Canadian Flags for Canada Day Featuring piCture pOlish, Cirque Colors and Black Sheep Lacquer!

Hello everyone! Today I have some Canada Day nails to share!

We are running out the door to join in on the Canada Day festivities, so this post will be a quick one word-wise! Happy Canada Day everyone!

For the middle finger nails, I started off with two easy coats of the best white I've ever used; Cirque Colors Carpe Diem. Next, I went in with piCture pOlish O'Hara on a small detail brush for the maple leaf.

On my index and ring finger nails, I applied two coats of O'Hara. The formula, brush and everything else about this polish was perfect!

Finally, for the pinkies and thumbs I applied three coats of Essie Waltz followed by a coat of Black Sheep Lacquer Grab Your Toque!

A bit of dry time and a coat of Essie Good To Go top coat and I was done!

What do you guys think of this look? Are those of you that are Canadians wearing some festive nails today? I'd love to know!

Thanks so much for reading everyone! I'll be back with some swatches and some nail art very soon! Happy Wednesday! :)

Five Manis I've Done on my Grandma!

Hey everyone! Today I have some manis I've done on my grandma to share!

I am in the middle of a few big midterms and lab write-ups so I thought I'd get up a quick post on some nail looks I've done on my grandma for you guys! I love all things nails (obviously) so I really love doing my family or friends' nails while we're having a visit!

Anyways, onto the nails!

In this first look she's wearing two coats of Emily de Molly Turbulence and a coat of top coat (link to the post on my plaid nails shown here).

Here I believe she's wearing two NYX Girls polishes in Pimp My Ride (lime green) and True Navy (navy)!

Here she's wearing a MrCandiipants floral design with Essie Play Date as the base, and Quo by Orly Lilac Lust, Zoya Kristen, Orly Mind's Eye and OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls for the details.

For these nails, I think I used NYX Girls Mermaid Green for the base and I definitely used OPI Solitaire for the zig zags (also inspired by MrCandiipants)!

Lastly, we have some American Apparel Coney Island with Black Sheep Lacquer Forbidden Fruit on top!

What do you guys think of round up posts like these? I'm sure I could put some together with my mom and sister's nails as well! Happy Monday lovelies! :)

Half Moon Heart Nail Art Featuring Tiny Triangle Studs and a Born Pretty Store Review!

Hello everyone! Today I have some half moon heart nail art and a Born Pretty Store stud review to share!

Hey look, I tricked you (and myself) because I thought I'd be back with some blue or green nails! I love blue and green so much and since it feels like it has been long enough since I last posted some, doing these nails really did feel like a trick or surprise to me! Sometimes a palate cleanser like this is nice; a mauve and white combo like this feels so fresh and lady-like. By the way, if you guys ever have a certain kind of nail art or polish you'd like to see on here you should let me know! Sometimes I struggle with ideas for nail art so I'd be happy to have a suggestion to work off of!

Anyways, onto the nails!

For this look I started off with two coats of OPI Just Lanai-ing Around and a coat of top coat. As usual for me lately, I wore this polish plain for a while before I added to it. The next day, I went in with two coats of Black Sheep Lacquer Scatter Heart (which I swatched a while ago here) in a top-of-a-heart-like shape. I then decided to add a contrasting line between the base and Scatter Heart with Contrary Polish The Boulevard (which I still haven't swatched or worn on its own, gasp!).

Because I remembered that I still had one more nail art thing from BPS to review, and because I figured it would go with the gold glitter in Scatter Heart, I went ahead and added these adorable triangle studs (B2 of these) to this look! They feel like they'll really stay put as they come down at the edges, and they were super easy to use! I feel like these are the most "me" nail art things I've ever picked to review from BPS so the shopper/hoarder in me wants to pick more up (specifically all six of the small ones on that page :P).

By the way, the lines and heart-top things here are pretty wonky because I filmed a video tutorial for this look. Unfortunately though, I can't find the video files. I filmed it through Canon EOS Utility 2, does anyone have any experience with that program? The camera did die while I was in between filming and I haven't plugged the whole camera back in to my computer to look for them (just the SD card) so maybe there still is hope!

What do you guys think of these nails or these studs in particular? I think they're my favourite things I've ever reviewed from BPS!

If you guys decide to check out any of their nail art stuff and want to pick some up, be sure to use my code for 10% off; SKBQ10!

Thanks so much for taking a look everyone! I hope you're having a great start to your weekend! Again, I'm not sure what I'll be back with because I just did these nails yesterday so I'm still wearing them, but stay tuned! Happy Friday guys! =)

Groovy Purple & Green Nail Art Featuring a Born Pretty Store Iridescent Rhinestone Review!

Hey everyone! Today I have some groovy nails and a review of some Born Pretty Store rhinestone-like studs to share!

I'm currently on my hour-long bus ride home writing this post! Our reading break is over so I'm on my way home from my first day of school in a while. The break made me so excited for the end of the semester and my four month summer! My friend Anna (who my sister and I visited last summer in Switzerland) will be coming here for three of those months! I'm so freaking excited! Basically I'm just dreaming about being done school for a while. I know I will be tonight while I'm writing up a huge inorganic lab report! :P

Anyways, onto the nails!

