Nautical Nails

Hello ladies!

I've wanted to do nautical nails for a long time, and when I had some free time on Sunday I sat down to do them!

I started with a base of Sally Hansen Lavender Cloud on my pinky, middle, and pointer fingers, and a base of China Glaze First Mate (how appropriate!) on my thumb and ring fingers. I put a coat of China Glaze Skyscraper on the ring fingers for a little BLING! I love Skyscraper and I think it works perfectly with this color scheme!

I freehanded the anchors with a small paintbrush and white acrylic paint and made the stripes with tinyyyy pieces of scotch tape (more on that below). Painted over the tape with First Mate and made little gold buttons with China Glaze Midnight Kiss!

The major difficulty I had with these was getting the nautical stripes to be the same width. It took me a while to cut the strips of tape and they all were varying widths. And I had some leaking under the tape, but I think I managed to paint over it pretty well! They could be a little crisper but I do still like it.

That's all for today, hope you guys have a great day!

China Glaze Electric Beat Chevron Mani

Hi ladies! Phew...what a relief that we're back up and running!

Today I have a chevron mani to show you guys! I've never done one of these before, but I saw this mani by Chalkboard Nails and decided I wanted to try it!

 Guys, let me tell you. NOT as easy as Sarah makes it look. Sarah, I bow down to you, you nail goddess, because that was way more difficult than I was expecting! My nails aren't very wide, so I found it difficult to get a good, even point on the chevrons, especially because those damn Sally Hansen brushes are SO wide! It does look cute though, it just ended up making the tips of my nails very thick.

The colors I used for this are China Glaze Electric Beat, Sally Hansen Lavender Cloud, and China Glaze Make Some Noise.

Do you ladies have any fun weekend plans? They're having a festival down at the park in my neighborhood this weekend so the bf and I are going to go to that :)

Hope you have a great weekend!

Welcome Summer!

This is a manicure I did over the weekend because I wanted something with a little ZING to really shine in the sunlight.  We haven't had many summery days here in Boston - I actually find myself missing those 90 degree days from Indiana!  Oh - and it's supposed to be 97F today here in Boston.  Wish I could go to the beach instead of work!!

I started with a base of Zoya Charisma, which is a beautiful neon magenta color. The pictures make it look pink, but it's actually a deeper red violet color.   Charisma is lovely on her own and will be featured again in an upcoming mani I have planned.  Over the top of Charisma I applied 2 full coats of Orly Bubbly Bombshell.

OBB is a clear base packed full of small magenta colored glitter.  Take her out into the sunshine and she burns your retinas with her glow!  The depth of this glitter is really unique too.  Bubbly Bombshell has been sitting in my stash unused for months and I'm glad I finally took her for a test drive!

We're Live Again! Malware Warning is Gone :)

Just a heads up :)

So for those of you wondering - what happened?   Basically a site on our blogroll was hacked with malicious content; and because we had a link to that site on our blog, Google flagged our blog as potentially dangerous.  The owner of the site that was hacked had no idea she was hacked and is currently working on repairing her site.  So if you happened to click on a link to Kiss My Acetone in the last few days you may want to run a virus and malware scan.  Hopefully Dori can fix her site and get it up and running again soon so we can enjoy her manis too - please send a lot of good vibes out there to her.  Dori - we love ya!

Unfortunately, we had to delete our entire blogroll to get our clean bill of health back as well as all the java scripts we had in our sidebar.

So we'd like to put a request out there that if your site was on our blogroll please email us at mad.manis@yahoo(dot)com with your URL so we can rebuild it.  (I've modified the email addy there to prevent us getting innundated with spam).

Oh, and - hackers suck.

Short update

It has come to our attention that some of you using Firefox have been getting a virus warning when visiting our site.  Upon investigation we have found that a site on our blog roll was flagged as having malicious content.  Most likely this is a false positive to some bit of code on blogger or someone attached a malicious code to that website.  We have removed the website from our blogroll till the problem is sorted out so you should not be seeing the warning anymore.  If you do continue to have virus warnings viewing our site please let us know.

Revlon Facets of Fuchsia Funky French

Hi all.

Happy....Monday?

Guess what? I FINALLY have a mani to show you guys that I'm actually relatively happy with!! I took off that Zoya funky french about an hour after posting it because the layers of polish started to seriously bug me. You know how when you have like 8 coats of crap on your nails and they just feel thick and gross and gnarly? That was my dilemma. So I removed it all about 5 minutes before I made an hour drive to visit boyfriend for the weekend, and was stuck with nakey nails.

Nekkie nails are not fun for me. I hate the texture of them. They always feel like they're going to break at any second. That's why I like to always have them polished - they just FEEL stronger. So after D left for work on Saturday night, the very first thing I did was sit down and do my nails (yes.... I may have brought a bottle of polish and top coat with me....). Mind you, this is a house full of men. So I sat down on my knees and polished my nails on his end table. No clean up, no cuticle cream....nothing. But I sat down, and put on two coats of China Glaze Gothic Lolita. And it was grand - I didn't feel like every nail was going to splinter into a thousand pieces anymore! But.... it was just so....BORING!

