Peppermint Bark

You guys all know what peppermint bark is, right?
I love that stuff. I wait all year for it, I swear I do.
I decided I wanted to do a holiday jelly sandwich, so I debated and debated what I was going to use as a base, and I decided to try out a white base. I ended up with Essie Marshmallow for the outer layers. Then I did a layer of China Glaze Party Hearty, and a layer of China Glaze Twinkle Lights from this year's holiday collection, and then I topped it all with Marshmallow. YUM. My nails looked like a super-festive peppermint bark!

And this is what it looked like without the top layer:

So anyway, with the camera at a macro setting, it shows off the glitter a bit better even with Marshmallow layered on top. If you're looking at it on your hands though, it's a little less obvious and more like the chocolate minty goodness - I just want to nom my nails lol! This is such a fun holiday jelly sammich.

Birthday Sammich!

Helloooo everyone! So tonight I officially turn 40. I was in serious debate over what to use for my full on birthday manicure, when my girlfriends Jeanette and Diana suggested a glitter sandwich of epic proportions - seriously, this one came out so stunning!
Okay, so I started out with Confetti Happy Birthday, which is a gorgeous glass fleck purple jelly. I added Confetti Tazmanian Devil on top - this is my favorite of the Deborah Lippmann Happy Birthday dupes, I love the fine silver glitter in it. I did two coats of this - I've included a picture of what it looks like at this point also. Then I topped the sandwich again with Happy Birthday, and added a layer of a polish that I got from Jeanette - the amazing BeYu 209, Brilliant Shiraz, on top of everything else. Lotsa layers, but boy is this stunning. Happy Birthday is a midtoned, blue leaning purple, so when you put Brilliant Shiraz over it it turns into a reddish purple. Brilliant Shiraz is a multichrome, take a look at the bottle in my shots!
I got photo happy and couldn't figure out how to cut any of these out. Make sure you click to enlarge these, so much better at full size!
This first shot is just two layers of Happy Birthday and two layers of Tazmanian Devil.

Here is the next step, another layer of Happy Birthday.

And then topping everything off with BeYu 209. Check out that bottle!

A bright sunlight shot.

Oh my gosh, is that an amazing combination or what? I will be experimenting with layering 209 some more, I want to try it over a green jelly and some other goodies. Hopefully I can get the green to come out and play more than I did here!
I'm off to eat country fried steak and blackberry cheesecake - my hubby and my mom are making my birthday dinner! Have a great night y'all.

Island Girl Oahu Paradise and Island Volcano

I've had a couple of great packages over the last few days! So, let me show you the first one, which is from Jen of The PolishAholic. When she went to Las Vegas for Cosmoprof she offered to pick me up some of the Island Girl polishes - and she sent me six beauties!

Okay, so from left to right are: Mahalo Dream, Island Volcano, Oahu Paradise, Hawaiian Volcano, Island Treat, and Island Sunset. Mahalo Dream and Island Volcano are very much like OPI I Lily Love You and Color Club Covered in Diamonds, in that they have those odd shaped mylar opalescent flakies! These two both have glitter as well. Oahu Paradise is an emerald green jelly, Hawaiian Volcano is a duochrome shimmer (!), Island Treat looks like a raspberry pink foil, and Island Sunset is a deep grape purple with holographic glitter! Great choices for me, all of them! Thanks so much Jen!
So the first thing I did of course, was open up that Oahu Paradise and slap it on. I thought it might be a creme but *swoon* jelly! Naturally, it's sheer, being a jelly. It's very close in shade to my beloved New York Summer Amaranth. I thought I'd recreate the jelly sandwich - with flakies! It worked wonderfully and I got an ABSOLUTE TON of comments on this. As a matter of fact, I took a bunch of ladies to the Britney Spears concert last night and they were all raving about it - they were trying to guess which brand, OPI, Essie, China Glaze - and of course, it was none of those, so I explained about Island Girl polishes, and they thought that was really neat. I really should get some business cards for Nightly Nails, as many questions as I get about my nails. Anyway, so what you see below is one thin coat of Oahu Paradise, one coat of Island Volcano, and another thin coat of Oahu Paradise. Awesome! I want to play some more with both of these flakie glitters. Island Paradise covered very well in one coat, by the way - but it is sheer on its own.

I'm excited to play with the rest of these! So pretty. I also got a package yesterday from Zara of Never Unpolished. I won her Zoya Smoke and Mirrors giveaway! I was super excited, because it's such a pretty set.

Umm, ignore my weird thumbnail color. It was a layering experiment gone horribly wrong! Thank you so much Zara, I can't wait to play with these. I can't even decide which one to put on first!
Okay, if you're burning with curiousity, I picked up OPI Greece Just Blue Me Away. It's an older polish, very thin and watery on its own - with what seems to be a slight duochrome. I've been trying to figure out what best to layer it over and I still haven't come up with anything! I then slapped one of the Island Girl flakies on top of that mess, and that's what you see.
Wow, this post is extra wordy. Bravo, if you made it through all of that! Thanks for bearing with me.