Check out Painted Lady Fingers's Chez Delaney giveaway

For those of you who do not know Chez Delaney sells some Konad and lots of fauxnad plates. There are some unique and cute designs on the fauxnad plates that are not availalbe on the Konad plates. My favorite is probably H21 with the cute little squirrel.

Painted Lady Fingers is celebrating her blogiversary with a few giveaways. Click here to check out the Chez Delaney giveaway where the winner will get her (or his) choice of 8 nail art plates! Amazing!!

Ta-ta for now!

NOTM: Wet n Wild Wild Shine Wild Card

Whoa, that's a lot of "wild" in the title. :p

Ok, before I show you all the pictures, I must preface by saying that my nails are not in good shape right now. I have a lot of peeling (like on 8 nails right now) and I tend to pick at my nails if I don't have polish on. I'm bad, I know. It's the worst on my right index finger. The polish also bubbled a lot, especially on my poor right index finger, so it looks doubly bad. :( I reapplied it 3x and it just got worse with each application so I finally just let it go.

With that said, I really think this is a pretty polish and I hope that when I wear it again it will not bubble up on me. It's a mauvey, purple base with pretty pink shimmer. The pictures aren't exactly color accurate - the pink shimmer is brighter in real life.

indoors

outside in full sun

outside in shade

I used 3 coats here without any top coat. It already chipped a bit after a day at work, but because of all the bubbles, I wasn't really planning on wearing this for long anyway. :p

Ta-ta for now!

I'm in Love with my Mani!

This is Milani Hi-Res konad-ed with Color Club Wild at Heart using Image Plate m64. I absolutely love the way it came out. It's purple! It's sparkly! It's just gorgeous!

I used 2 coats of Hi-Res, but I can still see through it in some spots so if I were wearing it alone I'd definitly put on at least 1 more coat. Since I knew I was going to use a full nail image I just left it at 2. Hi-Def is very sparkly and looks like crushed crystals.

I totally fell in love with Wild at Heart last night. I hadn't konad-ed since my birthday mani and wasn't really too excited about doing it again. Wild at Heart quickly changed all that though. Every single image transferred perfectly and it was the easiest and best konad I've ever done! Love, love, love it!!

I'm definitely wearing this one until it chips off. :)

Ta-ta for now!

Another Amazing Giveaway: Similar Addiction

I'm still wearing Zoya Jo, so no new nails today but here's another great giveaway that I've come across.

Similar Addiction is celebrating 100 Followers by having an amazing giveaway. The polishes she's chosen are all really pretty. Click here to check it out!

NOTM: Zoya Jo

Well, I didn't expect to be back with a new mani already but I just wasn't feeling how dark OPI Louvre Me, Lourvre Me Not was. I'll probably bring it out again in the fall or something. Anywho, I decided to put on Zoya Jo from the Spring 2009 Twist Collection.

close-up to show the pretty shimmer!

Zoya Jo is one of the colors that I got from the Nail Polish Exchange that they did earlier this year. It is a very pretty blue that is somewhere between cornflower and periwinkle. The shimmer really makes it in my opinion. I used 3 coats again but you can definitely get away with 2. So far I'm really impressed with the quality of the Zoya polishes.

NOTM: OPI Louvre Me, Louvre Me Not

The sun's finally out today (and it's scorching hot out), so I was able to get some pictures of my current color. After taking off my birthday mani, I decided to go a bit darker so I chose OPI Louvre Me, Louvre Me Not from La Collection de France. I've been wearing it for 2 days now so it's not fresh but since I'm left-handed, it still looks pretty good on my right hand.

with flash

without flash

without flash

It's a pretty color, but definitely darker than I expected. I think I ended up with 3 coats but that's because I'm horrible at getting the polish to apply smoothly. There's some pretty pink shimmer that's visible in the bottle but it all but disappears on the nail. You can't see it unless you look really closely at your nails, which is a bummer. All in all, I like it but I'm not in louvre with it.

Check out this AMAZING Giveaway!

Painted Lady Fingers and Diamond Cosmetics have put together an amazing giveaway where the winner will get the entire Fall collection AND their choice of 7 colors from the core line AND a choice of 1 nail treatment!

Go check it out and enter at: http://paintedladyfingers.blogspot.com/2010/07/ladies-choice-of-diamonds-anniversary.html

My Birthday Konadicure...

or the Konadicure that made me want to throw all my polish out!

outside

base color: OPI Panda-monium Pink
Konad Plates: s10 (panda face) and m66 (bamboo)
Image Colors: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Black Out and Misa Dirty, Sexy Money

Indoors

Note: I always stamp so that the image is facing me, which seems to be the opposite of what most everyone else does. :p

My birthday is tomorrow and I've had an idea in my mind for what I wanted to do with my nails for awhile now. I did them today so that I could enjoy them all day tomorrow. LOL. I'm sooooo glad I did them ahead of time now because it took me forever to get them done. I'm relatively new to doing my own nails and I am far from being an expert at even just painting my nails (as you can see in the pictures). Using the Konad plates is really hit or miss for me and today was a doozy!

As you can tell from my blog background and avatar, I love pandas! My absolute favorite panda is Tai Shan, the cub born at the National Zoo in Washington DC. For the past 4 years, I've spent my birthday (July 8) travelling down to DC so that I could celebrate Tai's birthday with him on July 9. However, earlier this year, Tai was sent to China to live as per the loan agreement the Zoo has with China, so I will not get to spend his birthday with him anymore. :(

When I saw that Konad had the little panda face and bamboo I knew I had to get those plates and use them for my birthday mani. Of course, I just had to use OPI Panda-monium Pink (the only color I've gotten based on the name) as the base and that's where the trouble began. Cremes and I do not get along and I had a bear of time getting the polish on my nails. It was streaky and uneven and I was getting majorly frustrated. I seriously contemplated just scrapping the idea but I wanted my birthday mani! LOL. So I kept going, and finally got ok coverage that I could live with. I put on my TC and waited for it all to dry. Then I got all my stuff for the Konad-ing and went to work. That's where the real troubles began. I did the bamboo first and I had major issues getting the image to transfer from the plate to the stamper; it seemed like every other time the image just wouldn't get on the darn stamper. I just kept at it and finally I got all 8 fingers done. That left the panda and the problems just kept on coming. I started with WnW Black Creme because I had read that it was a good black for stamping and the image would not tranfer completely onto the stamper no matter what I did, so I went to Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Black Out which I had used successfully before and I got the image on but it wasn't as dark as I would have liked. Then a lightbulb went on in my head and I got the special Konad polish in black that I got in a set and never used thinking that it had to work, right? Wrong! Once again, the stupid image wouldn't transfer. At this point, I'd removed the image so many times from my right ring finger that I'd wiped off a spot of the base so I had to remove and reapply the base and wait for it to dry again. At this point I just wanted to be done, so I settled on the SH for the panda and still had to try a few times before I got the whole image, but I finally finished my manicure over an hour and a half after I started Konad-ing. I think I heard angels sing at that point. :p