Although…with the colour-shifting base polish I chose here (Polish Me Silly’s jade green multi-chrome, Dreamer) this manicure looks less like evil peepers and more like Pascal the chameleon from the animated Disney musical, Tangled. I don’t think Pascal would ever look so evil, though (unless he was in the midst of delivering yet another tongue-based wet willy to Flynn Rider, that is!)
Looks like third time’s the charm for these charming Ariel nails that borrow quite a bit from a previous design, while adding some serious infrastructure upgrades in the form of new shells – a couple of nail charms from Daily Charme – for one Miss Mermaid.
I love these nails! I think this manicure turned out so well, particularly the shells, which started out life as plain white charms that I then painted a holographic purple (Enchanted Polish’s August 2015), highlighted with the same purple multi-chrome I used in Ariel’s tail. Speaking of, her tail also got a bit of an upgrade – ILNP’s glitter flakie topper, Supernova, over Polish Me Silly’s mermaidy multi-chrome, Paradise, for a scale-type look.
Ariel’s face over on my thumb also looks much improved. Pupils are the windows to the soul, and everybody should have them, even my little Disney nail characters. 🙂
Three years ago when I began really immersing myself in the world of nail art, I swore to myself (and others!) that I wasn’t going to become one of those nail artists who piles a bunch of lumpy embellishments all over her nails. Flash forward a few years and I’ve adorned my nails with various 3D adornments two days in a row now. At least it’s good to know I’m consistent in my inconsistencies.
But it’s hard not to waffle a bit (or a lot – also, oooh, waffles) when you’re dealing with nail art supplies as pretty as these tiny purple gemstone studs I recently purchased from Daily Charme. Here I paired four of the mother of pearl-type studs with a similarly beautiful (and colour-changing) lacquer, Polish Me Silly’s green-to-turquoise-to-purple multi-chrome, Obsession. Quite the gem.
Colour-shifty! For these chromatic rainbow nails (if your definition of a rainbow includes mostly greens, blues and purples) I brushed on five Polish Me Silly multi-chromes, layering them lightly along their edges in a kind of vertical gradient. The blended effect works best on my middle finger where the two polishes I used are slight tonal variations on each other, but I think this very mermaidy-looking mani is pretty cool, straight across the (modified) rainbow spectrum.
From index to pinkie (and left to right in the photo below) I used Polish Me Silly’s multi-chromatic Dreamer, Obsession and Paradise, and duo-chromes Guilty Pleasure and Holy Shift.
In case you were wondering what kind of nail art I’ve planned to do with all of the new Polish Me Silly multi-chromes I’ve recently acquired, here’s the first idea that came to mind – soap bubbles! The colour-shiftiness of the polishes – here Obsession, Paradise and Dreamer – make for the most perfect iridescent bubbles, to which I added a tiny little hit of holographic sparkle (Enchanted Polish’s Rainbow Juice (With Pulp)) along the outer edges of the bubbles.
This manicure is SO pretty in really real life, but it’s doing that thing where it’s not so pretty in photographs. That’s usually how I know I’ve hit on something good – if my mani’s being a difficult twit, it’s solid gold. 😉
Okay, so we had to come to one of these Polish Me Silly multi-chromes that I’m not completely spun for eventually. Might as well be the one the colour of Clark Griswold’s station wagon – the non-wood paneled parts, that is – a shade identified as either Electric Pea or Electric Pee. And as it turns out, both are pretty apt descriptors for this polish!
Legacy is one of those polishes that regrettably presents as completely different in photography than in real life, a difference that spills over into the slightly misleading photos of Legacy on Polish Me Silly’s website, which show a cool-toned yellow foil that shifts across lush shades of grass green and sea blue. Legacy’s reality is actually a brassy, greenish-gold frost that reminds me of the colour my 13-year-old brunette locks turned the summer I discovered Sun-In (to paraphrase a line from Buffy, in every generation there is one…who will so ignorantly and horribly damage her hair with bleach, it’s lucky she didn’t burn every follicle straight off her scalp.) Its colour-shifting effect is also nearly totally non-existent, and displays nowhere near the sparkling yellow-to-sky blue range as shown in its photos.
But no mind (or little mind), Legacy is exactly the kind of polish that I will find endless uses for. That’s the way it always works with me. Hand me something gorgeous and I’ll use it a couple of times a year, but hand me a polish the colour of baby poo and I’ll find a way to work it into every manicure I do for the next year and a half.
But aside from my ability to turn lemons into lemonade here, Legacy is just not on par with that of its Mega Multichrome collection mates. Legacy applies nicely, with that same phenomenal liquid satin-type feel as its sister polishes, but it dries down to a too-streaky frost finish that highlights every single imperfection in and about your nails, including ones you didn’t even know you had. That combined with the colour mis-fire makes this one Legacy I’m not terribly keen on continuing.
