Blue zebra manicure, all jazzed up

I was looking at my blue zebra mani last night, and rather than change it I was thinking that it might look better with silver glitter stripes along the black, and when my husband suggested the same thing today (without me even mentioning it) that did it- it was decided :)

A quick recap: The base color is AC #68, the black is Majolica Majorca, for the silver stripes I used Zoya Luna, and I topped it off with Nailene clear coat.
I think it does look better this way! What do you think?

Blue zebra print manicure

For this manicure, I had a little inspiration from a mani on nailcrack. I saw a manicure similar to this on their website, and I had just gotten a blue nail polish (though not the same color blue) so I wanted to try my hand at it :)

Here's the blue polish, from AC (a Japanese low-cost line, who makes some pretty decent colors! I used it in my recent turquoise pedi, and a past orange mani.) As far as quality goes, I'd rate them higher than NYC because their polishes only need two coats for even coverage, and they cost about the same. However, NYC has more variety.

I used AC #68 as the base color. It's a nice, vivid blue, and I do mean vivid! After that I painted the stripes on with Majolica Majorca black nail polish. Majolica Majorca is made by Shiseido, I LOVE this brand (they also make other makeup, their eye shadows are so pretty!) I need to get a thinner art brush one of these days, this one is good for most art but not when I need more detail.. Finally I finished off with Nailene clear coat.

Blue zebra print manicure, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

It is a little loud though, and I'm going out with my husband and his coworkers/friends this Friday night, so I may change it Friday to a basic swatch of a little more subdued color ^^;; I mostly just wanted to swatch the blue!

Turquoise glitter and stone pedi

Turquoise glitter and stone pedi, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

It was time to change the polish on my toes, and I had just gotten this really pretty turquoise nail polish, so why not?

The turquoise polish is by AC. I'll swatch it on my nails another time.. as soon as I think of a good manicure idea that uses turquoise glitter ;) It's very pretty, the polish base is a clear turquoise color with big and small glitter pieces. It is actually much shinier in person, but my camera didn't catch that too well.

Next, I applied gel topcoat to give the stones a good base to stick to. Then I used a gold jewelry jump ring to frame the center hot pink stone, and coated it with gel polish to make give it the illusion that it is bigger. Then I placed two light pink stones on either side.

This one is simple, but elegant :)