Zoya Cadence and Everly

Today on the blog I have the two new winter holos from Zoya for you.

First up is the stunning Cadence, this is the pink version of Zoya's scattered holo line, great formula opaque in two coats and no running or pooling.

The full list as of today 28 March 2019 is

Storm - Black
Dream - Blue
Finley - Blue toned Purple
Aurora - Pale Purple
Payton - Red toned Purple
Merida - Green
Alicia - Silver
Brighton - Nude
Blaze - Dark Red
Cadence - Pink
Everly - Red

I am hoping that Zoya come out with a grey, orange and yellow to complete the rainbow.

A Zoya a Day

Name - Cadence

Year - 2018
Number - ZP885
Coats - 2
Finish - Scattered Holo

Collection - Winter Holo
Colour - Pink
Topcoat - None

The red version is called Everly, she is stunning, perfect formula, opaque in two coats and no running or pooling.

A Zoya a Day

Name - Everly

Year - 2018
Number - ZP884
Coats - 2
Finish - Scattered Holo

Collection - Winter Holo
Colour - Red
Topcoat - None

Rainbow crazy computer

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was building myself a new PC due to no longer being able to see the screen on my laptop, well its finally finished :) its amazing!

Below are a couple of videos of my crazy rainbow keyboard and my rainbow lights within my PC case :)

The keyboard and the PC Lights are completely programmable to do all sorts of light effects.

The lights under my monitor just do static colours and rainbow swirl per strip.

Zoya Carmen and Shiloh

Happy Friday, today I have two reds.

I love the look of red polish but I hardly ever wear it because the clean up can be awful. I did have to do clean up on these but they cleaned up very well and no red stained skin.

First up is Carmen, this is listed as ZP001 meaning its the first polish Zoya made, Carmen is a medium blue based red, formula was great no running or pooling, opaque in two coats.

A Zoya a Day

Name - Carmen

Year - 2000
Number - ZP001
Coats - 2
Finish - Creme

Collection - Classic
Colour - Red
Topcoat - None

Then we have Shiloh who is a slightly deeper red with red shimmer, again great formula, no running or pooling, opaque in two coats.

A Zoya a Day

Name - Shiloh

Year - 2007
Number - ZP409
Coats - 2
Finish - Shimmer

Collection - Smitten
Colour - Red
Topcoat - None

Louis Vuitton Nails

I'm on a role with posting,

Today I have some Louis Vuitton nails for you, I ordered several plates from Nail-Artisan by Alex by the brand Mundo De Unas, I'd not tried their plates before and saw a post on facebook where someone had the Louis Vuitton plate and I thought thats cute, then fell down the rabbit hole of stamping plates.

Alex's shop https://www.nail-artisan.co.uk/

Alex is fantastic, her shipping is fast and very well packaged and she always has interesting items, be that plates or polish.

I started with two coats of Zoya Anchor my go to basecoat, I've switched out the normal brush for the new Z-wide brush and I have to say that it makes doing my basecoat quicker and I dont seem to be getting the bubbles I was with the old brush. The only down side is I have tiny nails so I have to be careful.

I then did two coats of Agnes, this could have been a one coater if I'd been a little more careful.  Then it was on to the stamping, I decided to go with a smooch of Aire (Blue), Evette (Purple) and Danica (Teal) for the small graphic and then did the logos in the different colours for my thumbs, the Mundo De Unas plates are slightly bigger than a credit card, they are very well etched and the pickup was really good, I dont tend to use polish thats been made specially for stamping as the ones I have tried I didnt like, when I went to do clean up the acetone just seemed to smear the colour over my skin instead of removing it. I topped the stamping off with my go to topcoat which is Barry M Plumpy Topcoat. The shine from Agnes is all her own doing.

You can see on my left hand ring finger I didnt quite float the top coat over my nail and its smeared a bit :( I also think I need to change my scraper, the one I am using now is a little old, I think a bendier scraper would work better.  Overall I am really please with how they turned out :)

Interesting things you use when polishing your nails.

