When I have time...

Sassy Saturday: MORE DOTS with butter LONDON

PART TWO of my PVA trip report! This is amazing! The only thing I would change is a thicker glue coat next time...I put the glue on really thinly and it was hard to get ahold of in places.

I wasn't able to get the glue off in one piece in most cases, but removal maybe took 2 minutes. All I had to do was run a q-tip with acetone down the sides of my nails. No damage! No dry nails! No foil hands for 15 minutes (I do one hand at a time)!

For my Sassy Saturday entry...well, for those who don't know, the first Saturday of every month Shelly's Sassy Nails holds a nail art competition. This month's theme was dots! I can do dots! Sorta!

I've been dying to use some of my new butter LONDON polishes (Cake Hole and Squatter were two of the Macy's exclusives I was talking about in the Brummie post). Gobsmacked is just WOW. It was meh at first, all grainy and boring, but after a second coat, Gelous and SV it's perfectly smooth, deep and sparkly. 

Look how sparkly!

The ring I got for $2 off of eBay :)

Finally, here's the Photo Grid I made up for my entry at Shelly's page...

And because I can, I leave you with this! Thanks for reading! K x

NOTD: Julep Pippa + Barielle Buddha-Ful

Hi nailistas (ok that was a little ridiculous but I've had some champagne)

This NOTD is a long, sordid story of FAIL. Argh. The Mr. is gone at a friend's house right now (I chose ME time over Street Fighter time, so I'm holding down the fort) so it's just me, my dog and my blog. LOL. All this free time means you guys get to hear the story.

So last night I planned out a funky french in my head: dark green sparkly tips, silver glitter striping and some nice OPI Coney Island Cotton Candy. Um, that's where everything good about this idea came to an abrupt end. Since everyone's talking about this PVA basecoat business, I picked up a few different glues to try my hand at it. One of them, Tombow Mono Multi, is a PVA according to Google but features "removable application" that I didn't notice at the store. This is so you can reposition photos, etc. as you choose. Turns out, this means this glue dries to a sticky finish. Oooooops. I kept thinking "it'll turn out OK, it'll turn out OK..." No. I ended up with some very nice and sparkly green tips (Smitten Polish I Want It Now) but this lumpy, gluey MESS of a nail bed. At this point I just gave up and took it all off. Note to self, read the glue next time.

After that I was pretty mad so I went for simple. I had recently picked up Julep's Pippa thinking it'd be a pretty good match for my skintone, as a one coat neutral to put under sheers and glitters. It actually is a decent match, but I could probably go for something a little more true neutral, this leans a little pink on  me. Either way I'm really happy with it. The formula is bleh coming out of the bottle, I feel like the brush just keeps dripping forever (thick but runny, the usual) but it has the nice wide brush most of the Juleps have. The below are two coats. I like the simplicity of it. Dry time was a little longer than I'd like but that's just what I expect from most Julep polishes.

After I was done I tried adding a paw print accent, but the base wasn't dry enough yet and things went slightly awry :s

When I was less mad I decided to add a topcoat of Barielle Buddha-ful. I love this polish even if it is a bit goopy and bubbly, it's this gorgeous nude base packed with green iridescent flakies. It bubbled on a few of my nails as you can see but overall I feel pretty happy with this. I used one coat.

Look at those flakies!!

Here's a bottle shot of Buddha-ful.

Pippa can be purchased from Julep's site (price depends on membership) and Buddha-ful can be purchased from barielle.com for $8.00.

Thanks for reading!

K x