ABC Nail Challenge; Letter E

Hey Everyone! I'm really excited about this post today. I'm participating in another challenge, the ABC Nail Challenge hosted by Kimber at Kimber's Lacquer Korner. I love doing weekly nail challenges because it helps me to come up with different nail looks that I might have not thought of on my own. The challenge is simple, once a week (Wednesday's) you post a polish or style of nail art whose name or brand begins with the corresponding letter. Fun, right? I missed the first four weeks since I just found about the challenge but it's okay!

This week is the letter E, I was really hoping to do some nail art but couldn't think of anything that started with E. I was looking through my polishes and found Essie's Navigate Her from there 2012 Spring/Summer collection. I bought this last year and never used it so decided that it would be perfect for this week. Navigate Her is a soft pastel green with subtle warm yellow undertones. The yellow component helps the color from becoming more of a minty green shade and gives it more warmth.

For this mani I used my Nails Alive basecoat that I love, two coats of Navigate Her and then a coat of Seche Vite top coat.

Navigate Her was opaque with two coats, the first coat was a little streaky but it was opaque and even with the second coat. The consistency was neither thick or thin so it applied evenly without any trouble. I wasn't sure if I was going to love this color on me but I'm liking it and reminds me of spring!

The color is lighter than it looks in these pictures.

I'm already thinking about something fun for next week's post! Take a look at what all the other ladies participating in this challenge came up with :)

Click the links below :)

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A Year's Challenge Week 14: Striped Mani

Okay, so I know I said I was going to post this week's challenge on time but as you can see it didn't turn out that way. (*sigh*) Hopefully next week I'll get it right.

 But anyway, this week's nail challenge was a striped mani which is cool because the possibilities are endless. There are so many different ways you can create a striped mani. I thought about it for a bit and decided to do something I haven't done since last summer, and that's a Zebra/Tiger manicure. That's when I first started really getting into nail art.

NOTD: Essie's Jazz

This is going to be a short post, but I'm excited to introduce to you a new weekly feature that I hope you will enjoy. The post will be up in a few hours :)

I picked a shade that's a little out of my comfort zone. For Christmas this year as a stocking stuffer I got this tiny package with a set of 2 mini Essie polishes. They really look so cute that tiny.  One of the colors is Jazz, it's a nude taupe/brown shade, very neutral.

NOTD: Essie Nail Polish: Chinchilly it is!

Yesterday I was out and decided to stop at Sally’s Beauty Supply for some reason. Everytime I go there I end up spending way more money than I intended to, but how can you help it with all of those great goodies. I was actually good, even though I was there for about 45 minutes I only bought a nail polish (the one on the right in the picture), china glaze in avalanche. I was looking for something with more of a greyish/silverish color but that was the closest I could find. (surprisingly since Sally’s usually has a wider variety of nail colors) Its actually more of a shiny dark purple if anything.

So then I stopped at CVS and go figure I ended up buying the other two colors in the picture. I liked them both and couldn’t decide which one looked more like the color I was looking for.

The one to the left is Sally Hansen Xtreme in wet cement and the one in the middle is Essie's chinchilly. I tried each color on a finger when I got home and Essie's chinchilly was the one I liked the most, even though the sally Hansen wet cement was pretty cool too. Essie’s color had more of a grey with light tint of maybe a lavender color. (not really sure how to explain it) so that’s why I took swatches of each color. I have to warn you though, the camera made the colors look slightly off. Especially the Sally Hansen color. The China glaze swatch resembles what the color in the bottle looks but the Sally Hansen’s swatch is a little lighter and has more pigment to it.

I really like this color and its basically what I was looking for. I probably own every other brand of nail polish except for this one. Now I know why essie is considered such a good brand. The size of the brush was perfect and it went on nice and smoothly. You have to use two coats with this color, I usually prefer only using one coat if I can get away with it. But its worth doing the second coat with this or it just doesn’t look right. Thumbs up for essie!