Summer Challenge, Pink and Purple!

Today I decided I would finally try a cocktail mani!  For those that don't know, this is where you paint your one hand all one color, and then the other that same color on two fingers, but the first three fingers have a different color.  You know, the fingers you hold your glass with!  The accent nails can be a bit spicier while the other nails a simple creme, or really whatever you want.  China Glaze held a contest not very long ago (time escapes me) and you can still find their idea page on google.

 I really needa start doing my nails during the light of day again..

I did this right after I got my Zoya trio in the mail, and I chose to keep it simple.  This week was a bad one for my nails, a couple started breaking on my right hand, and the next day I couldn't stand it any longer and now all my nails are short, with the nubbiest being on my right hand.  Zoya Kimber and Tru.  Both are opaque in two coats, with awesome shimmers that apparently cannot be captured in my tired haste..

Do you all like this "trend"?  I don't see a lot of people doing it so I don't really know if it's considered a trend or..what.. I feel really weird about my accent nails being on my right hand, since my left hand is the star of most of the photos on my blog (and with good reason..) so I think I'm gonna break the rules next time and do the cocktail part on my left.  What do y'all think?

I'm back! and I've got goodies=]

Hi everyone!  I have missed this place so, and I have a lot of stuff lined up believe it or not!  I've actually been really under the weather lately, I didn't know if I was going to make it over to my parent's to upload and write today... I think I'm just working way too hard.

Alright! So this week I have done tons of shopping, you will see my hauls and reviews on here later=]

Also, I have a few goodies that came in the mail such as my Birchbox, and a couple of other things, one of which will be taking over this blog post very soon.

So if any of you are not aware of the awesome blog that is run by Lizzy O, otherwise known as the Do It Yourself Lady, well then you need to click on that and go right over there!  Her blog is pretty freakin cool, she's always swatchin', haulin', and spreading the word on freebies and coupons and giveaways!  Anyway, a couple of weeks back she held a surprise giveaway, using a widget that totaled up her top commenters, and I was one of them!  She contacted me, letting me know I would be receiving my surprise gift very soon=] It arrived earlier this week:

I am so pumped!  I have never won a giveaway, and this one is even better cause I wasn't even trying lol  She sent me Zoya Reagan, and Sally Hansen HD Resolution, soooo pretty! I have only swatched Reagan so far, and I didn't even get to take photos til the third day *yes I did wear a polish for about three days. bite me.*  So that accounts for the tipwear.  This polish is opaque in one coat (awesome) but I still feel naked unless I apply two.  When I saw the bottle at first I was like oooooh how did she know I've been looking for another pink?  But it isn't.  It's MAGENTA! Even better=]  Saturated to the max, magenta! I loooooove Zoya so much!  I'm sure that I will love Resolution as well, but my untried stash is now growing growing growing, because it seems I can still find the time to buy a shit ton of polish even if I don't have the time to change it everyday.

I have said it before, but Thank you soooo much, to the lovely Lizzy O, you are one of my must-reads and I'm ecstatic that I won these lovelies=]

On a different note, I will definitely still be trying to keep up with the Summer Challenge, as much as possible, but that might have to wait til next week since I was planning on getting a lot of manicuring and photos done today but I got caught up being super sick yesterday, and then I got my hair done today (woo!) I'm a redhead!

Keep your eyes peeled, ladies=]

My guest post for Cuti-Clue-Les!

Hey everyone, today I'm guest posting for Roisin at Cuti-Clue-Les!  If you haven't already, check out her blog!  Gogogogogo!

Hello lovely Cuti-Clue-Les readers!  I'm Amber from Never Naked Nails  and I'm here today to show you how my very first successful water marble went!  I love reading this blog and she was one of my first followers=] so when she tweeted that she wanted guest posts, I thought, "Hey, I could do that.."

I have been putting off doing this for a while, simply because I was afraid I would mess it up.  I had tried a water marble mani once before, and it just made my nail a mess.. so that kind of discouraged me from it.  If you take a look at my blog though, you'll notice that I'm not shy to post my manis, and often am really critical of them, but I constructively criticize myself, and I'm always confident that with a little practice anything can be accomplished =]

If you want to know why I tried again, it's because I researched the CRAP out of it first.  I googled, I trolled blogs, watched a couple videos..finally, I knew I was ready.

I didn't even have to question what polishes to use.  In my mind, my Zoyas from the spring collection would be just perfection together!