Hey :) 

So today I thought I'd sure some items that you might not think of when you polish your nails :) 

So from top middle we have the following (I say so a lot!! even in real life) 

Watermarble tool

Plastic pipette

Clean up brush

Small dappen dish aka small glass dish

Very small funnel

Large funnel 

Watermarble tool, this isnt quite necessary to do watermarbles but if you do a lot of watermarbling its very nice to have a specific tool.

Plastic pipette, now this one is my own finding, I was forever spilling my pure acetone when I was trying to put it in the small glass dish, our vet had asked us to get a urine sample from our cat and provided the pipette, we never did manage to get a sample from the cat but the pipette struck me as very handy to transfer a small amount of acetone to my dish, less waste and no spilling stuff all over my dish and usually in the process ruining my manicure.

Clean up brush, if you are not great at painting your nails due to either shakey hands (me) or very bad eye sight (also me) then a clean up brush is essential, once you'll done your manicure, if you have a bit of cleanup then you dip your brush into the acetone and clean up your nails.

Glass dish, you need something to put your pure acetone in and you cant really use plastic unless you know its acetone resistant so glass it is, now you can get profession dappen dishes but I found that the glass tea light holders from Ikea to be the perfect size, mine is super mucky but it cleans up ok with a rub of acetone.

Small and large funnels, if youre obcessed with doing your nails you need a lot of nail polish remover, either pure acetone or my favourite is Zoya Remove plus, buying the bigger bottles is more economical value wise but miss shaky hands over here needed help getting the acetone or remove from the large bottle to my small bottles and the funnels are perfect, I use the very small one to put acetone into a nail polish bottle if I have used up a basecoat, treatment or topcoat.

The last item is my nail polish silicon mat, while I  dont mind getting polish etc on my desks, you can use the matte to make decals or test designs out before you go trying to put it on your nails.

Thanks for reading my ramble :) 

Zoya Colour Comparisons for Innocence Spring 2019 and 4 Random polishes I Picked up.

Hey, happy Monday

Sorry for being away for a while, my migraines where really kicking my ass, I had my botox appointment on the 12th March and have now managed to go a few days without a migraine, so hoping that continues.

Theres going to be a lot of pictures so keep going down. All pictures where taken in natural light with the comparison polish always first left in the bottle shots and top in the swatch sticks, also please do excuse the cat fur! I was using Rosie's window blankie as a back drop.

First up Theo from the Innocence collection, Theo is described as a summer thunder storm, yip thats accurate, I dont have anything similar to this in my Zoya's as they've never done anything like this before.

Left to Right
Theo (Innocence)
London
Dahlia

Left to Right

Fern (Innocence)

Sage

Evvie

Ireland

No dupes here, Fern has that gold shimmer and a touch more blue than Sage, Evvie much darker and Ireland with a large amount of yellow.

Left to Right
Aire (Innocence)
Jo
Danielle
Saint

No dupes here, the bottle I thought Aire was close to Jo but you can see the swatches are totally different, with Aire being much darker than Jo and Danielle showing that Aire has some green in there, Saint is way brighter than all of these with that pink shimmer.

Left to Right

Evette (Innocence)

Keiko

Audrina

No dupes, this would make the perfect gradient mani though as they are all just a hair lighter than each other. 

Left to Right
Cadence (Winter Holos)
Reece
Kiki
Everly

Cadence and Everly are the new winter holos they released, I didnt have another like them so I did colour comparisons only, I chose Reece and Kiki, Reece has gorgeous gold shimmer while Kiki has blue shimmer both opaque in 2 sweet coats.

Left to Right

Envy (Dare)

Tabitha

Evvie

Danica

No dupes, Tabitha while a similar base colour has that golden shimmer, Evvie has a really grey undertone and Danica and a really blue undertone, Ency is going to look black in most lights but I wore her for St Patricks day and she was stunning.

Left to Right
Birch (Innocence)
Megan
Vickie
Abby

No dupes, in the bottle Birch and Megan looked very similar but when you put the swatches together you can see how grey Megan pulls compared to Birch, Vickie is also very grey leaning and Abby is way brighter and lighter than them all.