Guess who might be a wee bit obsessed with Polish Me Silly’s Mega Multichrome polishes? Yup, this person! So how fortunate that the name of the third such polish I’m featuring this calendar week is Obsession, right? Because I’m feeling quite strongly about these polishes.
As in they’re fantabulous, and I want to immediately snap up all that I haven’t already purchased (which is actually not very many, sadly/not sadly for my wallet.) Obsession is a particularly lovely addition to the collection, shifting gorgeously between dark purple, jade green, turquoise, denim blue and a heathery kind of purple that I always refer to as “chemical haze.” So freakin’ beautiful.
I also don’t feel like I’ve harped on enough about the formula of these multi-chrome polishes, which is, across every single one of these lacquers, universally awesome. Like painting your nails with satin is how I recently described it, and that description stands. It’s very lush, very plush and applies like a dream about shiny rainbow things.
Huge recommendation on these polishes. Get yours at Polish Me Silly.
Happy Saturday, friends! We made it to the weekend – time to celebrate with some gorgeous (and so simple) nail art featuring a couple of fun (and new-to-me) beauty products.
For these very mermaid-y nails, I first brushed on two smooth coats of Polish Me Silly’s multi-chromatic Paradise, a purple-to-turquoise-to-periwinkle colour-shifter, and topped them with one coat of Seche Vite.
Paradise, another stunning lacquer from Polish Me Silly’s universally gorgeous line of Mega Multichromes, is so unbelievably beautiful, I would have been content to leave it just as-is, but then I remembered the mother of pearl-type shell stickers I purchased from Daily Charme some months back, and the idea for this marvelously mariney mani took shape.
The stickers themselves come on one small adhesive sheet. Made from real shells, the colour-shifting, iridescent stickers are finely scored in a delicate diamond pattern, which allows them to adhere neatly and firmly to your nails, exactly like a nail appliqué.
For this manicure, I eyeballed the approximate size of my index and pinkie nails (parts of my anatomy I am more familiar with than others, true) and then cut out a corresponding “nail strip” with a pair of super sharp manicure scissors. Then, carefully removing the paper from the adhesive backing, I laid the stickers down on my nails and gently pressed them into place before trimming off the excess material along the tips of my nails. So easy! So beautiful!
SO DELICATE. No, really, these shell stickers are gorgeous and can take a lot of back-and-forth, but what they cannot handle AT ALL is soap. Anything harsh or abrasive, I’m assuming, which is why I naturally decided to forgo the topcoat. But I really wasn’t expecting them to fall apart during the gentlest of hand-washings (I always wash my hands before taking pictures of my manicures.) If you look at the right edge of my index finger, you can see the small tear that opened up in the sticker. It’s not the biggest deal, particularly as the polish under the sticker is of the same colour-bendiness as the sticker itself, but something to be aware of – manis involving these shell stickers may not be in it for the long haul. Definitely a one-and-done nail art accessory.
Otherwise, I am so impressed with both these stickers and, of course, another fabulous pick from Polish Me Silly. Such an awesome, easy look, and 100 percent mermaid-approved. You know Ariel would dig on the shells. 😉
Here at the tail end of Earth Day (at least according to my time zone; WordPress Standard Time is telling me we’ve already moved on to the 23rd) I thought it would be appropriate to showcase a polish I recently picked up that reminds me so much of nature – either the skin of a gecko (hence the title of this post) or indeed, the lush blues and greens of planet Earth.
This is Polish Me Silly’s Dreamer, a multi-chromatic colour changer from their Mega Multichrome line. These polishes are so gorgeous, both in terms of colour shift and formulation (they glide onto your nails like satin) I don’t understand how they fly under the radar like they do. There should be mad rushes on these polishes, wailing and lamentation in the streets by frustrated would-be shoppers (actually, no, I can totally do without the lamentation; I detest the “ninja fast” approach to online shopping.)
But luckily for you and I, Polish Me Silly doesn’t seem to engage in those sorts of retail shenanigans, and there’s lots of these gorgeous multi-chromatic lacquers to go around. And Dreamer is just the most beautiful and unique addition to the line, a rich chromatic that morphs from grass green, to jade, to turquoise, to navy and then back again.
The bottle I’ve shown in these photos is a generously sized mini and retails for $7.50 US. All of Polish Me Silly’s lacquers are actually available in mini sizes, which gives you the option of trying out a whole handful of terrific polishes without total investment in a full size bottle. You can find Polish Me Silly’s fantastic lacquers on their Etsy site here, and you can also always browse around my archives and see some of the fun looks I’ve come up with using Polish Me Silly’s multi-chromes and more!
Getting way up close and personal with this flaked-out manicure that was little more than an excuse for me to muck about with a fun, colour-shifting polish and my neglected macro lenses. And this flakie, Polish Me Silly’s multi-chromatic Party Hearty, is an excellent candidate for the job – it just looks so cool mega magnified, particularly the larger, slightly raggedy rainbow bits. Love this fun, experimental look. 🙂
Finger Candy 