 I wanted to do a couple of things with this experiment, and one of them was to see how time consuming it would actually be.  I've read it can take up to two hours of your time!  In all honesty, it would've taken quite a bit longer if I had done all the nails on both hands, but I left out my pinkies and indexes.  My indexes really helped me out taping and doing my right hand while my left was still drying.  That was nerve-wracking enough, and actually sucked because I ended up having to redo my indexes.  Yes, you read that right.  I'm the girl who messes up the non-marbled nails.  After all of that it took me about an hour, but would've been less if I weren't too impatient to wait for my index fingers to dry.  Anyway, here is my desk, with all of my supplies after I got done:

 Base coat: LA Colors, Zoya Tru, Cho and Bevin, top coat: Seche Vite

For my water, I had a half a bottle of water that I hadn't finished from work all night, and decided it would be perfect.  From what I gather, you need to use filtered/bottled water free of the minerals and whatnot that comes with tap water.  It also needs to be room temperature.  I also have an orange wood stick, that's what I used to trace around my cuticles before I took my finger out of the water.  I taped off all around my nails using three pieces of tape per finger.  I found out that if you prefer to do the taping method (some people like to use cuticle oil, which I have none of & that sounds messier)  then after you have all your tape on, fold it around the rest of your finger, so it doesn't get in the way and touch your other wet nails.  Just be sure to leave a tab so removal is super easy!

I used my LA Colors base coat, then one layer of Zoya Cho on all my fingers.  I think my not waiting for the base coat to dry caused Cho to pool to one side on some nails..I could've just been moving so fast (I was excited to get to the next part!) that I gave her vertigo...

After I did my dipping and tracing, I waited about a minute before removing my tape.  Just a tip: be wary of polishy water droplets! they will splatter if you are not careful when removing the tape.  Not cool, water!  I waited so long to put on Seche Vite.  I was afraid to touch it, even with that stuff.  I don't really know how long it takes to dry, but I felt safe with about ten minutes.  While I waited, I did another coat of Cho on my pinkies and indexes, and then taped up my right hand (so should've done that in the beginning lol) and then continued everything on my right hand thumb, middle, and ring fingers.

My absolute favorite thing from this mani has to be my left ring finger.  I was surprised with how cool it turned out!  Tru blends right on in with Cho and Bevin as my tip so perfectly, it looks like I did it on purpose.  I tried to make a blurry photo, so that you could tell that Tru kept her shimmer through the marble process =]

My right is a bit more awkward, you can tell the purple in Tru is more washed out, and I think that has to do with not tracing around my finger fast enough, but I was just trying to be careful!  I need more practice, but I think I have promise =]

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thanks to Cuti-Clue-Les for having me =]

Sakura and other lovely florals =]

Hello!  Today my post will be about a manicure that I have been wanting to try out for a while now, and now that I have the right tools I thought, "Why not?"

My inspiration comes from one of my oldest besties who loves anything and everything Japanese.  I took a semester of Japanese in college and uh..I remember the day someone in the class was all "You know, English is actually one of the hardest languages to learn.." I was like...uhh where are you getting your intel, buddy?  I'm pretty sure I read somewhere it's one of the easiest for a lot of reasons, and one of them being that normally all of our words just generally have one meaning, and we don't normally use the same word to mean a lot of different things.  Also the way our sentences are put together is easier to understand.  Someone stop me if I'm wrong!  Needless to say, that class was really hard..

I had been getting my ideas just from googling "cherry blossom nails" for a while now, and there are a lot of variations, so i just used the basics as my base, a nude (or minty blue) background, a branch here and there, and then little pink and white flowers all over the place =] and let my mani lead itself as I went along.

 inside

outside

inside

This is one coat of Gelous, two coats of Zoya Cho, topped with Seche Vite.

I used tape to help make my tips, and painted them in Revlon Minted.  I used my really fine brush with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Flirt to make little branches on my thumb and ring fingers, starting at either top or bottom (I alternated the starting points on my right hand) and then for my cherry blossoms I used my brush again in OPI My Address Is Hollywood, and Sally Hansen French Tip White for the middles.  Topped off again with Seche Vite.

I loved loved loved this mani so much.  My friends seemed to like it, and my only problem with it is that I think I definitely should've used dotting tools to make the flowers, but I was on a roll with my brush lol I love that thing..

A little something else is another review.  I hope everyone likes reviews, because I think I'll start doing them a little more.  Not a lot, mostly things that I have received in past Birchboxes that I still have (mainly perfume samples)  I promise they won't all always be as long as my May Birchbox Review post lol I tend to get carried away...

