Nail Crazies Unite: Watermelon ft. MoYou London Tropical

Hello Readers!


I'm so excited for this week's Nail Crazies Unite challenge, because the prompt is "fruits" and food manis are my favorite! Also, I've been itching to do a watermelon mani ever since summer started, so my direction here was easy to arrive at.

Sweet, juicy, summer fun!

This mani began as two coats of Going Guru on all but my ring finger, which got 3 coats of Boom Boom. I love the Sinful Colors foil polishes for stamping, so went with "Queen of Green" to stamp the watermelon pattern on with. To make "Boom Boom" a little more juicy, I added a flakie topper.

My watermelon pattern comes from the MoYou London "Tropical 08" plate, which features so many fun fruit images! But, my slice is borrowed from a different company...

My sweet little watermelon slice is from Bundle Monster's fruit-and-vegetable themed plate from the "Kawaii Emoji" collection. The little faces on this collection just kill me!


I am certainly looking forward to seeing lots of fruit themed manis this week! If you are too, check out the link-up below!

An InLinkz Link-up

Dry Brush Flamingos for Clairestelle8 ft. MoYou London Tropical

Hello Readers!


Today's post is for the #clairestelle8challenge over on instagram, and today's prompt is "dry brush". I decided to try to pair dry brushing with flamingos, since flamingos have some subtle texture and color variation on their feathers I thought I could use dry brushing to try to portray that.

Also, flamingos are fun!

I kept my colors pretty simple; I thought gray would be a good compliment to the pink of the flamingos. For my dry brushed nail, I started with "Let's Playa" and added the dry brushing with "Peaches and Cream" and then "Cool Cadet." I also stamped over the white nails with "Let's Playa".

30 Days of Color: Sparkle (ft. MoYou London Tropical)

Hello Readers!


It's a new week again at the 30 Days of Color Challenge, and this week's prompt is "sparkle!" And who doesn't love a bit of sparkle on their fingertips? For this prompt I decided to go with a peacock theme, since they're such flashy bird and I felt like they would go well with some flashy polish.

Not pictured: the peel-off basecoat I used under that heavy glitter polish.

My un-used polish for this prompt is the Revlon Colorstay in "Showtime". I've used the Salon Perfect "Siren Song" before, and I decided to use it today because I'm never disappointed with it. I have just two coats on my nails here, no sponging required.

My peacock images are from this MoYou London plate from the Tropical collection, which features lots of fun tropical birds. My favorite images here are the toucans, which I did get to use on a different tropical themed-mani earlier this month.

Finally, I decided I wanted to bring a little gold to my sparkle fingers. These glitter polishes can be somewhat tricky to stamp over- I did a test on my Cindy hand and none of the stamping I was doing was showing up enough for me to really like it, so I decided to go with striping tape instead.

To check out some more sparkly manis this week,  be sure to check out the link-up below!

Toucans ft. MoYou London Tropical

Hello Readers!

Even though it's technically winter here, I felt like bringing in a little bit of paradise to my nails this week and playing with some of MoYou London's Tropical collection. I kind of figure that tropical places close to the equator don't really have winter anyway, so tropical is always in season!

Beside, I just couldn't resist that toucan image.

I started off with two nails painted Lime Basil and two painted Unicorn. I find Unicorn kind of a pain to work with- it takes 3 coats and it is a really runny formula, but it's the only color I have like it in my collection so I deal with it. ;)

Pantone Color of the Year ft. MoYou London Hipster

Hello Readers!

Every since I got the MoYou London Hipster plate with the tiny  Pantone card on it, I have been looking forward to making a mani based on the color of the year when it came out. Joyce from "What's on my nails today" already beat me to it, and I was really inspired by the lovely cream color that she paired the color of the year with, so I may have borrowed that idea from her. ;)

This year's color is "Greenery", a bright spring green that it intended to represent growth and new life. I had a couple of different ideas for what I wanted to do for my accent nail for this mani, and I was having a hard time deciding which one, when I realized, "I have two hands! Why not do both?" So here are my two variations on a theme:

Version #1 pulls in some of the colors Pantone suggests pairing with the main color. I'm always inspired by the suggested color schemes over on that website, so I decided to pull some of those in and try out a fun color-me-in stamping design. 

Version #2 (on my Cindy hand) sticks to more of a pure interpretation of the color. I wanted to use leaves because the bright green is inspired by bright green spring leaves. 

I thought the Sinful Colors "Innocent" was the closest match to the Pantone Greenery color that I had in my collection. Two coats of that polish was plenty! 

The Pantone card can be found on this MoYou London plate from the Hipster collection. I did make a decal with this, and colored the green over the top of the decal instead of on the back. It was just easier for me than trying to color it in after I had stamped it onto my nail. 

The tiny triangles on my pointer/pinky fingers come from this very useful MoYou London Holy Shapes plate. I used my Bundle Monster stamping guides to make isolating the triangle 100x easier. 

The leaves on cindy come from this MoYou London plate from the Tropical collection. 

And finally, the accent nail on my main hand was from this lovely Bundle Monster plate, I believe from the shangri-la collection. I haven't done a lot of these types of images before, and I have to say it was very fun and satisfying to fill this in! 

So, which version do you like better? Are you a fan of this year's Pantone color? 

ABC Nail Art Challenge: X is for eXotic

Hello Readers!

For the letter "x", I decided to follow the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law (pun not intended). So my mani doesn't technically start with "X", but it does start with the "x" sound, and I say that's close enough!

As a throwback to summer, I have created an manicure themed around an exotic location- Hawaii. I actually ended up throwing the exotic flowers on at the last minute because when I had finished my original plan I felt that it was too plain and there wasn't enough color.

To fill in the flowers, I started with a base of Devil's Stare and the added "hottie" underneath that and a touch of "Sleigh Me" to the flower's center. It's hard to really see those colors under Devil's Stare, but it does add a slight highlight/shadow effect.

I used a few Bundle Monster plates from the Secret Garden Collection:

...and finally a MoYou London plate from the tropical collection for the pineapple and pineapple leaves:

My original idea for this mani was to use the kind of fruit salad image from this plate on my pinky/pointer fingers, but honestly when I sat down to do it I got a little bit intimidated because of the style of the image. I puzzled over whether I should stamp it in black and try to color the images in, because some of the fruits would be almost entirely black and I wondered if that would be ok. I considered trying to do the trick where you add different colors to different areas of the image, but in the end I decided to go a different direction. I still wanted to try out the image though, so I tested it out over different colors on my Cindy hand for a simple skittle mani and I liked the way it turned out:

Excuse the nails on this hand, ha ha... it takes a lot of abuse.

Well, I hope you weren't outraged by my cheating for this letter- I can't wait to see what great things the other ladies come up with for X! Check them out for yourself in the link-up below!

An InLinkz Link-up