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Of Life and Lacquer > I Can't Stand Up Straight

Butter London Marrow

Posted on 5 January, 2013 by Cynthia

You know when you realize that you are waaaayyyy too old to be staying up all night? That was me last night. I wasn’t really planning on doing anything, but my friend called me and we ended up going out to karaoke. After we sang a bunch of embarrassing songs (I sang Justin Bieber’s Boyfriend…don’t say it), we went to a Vietnamese restaurant; I should have had some pho since it was wicked cold. After that, we went to another place for coffee and before we knew it, it was 3 am and I was basically a zombie. I remember the days when I used to stay out all night, sleep for a couple of hours and then head to class without even blinking. Ahhh…to be in my early 20’s again! The sun has set on those days, hasn’t it? Don’t get me wrong–I had a lot of fun, but it’s not something I can do a regular basis. So…what did I decided to do with my nails today? I slapped on another untried: Butter London Marrow.

This is such a strange polish! I don’t know if I just really love it of I’m just trying to figure out what it is about it that is confusing me. I think I sound a little nuts right now, right? With all the purple polishes in my life, I think this one is rather unique in my stash. I normally don’t have anything to complain about when it comes to the Butter London formula, but this one was not what I was expecting. It is so pigmented that I figured it wouldn’t take more than 2 coats, but I had to apply a third thick coat because I had some bald spots even though I waited for each coat to dry.

It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve done a plain and simple manicure. Somehow I feel that my nails are boring when I’m not stamping or beddazling the crap out of them. Here I used a design from Konad plate M64 and stamped with Wet N Wild I Can’t Stand Up Straight. I then used Wet N Wild French White Cream and a dotting tool to apply the white dots.

So what do you think of Butter London Marrow? Do you like the final stamped/dotted design? Well, I hope you’re enjoying your weekend, and we will talk soon!

31 Inspired Days of Nail Art – Day 12 : Chevron Nails

Posted on 13 October, 2012 by Cynthia

I was feeling completely uninspired about doing today’s challenge. I love chevrons on my nails, but I don’t think that chevrons would look good on my rounded super short nails so I decided to to inverted chevrons.

Sation Rock-a-guy Blue is a great blue that I recently purchased. It’s my favorite color from the Little Horse On The Prairie Collection.

I then used Sation Blue Sky’s The Limit for the inverted chevron tips. I am so annoyed that I didn’t see a couple of fibers on my nails and now I can’t do anything about it. Grrrrrr!

I don’t know why I decided to stamp over this, but I did…

I used the paisley print from Bundle Monster plate BM 315 and Wet N Wild’s I Can’t Stand Up Straight. This is so subtle that I can barely tell the stamping is there in indirect light. I’m totally not feeling this stamp on these base colors–can’t win them all.

I need to go cook dinner so forgive me if I’m not particularly talkative throughout this post. Today is a crappy day–just feeling a little down in the dumps so hopefully I’ll feel better once I eat something. Food: always the answer! 🙂

Don’t forget to check out the other manicures my lovely challenge participants created. Thanks for catching up with me today.

Stamping Sunday: Pulsating Pink And Purple

Posted on 26 August, 2012 by Cynthia

I feel like I have been in a total funk lately so when I remembered the Sunday Stamping theme, I had absolutely no idea what to do. I took out a bunch of pink and purple polishes and it came down to Sation Shock Me Twice Pink and Sation Power To The Purple. I thought about combining the two, but changed my mind. So I went with two coats of Shock Me Twice pink over a base of China Glaze White Out.

I really like Shock Me Twice Pink because it’s neon but still delicate. It has a really pretty shimmer that shows up unexpectedly at certain angles.

I then used stamp Mash 48 and Wet N Wild’s I Can’t Stand Up Straight for the design.

Since I still wanted some kind of purple accent, I used these purple rhinestones on my design. I always think rhinestones will look better than they end up looking once I glue them on my nails. I should just give up on rhinestones already!

So how was your weekend? I hope you had fun. Thanks for stopping by despite my uninspired nails as of late. I hope this coming week finds me in a better frame of mind. I actually have another post coming soon and it is one spicy tamale full of glitter goodness. I hope you will enjoy it!

