This Color's Making Waves by OPI

I BLOGGED I KNOW! The last few weeks seem to have been..very unproductive which isn't good. I'll just go ahead and blame the weather since it seems like it's mostly been raining and storming with a few nice, warm, sunny days here and there. And we all know how much rainy crap weather doesn't do anything good for our moods and sleep is basically the only thing one desperately wants. Secondly I did turn 25 (speed limit, yeahhhh!) so I'll maybe assume it's a mid-twenties-crisis? Anyways onto the blog post for this week, which is the 4th of July tomorrow! I'm kind of scared that it's already July since August means I'll most likely have my sanity sucked away.

For this post I want to be honest and to say that I have NO idea if or what this nail polish is part of..a collection? Random? WHO KNOWS! I picked it up at Ulta when I went to search desperately for my favorite dry shampoo, Batiste, and I planned on not buying a single bottle of nail polish going in..we see how well that worked right? I can't help but to browse through the clearance to see if there's any good nail polish on sale then found myself wandering over to the little tower of nail polish. I couldn't leave the store without buying at least one bottle and OPI's This Color's Making Waves was the chosen one basically for the color. If I had to describe this color I'd say it's similar to a sea foam green type of color. I noticed as well that if I tilted my hand forward that at the angle it seemed to shift a little to a blue which I find awesomely cool.

See? Maybe?

Putting the nail polish on was smooth, of course I put on two coats, and that always seems to help. There are also little sparkles in there too which I always forget are sort of a pain and a mess when I'm cleaning up my nails. However that could also contribute to the way my brush cleans up but I guess it's a mystery we may never solve. Overall I really like this nail polish as well as shifting it around in the bottle because well, I'm easily amused, what can I say?

Santa Monica Shore Thing by NCLA

Believe it or not I actually didn't have to go rummaging through my nail polish stash in order to find this polish! It was nicely in place at the front of the top drawing just staring at me begging for me to use it. So I did and I'm glad because I haven't used it in a while. I got "Santa Monica Shore Thing" by NCLA a couple of years ago along with a few other nail polishes. Since it's been a couple of years since I've gotten a bottle from NCLA, I'm not sure what has improved but my only problem/complaint with this one was that the brush wasn't my favorite. When I would brush on the nail polish it didn't go on that smoothly and put lines into what I just brushed on. During my second round of coating I tried to put more nail polish on the brush than I normally would so that it was a little thicker and wouldn't put lines into the polish. Overall that seemed to helped and after putting my top coat on they look pretty damn good!

Instagram Photos in Real Size

So every time that I go and post some cool photo that I've taken and edited onto Instagram I always have to screen shot the photo so I can get the whole thing on my profile. I feel like this doesn't give as many up close and personal details that it would if I was able to post the entire photo from the start. So I decided, hey I have a blog right? Right. So I'll make a post where I can just post the full sized photos on and then maybe people will be able to look and seem them better. Yes? Yes. And here they are! I feel guilty being the only person able to really see the images in the entirety and posting them on here lets me make them pretty damn big.

Also probably should add that this is pretty photo heavy!

Gradient: Color Club "Beyond" and "Eternal Beauty"

Today I said to myself, "Self, I think it's time that you be creative with your nails. You're up early and have done what you can so far, so be fancy." So there I was, sifting, once again, through my heaping pile of nail polish wondering which ones I grab and use. I figured I'd pick a not-blue color since I just had one on and then I saw "Eternal Beauty" from Color Club, which I forgot when I HAD to have the entire Halo Hues set (which I do). So I grabbed that, thought maybe I'd take the blue one too..but I've done that combination before, so let's do a different one. Recently on Instagram I've seen someone do a black and red gradient design so I thought black and purple? Yeah those two definitely go together. So I sifted some more and grabbed "Beyond" which is also part of the Color Club Halo Hues from a couple years ago now (Jeez has it been that long?). And so the process began!

Now this process is an absolute MESS! And I wasn't pleased with myself that I haven't gone online and bought that new latex-y type thang that I've seen some nail people putting on the skin around their nails lately. Now that stuff is something I DEFINITELY need to get ASAP because I feel that it'll allow me to do messy designs and not take forever to clean up. Anyways, after I put my base coat on, I took small pieces of tape and only put them on the bottom of my nail/cuticle figuring that it couldn't be TOO big of a mess on the sides (yeah I was wrong). It becomes a little harder, in my opinion, to use the nail polish bottles when there's tape around all sides of the nail to avoid a messy clean-up.

Before I started I made sure to unscrew each bottle first so that I wasn't trying to do it with semi-stiff fingers due to having tape on them. I use a make-up sponge to actually apply the nail polish to my nail by painting the sponge with the nail polish first in strips and then I dab the sponge on my nail back and forth in a small circle motion so that it covers (mostly) my whole nail. I always go through all my nails first and then go back for a second coat repeating the same thing I did the first round. For this one though I did three coats just to be on the safe side since the purple didn't seem to be going on as thick as the black was.

The aftermath..oh how it was a mess! I had actually waited a little while because I started to clean up because I was actually rambling on to my mom about something that I can't remember. This allowed all the nail polish, on my nails and around them, to dry a bit so I first took a pair of tweezers and tried to peel/pick off as much of the dried on nail polish around my nails off. After that I used my regular angle brush, which is now dead, RIP, and tried to clean up as much as I could of what was left of the non-needed polish. I have found that black nail polish, whether it's this one or any other, is a PAIN to clean off because it seems to just never want to go away. That's my own personal view on it though. Either way, it was all totally worth it because 1. I've been pretty uncreative the last couple of years in terms of my nails, and 2. Do you see how it looks in the sun?