More Valentine's Day Manicures

I did this super fast manicure a few weeks ago. I was putting Wet n Wild's Buffy The Violet Slayer on for the third consecutive time when I noticed my bottle of Nicole Step To The Beat of my ♥ sitting on the table. Perfect combination. Purple hearts with purple polish!


Of course, this isn't a color accurate representation of Buffy... But it still looks pretty, right? You can see little circles of topcoat around the hearts, haha! The polish is still wet in these pictures. I put extra topcoat on top of the hearts to make them a little more smooth, otherwise I keep playing with them and sometimes peel them off.


But even better than my mediocre manicure are these super cute designs submitted by my reader Nicole. She and her mom both did adorable designs for February, check it out:


This is Nicole's manicure, which is done with Zoya Jolene and Nicole by OPI Love Your Life. Fitting, right? Nicole wearing Nicole! She did a way better job with her hearts than I did with mine. This looks so pretty. I love the hot pink with the light pink hearts!


And her mom goes one step further and literally turns her nails into hearts! The color is Sinful Dream On, a neon purple. I love this so much. Heart shaped nails. I totally want to try this!


This time of year makes me all silly. I find myself wanting to be surrounded by red flowers and heart shaped lace doilies and pink sugar sprinkles... The actual Valentine's Day is rarely special for me, but I love the season and everything that goes along with it. All the pretty and almost sickeningly cute decorations and candies are a welcome break from the dreary, seemingly endless snow and cold during the last stretch of winter. You know what I'm talking about. That depressing period between the end of the Christmas season, after all the lights and decorations are gone and there's nothing but frigid cold, bare trees and absurd heating bills and that first warm day of spring when you can actually go outside without your hair freezing. As much as I do love winter, after a while, the oppressive cold and lack of color starts to get to me. I need that little bit of color and cuteness in February.

First Valentine's Day Mani

This weekend I did my first Valentine's Day-inspired manicure. It's not quite the typical Valentine's theme, but I had the urge to use these colors together, and this is what happened!

I think I'll try to do a couple more. Maybe I'll re-do that Illamasqua Heart mani that looks like saddle shoes, but this time do a better job. I think for my actual Valentine's Day manicure I'm going to use the Art Club Glam decals with the gold hearts, maybe over light pink or white.

I tried a different technique for applying Black Shatter this time, thanks so much everyone for the tips! You guys rock.



This was: Two coats of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Night Lights over one coat of NYC Black (not a very good black polish, sadly) with OPI Black Shatter over two coats of Nicole OMB! on ring fingers and thumb. Night Lights is a nice chunky holo, sadly, this type of lighting is not good for capturing holo.

On this hand I tried a zig-zag diagonal pattern for applying the crackle polish and I think it turned out great!

I forgot to take a picture of the other hand until I'd already been wearing this for a couple days:

On this hand I did the random-blobs-of-crackle technique, but I don't think I did it right, it didn't crackle enough cause I made the blobs too thick. Very different look from the other two methods, though! I got bad shrinkage on my thumb because I did two coats of Seche Vite instead of regular topcoat and then Seche. Lesson learned!

Last night while I was out grocery shopping, I picked up some really cool Kiss decals that I think would make a good gothy Valentine's day design... Now I just have to think of a creative way to use them. I'll try to post a picture of them later.

Nicole by OPI Liquid Metals for Spring 2011

Here's Nicole by OPI's latest: A set of four super-sparkly foils. Technically these came out late last year, but they're part of 2011's spring colors. These feature the new Nicole Perfect Stroke brush, which is similar to OPI's ProWide brush, just rounder and flatter.



It Starts With Me. This is a silver-based peach toned foil. It's not quite pure gold, not quite taupe.


Miss Independent. A pink toned foil. Again, it has a silver base with a pale pink-purple overtone. This one is pretty unique, I can't think of another foil quite like this.



Rich In Spirit. An aqua-blue foil. In certain lights it seems like it has a greenish tinge to it, in other lights it looks pure sky blue.



The Next CEO. A good neutral gold foil with a little bit of a beige tone.

The formula on these is good. Very smooth, not thick, not runny. Good coverage, I only needed two coats on all of these. Drying time is very fast. The new Perfect Stroke brush was much nicer in these than it was in the One Less Lonely Girl collection; none of the brushes in this set were crooked or defective in any way. Smooth, easy application and a nice glossy finish even without topcoat.

