Hard Candy Black Tie Optional

  The Walmart near my house finally carries these Hard Candy nail colors so I picked up Black Tie Optional  the last time I was there. This color is freaking awesome. I love it soooo much. This polish has all different sizes of hexagon glitters in black and white and black bar glitters.

  I did one coat of this over Ciaté Big Yellow Taxi. I did use two coats of top coat over this because I didn't want the bar glitters to poke out and snag on things like they normally do. I feel like this glitter could work over almost anything. You could put this over poop and it would look nice.

  This was a bit difficult to remove, but it's glitter so I kind of expected that.

Rainbows & Clouds & Balloons, Oh My!

  Look! Another super colorful post! This one is more fun than the one I posted earlier this week because this one has cute little balloons and clouds. These nails were inspired by a couple of Little Twin Stars wallpapers I saw while I was browsing for some nail inspiration.

  I used a ton of colors for these, I'll start with the base colors I used. The light pink on all of my fingers, except my ring finger, is Ciaté Cutie Pie. The base color on my ring finger is Lime Crime Milky Ways. The colors that were used for the rainbow are Sinful Colors Sugar Rush, Unicorn, and Sugar N Spice. Those same three colors and Sinful Colors Candy Coated were used for the tiny stars and for the little balloons.

  Brown and white acrylic paint were used for the clouds and the tiny details on and around the balloons. The little balloons were a pain in the butt to paint because they are so tiny, but I'm really happy with the heart one. The yellow balloon was supposed to be a moon, but it got messed up when I put Seche Vite on.

  In the end, I love these and I'm really happy with how they turned out!
 

Baroque Print

  I have been seeing tons of beautiful baroque print nails all over the place, so I was inspired to try my own! To start off, I searched "baroque print" in google search and tried to emulate some of the designs I liked. I didn't really try to do any exact copied of the patterns, I wanted to incorporate a lot of the ornate swirls and things that I liked in the designs I looked at.
 

  The nail colors I used for this were Ciaté Twilight and Ciaté Ladylike Luxe. Twilight is a black nail polish with teeny tiny gold glitter flecks throughout it. Ladylike Luxe is a gold foil that, for some reason, came out looking slightly green in my pictures. I can tell you that it doesn't have that weird green tinge in real life. 

  I used a thin striper brush to do these designs. I messed up quite a few times, and I actually redid the bottom half of the design on my ring finger. Good thing I used black so it was easy to fix any mistakes! I'm really in love with the design on my index finger and I'll probably do something with a design similar to that in the future!

Sassy and Classy Red Leopard half moons

  Hey guys! Here are some nails I did that other day that I'm slightly obsessed with: Red Leopard Half Moon nails! 

  To do this, I started with two coats of Ciaté Cookies and Cream and let that dry. Then I outlined where I wanted my half moons to be with a small brush dipped in Butter London Pillar Box Red and then filled in the rest of my nail with that color. On my ring finger I just filled in the opposite side of the moon. I don't have any of those white paper reinforcements, so I just draw my half moons.
 

 
  Then, I took a dark brown, I used Kleancolor Cappuccino, and just made some random spots over the parts of my nail with Cookies and Cream showing. I did that on each nail, and then with a small brush and black acrylic paint, I outlined each brown spot with either a "C" shape or a bracket type shape. I then added some small black spots in the empty spaces. Finish off with top coat and you're done!

Watercolors!

   Hey guys! Sorry I haven't updated in a while again, my computer decided it wanted to stop working again.  Everything is good now, and I'm back for real this time haha!

 I'm sure you guys may have seen some "watercolor" nails before. I saw a bunch of them last year and never got around to trying it, but I finally did and I really love how them came out!

  So, you probably know that this wasn't really made using watercolor, but with nail polish that has been sort of diluted with acetone. Using a nail brush dipped in acetone makes the colors almost like watercolor paints!

I used this tutorial, and started with a white base and picked a few colors that I thought would look nice together. I was going for something that looked like stormy clouds at first, so I started with some gray, blue, and purple, colors. I started with the color that I wanted to show up the least, the gray. After waiting a few minutes for the white to dry, I put about two or three drops of gray onto the white and then, with a brush dipped (not dripping, wipe it off a bit) in acetone, I dabbed with brush onto the dots of color and dabbed it around the nail.

