Zoya Kelly and an unexpected treasure!

So when the lovely Julie visited me a few weeks ago, she gave me a few awesome polishes, and I can't wait to try them all out!

The first one I tried was Zoya Kelly. With a name like that, you'd expect it to be some shade of green, but it's this beautiful dark gray with blue and purple undertones. I don't have any other color like this (I mostly have pinks, reds, blues, and glitters) so this was really awesome! It's such a pretty color, perfect for fall. It does dry darker than it looks in the bottle, which may be a problem for some people, but not at all for me. This time my photos suck more than usual (lol) but my camera is MIA at the moment. (Even when I have it I get terrible sunlight on my balcony for pictures..sigh) so I had to use my iPhone camera, which is usually good, but it doesn't photograph creams so well (it makes them look even streaker than they usually are) so bear with me here.

Here's the lovely Zoya Kelly!

Isn't it gorgeous!

So what is the unexpected treasure you may ask? Well, do you remember the gel look Beauty World polish sets I blogged about a whiiiile back? Well, they have ghetto fabulous copies of them in the Japanese version of dollar stores here. They are two bottles to the pack instead of three-well, what do you want for a buck?- and I never really thought they were very attractive colors (the one in the photo below has a clear yellowish base, and I didn't think yellow-looking nails would be attractive) but I gave it a shot, and was very pleasantly surprised! It's an awesome holo glitter, and looks great layered over a dark color like this. I guess the lesson here is don't judge a polish by it's bottle color!

(blurred to show holographic sparkle)

Brown and Gold Studded Mani

Hi everyone!

How was your weekend? I'm back with a Street Wear swatch, and a new mani!

Sorry about the bad picture.. I just couldn't get a good one this time. This is something I came up with a little inspiration from my Japanese manicure book, and my first experiment with 3D nail parts. They used blue polish, jewels, and they didn't do the all glitter on two fingers look (I had to change it somehow!) but I wound up liking this look much more.

The base color is Street Wear Forbidden that I got from Erika last year for my birthday. I've been dying to use this gorgeous color in a manicure for a while, but I had to wait for the right idea. This color is so amazing, it is a reddish brown with gold shimmer in it (though it's hard to see in the picture.)

Then I did a graidient look with the gold glitter from my Beauty World Champagne Nail Cocktail kit, then used my dot art tool to dot two different sizes of Beauty World bronze dots, and finally I added gold colored studs on the ends. I sealed it off with Coffret D'or gel topcoat.

Brown and Gold Studded Mani, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

What do you think?

1st mani for On Wednesdays We Wear Pink

I happened across this idea when I was looking at manicures in one of my many flickr groups that I belong to. For more info, please check out http://onwednesdayswewearpink.com/

We are big Mean Girls fans, and why not? This idea is fun!
So here is my first manicure for On Wednesdays We Wear Pink. This one is more simple than some of the manicures I do, and they will be for a while (my fine-tip nail art brush got lost in the move.. I hope I find it!)

1st mani for On Wednesdays We Wear Pink, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

I busted out the vintage polish for this one! I really wish Maybelline still made such pretty colors.
I used Pink Sorbet for the main color. I used a vintage pastel Wet 'n' Wild Crystallics pale blue (Erika, does this bring back memories?) for the ring finger, to mix it up a bit, and on top of that and my thumb, I used the multi-sized gold glitter from the Nail Cocktail Champagne kit.

Japanese Nail Cocktail Champagne gradient gel manicure

Japanese Nail Cocktail Champagne gradient manicure, a photo by KitaRei on Flickr.

I love the name of this product!

I snagged the last of this set at Claire's in Osaka over the weekend. It is a really cute gel-look gradient manicure kit, made by a company called Beauty world. It's fairly easy to do (just have to remember to apply all colors when the polish is wet or it won't blend) but the only thing the outside dries fast but the under coats take a long time to dry.

This set is called Champagne. It comes with three colors, a pinky-beige, a sparkly bronze, and a gold glitter with big and small glitter pieces. You can't really tell in the picture, but the base color is more pink than it looks. There are other color sets as well, which if I see get restocked I may consider getting, as they are really cute.

Another plus to this is the company puts money towards each purchase for breast cancer research, which can be seen on the bottom of the box in the picture.

I have a good idea for Wednesday manis. I'll have it started next week, since I had already done this mani when I thought of it.

I see we're at 99 followers! This is awesome. Only one more to go till we hit the big 1-0-0 and celebrate! Thanks everyone, we wouldn't be what we are without all of you :)