I used a whole lotta polish for this look; Essie DJ Play that Song (purple base, two coats), Deborah Lippmann Shoshanna (light purple), Rainbow Honey Shark Attack (blue jelly with glitter, on top of Shoshanna), OPI My Dogsled is a Hybrid (green) and Black Sheep Lacquer Lorelei (clear-based glitter, on top of MDiaH). For Shoshanna and Shark Attack I just used the brushes from the bottle, but for MDiaH and Lorelei I used a small paintbrush.

I applied a coat of top coat (Essie Good to Go) and left it alone for a day. The next day, I realized I still had some nail art stuff to review from Born Pretty Store and I decided the 2mm green ones of these* would go perfectly with this look! I smeared some top coat where I wanted to put the rhinestones and just picked them up with tweezers and stuck them in. I then applied one more coat of top coat on those nails and I was done!

I think these studs are really cool looking due to their iridescent finish and they were really easy to use! I think the layer of top coat on top made it so you could only see them flash yellow or orange, but they still look really cool! They have stayed on perfectly so far, and I've been wearing them for a day doing student-like things including taking books and other things in and out of my bag! As long as you like the look of these, I see all pros and no cons!

What do you guys think of these nails or these rhinestones? I'm not so sure about the nails, I think they might be getting too long and they're a bit too glittery for my liking. I'd love to know what you guys think the comments!

My microbiology lab teacher commented on these today and said I had really pretty nails, which totally made my day! I think I do like them but they're just not really my style.

If you decide to pick up any nail art stuff from BPS be sure to use my coupon code for 10% off; SKBQ10!

Thanks so much for taking a look everyone! I'll probably be back with a swatch and review of a KB Shimmer polish this Thursday! Happy Monday guys! =)

*This product was provided in exchange for an honest review.

Snowy Nail Art Featuring Born Pretty Store Snowflake Decorations!

Hey everyone! Today I have some wintery nails featuring some Born Pretty Store snowflake charms to share!

Look at this, I'm posting for the second week in a row and keeping up with my proposed schedule! Say what? I'm even thinking of trying to get two posts in on weeks where I'm not so busy and eventually maybe two posts a week regardless. I think getting back into blogging has helped me motivation-wise already. Taking a break from here and not doing my nails wasn't taking a break, it was not doing the things I enjoy and doing things I don't enjoy like procrastinating at school and stressing myself out. Anyways! Onto the nails!

I started off with one coat of the base coat I've been using recently (Orly Bonder) and then to most of my nails I applied two coats of a lovely texture polish, OPI Solitaire. For my snow-capped nails I just used a small detailing brush (Winstonia Kolinsky Sable Brush in #000) for the white part (done with OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls) and Black Sheep Lacquer Blink straight from the bottle for the duochrome topper. For my remaining nails I applied two coats of MBSW and while the second one was still wet I applied the snowflake charms (number 8 of these, though I seemed to have a 9 thrown in as you can see in these pictures).

I ended up tripling up on top coat for the snowflake nails (as well as pushing the edges down while they dried into the white base) and the corners still came up and got caught on everything. If that doesn't bother you then these charms would work for you, but in my opinion they're only really good for pictures and not practical to wear. They are super pretty though!

I'm getting a proper soft box/light box in the mail soon and I'm really excited about it! Lighting and white balance is something I'm constantly trying to improve on and I think it will really help!

Thanks so much for taking a look everyone! What do you guys think of this look or these charms? Does it snow around this time of year where you live? Let me know in the comments!

If you guys decide to pick up some nail art stuff from BPS be sure to use my coupon, SKBQ10, for 10% off!

I hope you guys are having a good week so far! I'll be back with some dark green glittery nails featuring some Hex Nail Jewelry charms soon! Happy Monday!

Wedding Nails Roundup Number One Featuring a Green Floral Double Gradient!

Hey everyone! Today I have five manis that four other people and I wore to a wedding last weekend!

I'm getting really scared about school starting soon guys! I'm transferring to university from college and it's so much bigger and it's stressing me out. I went in today to get my student card/bus pass and I really don't know my way around at all :P. I might bus there before school starts to know where I get off my bus and where the buildings I have classes in are in relation to the bus stop. Maybe that will make me less nervous about going there, here's hoping! Anyways, onto the nails!

These are the bride's mother's nails that kind of look like opals! The base is OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls and the fancy top coat is Essie Shine of the Times as you may have guessed!

Next up we have the bride herself's nails! The base is Revlon Jaded and the glitter polish is OPI In True Stefani Fashion.

Here we have my mom's nails wearing just two easy coats of OPI Chocolate Moose!

Next we have my grandma's nails! I do her nails really often and for any special occasion she has coming up and it's always so fun! Here she's wearing American Apparel Coney Island with Black Sheep Lacquer Forbidden Fruit on top!

My grandma came by later that day to get her nails done so she didn't make it into this cute picture and I didn't even think to put my hand in!

