Thursday, December 4, 2014

Christmas Nails for 2 December 2014

Hi, everyone.  Today I have my first Christmas-themed nails for 2014.  I had a few disasters whilst preparing to polish my nails - three of my nails that I had been nursing along with patches finally gave way, so I had to file them back even further.  Very discouraging, but I persevered, and this is what I finally came up with.  Sorry the photo isn't better, but it's a really dull day here in Tasmania, so the light wasn't very good.


I started with one coat of Sally Hansen Nail Rehab Strengthener, then followed with one coat of OPI Natural Base Coat.  The red polish is China Glaze "Just Be-Claws", which went on really easily. The colour is a rich, shimmering red, and I only needed two coats to get full coverage.  I love this polish, and will be using it a lot in the future, I"m sure.

The white polish is OPI "Alpine Snow" - I needed 3 coats to get full coverage, and even then I still had some streaks. The colour is very nice, but I must say I'm not a fan of this particular polish. I was using stickers and decals anyway, so I used them to cover up the streaks. The snowflake and Christmas tree stickers, and round gold decals, were just some miscellaneous ones that I had in my stash, which I chose at random. I wasn't really happy with the size of the gold decals on the Christmas tree nails, and I would have preferred to pick out some individual pieces of smaller glitter from one of my gold glitter polishes, but it was getting very late and I didn't have time to do them again, and I needed to finish, so I left them as they were. Another lesson learned - give yourself more time to do your manicure! 

I then applied one coat of Calvin Klein "Hallucinate", which has a clear base with gorgeous, tiny holographic glitter thickly spread throughout.  The glitter does not drop to the bottom of the bottle, either, which is a real bonus.  I was really surprised at what a difference this glitter polish made to the overall effect of the whole manicure. The photo does not do it justice, and in sunlight it is just beautiful.  It covered up the streaks in the white polish, and I think it actually saved the manicure.  Thank the Lord for glitter polishes!

I finished up with 2 coats of OPI Top Coat, which I am absolutely in love with.  My manicure from last week was still intact before I took my polish off to do this week's mani, which was great.  Of course, I did apply a new coat of Top Coat every other day, as usual.

I can definitely recommend the China Glaze "Just Be-Claws", but I'm going to have to find another white polish if I want a good finish.  I'd appreciate any recommendations for good, shiny white which gives good coverage if anyone can help.  Being a newbie, I'm still checking out all the reviews on blogs, etc, so maybe I'll find one there.  One of the main problems I have is the inability to get so many of the beautiful polishes that I see recommended on other people's blogs.  Tasmania is really deprived with quantity, quality and range of polishes available, and it is so hard to get polishes online at a reasonable price.  Hopefully, with nail art starting to take off here in Tasmania, demand may force suppliers to offer more options for us in the near future.  So, if you live in Tasmania, and want our stores to stock more choices, LET THEM KNOW that you aren't happy with the limited stock on offer. 

So, that's it for my manicure this week.  Unfortunately, I damaged it in a couple of places while I was doing the clean-up on my fingers (so please don't look too closely), but I'm still learning, and hopefully next week's manicure will be better.  We all learn from our mistakes, so I'm just looking on this as a learning experience, and practice makes perfect (I hope).

Thanks for checking out my blog, and I hope you'll come back again soon, to see how things are going with my nails, to find out what I have discovered online that has helped me a lot, or something that I've fallen in love with.

God bless you, and peace be with you all!  Have a wonderful day!

Hugs

Christine

(Please check out my other blog below, too.)

Words of Life and Hope

P.S. I have received no monetary or material gain from my reviews of the products used for this manicure.
Everything comes from my personal stash, all purchased by me, either in-store or online.

2 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thank you so much. Hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and that they New Year will be an amazing one for you and yours.

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