ICEGEL Star Galaxy Magnetic Gel Polish

Sample provided for review

 

When I posted the Haruyama gel polishes that NashlyNails sent me for review, I teased that I liked another polish they sent so much I wore it as a full mani. Today I'm sharing that polish: ICEGEL IM POLY Star Galaxy magnetic gel polish in 1153, a warm tan shimmer. I used a ring magnet held diagonally to make the pattern. On some nails, the pattern spread a bit more than others before I cured the polish. I used two thin coats for full coverage.

 

I was just fascinated by how the silvery design pulled out by the magnet shimmered and shifted as I moved my nails to different positions.

 

 

 

I discovered this one also glows orange under black light. That's a fun bonus!

 

I added a spider design on one nail from a second set of IBDI water slide decals NashlyNails sent (see the other set in last week's post).

 

 

When I did my second hand so I could wear this polish as a full mani, I held the ring magnet in place longer and cured sooner, so the lines are more focused. The great thing about magnetic gel polish vs. conventional magnetics is that until you cure it under the light, you can move the magnet around and get just the look you want, no fear of it starting to dry while you work.

 

I wore this polish for a full week. I did get chips on some nails, which I attribute to not pulling the polish over the ends of my nails (capping) on the first hand because I didn't plan to do a full mani at that point as well as my usual issue with not paying attention and jamming my fingers into walls/cupboard doors/etc. which is hard on nails and polish. Removal was no problem when the time came. Here's what one hand looked like mid-week, in the filtered sunlight in my car.

 

There about 20 different colors of the Star Galaxy ICEGEL polishes, including a few purples and teals that I find very intriguing. They are $14.99 for each 9ml bottle; if you buy one of the sets, per bottle cost is between $13.50 and $14 a bottle depending on the set. Use code frazzle10 for 10% off your first order at the NashlyNails website.

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The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and I get to keep the polishes for my own use.

Haruyama Soak-Off Gel Polish and IBDI Decals

Sample provided for review

 

Today I've got something a little different: gel polish, courtesy of NashlyNails, who kindly sent me some products for review. While I do have some gel polish from Sally Hansen's foray into it, I've mostly just used their gel topcoat to add wear time to nail polish strips, so it's been a long while since I did a full gel manicure. I pulled out my light and got to work with these two Haruyama gel polishes. Because they're gels, you can't see the colors, but they're 964 (pink) and 254 (medium pink).

 

Because these coordinated so nicely with each other, I swatched them together; 964 is on my index finger while 254 is on my other digits. Any uneven coverage you may notice is my fault, not the polish's. It had been so long since I worked with gel that it took me a bit to adjust my application technique to the slightly different formula of gel compared to regular polish. Basically, I needed to use thinner coats of the gel, which I was doing better at by the time I got to my pinky finger.

 

When I was curing these, I noticed they had a glow to them under the LEDs in my lamp, so I hit them with my black light and was delighted to see both colors reacted. Good to know should parties with black lights become a thing in my life again one day.

 

NashlyNails also sent some water slide decals from IBDI.

 

I used one of the gold fronds on the light pink and black fronts on the medium pink. The decals were easy to work with. I just cut out the frond I wanted, dropped it in a little dish of warm water for about five or ten seconds until the backing paper was saturated, fished it out with a manicure stick, and slid the decal off the backing and onto my nail. I didn't have any issues with the decals tearing which I was worried about since it's been a while since I did water decals, too. I applied topcoat over the decals once I was sure they were dry.

 

 

Of course I had to see the decals under black light, too ... great contrast, even with the gold/pink combination that's more subtle in regular light. (The angle of the light is giving my cuticles a weird glow here, I see.)

 

When it came time to remove this polish, I used the 180 grit Staleks Pro nail file NashlyNails also sent. This has a metal base that a replacable pad is stuck to, so when the pad wears out, a new one can just be put on, reusing the durable metal base over and over. I "broke the seal" of the top layer of polish by filing across the surface of my nails, then put acteone saturated cotton pads on my fingers and covered them with some soak off nail caps I finally broke down and bought after getting tired of cutting up squares of foil. I didn't keep the caps on very long, maybe five minutes, and the Haruyama gel polish just slid right off onto the cotton pad when I wiped gently. Very easy.