  I did this to each nail with each color until I liked the results. At the last minute I added some neon yellow and green (and I'm super happy I did), because it looked really boring and bland with just purple, blue and gray. Then, I finished with one coat of Seche Vite!

I am so in love with how this turned out! You will probably be seeing more watercolors from me in the future. ;)
 

Here are the colors I used for these nails

• Essie - Blanc
• Zoya - Dove
• Ciaté  - Headliner
• Essence - A Lovely Secret
• Color Club - (this one has no label)
• Funky Fingers - Tortuga
• Sinful Colors - Neon Melon

My Christmas Nails!

   Hey everyone! This will obviously be my last post for the Christmas nail season. I really hope everyone has a awesome Christmas holiday, and here's some very festive red with gold leaf!

 The red I used for this one was Ciaté Dangerous Affair aka my new favorite red. This read is slightly darker in real life, the flash caused it to look lighter. The gold leaf was from a regular sheet of fake gold leaf. I ripped it up and pressed it onto the wet nail polish with my fingers. Then I finished with one coat of Seche Vite.

Merry Christmas everyone! Love Zoe

Girly Glitter Gradient

 Girly Glitter Gradient, say that three times fast.

 This week I needed a short break from all of the holiday themed nail designs, so I did this very girly glitter gradient.  My next posts will definitely be holiday nails.

 For this I used more Ciaté colors from my Mini Mani Month Calendar. The pink is called Cutie Pie and it's a weird one. The formula is almost a hybrid of jelly and creme and the formula is very build able. Here I used three coats. Again, the formula and drying time on this was awesome. The purple pink glitter is called Magic Carpet and this was one of the exclusives to the Mini Mani Month set.

Happy Holly Days!

  Can you tell I like holiday nails? Here are some mistletoe/ holly berry nails!

For this I used Ciaté Angel Wings as a base because I felt like this would look best over a white, but I didn't want a stark white. This is more of a pearly silvery white.

The mistletoe was done using acrylic paints. They just make nail art soooo much easier. 

Gold Leaf Half Moon

  Hey guys! Here is a mani that I am so excited to share, my Gold Leaf Half Moon nails. This started out with my trying to do something completely different and then this being the end result. That seems to happen to me a lot, but that's ok in this case, because I LOVE this! I feel like this would be perfect for a fancy holiday party or something.

   The red color I'm using here is Dangerous Affair from Ciate. It's a very deep, dark, red wine color. The bottom picture shows the color more true to real life. I really love the formula on this, and most of the other Ciate colors that I've tried, it goes on really nice and the color is always perfectly even in two coats. It dries really fast too.

  The gold leaf is just regular faux gold leaf. I'm sure you could find it at a regular craft store. I put it on by putting a thin layer of clear polish over the red and picking up some shredded gold leaf with an orange wood stick and then placing it where I wanted it. If I messed up a little, I just took the red and covered what I didn't want to show. I finished it off with a coat of Seche Vite.

Caviar Caviar Caviar

  Caviar!  So, I recently bought the Ciate Mini Mani Month Calendar for myself while Sephora was having their 20% off VIB sale. It came with 24 mini bottles of Ciate, 4 of those are mini caviar bottles. With the 20% off I thought it was a pretty good deal and I've never owned any Ciate nail polish colors or tried out the caviar nails so I was pretty excited about this.

    Since I've never tried out the caviar before, I went super girly for my first try. The pink color is called Cupcake Queen from ciate and it is a beautiful hot pink color with a subtle blue/purple duo chrome. The formula on this is awesome. It went on super smooth and I probably could've gotten away with one coat.

  The caviar mixture that I used is called Prom Queen (Should I call this Cupcake Prom Queen? lol)  and it has dark blue, pink, and silver pearls along with blue, pink and silver glitters. It's hard to see the few glitters that stuck in these pictures.
  
Anyway, I'm really impressed with this and surprised at how much I really do like this. The feeling of the caviar pearls sticking up isn't as overly annoying as I would've originally guessed.

I'm gonna be so sad when all of the little pearls fall off.