White/Teal/Turquoise Nail Art :)

I did this particular manicure for a contest held by cutepolish on YouTube back in December. I'm really happy with how it turned out :)

Polishes used:
China Glaze For Audrey
Elevation Polish Jengish Chokusu
Sephora by OPI Read my Palm
Zoya Wednesday
Pahlish Colder Than a Wave (the glitter on the ring finger)

As for the giveaway, I think it'll be of polishes I currently own. I haven't picked the polishes yet, but it'll be at least 10-15 polishes and possibly a gift certificate. I'm still figuring out, I'm sure I'll be more inspired in the following days as it is finals time :) At least 1 prize, up towards 3. It may be a long running contest, though, as it may take me a while to decide on which polishes to part with!

EDC Nails! Neon gradient with randon black stripes :)

I listen to mostly Top 40 music with a smattering of more popular EDM (electronic dance music) thrown in. Lately EDM is all I've been listening to, although now I'm on a classical music kick. My tastes varies, I can listen to most anything.

EDC Las Vegas is coming up this weekend and I have a few friends (from all over!) going. I know they're going to have a great time, and one of them asked for EDC nails and I said of course! I didn't quite know what I wanted to do, except that maybe it'd be more complicated. I haven't done "complicated" nail art in a while. A looong time. This is what I came up with.

I did neon gradient with random black stripes :) I used all China Glaze neons.

Thumb, middle finger and pinky are: Pool Party (neon pink), Towel Boy Toy (neon blue), Kiwi Cool-ada (neon green). I also put a coat of China Glaze Fairy Dust over the top of these nails.

Index and ring finger are (these really didn't come out in the pictures): Flip Flop Fantasy (hot neon coral), Sun Worshiper (neon orange), Yellow Polka Dot Bikini (neon highlighter yellow).

I love how these came out. For the gradients I used a cosmetic wedge sponge, painted stripes of the colors and dabbed it on. I use random placement of striping tape and just used my go to black, American Apparel Hassid over.

Only pain in the butt part was the fact that I used neons, which aren't the most opaque nail polishes to begin with. I did use a base coat of white but it only helped a little. I tried to minimize smudging (maybe one day!) but I'm happy with how the lines came out.

If you're going to EDC Las Vegas, I hope you have fun, safe time! Have a great weekend everyone!

Purple Use-Up-the-Polish mani number 2

Here's my second mani to try to get through a few untrieds - China Glaze Marry a Millionaire and Nubar Peacock Feathers. I didn't think I wanted Marry a Millionaire based on swatches I saw online, but when I went to the mythical Pro Nail Supply in Sydney and saw it glowing in the corner, I had to have it! The green bits of bar glitter look stunning against the grey tinged purple (grurple?).

Peacock Feathers was a lemming of mine, and while it's not the most stunning multichrome, I love all the colours it contains.

I'm not sure if these shades really work together - they're both not really on the same spectrum of purple. But it was a very visually interesting mani to wear!

Shopping My Stash - Blue Creme Layering

It's been a while coming, but I finally got organised and painted my collection onto swatch sticks! This made my February No-Buy a bit easier as I fell in love with my cremes again. Here's a gorgeous blue creme I rediscovered - Face of Australia Ocean Villa. It usually has a matte finish, but I layered Nubar Black Polka Dot on top. But then I got stuck with the accent nail.

First I tried Candeo Smores (kindly gifted by Jen of The Nail Polish Project at the Sydney Aussie Nails meetup) over ulta3 Earl Grey, but that didn't look quite right:

Then I tried China Glaze Some Like It Haute over China Glaze Stone Cold. Much better!

Shopping my own stash has been the best strategy for my No Buy so far - with over 400 bottles in my collection, there are a lot of underappreciated polishes in there!

China Glaze: For Audrey, dotted

I've been craving cremes lately (which is really rare!) and that usually means China Glaze: For Audrey. I can confidently say this is my most favorite China Glaze and I've actually done more than a few manicures with it. I love the color :) The application is still pretty great with half the bottle gone.

I jazzed it up with a few dots here and there.

Love!!

Also, as a reminder, y'all can follow me on Instagram at xminhae, Twitter at miiinhae and Pinterest here!

China Glaze: Elephant Walk + Hit Polish: Patina

A lot of times I have trouble picking out my next manicure --  a problem, I'm sure, is because I own too many. Either way, I eventually pick a polish or a polish combo and go with it.

This one is one that occurred to me while staring at polishes laid out on my dresser. I thought it'd go perfectly together and it did, and I loved it while I wore it!

China Glaze Elephant Walk is a smokey darker periwinkle, and paired perfect with Hit Polish Patina, which is a glitter top coat made up of varying sizes of copper glitter along with some light blue and smaller aqua glitters. In the bottle, I thought Elephant Walk would make the lighter blue glitters blend in but it dried darker than evident in the bottle.

