Fish Flakes

Chromatic flakes, actually, in the form of ILNP’s fabulously fun Ferris Wheel, adorned with a couple of golden fish bone charms.  Lots of F-word punning going on around here today. 😉

Bowverkill: The Reckoning

Last year I titled a post, featuring a bow-centric manicure, Bowverkill!, thinking I had achieved maximum bowage per nail.  Turns out there’s always more room for bows, as this manicure certainly bears out.  Here I used a sweet, summery polish from Delush, 50 Shades of Yay, topped with OPI’s matte topcoat for a frosted, almost candied sort of look.  Plus bows!  So many little bows. 🙂

Make it Pink! Make it Blue!

Or make it a little bit of both!  But that really didn’t fit the fairies’ rhyming scheme in Sleeping Beauty, so they just stopped with pink and blue.

I, however, did not stop with just pink and blue in this manicure (Pure Ice’s frosty pink Peony and Nails Inc.’s cobalt Baker Street, in case you were curious) topping both polishes with Mr. Bubble, a favourite glitter topper from indie polish maker Polish Me Silly that has to be at least five years old now, and I’m just astonished that it’s still in polish-able condition.  Glitter-based polishes, particularly those in mini bottles, have a tendency to dry up rather quickly, but this bubbly lovely is still flowing smoothly.  Noice!

I cribbed the indigo-over-pink gradient AND the choice of glitter polish from an old Chalkboard Nails manicure that first caught my eye back in – woah, sorry, had to take a moment to contemplate my own mortality there for a sec – 2014.  The glittery little bow was my idea, although I’ll add a bow charm to just about any mani I can.  Sarah Thompson, the blogger and nail artist behind Chalkboard Nails, is still doing her thing, albeit now over on Instagram.  I follow some nail art accounts, and yet I had absolutely no idea that she was still in the mix.  Instagram really sucks these days, doesn’t it?

This mani doesn’t suck and I love this colour combination.  And three cheers for Mr. Bubble, keepin’ on keepin’ on. 🙂

Icy and Iridescent

Kicking off another week of winter with an easy peasy manicure positively spackled with iridescent glitter.  This is four coats of Essence Polish’s Space Queen over a simple white creme.  I always think these kinds of not-too-flashy clear glitter polishes look like they belong in a little girl’s Tinkerbell makeup kit (Tinkerbell Cosmetics, for my younger readers, was the ’80s girl’s answer to the kind of makeup they sell today in inexpensive jewelry and accessory shops like Claire’s – it was *maybe* not of the greatest quality, and everything smelled like plastic strawberries.)

But the Space Queens of the world endure because these polishes are fun, for little kids and big kids alike.  It’s also the only iridescent glitter polish I own, because iridescent glitter sticks to your nails like it’s been Crazy Glue’d onto your person for LIFE.  But it doesn’t smell like phony strawberries, so there’s a big plus. 🙂

I commented in a post last month that one of Disney’s colour trends of 2018 was this sort of blue-leaning iridescent hue that looks as though everything has been iced with pastel rainbows.  Seems I really took that particular trend to heart, because a quick glance around my apartment turned up a dozen or so items in this exact finish, ranging from shimmery makeup and a glossy new day planner, to barware, candle holders and even a stack of 20-year-old dessert plates!

I adore my new planner!  Nabbed this pretty at Chapters for $5 a couple of weeks after Christmas (small tip when it comes to purchasing things like calendars or day planners: If you don’t absolutely need one for the first couple of weeks of the year, hold off until they come down in price – usually about 75% – in early to mid-January.)

Even my daily water intake has gotten into the shimmery, iridescent action, courtesy of my cool new Starbucks tumbler.  The reflections on the surface of the water remind me of the brew Dumbledore chokes back in the Inferi-beset Crystal Cave in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (you know, just ever so slightly less poisonous and insanity-making.)

And on the hot side of the beverage spectrum, we even have my new poison apple mug, positively dripping in a shimmery, iridescent glaze.  So pretty.

And one of these days I will find a bottle worthy of this iridescent stopper my mom gave me some years back, fetchingly outfitted in the finest of squirrel fashions (perched on those Pier 1 dessert plates, most of which have lost their silvery rainbow lustre over the past 20 years of hard use.  Knock on wood, but I’ve never broken a single one, and I STILL, to this day, lament not purchasing all of the dishware available in the collection when I had the chance.)

And with that, time to venture out into the true iciness of this Monday morning, some pretty, mood-boosting iridescent goodies in tow.  Happy week, friends – I hope it’s shiny rainbows every single day. 🙂

Frozen Fingertips

Still frosty, still frozen, only now we Canadians have a lot of American company – welcome to continuous sub-zeros, my southern friends.  Ain’t she glorious?  I seriously haven’t been warm in weeks.  I just live in little furry boot slippers and every layer I can get my frostbitten hands on.  Looking forward to enjoying some sunnier Florida temps soon.

