Julep and Hot Ticket on sale at Hautelook

Head on over to Hautelook today for deals on these two!

Wet n Wild's A Show at the Palladium

Admittedly, I cannot pass up a good nail polish sale (or any sale really) so today I snagged a few colors I've been eyeing from Barielle half off from HauteLook that I can't wait to try out.

Since I have to wait I decided to try out Wet n Wild's A Show at the Palladium, which I snagged from CVS last week on impulse, mainly because I wanted to see how it stacked up.

For $4 and the look, I was fairly impressed. The polish went on pretty easily, and as you can see, does have a nice chrome/shine to it. The pictures don't do it justice, but there are some darker gold flecks that give it what I consider a slightly mottled look. The only real issue I had was that I had to use three coats: the first went on kind of streaky and the second didn't quite give me the look I wanted. However, it dried pretty fast so that wasn't as much of an issue as it could have been.

While I liked the color, I needed something to spice it up, and I was starting to be in a hurry, so I added some Kiss nail stickers and called it a day. Overall I think it's a cute mani for how inexpensive and quick it was (and of course, easy)!

Daisy Chains for a Bridal Shower

About a week ago I had a bridal shower to go to and I thought I'd do something a little more on the cute but subdued side. So I grabbed some new colors and went to work on a variation of the daisy design that has been all over blogs and the internet.

There are plenty of tutorials and pictures out there, so you won't get any of that in this post, just pictures and tips!

I started out with "Dress Me Up," which is such a lovely color, and is one of China Glaze's "Hunger Games" line. I love it, it's great on it's own or for a base for designs. As you can see, I was lazy and decide to leave all the clean up for last, I am extremely messy with nail polish!

Anyway, on with the daisy's! I didn't have a lot of time, so I just did them on accent nails, but it was enough of a pop of color that people were grabbing my hands throughout the afternoon curious to take a closer look: I got lots of compliments!

This was definitely an easy manicure, the hardest part, like almost always, was drawing with my non-dominant hand, but there are ways to fix a lot of those mistakes. I used a dotting tool and I learned my elbow on the table I was sitting out to help steady it. But what I thought was most important was that I did the outside of the daisy's first: once I put the dot in the center it helped to cover over some of my bigger mistakes!

Orly Sale at HauteLook

There's a sale on Orly Minis going on through Thursday at HauteLook. I don't have a lot of minis in my collection, but for as often as I use most colors, I can see the draw, so I am eyeing a few of the sparklier colors!

If you don't already have an account, HauteLook requires you to be Invited. Disclosure: I get a referral bonus.

Hulk Nails

Not so secret admission: at some point during the last 6 1/2 years I've gone from being a little bit of a comic book geek to knowing all kinds of random things about Marvel comics (my guy's comic of choice). We've been to quite a few midnight movie showings in the last few years, and so far two this summer: The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

For the Avengers showing I tried out Captain America nails that didn't come out as well as I'd hoped, so no pictures, but I figured out where I went wrong I'm looking forward to trying those out again one of these days!

So when I did my nails in Sinful Colors' 'Rise and Shine' (which is an amazing green: not too bright but not forest colored: I have a hard time finding greens that go well with my skin!) and wanted to spice them up a bit I decide to go for a "Hulk" look. This picture shows a little bit of the gentle shimmer to the green.

I didn't want to go completely overboard with the purple, so I decided to do an accent nail in purple and blue glitter.

The glitter polish is a Wet n Wild Spoiled polish that I grabbed at CVS on an impulse (it was so sparkly)! I've tried it over a handful of different purple polishes, and liked the result each time, so it was time to try it over something else.

I think it came out lovely! And even with the sprinkle of blue Chris knew exactly who I was going for when he saw the mani!

e.l.f. Birthday Sale Hunt & Urban Decay Sale

I find that their colors can be hit or miss, but at a buck a pop I just snagged some polishes from e.l.f.'s birthday sale hunt. Only some colors are included in the sale, but if you're looking for a few more purples to add to your collection they've got a few pretty looking ones.

While you're at it if you didn't snag Urban Decay's gorgeous holiday nail set last year you can snag it for $9 on sale!

Bright Colors Giraffe Mani

I wasn't going to do a tutorial right away, but I love my current mani so I'm going to jump right in! These nails were inspired by some cute tiger nails a friend of mine was rocking: I just wanted to try a different kind of print.

As you can tell, they aren't perfect. That's my favorite part of animal print designs, actually: they aren't perfect, which means even if I screw up I can pretend that's the way it was supposed to be in the beginning. In fact, they were supposed to be leopard print when I started out, and these could easily be made into leopard print, but I had to be somewhere and it wasn't going as fast as I was hoping so I decided they were going to have to be giraffe.

Start with a white base. I only needed two coats to get my nails the color I wanted, but they are also fake so they already look somewhat white and you may need more than that. Then I put on a quick top coat and let it dry.

The next two steps you can do in either order: the spots before the tips or the tips before the spots. I always give myself plenty of time for the base to dry before I try to do tips, so I took a break from my mani and came back to it later and did the tips first. There are tons of color combinations you can use for this, I chose what I considered the brightest of my blues and a matching pink (the purple was added because I felt like I hadn't had purple on my nails in awhile) but they were originally all going to be blue. I think they would be cute with one color for each nail!

I always do my tips with scotch tape. They don't come out completely perfect but I've found out it's the easiest method for me. You really do have to make sure the base is dry if you use this method, or the polish will start coming off.

The spots are the best part: they can be messy! You can put them all over the bottom of your nails or just up the sides like I did. I used a detailing brush but you can also use a flattened toothpick to get messy spots like these.

A quick top coat later, and it's finished!