Anyway, last month Birchbox sent me a sample of Taylor Swift's new perfume, Wonderstruck.  I love the way this smells! If you love floral and fruity scents, this is something you need to take a whiff of!  At Birchbox 3.4oz of the stuff is $59.50.  The bottle is so magical looking, purple with a gold top, and little golden charms all around the cap.  I don't know how much you guys like Taylor Swift, or country/pop in general, but I can't help myself.  Her songs are catchy, and her voice is great.  And she really seems like the type of girl who still has a good head on her shoulders in the world of celebrities, really girl-next-door-ish.  She brings out the "country girl" in me that I used to stifle and be embarrassed of, but where I'm from it's damn near impossible to not have a little backwoods coursing through your veins.  Also, this "country girl" (ha.) does not pay the high prices for perfumes and stuff..I'm the type of girl, if I don't get it for Christmas or buy it right before Christmas when VS has that lovely "Buy a million lotions and sprays for $this" then I'm not getting any perfume.  If I WERE the type of girl to have money to splurge on such things...then $60 wouldn't be so bad to pay for this lovely bit of goodness..I guess..

What's your favorite smell?

Zoya True Spring Collection! (super teeny tiny haul)

The other day I realized I had accumulated about 240 Birchbox points and decided I would use them to grab some full-sized Zoyas!  I have two minis that have been sent to me in my Birchboxes over the past year, and recently I received Bevin, which is an opaque sort of teal color, it's not dark but it isn't very bright.  It's dusty!  It really is very pretty=] No pictures of Bevin yet, because to me it's a kind of color that I just haven't been in the mood for lately.. no offense, Bevin!

So I was super excited when the mail ran a couple days ago, and I got my lovelies!  

This is Tru, which is a grape-colored purple, but it's deeper than that.  Not only is it saturated, it has shimmer to it!  The website says the shimmer reflects gold, orange and red, and from what I can tell that's probably pretty accurate, though I see more red than anything. I tried blurring the pictures some, but really I guess you can only tell the shimmer from the bottle pic in that last shot, which actually shows all of the shimmer!  I just loved taking pictures with this one.

Then there's Cho.  Now, I seem to keep collecting nude polishes, but they're always pink toned.  Cho is an opaque nude.  I was shocked!  this is completely opaque in two coats, how cool is that?  Cho basically looks like my skin on my nails.  Now, let me just say that I don't tan.  Not like I haven't tried or that I won't or that I'm a freak about sunblock, (I am) but my whole lifetime of trying to tan has just left me sore and befreckled.  This color is my nude =] I love it so.  It has really fine silvery shimmer in it, I love that added bonus.  Not only is it a super awesome nude, it's got super awesome shimmer!  I have no idea why I love nudes soooo much, but after Cho, I am definitely diving deeper into the nudey pool on the nudey beach =] (kidding) But I will be grabbing up some more beige colors from now on, just to have the variety. =]

Of course I couldn't just leave those manis be!

for my Cho, I left it as is for the most part, only accenting my ring fingers with China Glaze Fast Track from the Hunger Games collection.  I love that color!  You can't really see all of the shimmery goodness that Fast Track has to offer in this photo, and for that I am sorry.. but it's packed with gold shimmers and looks very much like liquid sparkly shimmery gold when you lift the brush out of the bottle.  God, I love it.

For my Tru, I did the same thing, only changing up the ring fingers.  I sponged some CG Fast Track onto the tips, and then Maybelline Bold Gold (I think that's what it was..) on top of that.  Then I used my cheeky plate with a little star design, and stamped twice using the gold color, so that it would fill up the rest of the nail space.  

For my second Tru mani, I went over my ring finger with NYC Starry Silver Glitter with a sponge.  I don't remember but I think I did two layers of sponging on that.  I doubt I will ever use a polish brush to apply glitters ever again! This glitter is freaking awesome!  I did not realize the glitter was holographic until I saw the pics.  It just looks like a light lavender purple and the darker blue circular glitter pieces (as well as super full of fine silver glittery goodness!)  But here you can see more, a darker purple, a lighter blue, and a green.  I also found another picture that shows red and yellow. Again, i tried to blur that pic so that everything could get caught up in the light.  I fail.

All of these manis and swatches are done with a coat of Gelous as base coat, then Topped off with Poshe.

I love these colors! I think if I had to I would pick up Skylar also from this collection, but I would much rather explore other collections since I am still verrrry new to Zoya.  One thing I know for sure, I NEED Zoya Zuza.  soo pretty!

My Birchbox should be here soon!  A few days ago I got an e-mail saying it was shipped, which I thought was weird since they normally go out on the 10th of every month, and that was like the 6th or something when I got that...and there still isn't any tracking info up yet!  Yes, I track my packages, I track them ferociously. Gotta know when my babies are comin' home!


Have a great day =]