Lastly, we have my own nails as I'm sure you can tell! As usual, these are inspired by the lovely MrCandiipants!

I started off with two coats of OPI Stranger Tides and allowed that to dry. Next I sponged Revlon Spanish Moss on the tips of my nail (not that and Stranger Tides as I wasn't really going for a smooth gradient look). I then went in with OPI OPI... Eurso Euro and a small nail art brush for the petals, followed by OPI Fiercely Fiona and a dotting tool for the flower centres.

After that had dried I gave my nails a spray of hairspray and let that dry before applying my top coat (Essie Good to Go)! The more I looked at these when I wore them and the more I look at them now the more I like them; I wasn't totally sure about them at first.

What do you guys think of these five nail looks? Do you like the look of the almost double gradient, with the sponging and the flower concentration? I really do and I want to play around with this idea some more!

Thanks so much for having a look everyone! We're on a little road trip on our way to another wedding which should be fun! I brought polish so I might do another wedding post like this with my mom's, sister's and my nails very soon! Happy Friday! =)

Born Pretty Store Patterned Metallic Stud Review!

Hey everyone! Today I have a fun stud nail art look and review to share!

I'm getting really excited about my trip to Switzerland, so much so that I'm even looking forward to the long trip there! :O It's just my little sister and I going and travelling without our parents is a first for us! It's all very exciting but I'll quit yammering on and get to the nails!

For these nails I started off with three easy coats of Black Sheep Lacquer Smells Like Teen Spirit. To apply the studs, I applied the third coat of polish and then stuck the studs in the wet polish before moving on to the next nail. The smaller studs are from a random shop on Amazon or eBay, and the larger studs with the striped holographic pattern are from Born Pretty Store (link here, item number 2)!

All of the polish and studs were very easy to work with in this mani! Some of the Born Pretty Store studs we're stuck to other ones in pairs, but since they're not super small they were easy to pull apart. It also comes with plenty (100 pieces) so you wouldn't need to pry two apart until you've used them many times and were starting to run out! One other thing I noticed is that removing the studs with acetone-free remover still took off their holographic stripe design. I thought that was actually pretty cool because now I have some plain silver circle studs in my collection!

The Black Sheep Lacquer polish I used here is a thermal and I've done a review post on it before showing it's transitions (link here). It was so much fun wearing this mani (I wore it for 5 or 6 days crazily enough) because sometimes my nails were a pale jade green like in these pictures, and sometimes they were a much darker teal colour when I was cold!

If you guys decide to pick these studs or any of their other nail art stuff up, be sure to use my coupon code, SKBQ10!

Thanks so much for having a look everyone! Let me know what you think of these nails or these studs in the comments! Happy Friday! =)

Deborah Lippmann Hannah & Taping with Black Sheep Lacquer Purple Planet!

Hey everyone! Today I have a swatch and review of Deborah Lippmann Hannah as well as some simple taping nail art to share featuring a lovely Black Sheep Lacquer multichrome!

Today I've been enjoying another lazy morning with my boyfriend since he has Thursdays off. I'm especially glad about it because I've had a migraine all day that started last night, so I definitely wouldn't want to be running around! I took a Tylenol earlier but I don't think it really touched the pain. Oh well, I'm happy just laying around because standing up and moving around is mostly what's hurting. Anyways, onto the nails!

I played around with a bunch of different lightings, camera settings and poses this time around, and I'm still not sure what I like the best. The pictures with a white or brown background were just kind of for fun. I took them outside of my light box on full automatic settings, but they actually turned out better than my light box swatches!

I do think I'll be wanting to use my light box for my pictures, I just need to figure it and my camera out a bit more :P. I plan to spend more time fiddling with it today or tomorrow and I hope to make some decisions!

I found that custom white-balancing the pictures on the white background was easier to do and more accurate, so I'm feeling very tempted to go back to that. I didn't include any of those pictures here but maybe I will in my next post. I'd really love to hear your guys' thoughts on all of this! It would help so much!

Now, onto these nails specifically! I started with two easy coats of Deborah Lippmann Hannah; a gorgeous dusty dark green creme. It had a perfect formula and was super quick-drying! I also absolutely love the brush Deborah Lippmanns have, they're thin and kind of small and so dang easy to work with and get nice rounded lines at the cuticle!

Speaking of cuticles, this polish did stain my cuticles a little bit. I'm pretty sure that was because I had just pushed them back and they were a bit dry though!

The next day I decided to add little accents using Black Sheep Lacquer Purple Planet. I purchased it a while ago and I have been really excited to try it! I think I'll swatch it and have a post up about just it later this week!

Another decision I'd like to make is whether to use square pictures or pictures with the normal dimensions. Square pictures show up bigger on my blog and they're so easy to Instagram! What do you guys think? I'd really love to know!

I can't get over how pretty and how multichromatic Purple Planet is! I can't wait to get up some proper swatches of it!

Sorry for all the pictures here guys, I kind of went nuts!

Thank you so much for reading everyone! Again, I'd love to have your input on backgrounds and picture shapes because I'm pretty indecisive! :P Let me know what you thought of these nails in the comments too! Happy Thursday! =)