I will have to show that to you soon!
I’m really excited about all the plates that MoYou London carries and they keep pumping out fresh collections all the time. If you’d like to see more MoYou London goodies you can visit them online at http://www.moyou.co.uk. Just know if you buy a plate labeled as PRE-SALE or LATE SHIPPING then it will not ship til a later date. Make sure to use code SHINY20 to save a generous 20% off your cart until Nov 1st, 2013.
Craftynail 