31 Day Challenge Day 18 - Half Moons

My first half moon turned out a bit awful, I think due to how highly curved my nails are; my guide stickers didn't want to stay stuck down anywhere but the middle. So this time I just grabbed a short striping brush and freehanded the moons, which turned out much, much better!

I really love how this turned out! I used Revlon Scented - Not So Blueberry for the main color, and Nicole by OPI - Follow Me On Glitter for the moons. Fabulous nails, and oh so easy to do, too!

Not So Blueberry has a subtle duochrome that's obvious in the bottle but that I didn't see on the nail at first, but then kept popping out and making me wonder if I was going crazy! So pretty.

I was playing around with hand positions, and I just have to share this one even though the colors came out wonky for unknown reasons:

Love that! Even though it's not true color it just looks so fantastically dramatic! Unfortunately I don't think I can re-create that pose without a lot of practice and fussing, this pic was a lucky accident. I'm definitely gonna have to try though!

I'm not sure yet how I feel about scented polishes. I own two, this and a bubblegum scented mini from Claire's, which smells super yummy and helped make up my mind to give in to the duochrome lust for this one, which... doesn't smell quite so yummy. It's not bad, exactly, but I'm on the fence about it scent-wise. Color wise, it's 100% love!

What do you think? Scented nail polish, yes or no? Or it depends?

31 Day Challenge Day 17 - Glitter

I wanted to do something different for glitter day. I've kind of overused gradients for this challenge, which is always the first thing I think for nail art with glitter, and the second thing I think of is jelly sandwich, which I tend not to love my execution of (and have already done once in the challenge). :/ 

In the end I decided to take the jelly sandwich idea and tweak it a little, giving me:

A shimmer sandwich!

Going back to my love of Wet & Wild polishes yet again for this one, I started with a base of Blue Moon, then a layer of Party of Five Glitters, and finished it off with a coat of Grey's Anatomy.

31 Day Challenge Day 16 - Tribal Print

This idea was kind of sitting around in the back of my head just waiting for tribal print day.

I started with a base of Nina Ultra Pro - French Roast, then a layer of Essie - As Gold As It Gets. That combo was so pretty I had to take a picture of it before adding the design, and ended up wearing it alone for a few days: 

Isn't that gorgeous?!

For the tribal design I freehanded with a shimmery-black Kiss striper. I planned to do it in plain black but grabbed the wrong striper and didn't realize until I'd already done half my hand. So I just went ahead and finished up with the shimmer.

31 Day Challenge Day 15 - Delicate Print

The only thing I could come up with for "delicate print" that I wanted to do and was reasonably confident I could pull off was vines. I was originally gonna do ivy vines, but the leaves turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I anticipated, and after giving up on them in frustration I grabbed a random pink and gave my vines flowers instead.

The base is Color Club - Beyond The Mistletoe, which is fantastically blingy green, light blue, and holo glitter. The holo really overwhelms the polish, but the other glitters give it a soft blue-green tint. 

For the vines I used Finger Paints - Go Van Gogh! and for the flowers I picked out a pink from a Simple Pleasures set I picked up at Ross super cheap, all the polishes are too streaky for me to wear as a base or on their own, so I just use them for nail art. None have names that I'm aware of.

31 Day Challenge Day 14 - Flowers

I was just *dying* to try out the four polishes I picked up from China Glaze's Bohemian collection, so I went for skittles: 

Index: Deviantly Daring

Middle: Unpredictable

Ring: Rare & Radiant

Pinky: Swanky Silk

And for the challenge art I got lazy and pulled out some Kiss nail decals. I hope that's not cheating!

31 Day Challenge Day 13 - Animal Print

Since I already did tiger stripes for orange day, I decided to bite the bullet and try a freehand leopard print. The idea of doing this has always scared me a little, with my poor dotting-tool skills... But here you have it.

Quite possibly the sloppiest leopard mani ever posted to the internets

One more for the all Wet & Wild kick I've been on, using Wild Shine polishes this time. I started with a base of two coats of Tickled Pink, and over that one coat of Sparked. My bobby pin dotting tool came out again and I used Dreamy Poppy for the inside of the spots and Casting Call for the outer part.

Sparked is my favorite out of these four polishes, a nice and evenly applying pink and silver glitter. 

Tickled Pink is a bit streaky, I only got away with two coats because glitter covers a multitude of sins.

31 DayChallenge Day 12 - Stripes

For stripes I immediately thought of magnetic polish, maybe because I just picked up these four lovelies from Wet & Wild's Magnetic Effect collection.

From left to right, the polishes are No-Gas, Electrically Charged; Can't Resist Your Magnetism; Don't Break The Circuit; and Igniting The Spark.

I love love love how pigmented and vivid the colors in this collection are. If I weren't trying so hard to scale back my polish buying I would have snapped up the whole collection! 

No-Gas looks like a duochrome in the bottle, but it doesn't translate well to the nail. You do get a subtle greenish tint to the shimmer that makes the black a bit less harsh, though, and I'm still glad I bought it.

Can't Resist Your Magnetism and Igniting The Spark are pretty basic magnetic shimmers, nothing particularly special about them other than the color intensity.

Don't Break The Circuit is the standout for me, with little subtly iridescent glassflecks giving it a fantastic sparkle.

31 Day Challenge Day 11 - Polka Dots

Sticking to Wet & Wild polishes, this time I decided to show off three from their Megalast line with some basic dotting using a bent out bobby pin:

The base color is On A Trip. On my index and ring nails I dotted with I Need A Refresh-Mint, and on my middle and pinky I used Wet Cement.

Overall this isn't my favorite of color combinations, and I dotted all wonky so it looks kind of weird. I might have to play with dotting a bit more, get some practice in.