If you haven't noticed, I'm in a bit of a floral period right now. I think it's this nonexistant winter that isn't providing the quaint excitement of snowy afternoons full of hot chocolate and a good book, or maybe a snowball fight, nor is it warm enough to be expecting buds to pop up and leaves to begin to appear. it's all the crappy things about Winter without any of the good things. So I'm boycotting Winter, and I'm living in denial. It's Spring for me right now. I did this manicure for two reasons; 1) I saw this manicure by BlogNailedIt and was inspired, and I still have one living, albeit beleaguered, flower out in front of the house right now that just won't give up, and it's a pansy. I've got a couple pics from last Spring of a pot o' pansies after the jump from directly after potting them last Spring. They got rather huge over the summer, and all have died but one really determined little guy in the middle. le sigh.

For this design I used China Glaze Sweet Hook as the base, then I used China Glaze Gothic Lolita, Holly-Day and Sally Hansen Lavender Cloud for the flower and the random dotting.

Click for flower pics...

China Glaze's new Electro Pop collection is really inspiring. The colors are bright, beautiful and just beg to be used together. I paired up four of them, along with another China Glaze favorite to make this abstract springy floral design.

Electric Beat, a dusky periwinkle, was used as the base, then I used Sweet Hook and Dance Baby to make the flowers. With Gaga for Green and Electric Pineapple from the Island Escape collection for the leaves. Then I used a black striping polish to do really unstructured outlines to just suggest the form of the flowers and leaves. Without the black it literally just looks like blobs of color, and the black just made it pop.

Click for more photos!

Spring has sprung at Vera Bradley, and one of Spring's four new patterns has me yearning for (my husband's gonna kill me so hard) more bags and accessories! Island Blooms is bursting with my favorite colors; citron, teal, white, black and grey. A better color palette there is not, my friends. And the mixture of bold florals and and an accent pattern that would make Frank Lloyd Wright weep with joy are a siren's call to this girl. I decided that I'd pay homage to yet another perfect Vera pattern by replicating it for nails, and it was so much fun!!! I used OPI Did It On 'Em, China Glaze Flyin' High and some striping paints to do this look.

Click for another photo!

It's snowing here right now. Yeah. I love snow, in theory, especially on a weekend, but for some reason I'm not jumping for joy as per usual. Maybe it's just that I'm busy, or maybe that the sparkling and magical juvenile glee at the prospect of a snow day is somewhat less appealing when one is the parent and no longer the child. But if I'm being completely frank, I'll tell you I think it's because I broke a damn nail. Yes, just one. But you know that deep down all of you can identify with my horror, my dejected and grudging acceptance of a broken nail; a lost friend. I momentarily considered applying a tip, overlaying it with a thin, harmless little layer of acrylic, but after getting out my powders and liquids, and brushes and all the other trappings of my nemesis, I chickened out and packed up and hid all the acrylic accoutrement back in the far reaches of my closet so I wouldn't be tempted. Instead, I embraced the break this time. My index finger nail had popped off at the free edge, leaving me little choice but to yell "TIMBER!" and take the rest of the girls down. It was actually liberating, and as pudgy and stumpy as my fingers look now, I am enjoying that liberation.

I can type, text and apply eyeshadow primer without a care right now. YAY! I can also apply layers and layers of gaudy, and obnoxious color combinations and designs with reckless abandon, because let's face it, nubbins always look so adorable with an intricate design. So here is a random abstract floral number using shades like China Glaze Electric Beat, Flip Flop Fantasy, Gaga for Green, and Dance Baby and OPI Did It On 'Em all on a base of white.

Click for more pics....

This Hollywood-themed manicure was the product of weekend boredom. Using China Glaze Concrete Catwalk, Seche Porcelain, and Wet n Wild Believe Me, It's Real, along with assorted striping polishes. a somewhat kitschy manicure emerges. I didn't really think this one through before I did it, so really it's more of a rough draft, as you could probably tell by the half-assed skyline. The hills should have had a "Hollywood" sign, but I didn't really think of that till I waws done and had hit saturation point in "I don't give a crap, it's a lazy Sunday." The yellow Art Deco striper I used for the spotlights really ended up working better than I'd thought. I'd originally thought maybe I'd need to lay down a coat of white under those lights, but the striper directly over black made it look like actual light instead of acid yellow laser beams. Yay for happy accidents born of laziness! The film is all black striper on a white background, the pinky all black on top of some kickass nearly opaque blue glitter with an nth of purple. love this Wet n Wild polish, must go back for more!

One of the two glitter shades from OPI's new 6-piece specialty Nicki Minaj collection, Metallic 4 Life is a sheer black jelly with both small round and large hexagonal silver glitter. It's somewhat sheer, so I'd recommend layering it over a plain black polish so that you can apply and maneuver the glitter around to get the right look without leaving bald spots in your base. These photos are three coats on top of a clear basecoat and you can see that some of my little bald spots didn't stand up to the flash of my camera.

Below, I've also compared M4L to China Glaze Tinsel Town, which from M4L's promo photos I assumed to be similar. That's the not the case, though; happily it's different but just as awesome. Black polishes with shiny glitter, yeah they're awesome.

Click for more photos...

I've seen a few manicures over the last few weeks with this technique of outlining the nail, and I haven't found a name for it, so I'm gonna go ahead and call it "Vignette" for the sake of titling purposes and convenience. At first I wasn't very fond of the look, but it's really grown on me, so I decided to give it a try myself. This manicure was inspired by this manicure by MadelinePooleNails. I added a little color and some mixed metal action to make it more quirky. For this manicure I used China Glaze Electric Beat and Contrete Catwalk, and OPI Glitzerland, along with black, white and silver striping polish. The technique is pretty simple but definitely makes a statement, in my opinion. Despite the business of the look, the longer I wore it the more elegant it felt to me, which surprised me given the helter skelter nature of the manicure.

Click to see more pics!

OPI Nicki Minaj - Did It On 'Em - $8.50

OPI's newest Limited Edition celebrity-inspired collection, features 6 new shades including cremes, glitters and a berry shatter polish. Did It On 'Em is one of three cremes in the collection and it's awesome. I've been dying for a polish I could call "acid green" and this is the closest I've seen. I've swatched the other three contenders for the perfect acid green/citron polish below, but as for DIOE, it's a great creamy citron that's neither too yellow nor green, and very bright and vibrant without being neon. It applies near perfectly in two coats, too!

Click for a comparison to OPI Who The Shrek Are You?, China Glaze Electric Pineapple, and SinfulColors Innocent!

One of five new flaky beauties from Finger Paints' new collection for Winter, Twisted is a bottle of awesome. There are flakies of every color in this clear base, making it the Queen of Flakies in this girl's humble opinion. There are a number of great flake-filled polishes out there, with more to come, I'm sure, but until now to get such a rainbow-tastic look, you'd have to layer several different polishes to get this much fabulous on a nail. I applied two coats of Twisted over a plain black creme in these photos. I also took a few photos of this look mattified with Essie Matte About You which I've included in this post. It looks insanely beautiful either way, and whethere you're in the sun or in indirect light, these are traffic accident worthy nails. Each of the five polishes retail at $4.99 at Sally Beauty Supply and are on the shelves at some locations now. I've got a couple more to show you later in the week. They are AWESOME.

Click for more photos!