Even my roommate, a non-glitter lover, liked this combination :)

China Glaze Electric Pineapple

China Glaze Electric Pineapple

I'm in utter denial that it's not summer anymore. Hence, a greenish neonish yellow. (It's just slightly greener in real life than in the photo.) Unfortunately, this polish was thin (I think we're looking at 4 or 5 coats up there), prone to cuticle drag, and then chipped in just a few days. Boo. Still, it was a nice little early fall pick-me-up.

China Glaze: Fireside Glow + Dollish Polish: Random Dancing

Along with all the things that have been happening lately, I've somehow managed to kill my video card, rendering me unable to use my PC for the past week. How I relieve stress is either eating, playing video games, or doing my nails. As I have cut my finger last week, doing my nails has been difficult. Sigh. I apologize for the late posting, I've been caught up in that and just remembered this morning I had a post due.

I'll be getting a new video card this week, so that'll be sorted out!

As I am unable to get to my PC, I looked through my camera and found a NOTD I had not posted yet. It's from a while ago, I just never got around to putting it up.

It's an odd combination that I liked a lot.

The base glitter is China Glaze: Fireside Glow. I think it was an ULTA exclusive last winter. It's a copper glitter with some silver/holo glitter scattered throughout, all the same size (small glitter). It was very sparkly and I liked it a lot more than I thought I would!

On top of it I added Dollish Polish: Random Dancing. I've had this polish for a while but never got around to it. I love the colors and the glitters, but if I recall correctly, it was amazingly difficult to apply. The base was very thick... I should have thinned it out but I was a bit stubborn. Either way, it worked out well.

Do you like this odd glitter combination?

Gold and purple all-over-the-place nail art explosion

Alanna of Pretty Purple Polish recently celebrated her first blogiversary by holding a nail art competition with a purple theme. She was one of my first followers and co-created Artsy Wednesday with me, and has really nice swatches and is generally all-round lovely.

For my entry, I decided to showcase a bunch of my favourite purples. I have a lot of purple polishes! I also had some big iridescent hex glitters, so I decided to explore a number of different nail art techniques on my nails. I only had 3 nail designs in total, because... I'm lazy :(

Thumb and ring finger: China Glaze LOL (Alanna grabbed this HTF for me from the mythical Bankstown nail supply shop - told you she's lovely! :D), glitter gradient with Essence Make It Golden, applied with a Q-tip

Index and pinky: These nails were the first I came up with. I wanted it to look like mermaid scales. The base is ulta3 Berry sponged over Rimmel Lively Lilac, then stamped with Mash-39 in ulta3 Gold Rush Fever and mattified with Rimmel Lycra Pro Mattifying Topcoat. I then stuck on hexes with clear polish.

Middle finger: one of my favourite but time-consuming and hard-to-get-right techniques - drag/needle marbling. I painted the entire nail with a thick coat of ulta3 Orchid, spotted some Gold Rush Fever on top, then dragged loops in the polish with the needle of a compass. Finished with Rimmel Mattifying.

For everyday wearing this felt over-the-top, but I think each of these would make good manis on their own, and I'll probably revisit them. What do you think?

Matte charcoal, yes please! China Glaze Stone Cold

China Glaze Stone Cold was part of the Hunger Games collection - I haven't watched the movie or read the book, but this is the most beautiful matte charcoal polish with silvery shimmer particles. It looks like dark lead pencil, and dries super quick. I wasn't expecting to love it so much, but I do!

Annoyingly, the black matte base rubs off over a few days, and by the third day my nails were noticeably more silvery than I would've liked (if you look closely near the cuticles, you can see where cleanup has gotten rid of the darker base and left the silver shimmer behind). But a quick 10 minute touchup fixed that and it was back to gorgeous graphite glory. Definitely my favourite matte polish so far!

What's your favourite matte polish?

China Glaze For Audrey

Ah, the famous For Audrey! This reminds me of swimming pools, which is apt, since I've recently taken up swimming again. It's minced my manicures of late (seriously, nothing lasts after two hours in a pool!) but I'm really enjoying it. This was two easy coats and it looked perfect, or at least it did until I bumped my thumb (using a new top coat, still not used to the fact that it's not as fast as SV, keep trying to make tea with wet nails).

I really like the finished product, although I have to say I'm not quite down with it as a cult polish. Apart from the box and the film, I don't think this is *that* special.

THEME WEEK - My Favorite Neon :)

I admit, with my life being filled with glitters this past year, I haven't had time to look at neons. But I figured, with it being summer, I should give them a chance! So, this is pretty much the first neon I've almost ever tried (I'm sure) but I love it already! I went with the classic neon YELLOW. Nice, bright and obnoxious in a good way.

China Glaze Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. Trust me, it's bright. And totally matches neon yellow highlighter. It's super lovely and bright and may I say, vivacious? I'm not sure if people were complimenting me when they would comment that it was REALLY bright, but I'll take it as such :P It was overcast when I took this picture but this just goes to show the true neon-ness of it.