Stamping Sunday: Silver, Gold or Bronze As An Accent

Posted on 5 August, 2012 by Cynthia

I seriously feel like I need to tone it down. This is the second week that I create something for the group Adventures In Stamping and it’s a big fat fail again. I don’t know what it is about challenges, but it seems that I come up with the tackiest ideas ever. I don’t even know what I imagined anymore when I came up with this monstrosity, but at least it wasn’t as bad as last week’s look…at least in my opinion.

I started out innocently enough with China Glaze Exotic Encounters. I don’t know how many times I have said this, but the On Safari collection blew me away. I was really excited when the promo pictures came out and after I got them, they were everything I had hoped for and more. Kudos, China Glaze. “Well done. Whoo, whoo, whoo !” à la Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

Beautiful color, right?

The next step was taping off my nails in a diamond pattern and I used plate MASH 46 for the design and Wet N Wild I Can’t Stand Up Straight for the stamping polish. I should have taken a picture of that before I went ahead and added the glitter but I spaced out and forgot. It actually looked interesting before I added the glitter. This Dare To Wear glitter called Disco Ball and it is full of different holo glitter shapes. I think it will look very pretty over a dark base. Once again, I’m not thrilled with this manicure, but I like it a little better than last week’s.

And for Sunday’s food porn, here is my breakfast: a delicious egg and chorizo breakfast burrito. Yes, it was heavenly!

Hope you’re having a nice Sunday! Let me know what you think of my stampicure.

Essence You Belong To Me

Posted on 29 July, 2012 by Cynthia

I don’t know about you, but when you buy as much polish as your average nail polish fanatic, you are constantly on the lookout for sales. Just look at the great success of Nouveau Cheap! I love that blog because it fills me in on all the affordable cosmetics and drugstore sales. I know a lot of people stocked up on Sinful Colors despite the PR nightmare that ensued when they were caught using bloggers’ photos without their permission. Taking it one step further, they manipulated the images onto their models and incorrectly described the process of achieving the look. I find it rather tasteless on their part, and hope that they do right by the affected bloggers.

On my cheap polish quest, I found myself at Ulta a couple of times this week…and by a couple I mean I visited 3 Ultas in my area trying to find good deals. I had noticed that Essence polishes were being put on clearance and that the images of their bottles were different on the website so I figured they were trying to get rid of old stock. Well, tickle me cheap…I was all over that. I ended up purchasing all the colors I could get my hands on and they ended up being around $.79 each. Score! Today I found a few Zoyas on clearance including one of the flaky topcoats, Chloe. Woot! Major score. One of the polishes I purchased today is You Belong To Me which I decided to wear as soon as I got home.

While it’s not very noticeable in the bottle nor in my pictures, You Belong To Me has the faintest shimmer which makes it look so beautiful. The formula was ok…not really problematic but I needed a third coat to smooth it out.

I really like how delicate my nails look with this stamp design. I used BM 314 and my favorite WNW Silver for stamping called I Can’t Stand Up Straight. Does anyone have any recommendations for a cheap silver that stamps really well? Upon closer inspection, I think this design looks arachnid-like and it’s kind of freaking me out.

I was feeling really lazy tonight so I didn’t feel like cooking dinner. Instead, I made my special tuna sandwich: tuna, mayo, mustard, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, swiss cheese and slices of hard-boiled egg. Egg?!? Yes, egg. You have no idea how delicious it tastes. The creaminess and richness of the egg adds a whole new level of yumminess to this sandwich.

I don’t even know how many times I’ve talked about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on this blog, but I’m going to do it again because I have a major girl crush on Noomi Rapace. She is such a crazy badass in these movies. If you have Netflix, the full Swedish trilogy is online and it has like 2 extra hours of content that was edited out when they were released in the US. And yes, I’ve been watching the movies all over again. lol

I hope you’ve had a good and relaxing Saturday! Thanks for the visit and let me know what you think of my “spider nails.” hehehe

P.S. Do you have a preference for the picture size on my blog? I’ve made the images smaller for this post instead of using the full-sized images. What do you think?