Until then, another icy-looking mani featuring ILNP’s silver holo, Mega, under a frosted dusting of Enchanted Polish’s Freeze Machine.  Brrrr…

Ragdoll

Hi there, friends!  Wonder of wonders, this is a blog post, and I have apparently NOT disappeared!  With apologies for my unintended absence, I’ll simply note that I’ve been hard at work on some renovations and upgrades to my apartment AND deep into the always fun (but also always stressful) preparation stage for our next trip to Disney, which I’m somehow only now appreciating is coming up at the end of THIS WEEK!  Holy cats, I’ve got so much to do.

But first, nails!  This is a glitter polish I made last year that was inspired by Sally of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Here I’ve paired it alongside A England’s Whispering Waves, a deep, bruisey purple-tinged turquoise that really takes Sally’s look to the next level.  Speaking of, I’ve got to get working on MY look if I’m going to meet Miss Sally this coming weekend, which is a distinct possibility; can’t be slacking on the character meet and greets with one of my all time favourites. 🙂

Kaleidoscope Candy

Cheery sprinkled nails (using Cirque’s gold glitter standard, Kaleidoscope) for this cheery Saturday morning.  Hope your weekends are kicking off most delightfully, friends! 🙂

On the Hunt

Hop to it, friends, those chocolate eggs aren’t going to find themselves!  Wishing you all a nice end to your Easter weekends.  Mine is closing out with a big dinner at my mom and dad’s.  My mom’s an excellent cook, with a particular emphasis on blow-out holiday meals, so this should be fun!  Watch this space later for any updates I can manage on my turkey and roast potatoes and GRAVY coma. 😉

But talk of chocolate and holiday feasts aside, if you’re trying to hunt up this festive nail look for yourself, I regret to inform you that this is one of those deeply aggravating posts where I used two polishes (heck, potentially two brands) no longer in existence, Candy Lacquer’s Ring Pops glitter topper over Smitten Polish’s Not Your Mama’s Easter Grass (then whose Easter grass is it precisely?)  I believe Smitten operates under the name Dreamland these days and I’m really not sure of Candy Lacquer’s status.  But both of these polishes, despite being years old, are still trucking along just fine, and so I put them to good use in this very Springy manicure that looks like a macro shot of the inside of an Easter basket filled with sweet treats.

Frozen Bubbles

As in Polish Me Silly’s fun Mr. Bubble glitter bomb over top of my frozen, lacquered fingertips.  ‘Cause it never stops snowing.  As I may have mentioned once or twice or 20 times over the past two days.  Fur real, though, it’s the middle of MARCH.  Time to wrap this up for the year, Earth!  Besides, there’s only so much time left before we all switch over to griping about the heat and humidity (also a thing in my in-a-valley city.)

Heh, that reminds me of a cute interaction I had with a reader years ago.  I had mentioned in a post at the time that my city sits in a valley, as in the Ottawa Valley.  If you’ve been to Ottawa, you know it has its lovely qualities, but it’s also a major (bureaucratic) city, with all the attendant ugliness that goes along with that descriptor – old, crap, perpetually breaking infrastructure (sinkholes!), sprawling, high density suburbs (vinyl!) and a death trap of a 400 series highway that cuts through the entire city like a gaping, infected wound (but tell us how you really feel, Sandra.)  Anyhow, this reader, who I believe hailed from the Philippines, left a sweet comment on my post to the effect of “You live in a valley?!  How wonderful, it must be so beautiful and magical!”  It was adorable, and I laughed for about five solid minutes afterwards at the thought of this girl thinking that I lived in freakin’ Fern Gully.  I tried to be as gentle as possible as I explained that no, Ottawa was your pretty typical metropolitan mess, and how its valley-ness manifested itself was mostly in poor weather conditions that would settle into the divot and then not move off for the next 10 days.  That’s kind of what we’re in right now – a snow cycle that’s trapped down here “in the Valley.”  No place like home, eh? 😉

Sweet and Speckled

The weather’s all snowy, cruddy and overcast today, and as I sat down at my work area with my polishes, I thought, “I absolutely do not want to do some super complicated design, just something bright and cheerful that makes me happy.”  So I pulled out this polish, Candy Lacquer’s Licorice Allsorts, which I nearly always pair with cool-toned pinks, because it’s gorgeous that way.  Licorice Allsorts is actually the first indie polish I ever bought, yikes, five years ago now?  That this polish is five years old is actually pretty amazing; it has held up incredibly well.  And it’s just so much fun, with that weird, mixed candy-hued assortment of glitter in hot pink, baby pink, marigold, black, yellow, white, mint green, darker mint green and probably a couple of others that I’m missing right now.

And I’ve always loved the look of these large, extra chunky glitter polishes after they’ve been topped with a smoothing layer of matte topcoat, here OPI’s Matte Topcoat (bit of a redundant name, that.)  Et voila, throwback candy shop nails that are definitely making me happy – cruddy day mission accomplished. 🙂