 

There are a bunch of colors of Haruyama gel polish in 8ml bottles on the NashlyNails website, ranging from $6.99 for cremes and glitters to $7.99 for magnetics. As many colors of polish as there were, there were many many more sets of IBDI decals, which are $3.49. Use code frazzle10 for 10% off your first order ... though you may want to wait until next week after I post the other polish I got to try, which I liked so much I'm wearing it as a full mani as I type this.

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The products shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and I get to keep the polishes for my own use.

NOTD: Essie TLC and Sally Hansen Salon K-Design Diamond

I had a different post planned for today, but unfortunately lost my camera this past Friday with some display and swatch photos on it that I hadn't yet downloaded. I've looked everywhere I can think of and checked several businesses near where I think it went missing to see if it had been turned in, but no luck. I think it's really gone. I felt really down about it that day and the next day but am sort of okay with it now. At least I only lost a little more than one day's pictures. At least I didn't lose something more difficult to replace. I can redo the swatches. I can hunt down those displays again (though they'll have fewer polishes in them). I did already retake some non-polish photos I lost with the camera. It'll be okay.

I do have photos today, though, ones I took of my nails of the day after I dug out my backup camera (which I'd gotten as a service award gift from my former employer) and bought a memory card for it. This is the first manicure I've done in ages which is more than just treatment or treatment covered in strips or fake nails. There's nothing wrong with any of those things, of course; I'm just happy to be breaking out of my rut.

This manicure did start with treatment, though, because my nails are still in bad shape from the rigors of winter. It is a new to me product, though, so that's still sort of rut-busting. I found some shades of Essie Treat Love & Color on clearance at a Walgreens, so picked up the super pale purple Laven-dearly. It's a one-step product, so I just did two coats and called it good. It's designed to be sheer, so it self levels pretty well even at two coats, though I did see some issues on the two of my nails that are naturally more ridged, as I haven't been buffing them down lately so as not to risk weakening them further. I have been buffing down my peelies when I just can't bear to lose more length, and this sheer formula didn't cover that quite as well as I'd hoped.



This does have some very fine, subtle pink shimmer in it, but I didn't manage to get it to show up in any of the photos I took.



After a couple days with just the TLC, I decided to add one of the Sally Hansen Salon K-Design nail art stickers I'd picked up from that display. I thought the silver holo of the Diamond design would go well with the pale purple.



The directions seemed straightforward:



Inside the package there are two folded strips with eight decal sections a piece (the sections are perforated):



The directions in step 2 don't explicitly say to remove the decal from the plastic backing, but you've got to in order to free the very thin decal to put it on the nail.



Because these aren't see through and the black area around the design is rather wide, I had trouble judging where to place the decal. On my first nail, one of the segments extended beyond the end of nail, so I had to lift it off with a manicure stick and move it to a better location.



After that struggle, I hit on the idea of trimming one end of the decal so it would better match the curve at the base of my nail, which made it easier to put in the right place. I found it easiest to do the trim before I peeled the decal off the plastic backing.



Peeling the background off was generally pretty easy. I had a few individual shards either get stuck in the background or have the sticky layer separate from the holo foil layer but was able to remedy by trimming my own shapes from the margin left around the black section on the strips.

I used one coat of Sally Hansen Diamond Flash topcoat to seal these; that seemed sufficient to smooth over the decal shapes.

I was pretty happy with the finished look, though the gaps between segments were wider than I'd like.



The rainbow colors sparking off the holo were good in indirect light as above, but were better in direct light (below).



I wore this look for what is probably my last day of skiing this past Sunday, and it was warm and sunny enough that I took my gloves off a few times to admire the colors.





