Lime Accent

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I am loving those two Bleached Neons I was able to find at Big Lots, I still really wish I could have found the rest of them! Today I have Lime Accent for you, it's neon, it's lime green and it looks as though it's been bleached.

I started out with one coat of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, just to make it pop a little more, I followed that up with two coats of Lime Accent. It went on very smoothly, but it did seem to take a while to dry, so much in fact that I put a quick drying top coat over it just to speed up the process. After that dried I stamped a cool looking design on it, using stamping plate BP-50 from Born Pretty Store, and added another coat of my quick drying top coat.

I really love the way this came out, the black and lime go well together!

Checking another number off the #SBBNailChallenge with this mani, number 46 Favorite nail art technique! Stamping is by far my favorite thing to do to my nails and it's so easy anyone can master this technique with a little practice.

I'm working away at this untried pile of polish, I'll be back next week with another polish :)

Broadway Gradient

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As you know I am trying to chip away at this massive pile of untried nail polish, so today I have not one but two colors for you!

Today I have two polishes from Broadway Nails, Sour Apple and Easter Annie. Both of these are cream polishes and a little on the thick side, once I seen how thick they were I opted to do a gradient mani and they worked amazingly well for that.

I started off by getting one of the wedge shaped makeup sponges and letting water run over it then squeezing it out, this helps to not have to use so much nail polish. I set my sponge to the side and painted all my nails with Avon Iceberg, a white nail polish. Once that dried I began working on my gradient, I did them all the same way with the exception of my ring fingers, I flipped the colors just to change it up a bit ;) I topped everything off with some Salon Perfect Cosmic Dust, which my camera refuses to take a good photo of. I can not for the life of me get a good shot of all the sparkle that it contains!

I really love the way this came out, I even had a little old lady comment on them saying "look what beautiful nails"!

I get to work the day shift on Saturday and have Sunday off so I will chip away at this pile a little more over the weekend!

Bleached in Peach & Leopard Print

Hey y'all! Today I'm am getting started on my big pile of un-tired polishes with Bleached in Peach!

Bleached in Peach is one of the Bleached Neons from Maybelline, I really love this color and the name is very accurate, a very washed out peachy color. I wanted to to a leopard print mani but it did not turn out quite like I would have liked it too. I started with 3 coats of Bleached in Peach, first two were rather streaky and I still ended up with some streaky looking sections. Then I grabbed my dotting tools and made a few black 'dots' and went around them with some silver. I think it might have looked better if I added more dots.

Also my photo did not capture the true color of this polish. In person it's more peachy less orange LOL

For this to be a neon polish it faired better than most neons do with me. I was able to get about 3 days out of it before it chipped. Most neons chip on me the first day or two.

Up next on my list of un-tried polishes, Funky Monkey from Orchid!

Pink and White Chevrons

Happy Friday everyone!! Today I have a fun and easy nail look for you!

I used the Kiss Nail Guides that I hauled the other day, Fing'rs nail polish in the shade Don't Even Pink About it, Sinful Colors Snow Me White and Cosmic Dust from Salon Perfect.

I started out with painting two coats of Snow Me White on my ring fingers and applying two coats of Don't Even Pink About It on all my other fingers. The first coat of DEPAI was really streaky, but applying a second coat evened everything out nicely. Once my coats of Snow Me White were dry I applied 2 of the smaller chevron guides to each of my ring fingers, then applied one coat of Don't Even Pink About It. I did not wait for that to dry before I peeled the guides off, everything went smoothly, no peeling of the paint or messing up the crisp lines. Once all those coats of polish were dry, I applied a coat of Cosmic Dust.

For those that have not heard of Cosmic Dust, it is a 100% Dupe for China Glaze's Fairy Dust! Here is a slightly out of focus shot to try to show the sparkle off some.

I really like the way this came out even though I dinged up my ring finger, it's simple yet really cute. Of course it being a neon it did chip pretty bad on my third day of wearing it, but I can live with that ;) Another interesting thing about this polish, even though it is neon, it does not dry 100% matte, it's more of a semi-matte.

Yay! Now I can check off #36 Pink from the #SBBNailChallenge

It's off to work for me! Hope you all have a great weekend!

