Simple Valentine Faux nad

Have you ever just had one of those days?  How about one of those weeks?  About 2 weeks ago I broke the corner off one of my nails on my picture hand.  So since my right hand looked pretty decent, I switched to taking photos of my off hand while the break grew out.  Last week I broke the corner off a nail on my off hand.  ARGH.  So I went back to my left hand (which had had 7-10 days to grow out and was easier to hide the break).  And yesterday I broke another corner on my left hand...  Someone is definately trying to tell me something.  So I bit the bullet and just chopped them all off to be the same length so they can grow out strong and split free. I prefer my nails square, but for the purpose of growing them out I went ahead and tapered them to give them extra strength.   It annoys me so much when I break a nail; and I've had a real hard time getting them back into good condition this winter.  So here are pics of my super nubs proving that short nails can be pretty too!

Today's post is a super easy Valentine's Day mani combining some simple sponging with stamping.

I started with Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Pink Blink which is a light pink, then sponged over it with Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Presto Pink (which is a darker pink) and Pure Ice Superstar to give it some depth.

After it was fully dry I stamped with Sally Hansen Color Quick Fast Dry pen in Red Chrome and Red Angel plate 114.  If you haven't tried these pens for stamping yet, they work really well but dry SUPER fast so you have to work very quickly.

Thanks for reading!

Berry Flakey Goodness

I received all five of the Finger Paints special effects flakies last week from my mom, and have just now gotten around to using them! I know, I know. Blasphemy at its finest.

For this mani I used a base color of Zoya Jacy. If you've been following Mad Manis for quite some time, you've probably heard me say time and time again how much I love this color. Well, for those of you who haven't: I. LOVE. THIS. COLOR!! I love berry shades, but this ones a bit different.  If you look closely in the bottle picture, you can see little teeny tiny particles of a purpley shimmer! The application on this was a little runny for a Zoya polish, but I can handle it because I love this polish so much. Zoya had one of the best berry shades of all time. OF ALL TIME!! (Kanye reference, anyone?)

 

The flakey polish I used over this is Finger Paints Asylum. Asylum is the prettiest of the bunch -- it has little flakey particles that flash blue and green and orange and yellow and it's just like a shredded flakey rainbow of goodness on my nails! I used two coats of Asylum for these pictures.

Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!

Magnetix magnetic polishes

Look what I spotted in Rite-Aid today.    A display of new magnetic nail polishes.  I snapped a pic quickly before a sales associate could see me ;-)

There looks to be about 6 colors in the collection.  I already had similar colors from Icing so I bypassed all but these two.  I can't seem to find names on them, but they are a toffee color and a light plum color.  They come with 2 magnets, which I'm a little lukewarm on.  It looks pretty flimsy and not very user friendly.  Look for swatches coming up next week!

 

Valentines Love Birds

It's time! Time for the beginning of Valentine's Day manis! Yay! I love love :) :)

I found this adorable little image of a love bird on Shutter Stock and decided I had to recreate it on my nails. The base color is OPI Sparrow Me The Drama and the rest is done with acrylic paints. I really need to get myself a full size bottle of Sparrow Me The Drama... I only have the small one from the POTC mini pack (which sucks to use on my big nails, btw)

 

Aren't they cute?! I didn't want to take these babies off!

Icing magnetic pink Wednesday!

This was my first attempt with magnetic polish.  I picked up 3 of the 4 colors at Icing Saturday night and decided to start off with the pink one for Pink Wednesday!

I started with a base of Color Club Hot Like Lava, which is a beautiful color in and of itself.  I love this Foiled collection - the polishes apply well, dry fast and are very forgiving of brush strokes.

The Icing polish applies nicely as well, it isn't too thick or too thin; but it is in a smaller than average bottle with .33 oz of product rather than the usual .5.  The price was much more reasonable than most of the other magnetic polishes that have been marketed to date (but that may soon be changing as more companies jump on the magnetic polish bandwagon).  I paid $9 for one bottle, but Icing was having a BOGO half off sale so the second polish rang up at $4.50.  That's $6.75 per bottle. (I are a math whiz)

The polish comes with a removable cap containing the magnet, so you dont have to flip your brush upside down to magnetize the design.  The magnet also contains little finger ledges to help with holding the magnet the correct distance from your nail without it coming in contact with it.  Well -- in theory anyway.  I actually had to redo 5 nails because I got a tiny bit too close and bumped the magnet into my wet polish.  So there is an initial learning curve.

And here is the lovely Hot Like Lava on it's own

Noobie tips

1) Do only one nail at a time, you want to magnetize the polish while it's still wet.

2) Hold the magnet stationery.  I was under the misguided notion that since I have wide nail beds if I kinda slowly pivoted the magnet from one side to the other I'd get a more uniform design.  Untrue.   Your best design comes from holding the magnet absolutely still.

3)  I found that the best way to judge the distance from my nail bed to the magnet was to hold my finger under a bright light and look down from the free edge toward my cuticles rather than a side or lateral view.  (see pics for example)

Yes

No

4) Base color (at least on the polishes I have tried) does not seem to impact your finished product much.  I swatched on 4 different base colors and my design came out pretty much identical on all 4 swatches.

This is such a different concept to me and I like it a lot more than I thought I would.  I think the phrase I used while I was working on this mani was "freaking awesome"!  hehe  Also the color variations don't show up as well in bright light (i.e. light box) than in normal ambient lighting so your design is going to be more pronounced than it looks here.