After a couple days of wearing these, I was rethinking the single layer of topcoat, as some of the decal sections were lifting (sometimes entirely, sometimes just the foil, leaving the sticky layer to pick up lint—not a good look). The worst were ones that were close to the edges of my nails, so when I use the leftovers for accent nails, I'll take care to place them so they are farther away from my tips and sides if I can. Of course it doesn't help that my peelies are still a factor, and that's not the decals' fault.



I didn't realize until I was putting this post together that the Korean nail artist who popularized these looks had been discussing collaborating with Sally Hansen before these products came out but was not part of creating them nor was she compensated in any way for inspiring these products. There's more on the controversy over on Racked. Now that I do know, I probably won't buy more of these kits, but I will use up the ones I already have.

HPB Presents Autumn

Sample provided for review

Part of getting back into my blogging routine is keeping up with the Hobby Polish Bloggers group on Facebook. This month's theme for the HPB blog linkup is fall/autumn, fittingly enough for this hemisphere. To do my look, I chose two colors from Zoya Fall 2015, the red creme Janel from the Focus collection and the brown shimmer Cinnamon from Flair. I did two coats over Qtica Nail Growth Stimulator and finished with Diamond Dry topcoat. I used rub-on decals from the scrapbook section of the crafts store to further decorate my nails. The particular decals I used have been sitting in my basement for several years, which was apparently too long, as a few of the designs didn't want to cooperate when I wanted to take them off the backing sheet, so I couldn't use those, but enough were fine that I mostly was able to make the vision in my head come to life on my nails. (For more on the rub-ons, see this post from the first time I used them.)







The two nails I broke two weeks ago are growing back nicely; they're almost long enough to blend in again (I couldn't bear to cut down all my nails to match, so I've been sporting two shorties all this time.)

My right hand has one anomoly, a purple butterly that doesn't really fit the autumn theme, but it practically peeled itself off the rub-on sheet to get on my nails, so I included it.





I'm going to take a tour and see what the other bloggers did for the theme; if you'd like to join me follow the links below. Happy Fall!

The polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and I get to keep the polishes for my own use.

An InLinkz Link-up

HPB Presents Surely There's Beach in IKEA Somewhere

I had such fun doing last month's Hobby Polish Bloggers challenge, May Flowers, I decided to do this month's beach theme, too. I thought about using Zoya Tomoko or Zoya Godiva to mimic sand on my tips, or a jelly sandwich of some sort that would be like looking down through the water to fish or seaweed or something, but in the end I found my inspiration in a shirt and some stickers and created this bright dotted and decaled Skittles mani.



It was a full mani, too; here's my reclusive right hand:



I took the color scheme and dots idea from this shirt I got at Rainbow, a store where it feels like at least 90% of the merchandise is aimed at people who are not me but I still go into because sometimes they have very fun stuff in my size, like this shirt.



I'd originally planned to just copy the dotticure outright, wear it and the shirt to meet up with some of my nail polish friends at IKEA and do my beach mani later, but then I noticed the palm trees on the shirt and remembered some nail stickers I'd gotten at Five Below, the Tropical Smoothie set.



To pick the base colors, I took the shirt over to the Helmers that have the creme polishes sorted and waiting to be put on nail wheels and just pulled bottles out until I found shades that looked close to the ones on the shirt. The final product lineup for this mani (even without the stickers) was too big to fit into my lightbox comfortably. Left to right: Qtica Natural Nail Growth Stimulator (which I found on clearance and have been alternating with Duri Rejuvacote), my old favorite Salon Sciences Instant Artificials, Funky Fingers Alex's Lemonade (2014 version), Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Red Rebel (it's a rebel because it's actually orange), L'Oreal Red Robin (oh how I love my old L'Oreals), Sally Hansen Triple Shine Dive In, Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Pink of Punch, and Diamond Dry (which has become my go to quick dry topcoat, so that's probably why Sally Hansen hasn't yet discontinued the Insta Dri one in the red bottle—they know I won't be sad like I was when they yanked the Age Correct base before I'd found something I liked better).



I was so excited to get to the arty part that I completely failed to write down any notes about how many coats of the creme base colors I used. I think it was three for the orange and red and two for the others, but I've really no idea.