Review: Creative French Tip Nail Guides

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Today I have another great product from the Born Pretty Store to share with you! It's their creative french tip nail guides, these come in two styles and they are only $1.58 each. I chose style #2

I do not have nails that are quite long enough to do french manicures with, so I decided I would use these in the same manner I would striping tape.

I used China Glaze Hang-Ten Toes for my base color, applied the french tip sticker and painted over all that with a black cream. I liked the way it came out and I love the bright pink with the black, one of my favorite color combinations!

These nail guides are super sticky so you have to be 100% sure that your nail polish is completely dry before applying them or you will pull your polish off. For me these worked really well, I did not have any areas where the polish seeped under the guide and as long as my polish was completely dry they did not pull my polish off.

Another super quick post! Today is my day off and they Hubby and I are planning on going out to do a little shopping :) Hope you all are having a fantastic day! Don't forget you can save 10% off your entire order from Born Pretty Store by using code: SMBW10

Valentine's Day Nails

Blogging from my phone today cause I wanted to show y'all my nail look that I had created for my anniversary and Valentine's Day, our anniversary is 4 days before. I am so happy with the way this came out! When I first got ready to do my nails I had picked out one stamping plate and two nail polishes, I ended up using three stamping plates and four nail polishes. 

The polishes I used were Jamberry and Raspberry Sorbet from Duri Cosmetics, Snow Me White from Sinful Colors and Mer-Magical from Pure Ice. The plates I used were plate F11 from Born Pretty Store; it's one of those French tip plates, Mash-48 I'm pretty sure I got this off Amazon and the last plate is also from Born Pretty Store it is plate number QA91. 

I used Raspberry Sorbet as my base color, I love these Duri polishes they dry super duper fast! On my ring finger I used the LOVE image from QA91 I made a 4 square checkerboard pattern using Jamberry and Snow Me White on the image, scraped it and then stamped it. I used the same technique for all the stamping in this nail look. I took the French tip plate and used the heart pattern and stamped my middle finger and also my thumb. After stamping I felt like there was too much 'blank' space between the stamp and the other part of my nail, so I filled that space in with Mer-Magical for a little bit of sparkle. For my little and index finger I used the Mash plate and stamped heart clusters. 

I am seriously so in love with how this turned out! I don't think I have ever used more than one stamping plate for one nail look, but now that I have I will do that more often. 

I hope y'all enjoyed this as much as I did!  Have a great rest of the weekend :)

Pink & Silver Chevron

 I am currently out of town, but had a little down time while waiting on my sister to get home so she can color my hair, so I thought I would share with y'all my latest mani. 

I'm kinda on the fence with this one. I started out with 2 coats if Sally Hansen Bubblegum Pink and waited for it to dry and I applied some chevron vinyls. Then I took a silver glittery polish from Sinful Colors which I think was called Charmed, I'll check when I get back home and update if needed. In any case it is a densely packed glitter with some small colored glitter, I mostly see pink which is why I paired it with the pink base. After I got the silver on I went to pull off the vinyls and I guess I didn't let my base dry enough and they pulled some of my polish off! To fix my mess up I took a small detail brush and painted a black line between the two polishes. 

I'm still not that great at free handing things, but I guess it will do LOL I don't think that it's terrible, it's just different. 

Hope you all are having a great day!

Review: Kiss Complete Salon Acrylic Kit

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Today I want to share with you my thoughts on the Kiss Complete Salon Acrylic Kit. First off let me start with the reason I went out and purchased this kit; simply I just have bad nails. It seems like no matter what I do to try and help them grow, nothing helps, I end up with weak nails that break and peel like you wouldn't believe. I've tried nail hardeners, I've tried using Vitamin E oil on them, filing the ends to 'seal' them off and I've not seen any real results from any of that. I got to a point where I was just fed up with my polish peeling off because my nails were peeling so off to Walmart I went to get this kit.

I looked at a couple other kits before I made the decision to go with this one. One reason I went with the Kiss brand is because I've used one of their acrylic kits before

Nail Stamping with Born Pretty Plates

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I'll be honest, I really thought these fuller image plates from Born Pretty Store would turn out to be my favorite plates that I own, but it didn't work out that way. I have used these plates a few times now and I'm never quite satisfied with my results, I don't know if it's my color combos or if I'm just being too critical of my work. I do have a couple nail looks to show where I have used these plates today, I'll will continue to tinker around with these to see if I end up with better results somewhere down the road.