And of course, the add on of glitter. I did one coat of Essence - Edward. I love the teal/green square glitters! The yellow and the green matched so well together, I loved looking at it.

edit: Sorry! I must have been half asleep when I wrote this post, it's China Glaze Yellow Polka Dot Bikini :)

THEME WEEK - My Favourite Holo

I don't have enough sun to swatch a holo properly - since I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, I'm sitting here shivering in my ugg boots with a mug of hot tea! So this is an old swatch of China Glaze TMI, a salmon-pink holo polish from the OMG collection. I don't know if it's my FAVOURITE holo - holo is holo is holo is awesome! Other ones I love are DV8, LOL and Nubar Reclaim... plus I have a DIY spectraflair topcoat, so argh. How is one supposed to pick a favourite??

I guess this is the dilemma that mothers supposedly have when they can't pick a favourite child. I used to think it was weird when people said they couldn't pick their favourite fur baby - I mean, it's an animal, not a child - but now here I am with my holo kids. Sigh.

Mmm rainbows! Here it is with some stamping - ulta3 Orchid with a BM plate.

THEME WEEK - My Favourite Glitter

I don't own many glitters. Too much bling on my fingers makes me feel awkwardly overdressed and teenagery, I feel self-consciously like I have strobe lights on my fingertips - as much as I love how glitter looks in swatches, I can't wait to get it off!

That's why China Glaze Some Like It Haute is such a great glitter for me - it's sparkly, with round holo glitters, but the charcoal microglitter tones it down. The holo glitters are also always obediently weather appropriate, looking muted on cloudy days and blindingly bright in the sun.

This is two coats over one coat of ulta3 Metal, a gorgeous charcoal shimmer that looks like lead pencil, one of my top ten ulta3s. I can't stand how Some Like It Haute is translucent when backlit (e.g. when using my phone), and for some unknown reason it looked weirdly gritty in my photos of it on its own, so Metal is the perfect opaque underwear!

Can anyone recommend some other slightly-toned-down glitters?

China Glaze Midtown Magic + stamping + glitter

Midtown Magic is a gorgeous brown shimmer with green-toned gold shimmer throughout. I'm a big fan - smooth and beautiful in 2-3 coats.

Of course I couldn't leave it alone... so I stamped over it with a pattern from BM-206 in ulta3 Gold Rush Fever (PRC version - great for stamping!), then added a glitter topcoat of ulta3 Gold Digger. I am such a ridiculous fan of ulta3 - it's impossible to feel guilty over buying a $2 bottle of nail polish from the grocery store. Utterly impossible.

China Glaze Luxe and Lush

One coat over two coats of OPI Midnight in Moscow. MIM is actually one of my favourites so I took some bottle pictures so you can see the hidden red shimmer - it reminds me of Teasy Does It from burlesque. I also got Riveting and Harvest Moon from the Hunger Games collection. I've not read the books, but I intend to, when I get through my current 'junk food' reading material (Legend of Drizzt, stolen from the boyfriend...).

I really couldn't get the colours to show up as nicely as they do in real life - it shifts from red to yellow to green. However, it is a PIG to remove. I scrubbed, I foiled, I scrubbed again. I'll have to be in a brave mood to wear this again.

In other film collection related news, I've just discovered that OPI are releasing a dupe for peridot as part of the spiderman collection - YAY! I was so gutted to miss it last summer, but OPI is much easier to get my hands on so I am looking forward to scoring myself a bottle

Butter London Knees up & China glaze Party Hearty

I decided last year that I had to have this after seeing it on Lipglossiping. After tracking it down at Harvey Nichols and paying a small fortune (this was before the re-release) I wasn't disappointed - this is an amazing glowy metallic red. It does have a sweet wrapper quality to it, for sure. Easy application in to coats with no horrible streaks. Total perfection.

The only downside? Wear. I applied this last night, washed my hair this morning before taking pictures, and I'd already developed three chips. So, since I'm going to have to take this off soon, I decided to pop some glitter over for the hell of it. Since this is a perfect holiday colour, I paired it with China Glaze Party Hearty. Yeah, so I'm only three months late for Christmas...maybe I'll have a V-day mani for summer.

China Glaze Ingrid

I really wanted to call this 'Astrid'. I'm playing too much Skyrim.

This one is YDKJ's fraternal twin. The base colour is very similar but all the gold shimmer shot through this makes it a lot warmer on the nail. This was my favourite from the Vintage Vixen collection and it's still a winner in my book.

I think this was two coats plus top coat. Very easy to apply and wears well, too. Such a lovely polish!

China Glaze Some Like it Haute

I have a serious love/hate relationship with this polish. On the one hand: it is really pretty. I love the fact that it looks quite grungy and reserved, with the charcoal and black glitter, but also quite fripperous (is that a word?). This is a very 'me' poilish! On the other hand...bump city! This is seriously the grittiest polish ever. Even after two coats of SV it was still really uneven to the touch. Which annoys me.

Also, because I find it really hard to photograph glitter, here's a blurry outtake where you can actually see the holo.

And one showing what the cat thinks of it.