Left to Right
Agnes (Innocence)
April
Ana
Rue

No dupes, this was another were I was sure Agnes would be a dupe of April but no once on the swatch stick you can see that April has a peachy undertone to Agnes and Ana is lighter, Rue is a classic Zoya shade and shes much deeper pink than the others.

Left to Right
Grace (Spa Essentials)
Scarlett
Leigh
Lulu

No dupes, Grace and Scarlett are the closest but not dupes as Grace has a peachy undertone and Scarlett has a pinkie undertone, Leigh is much deeper in colour and Lulu is a very pale peachy orange.

Zoya Virginia and Sylvie

Today I have two stunning bright reds from Zoya for you.

First up is Virginia, Zoya say Virginia can best be described as a full coverage juicy coral red cream, I'd say thats accurate. Really great formula, almost opaque in one coat but had a few lighter spots so did two.

A Zoya a Day

Name - Virginia

Year - 2018
Number - ZP947
Coats - 2
Finish - Creme

Collection - Sunshine 2018
Colour - Red
Topcoat - None

A Zoya a Day

Name - Sylvie

Year - 2007
Number - ZP410
Coats - 2
Finish - Shimmer

Collection - Smitten
Colour - Red
Topcoat - None

Sylvie is a discontinued polish but she is also a bright red with red shimmer and a gold flash. perfect formula no running or pooling and opaque in two easy coats.

If you can see little bubbles thats my basecoat not the polish.

Instagram Challenges for March

Happy Wednesday.

The lovely Claire on Instagram holds a little monthly nail art challenge and I've managed to take part in two for March so far.

Link to March comp --> https://www.instagram.com/p/Buei1uQle6d/

Link to Claires challenge account --> https://www.instagram.com/clairestelle8challenge/+

This is a great way to keep your nail mojo going if youre a little stuck for what to do with your nails.

So the first challenge was Unicorn :)

I starting by attempting to water marble, which went okay-ish, its quite difficult figuring out which polishes will water marble, you have to have the right water too, room temperature, the water in the East Midlands is as hard as the road so I got a bottle of spring water 30p from Iceland (shop not country).

I used a bunch of Cupcake Polish polishes, I then painted the remaining nails with Bloom Bloom Room the peach, I then grabbed my Maniology plate BM-XL214 which is a unicorn plate and stamped using Sally Hansen White On, topcoat was Barry M Plumpy topcoat.  Continues after the picture.

The next prompt was Dragon, so I knew I had to do Game of Thrones inspired dragon nails! I'm rewatching it all from the start to get ready for the new and final season staring April 14th here in the UK on Sky.

So I started with one coat each of Virago Varnish Oktoberfest the green and Speedo the red, the white is Sally Hansen White On also one sweet coat.

I then used Powder Perfect plate Kings and Castles 01 plate as it has a really great dragon scale stamp, so on the red I stamped using Revlon Stiletto, over the green I used Models Own Chrome Copper and over the white I used Models Own Chrome Gold, I topcoated with Barry M Plumpy as it doesnt smudge stamping the used Zoya Matte Topcoat to bring out the scale detail. Please do ignore the cat hair on my index finger, I didnt even notice it until last night when I took my contact lenses out.

The prompt for the 9th March is Mermaid and I have the perfect plate for that, just need to think about colours.

Zebra Nails

I thought I'd do some blue Zebra nails coz you know Zebras are blue ;)

So as you can see I started with two coats of Virago Varnish Strap Down Overalls, then used Blueberry Bleak to stamp with, the plate was from Bundle Monster who are now Maniology and it was BM-XL08 which as animal skin type stamps on it.

I love these, think if i do them again I might add some holo sparkle.

Birthday Collab nails

Happy Friday

I was part of a collab on instagram to do birthday nails for @2110lola

https://www.instagram.com/2110lola/  check out her page she does really cool nail art designs.

The theme was birthday and the colour choice was purple, so I decided to go with Zoya Abby as my base, 2 coats for full opacity, then i stamped with Sally Hansen Pronto Purple using a Bundle Monster/Maniology plate that had some birthday appropriate images on.