First up is plate BP-17 I chose this plate because I really liked the 'fan' design that two of the images have. Gorgeous, right?

For the look I used Ciate Mistress and a white cream for stamping. Please excuse the quality of the photo, I took it with my phone in terrible lighting.

Next I have plate BP-22 I really liked the image from the top left and the one on the bottom, but for my first time using this plate I went with the top left image.

For this look I used Sweet Irish Cream from The Little LacquerBean and a black cream for the stamping. I like the results of this one better than the one above.

I know it's not the plates that I'm not satisfied with because they are really good plates, the etching is just perfect on them and they both have really awesome designs, like I said before it's either my color combos that I've tried or something. I will revisit these plates in the near future though :)

If you would like to grab the plates that I've shown here or any other nail art supplies you can save 10% off your order with code: SMBW10 and as always Born Pretty Store has FREE shipping!

Half Moons

Marking another mani off the #SBBNailChallenge today with a half moon manicure! This was my first try at this technique. I used Plum Power from Sally Hansen and Saffron from Mark.  I wasn't satisfied with just the half moon design so I decided to add some dots and turned it into a mani that I absolutely love!

Don't forget you can participate in this nail challenge too, just remember to tag your post and instagram photos with #SBBNailChallenge You don't have to work the list in order and you can post as often or as infrequent as you like.

Black & Yellow Stamping

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I really love how black and yellow look together so as soon as I received a bottle of Candy Color Fluoresent Polish and this really cool Cartoon Face Stamping Plate from Born Pretty Store I knew I wanted to use them together and do black stamping.

The stamping plate worked great! The etching was done really well on this plate, it allowed enough polish to settle in it so it was super easy to pick up on the stamper. I love all the cool designs on this plate and see myself using it a ton. Great investment for only $2.99

The polish, I did have a few issues with. For me it seemed a little on the thick side, nothing a little polish thinner wouldn't help, and it seemed to take a little longer than other nail polishes to dry. The wait was worth it though cause it is a really nice color. The wear time has been really good on this polish, I did them on Friday and here it is Wednesday and I have no chips at all, just a little tip wear. This polish is currently on sale for $3.46

I did get a little smudging of the lines, but that always seems to happen with me LOL I probably should have let the black dry a little bit longer before I added my top coat. And OMGosh, I should have done a better clean up job :/

As always Born Pretty offers free shipping on all orders and you can save an extra 10% with coupon code: SMBW10

I hope you all are doing well and I hope to get back in the swing of blogging when summer ends! Until then (and even after) you can keep up with me on Instagram!

Burgundy & Gold Nails

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Good morning (afternoon or evening) today I will be sharing with you a polish from Cover girl and some Foil Metal Gold 3D Decal Slices from Born Pretty Store.

I'll be honest, this whole mani was a fail for me. The polish is Pyro Pink from Cover Girls Hunger Games District Collection, and it was just okay for me, nothing really speical. I know I used 3 coats, possibly 4 to reach some kind of opaqueness.

The decal slices were the worst part for me, they looked super pretty in the packaging, but once I got them out they felt really stiff and I thought I may have an issue working with them. I was right, after I painted my last coat of polish, using tweezers I placed the decal on my nail and pushed one side down with the tweezers to get it to 'stick' to the polish. Once I had the one side down, I went to push the other side down, and the first side would pop back up. I also attempted to 'bend' them on my own so the would lay flat on my nail, but I had no luck at all. Maybe they are not supposed to lay flat, I don't know LOL

I don't know if it was just 'operator error' or what with these, but they just did not work for me.

As always if you wish to make a purchase with Born Pretty, be sure to use my coupon code:  SMBW10

I have two upcoming posts, both reviews. One is for some Vincent Longo makeup products that I received from Beauty Stat and the other is a Moisturizing Foot Soak that I received from Candie Chic! Hope you all will come back for those :)

Neon Stars

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Today I have the first of 2 posts I told you about in my last post. The Born Pretty Store sent me these awesome Colored Star & Round Shaped Rhinestones to try out and provide an honest review.