RGB Haze

Posted on 17 July, 2012 by Cynthia

It’s about time I use this nail polish. I think that because it was associated with the whole SpaRitual/Beauty.com debacle a couple of months ago, I wanted to give myself some time to forget how they sent me empty nail polish boxes twice! I’m still wondering how that even happened. Eventually, I ended up getting the nail polish set and they refunded my money for all the aggravation. This is my first experience with RGB and I’m not really blown away. It’s a pretty color, but the formula seemed kind of strange: it was kind of streaky and goopy. At $16 for .40 oz, I guess I was expecting something better. I don’t know if I just got an off bottle because I’ve heard a lot of great things about RGB. It’s too bad because these are the colors I enjoy the most: dusty, smoky and PURPLE!!!

I haven’t used this design from Konad plate M73 in a while, but I really love it. This Wet N Wild silver polish called I Can’t Stand Up Straight is my favorite silver polish to use for stamping.

I decided to build a better lightbox today so I went out to purchase some posterboard. While I was at Dollar Tree, I saw packages of Big League Chew. Remember that stuff? It’s like little shredded strips of bubble gum that gave kids the impression that they were using chewing tobacco like their favorite baseball players. That stuff is almost as bad at the gum cigarettes that had a powder in them that you could suck and then blow out…like you were really smoking…at 5 years old. WTF? Anyway, it took me so long to build the darn thing, but I refuse to pay for one because they are super pricey. For you ladies who are also nail bloggers, do you use a lightbox? I’ve been using mine a lot more lately which is why I decided to make a new and bigger one.

Today I chopped off my nails down to the nub so I’m going to lay off the nail polish for maybe a week and just work on hydrating my skin and cuticles. I have a stockpile of pictures so I’ll still be posting regularly. Don’t worry…I know you’d die without my random nail/life ramblings. 😉 I am also putting myself on a no-buy. Yeah, yeah…laugh it up. I know I’ve said that before but I really need to tone it down a bit. I’m inching closer and closer to 600 bottles and I just can’t outgrow three melmers…I can’t! The last time I put myself on a no-buy, this happened. Yeah. I will say that I will get the China Glaze New Bohemian duochromes…no mater what. I think I am over the idea of getting the Essie Mirror Metallics because I know that I won’t use them too often so at least I’ll save some moola on that end.

And lastly, my giveaway for the Saved By The Bell nail polish collection is ending in a couple of days so don’t forget to enter. Today I went back to my lucky dusty and purchased a couple more bottles of the OPI DS linear holos for a future giveaway. I’m really enjoying all the new ladies who are stopping by and interacting on my posts so I want to make sure I thank you all by sharing some of the polish love. These are the two polishes I bought for future giveaways.

Thanks for reading, ladies, and have a nice Wednesday!

Sephora by OPI My Personal Serpent

Posted on 30 June, 2012 by Cynthia

I was debating what to wear on my nails today, and bright cheery colors just weren’t appealing. I’ve been in a crappy mood today so I wanted something dark and smoky. I looked at my untried stash and pulled out SOPI My Personal Serpent which I recently got on sale at Sephora. This color is part of their Fall 2011 collection called The Garden Of Good And Evil which included seven other polishes. Before I get into swatches and the stamping I did, I wanted to do a quick polish comparison. My Personal Serpent reminded me of Essie Bobbing For Baubles and Zoya Cynthia so I did a side-by-side comparison

Pretty similar, right? I purchased Bobbing For Baubles first and really liked it. Out of the three, Essie has the best formula. They actually all are pretty great when it comes to the formula and you reach opacity with 2 thin coats. I purchased Cynthia because…well…it’s my namesake so how could resist? I just imagined that my namesake polish is a crazy glitter in an alternate universe. NOOOOOOOOOOOO! So why did I purchase My Personal Serpent even though I have 2 other nearly identical colors? Because it was on sale, and who can resist any nail polish sales? I am such a psycho nail polish hoarder….

You already know I like blues so this dark smoky blue fit the bill today. This color is just so dark and saturated that it makes me dream of fall/winter colors. Ahhhh!