And here's how much I love my sensitive-nosed husband: I painted this mani standing up on our back patio, using our electric meter as a shelf for my bottles.



The stickers went on next. I really should have waited a bit longer for the base to dry; I slicked on a layer of Diamond Dry to speed the process but even that wasn't fast enough for me. Some of the decals wrinkled ever so slightly as the layers underneath completely dried, but it wasn't too noticeable.



Some dots with Wet 'n' Wild Black Creme and another layer of topcoat and I had a mani to match my shirt.



One last check in the car before I headed in to meet up with the ladies at IKEA—looks like I need some cuticle cream:



The ladies and I (and two patient husbands and one adorable little daughter) gathered in the IKEA cafe for some sustenance before we headed out to trek through the store inspecting items for their suitability for use in our nail polish hobby. I'd brought one of my tallest bottles (Bourjois 1 seconde) and a standard size (Orly, same height as OPI and China Glaze and so many others) to try out in various drawers and such.



Along the way, we looked at Helmers (they come in orange and green now!) and Alexes in all their many configurations and carts and shelves and cabinets whose names I do not know. We looked at lamps and mats and containers and chairs. We took a wrong turn and missed a whole section and had to backtrack. We temporarily lost one of the husbands near the end of the maze before the cash registers. After all that, we posed for a group shot with the cinnamon rolls that they stragetically place by the exit to snare tired and hungry shoppers. Clockwise starting from my hand in the lower right, it's @jamylyn_nails (who has just moved to Michigan and doesn't have her stash yet, so she can't do the all the crazy great manis she usually does, which is why I've given her MS Paint star Skittles), @traceyloveslacquer, @honeybee_nails, and @paintmewithpolish.



I had such fun hanging out with these ladies, and also fun doing the HPB challenge again. Click through the links at the bottom of this post to see what the other bloggers participated did for their beach/ocean manis (links will continue to be added for the next week).

An InLinkz Link-up

Fake Nail Tattoos

Today I've got real nail tattoos from a brand named Fake, who kindly sent me some of their products for review. These tattoos come on paper backing and are protected by a clear plastic top sheet. I was so anxious to try them that I pulled off the top sheet and cut out the first design before I remembered to take a picture.



Here's the missing image from the sheet above, set down for a moment on the wet cloth (in this case a paper towel) I was planning to use to get the paper backing to come off once I had the image on my nail.



Here are the full directions:



There are some similarities between these and water decals, but enough differences that I struggled a bit working with them. With water decals, I generally soak them off the backing paper and then pick them up with a cuticle pusher and slide them into place on my nail. These tattoos are designed to stick to your nail with the paper backing still on (the exposed side of the tattoo is a bit tacky to help with the sticking) and then have it soaked off with a wet cloth. When I tried doing that with the paper backing dry, I had trouble because I couldn't see where the design was exactly. When I wet the paper slightly first, that let the design shadow through so I could see. I also wasn't patient enough at first for the paper to get wet enough to slide off without disturbing the design. I chose a variety of the birds to fly across my nails (the base color is Sally Hansen Inst Dri Whirlwind White).



I think I did best on my pinky finger, but even then there's a spot where I yanked the paper off too soon. You can see how thin these are.



Once I had the tattoos on they had dried, I added my own step 6.5 to the instructions—color in missing parts with a Sharpie. Bad idea. Top coat smears Sharpie (at least the one I tried did). That left me with this mess after topcoat—totally my fault, not the Fake Tattoos:



Fortunately, Fake sent a variety of designs, so I can try again one day and I will be sure to leave the Sharpie be. I have nail art polishes I can use to touch up if needed but now that I know more about how these tatoos work, I probably won't need to.



You can buy these on the Fake Tattoos site for $9 for a set of two sheets. They ship for free worldwide. They also have bigger sizes for use on skin; that might be fun to combine nail tattoos with one on the back of the hand.

Have you used tattoos like this on your nails (or skin)? Do you see any designs you'd like to try from Fake?

The nail tattoos shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The content of the entry was not dictated by the provider, and I get to keep the tattoos for my own use.