I have been so in love with neons since this spring, I just love the brightness of them, so I started out with two coats of Here Comes Trouble from Wet n Wild's Street Art collection. How gorgeous is that color? At first I was only going to use the pink stars, but I could  not resist using the green ones too! My original plan was to apply one star to each nail up towards the cuticle, but I thought it looked a little plain so I added two more to each nail alternating the colors.

These were very simple to use paint your first coat let it dry then paint the second coat one nail at a time and apply the rhinestone while the polish is still wet and seal it all in with a top coat. I made it a day and a half before I lost one star, not to bad in my opinion. I really like how this came out, I really want to try these on black and white polish ;)

These awesome rhinestones can be purchased on the Born Pretty website for only $7.59 currently on sale for $5.99 for 300 pieces! As always shipping is free and you can save an extra 10% with the coupon code: SMBW10

Hope you all are having a fantastic day!

Mint Mani

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Y'all I am so in love with today's mani! I was going through my drawer of unworns trying to decide what I wanted to do with my nails and I kept coming back to That's What I Mint, the last of my unworn Essence polishes, I'm a sucker for mint shades so I love this one too. I didn't want to paint them a solid color so I dug around in that drawer some more and found one of the polishes I had picked up from Rue 21 which also has mint in it's name, Mint Crush. I decided I would give these two a try together, I swear they were 'Mint' for each other! LOL see what I did there.

I started out with two coats of That's What I Mint, of course application was flawless and it had a super fast dry time. In the bottle you can see some shimmer, but it did not show up on my nails. I used Mint Crush for my stamping color and used Mash plate 42, picked that up on Amazon. Mint Crush is a fantastic polish for stamping. Next time I'm near a Rue 21 I am going to pick up some more of their polishes!

So in love with both of these colors and the cool stamping design, hubby even said it was cool looking :)

Tomorrow I think I will do an empties post so I can stop hoarding trash LOL Hope you all are having a great day and if you live in the south watch out, I've heard it might be kinda stormy :/

Memorial Day Nails

My plan was to get this up yesterday, but as we all know that did not happen LOL then I was goning to get it posted this morning before I headed out to the event I was attending and I just didn't have the time. Better late than never right :)

I used Cherry Merry and Lucky Strike fom Duri Cosmetics and Snow Me White from Sinful Colors. I painted all my nails, except for my ring fingers white, put down some striping tape and painted them again with Cherry Merry. I used a holographic Color Club polish for my stamping. I would tell you what plate I used, but I'm too tired (lazy) to get up and go see which one it was, if you really want to know let me know in the comments and I'll let you know ;)

I hope you all have had a great weekend! I will be back Monday with a look at the Spring Voxbox from Influenster!

Don't Even Pink About It & Kaboom

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I hope you all had a great weekend! Hubby had to work all weekend so I just watched Law & Order: SVU on Netflix then had crazy dreams because I watched to many episodes :/

Today I have a two-fer for ya! Fing'rs Heart 2 Art Don't Even Pink About It and Salon Perfect's Kaboom. Fing'rs sent Don't Even Pink About It for me to try out and I picked up Kaboom at Walmart a few months ago, it was the only one like it and I could not find any other colors of this particular kind of polish.

Don't Even Pink About It is a hot pink cream polish that dries to a semi-matte finish. This polish was super easy to work with, applied like a dream, no dragging or anything. It did dry pretty fast, even the nails that I did thicker coats on. I think this is a great color on it's own, especially for the Summer time, it would look so great on the toes! I wanted to add a little something to it so I dug out Kaboom, Kaboom has a clear base with teeny tiny yellow and blue circle matte glitters. When this polish dries it does have some texture to it, apparently it was part of their Neon Collision collection. That collection had 6 colors in it, wish I could have found the rest of them! I am assuming Kaboom could be built up and worn alone, but can you just think of the trouble you would have removing it.

Here is a close up shot of Kaboom, look how tiny those glitters are!

Here is my finished mani! Of course I had to take this photo with my phone, because my camera was not having any of it LOL I really like the way this came out, I think it's a great mani for the spring and summer. I did 2 coats of Don't Even Pink About It and one, as thin as I could, coat of Kaboom. I did apply a thick coat of NYC's Grand Central Station, but for the most part you can still feel the texture of Kaboom. I will also add that Don't Even Pink About It is showing up darker in this photo than what it looks like in person, think pink highlighter and that is really what it looks like.