So yesterday, after we celebrated Father's Day, I sat down and did another funky french. For this one, I cut pieces of tape on a diagonal and placed them in the center of my nails. I used a coat of Revlon Facets of Fuchsia over top of the tape, and boy do I love the way these two colors go together!

Can you believe I've never used this bottle of Revlon Facets of Fuchsia?! I mean....ever. I've used Mom's bottle of DL Bad Romance, but never used this one. What a mistake that was, because I love this! I thought it needed a little more pizazz, so I added some silver lines with a striper brush. But in retrospect, I wish I'd just left them off. It was much sharper before I put the striping polish on, and the Kiss striper I used was so old and think and glumpy that I couldn't get a crisp line. Le sigh. I still like the way it looks :)

Hope you all had a fantastic weekend, back to the grind today :(

Zoya Sooki Funky French

Hi all. I'm alive!

Today I have a funky french for you guys. Since I rarely have the time (or motivation) to do my nails these days, I've been building on plain color manis as a refresher so I don't have to remove the entire mani.

This started with two coats of Zoya Sooki (any True Blood fans here?) which is the SEXIEST red in all the land. I love it. It's just like...UNF!! Then I taped on a diagonal and used Zoya Kelly to make a funky french. I stamped with a Sally Hansen chrome pen and Konad plate m73. I usually have problems with this particular plate design but it worked pretty well with the Chrome pen.

Sorry for the short post, I hope you all are well! Until next time, see ya :)

Minx nails - my first attempt

Minx nails are a type of nail applique previously only available through a professional salon or certified technician that are now being marketed to Ulta for home use.

If you've ever used Sally Hansen nail strips, Minx nails are very similar to those.

The package comes with 16 nail strips and 12 pedicure strips.  I wish there were more than 8 sizes to choose from for my nails.  Some were too small and the next size up too large.  The directions say to trim down the larger size to fit, but - these things are sticky!  That would have been a hot mess trying to trim a sticky nail applique and have it look neat.

So anyway you are supposed to "Rub the Minx to warm".  After trial and error, I found that gently warming the strip with a blow dryer was much easier (and more successful) than trying to warm it by rubbing.  As the applique heats, it becomes more flexible (and you're gonna need that).

After you've heated the strip you peel it off  the plastic and apply it to a clean nail that you have prepped by removing polish and swabbing with alcohol to remove oils.  I recommend smoothing it down the center of your nail first then moving out to the cuticle edges.  I had to lift and smoothe back down several times and still ended up with some small wrinkles on my non picture hand (which I did first).  Definately a learning curve to application on these.  After you have the applique where you want it you take a fine grade nail file and file in a downward motion on the free edge of your nail to remove the excess.  Any little imperfections can be cleaned up with small scissors or clippers and smoothed back down.

In retrospect I wish I'd picked a pattern for my first attempt rather than a solid color (and a foil at that!) because I think patterns will be more forgiving of tiny wrinkles and imperfections. 

Have any of you tried Minx nails and what is your experience with them?

Rolling in the deep

Today's post is mermaid nails!

While at Ulta this week I picked up the lovely Zoya Charla and wanted to do some sort of nail art with it.  Since the color (aquamarine shimmer with flashes of green and gold) reminded me of a mermaid's tail I decided to go with a mermaid theme.

This is actually 3 coats of Charla.  I could have done 2 but due to some user error, I needed a third to even things out.  :)  I let it dry thoroughly then stamped over it with Konad Blue and Red Angel plate RA-111 in the fish scale pattern.

It came out a little more subtle than I expected, but I really like it!  When the sunlight hits Charla she really shines like POW! look at me!  The pictures lean a little more blue than Charla does in real life, but alas - I am heading out the door for work and no time to color correct them..

And here's the lovely Charla on her own.  She actually has a little more green and gold sheen than the picture represents.  It just doesn't capture how beautiful this polish is.

Have a great week everyone!

Gradient tiger

Hello readers!  Did you think that Amanda and I fell off the planet?  Well I'm back today with a fierce tiger mani for you.

You have probably noticed our lack of posts.  Both Amanda and I are struggling right now with a little blogger burnout, but trying to post at least once a week to keep things going.  We had a death in the family last week.  A cousin of ours who has been very sick for about a year died at age 47 to brain cancer.  We were both devestated and will miss her very much. 

Amanda is working a full time job during the week and has a long-distance boyfriend that keeps her traveling on the weekends.  I'm also working a 30 hour week, but try to do my nails in the mornings before work.  The last 2 manicures I've done I hated, and removed right away without taking pictures.  Plus, I admit that Diablo 3 is taking up quite a bit of my free time.  Grr it's so addicting!  If you play - look me up (Zoya#1115)!

So enough with personal stuff and on to the mani.  I actually really like this one.  I've been trying to master the art of the gradient mani, but apparently am a slow learner :)  Here we have a base coat of Sally Hansen Kook-A-Mango with Zoya Jancyn and Sinful Colors Pull Over to make the grade-IENT.  (haha).  Then I stamped it with Konad black polish and plate m57.  Please forgive the tiny bit of streaking as I was rushing out the door to make it to work in time! 

Hope you enjoy!