These foils are extremely shiny and sparkly. While the colors themselves aren't terribly bold or exciting, the finish is amazing. They're like a cross between a true foil like Zoya Trixie, a chrome like China Glaze Millennium and a glass fleck sparkle. They are both reflective and sparkly/shimmery/borderline glittery and that's what makes these stand out. They aren't as dense of a foil as, say, Orly's Foil FX collection, but they're twice as sparkly.

(These were sent to me for review.)

OPI Black Shatter over Nicole My Lifesaver

The full manicure picture of this didn't turn out, but I wanted to post this cause I liked the combination so much:

OPI Black Shatter over Nicole My Lifesaver. Washed out (and my skin looks weirdly red) because of the flash, but this is really more about the Shatter than the base color. Look how perfectly it crackled! I love this stuff so much. It's so much better than the old crackle polishes. It crackles so quickly and doesn't take an hour to remove.

I also think it's quite funny that I'm wearing a Katy Perry nail polish over a Justin Bieber nail polish. Two musicians that I know next to nothing about and would rather eat my mother-in-law's turkey lasagna than listen to even one their songs.... Yet here they are on my nails, their colors joined together in perfect harmony and greatly admired by me.

But, yeah, I really love this combination. Nice contrast between light base color and black crackle effect.

Nicole by OPI Justin Bieber One Less Lonely Girl Collection 2011

It's here. The much talked about nail polish collection inspired by Justin Bieber. I'm still not exactly sure how Justin Bieber and nail polish are related at all, hey, the colors ended up being really cool...


I took full advantage of the twenty seconds of sunlight we had this week...


Give Me The 1st Dance. Standard sparkly silver foil. Not unique, but not a bad color.



My Lifesaver. Wow. This one was not in the promo pictures I originally saw of this collection, so it was a complete surprise. It's awesome. It's not as sky blue as it looks here, it's actually a turquoise creme. The shade is somewhere between MAC Peppermint Patti and China Glaze For Audrey, closer to the Peppermint Patti side. Super creamy finish, easy, non-streaky application, very pigmented. All around great shade.



OMB! Another pleasant surprise. Very different from the promo pics. This is an amazing fiery, duochromey glass fleck red. My pictures don't do it justice. The main duochrome colors are orange and pink, weird contrast between cool and warm in this polish. See this one in real life if you get a chance.


Me + Blue. A blue shimmer base absolutely packed with holographic microglitter. There's just a ton of glitter in this. It's not your traditional holo that's made from little flat sheet-like particles. This is like some of the Nubar Gems that are a shimmer base color with chunky holo glitter, but so much of it that it looks like a true holo under sunlight. It is a little lumpy, but because there's so much glitter you almost don't notice.

Just for fun I put OPI's Black Shatter on top:




One Less Lonely Glitter. What a name. Great color, though! Light lavender glitter in a clear base. It has tiny little glitter particles mixed with bigger round pieces. Very sparkly. Delicate. Nice opacity, too.




Prized Possession Purple. A medium purple shimmer. Very pretty color, but the formula was quite unruly. It was very watery and the brush was defective so I found it rather frustrating to apply. I wish I had something better to say about the formula because the color is so nice, but it reminded me of trying to apply NYX Wild.



Step To The Beat Of My ♥. One of Nicole's signature heart polishes. This one is tiny opal glitter in a very faintly purple tinted base and it has purple and red holo metallic hearts. This is meant for layering but if you like a more subtle look you can wear it alone.

The formula on these was good with the exception of Prized Possession Purple. I did two coats of all but Prized Possession Purple which was three coats. The formula feels like normal Nicole formula, no surprises formula-wise. The big surprise is the new brush. They have switched to a short, wide, curved brush a little bit like the Sally Hansen Insta-Dri brush. Half of the brushes in my set were defective and made application difficult. They're supposed to be gently rounded at the bottom but some of mine were more like Vs or even Ws... When the brushes are the way they're supposed to be, they're great. Hopefully the faulty brushes will be fixed soon. Brings me back to the OPI India collection :)


Overall, the colors are quite nice. I love My Lifesaver, One Less Lonely Glitter and OMB! the most. They're nothing at all like the promo pictures would have lead me to believe, but they're still very pretty. Some of the shades can be easily duplicated, but I'm sure Bieber fans would love to have these either way.

There's some info cards attached to these bottles and they say, "In support of Pencils of Promise. Join Justin and PoP to build 100 schools around the world." It doesn't specify that any proceeds go to Pencils of Promise or anything about a charitable contribution or anything like that... So I'm unclear on whether or not any money from these goes to support a cause, but I'll see what I can find out.

These are available now at Wal-Mart.

(These were sent to me for review.)