Not sure if I will have a TIOT post tomorrow, but Wednesday I'll have my review on Maybelline's Dream Smooth Mousse Foundation. Hope y'all come back for that :)

Essie's I'm Addicted & Avon's Plum Illusion + Life Update

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Y'all this week has been a crazy one! First my nails then if you're still around I'll tell you all about it. 

Today I wanted to give Essie's I'm Addicted another try cause it is such a gorgeous color. I'm going to call this a neon sky blue! I decided to pair it with Avon's crackle polish called Plum Illusion for two reasons; one get two unworns out of the way at one time and secondly because of a mani I seen over on Lizzy's blog!

I used two coats of I'm Addicted and I feel that gave me pretty good coverage. Clean up was easy too and did not seem to stain my fingers and they dry time on this was pretty good too, around five minutes. On thing I didn't really like about it was the application was a little streaky and I had some dragging of the polish issues. The second coat did even out the streaky from the first coat

Next I tried re-creating the mani I mentioned above using striping tape. I think it came out quite nice and I think it is such a unique way to use crackle polish!

Okay if you stuck around that must mean you are interested in hearing about my week, yay :)

On Tuesday afternoon I got a phone call about the job I applied to and it turned out that I got the job. I was really excited about it, but also really nervous. On Tuesday evening I stepped out on our back porch to talk with my Father in Law and when I went to go back inside my foot snagged a little piece of wood that was sticking up and I got a good sized splinter stuck in my foot so deep that it required a trip to the ER, a shot to numb my foot and a tetanus shot!! Wednesday I went to my job and pretty much hated every minute of it. The guys I had to work with were super nice, but it was so hot and dusty in there, by the end of the day my clothes felt like I had got caught in a rain shower, there was so much dust stuck to my sweaty face it felt like sandpaper, I was smothering from all the dust and physically ill from the heat. I came home in tears called the next day and told them I would not be back. Now before you judge me, I don't mind getting out and working or getting dirty while doing it, but if it's gonna make me physically ill I just don't think it is worth it. So now I am back on the hunt for something else in a better environment. Preferably retail cause I'm good at that.

I hope you all had a great week and hope you have an even better weekend :)

I'm going to spend my weekend (hopefully) getting some blog post together for next week!

TIOT: Essie Vices Versa

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I'll go ahead and put it out there, I'm a little on the fence about Essie's 2014 neon collection *gasps* I know, sorry. I have 4 of the 6 polishes and the shades are amazing and they apply pretty decent, my issue is how fast they chip! I know neons do chip more than regular polishes, but the same day come on now.

I've used two of these, I'm Addicted a super pretty light neon blue, chipped the next day. I tried out Vices Versa next, it chipped the same day I painted them, not super bad chips but still chips. Hoping the other two that I have won't be like that, but we shall see. Still not sure if I will get the other two shades from this collection.

Okay let's get to Vices Versa, it is a super bright neon green! Love the shade, perfect for spring and summer manis. It dries to what I'm going to say is a semi-matte finish, not completely matte, but not really shiny either. It is slightly sheer, I applied 3 coats and you can still see my nail line, not a huge deal to me but I know some don't like that. Application was decent, no real issues, with it being a semi-matte finish it does dry a little faster than regular polish so you have to be careful and not take too much time or else you will start to drag the polish around.

I loved this color on it's on, but I wanted to add a little something to it. I had some 2mm Fluorescent Round Rhinestones from the Born Pretty Store that I thought would go great with this color! The set came with green, pink, orange and blue rhinestones. I decided to use the pink on my ring finger to make an accent nail, I did a simple French Tip type look, mostly because I had house work to do and didn't know how well these would stay on. I have to say I'm quite impressed, I only lost one yesterday and that was because I didn't get it coated well enough with my top coat and I was messing with it. I really like these rhinestones because they are pretty flat, so the won't get snagged over stuff. These come 400 pieces to a set for $3.12, free shipping and you can save 10% with the following code: SMBW10

I am trying so hard to get my unworns whittled down, but honestly we all know that is a never ending task because I can't stop buying new polishes LOL If any thing in there catches your eye and you want to see it let me know and I'll test them out first ;)

Alright that's all for today! Hope you all have a great day, we are expecting some storms over the next few days, hopefully nothing severe!