KISS: Stars and Hearts Cheeky Plates Mani

Hey lovely ladies,

Today I have some very simple, well for me, nail art.  Occasionally, I burn out on my designs.  This happens when I've been doing super intricate or complicated mani's in repetition.  That's when I take a step back and return to what turned me from a regular lacquer lover into a hardcore polish prisoner.  Shoot these days I'm so into polish might as well call me the warden round these parts lol! But today  I'm returning to simplicity i.e. KISS and my initial love - stamping.

I started with Color Club's Chelsea Girl.  Chelsea Girl IMO is the most dubious jelly polish I've run across to date.  The formula is terrible - gooey, streaky, and a bit of a PITA to apply, but once you get it on you've got color pay off for days!  Actually if the color wasn't so rich I'd have gotten rid of this polish long ago because of the troublesome application.  I'm wearing between 3-4 coats here due to the humpy bumpy finish of this polish.  I stamped these nails using China Glaze Millennium and Konad Special Polish in White and Pastel Blue using Cheeky Plate CH26.  My accent nail was painted with 2 coats of Color Club's Age of Aquarius, a delicious Tiffany's blue that applied like a dream.  I then topped it with All That Glitter's Hole Hearted and Elemental Styles Unuseptium (117).

Speaking again on the formula of Chelsea Girl it split and cracked on one of my nails as I was laying it down. I have to admit this is not an easy polish to work with much to my disappointment given the vibrancy of the color.

I have to admit the first time I used Hole-Hearted in was a real problem getting the stars out but this time many were coming out on the brush each time making the placement easier. My featured drink here is a Green Tea Frappacino - yum!

Up-close I can see all my tiny mistakes how brutal! Lol!

What do you ladies think? Sometimes it's nice to do something easy and straightforward like this.  Of course I still needed a bit of bling to feel "me", but overall I enjoyed this quite a bit.
Song Stuck in My Head: Titanium by David Guetta feat Sia.  It's like punch drunk dancing! I love the message of feeling strong no matter how many shots are taken at you.  Plus Sia is a woman after my own heart.  She's got a voice like a bolt of lightening! Anyway thanks for reading and toodles.

Lush Lacquer & Elemental Styles Jelly Sandwich

Hey polished prisoners,

I don't know about you but these days I'm starving for jelly! Luckily I have just the right indie polish "fixings" to whip up a very lady-like sandwich. Yum, yum, yum! But to make a good sandwich you need some great glitters and I chose two awesome ones.  The first is Elemental Styles Xenon: Warrior Princess (50), a matte glitter polish consisting of magenta, white and dark pink small sized glitter. It has zero element of sparkle and all my love! Xenon gets a 10 for formula and ease of application - it's a winner all around. I also chose to use one of my newest Lush Lacquer polishes.  Chubby Checker is gorgeous pastel pink glitter with loads of ultrafine holographic shimmer and small black and white squares, hexes and round glitter. Chubby gets a 8 for formula because it's a sinker.  It's nothing that ten minutes upside down and a few shakes of the bottle can't fix, but I disliked how quickly the settling reasserted itself.  Nevertheless the sparkle on this bad boy was fierce so 8/10 all around. Finally for the the main ingredient I chose Essie's Sugar Daddy a very light pink super sheer jelly polish.

My recipe: One layer of Essie's Sugar Daddy followed by one layer of  Xenon. Then another coat of Sugar Daddy followed by a layer of Chubby Checker and finally one last layer of Sugar Daddy.  For my ring finger I just put Xenon at the top and added a layer of CND Effects Copper Shimmer.

This is outdoor lighting unfortunately when haven't had much sun so the light was low, but this is true to color.

You can still see a bit of VNL even with so many layers, but I love how the hexes and matte polish peeps through sugar daddy.

 

This is was shot indoors. Unfortunately I had a very hard time getting the lighting right and the pink here is much darker here than it actually is.

What do you think? It's another first for me. I'm getting rid of an awful lot of firsts these days.  Maybe I should change the name of my blog to Cherry Lockdown, but oh my what would the readers think?!?  The truth is as obsessed with jelly polishes as I am these days I expect to be making many more sandwiches in the future.  I'm on a quest to find lots of great jellies and since I have so many glitters they would come in handy.  Do you ladies have any favorite jelly finish polishes? If you're interested in the glitters I used you can find Lush Lacquer and Elemental Styles on Etsy.  Thanks for reading and for now I'll bid you adieu and bon appetite!