Enter Our #Bloggersquad Giveaway!

Good evening! I have partnered up with some fabulous ladies for a blogger/swatcher collaboration giveaway! We have teamed up to bring you a collection of our favorites that will seriously blow you away. 

I an super happy to have met these people through our community of nail bloggers and swatchers, and we are all SO happy to have formed this team of super-talented ladies who like to spend way too much time either swatching and/or blogging, and who share my love of indie polish! So today, I am sharing our very first collaborative giveaway! The one and only #BLOGGERSQUADGIVEAWAY! Heehee.

Here are the details:

ONE very lucky winner will win a giant box of our indie faves including nail polish, topcoats, basecoats, cuticle oils, nail vinyls, bath and body products, and more. Each blogger or swatcher included an item or two that is something which they love. I contributed a bottle of Pretty & Polished Years of Dionysus and a sheet or You Polish Mermaid vinyls! Squeeeeee! Since the rest of the items are handpicked by some of the most prominent ladies in nailpolish-land, you know that the rest of the items in this glorious package will be the best that the indie world has to offer! You DON'T want to miss this. I would give my left arm to enter if I could haha!

The giveaway will be live from November 25th, midnight EST to December 18th, midnight EST. After the giveaway ends, the winner will be emailed and will have 48 hours to respond before another winner is picked. Babi from Colorsutraa will personally ship the prize to our lucky winner. :)

Don't forget to enter and share, share, share! Good luck!

***OPEN INTERNATIONALLY***

a Rafflecopter giveaway

40 Great Nail Art Ideas - Cartoons & Comics

Happy Friday everyone! Today, the Nail Tarts are all sharing cartoon/comic themed nailart. I decided to go the cartoon route, and specifically decided to choose an anime tv show. My husband and I have been really into anime lately, and have watched a lot of shows. Our recent favorites are InuYasha and Seven Deadly Sins. After considering carefully, I opted to do some InuYasha nailart for this week's prompt. Any fellow InuYasha fans out there? Let me know what you think! :)
 

I had to include InuYasha's favorite move "Iron Reaver Souls Stealer". It was a little hard to fit it all on the nail...whoopsie. Also, Kagome is shouting "Sit Boy!" at him because that is my favorite thing in the show haha. I used a lot of different polishes for this. I'm just going to list them out, but just ask if you have any questions about any of the colors!

• Revlon Posh & First Class (Kagome's shirt, and highlight in her hair)
• Pure Ice Black Rage, SuperStar!, and Kiss Me Here (black, white, grey)
• Zoya Pippa (yellow)
• Essie Apertif (red)
• Julep Ciara (skin color)
• China Glaze Desert Sun (InuYasha's eyes)
• NYC Fuchsia Shock Creme (Kagome's mouth)

The base for this manicure is Pretty & Polished Aquaholic. This polish is crazy-pretty. It's a creamy bright aqua -leaning more blue, with a very subtle scattered holographic shimmer. I did three very thin coats here (I had issues with dragging due to my own impatience, and should have only had to do two). It dries to a satiny finish.

Thank you so much for stopping by to read my blog today! Make sure you check out what everyone else did for this week's prompt!

An InLinkz Link-up

Thanksgiving/Fall Nailart

Hi everyone! I have some Turkey Day nailart for you today. It is really just a fall manicure, but it feels festive to me! Since I have lots to do, this is going to be a short post - mostly pics!

I used Butter London Chuffed for my base, then stamped over top using Mundo de Unas Yellow and Reddish. The stamp I used for the leaves pattern is Bundle Monster's BM-H11. The acorn was a fail, but there is no time for  a redo. I made the mistake of not testing it out first, and the brown polish I tried to use was no good...so I just stamped over top with a different brown thinking I could line it up, but I was sorely mistaken! Haha! The acorn image is from BM-H12.

Here is what Chuffed looks like on it's own. So much lovely gold shimmer peaking through this orange jelly! This is three thin coats.

Thank you so much for looking. Have a happy Thanksgiving, and I will be back this weekend!

40 Great Nail Art Ideas - Grey + Colour

This week's prompt is grey + colour, so I am keeping it simple and elegant with a grey base and some pretty purple stamping. I used China Glaze Elephant Walk for my base, and OPI DS Extravagance for the floral lace stamping. The stamping plate I used is from an indie maker, It Girl. This image is from plate 103. The images are HUGE, and I just love how you can take different pieces of the same image for each nail. So much variety!

Here is China Glaze Elephant Walk on it's own. This is a cream grey that almost leans to green. It has a subtle silvery shimmer to it as well. It's very pretty. I did two coats here, and one coat of Out The Door topcoat.

Thank you so much for looking! Make sure you take a peek at what everyone else paired with their grey!

An InLinkz Link-up

40 Great Nail Art Ideas - Your Job

Oh my job...I don't have a job that felt easy to translate to nail art, like a nurse/doctor, or a veterinarian, or a teacher, or a firefighter. In fact, I think I will have to take on the difficult task of explaining what I do in order for my nails to make any sense...and even then I'm not sure it will. :P So, I work in what is known in the industry as workforce management. Specifically I am responsible for real-time operations for my division. Basically, I am the person that makes sure that we have enough people staffed in our call center in every 30 minute interval of every day to answer a certain percentage of the calls that come in. Yay! Fun times! So, needless to say, my life at work revolves around spreadsheets, watching call routing statistics and trends, contingency planning, and getting angry at people for not following their schedules haha. They really just have no clue how much they mess me up every day with their random smoke breaks and unplanned meetings. I need to CONTROL them hahaha. Ok anyway, since none of you know what I am blabbering about (or if somebody does, PLEASE come commiserate with me!), I will get on to an explanation of the nailart. Since my day revolves around my constant use of Excel, trends, charts, and lots of math, I decided to try to put some of what I do in Excel onto my nails. I decided the easiest (I know, cop-out) thing to do would be a chart. Charts and trends are like my whole existence. If my forecast about the number of calls that are going to come in each interval is wrong, the whole day is wrong, and I will not be able to meet my goal for our abandon rates. The one that I decided to use for my nail art is a control chart. If you have taken statistics 101, you know what this thing is, but you may not want to remember lol. Basically, this is where all the data is represented with each number as a point in the chart. The center line and the lines above and below it, represent the area where you were "in control". These are the days that we met our goal or were within an acceptable range of our goal. The points outside the lines (above the upper control limit, or below the lower control limit) are bad days. The latest examples I have of bad days are: a call center shutting down due to a tornado, a system issue where our call center representatives could not help customers until systems came back up, or just being over the forecasted amount of calls and therefore, understaffed. Don't ask me how I wound up doing this job haha. I just need money to pay for all the things that I want! Anyway, on to the nail art!

When I make charts and graphs for myself, I make them colorful. So this is not a representation of what I would share with my coworkers in a meeting, but something I would create strictly for my own use. :)

The white base I used for this manicure is Confetti Wedding White. Each data point, and the line connecting them were drawn using Zoya Isa, and the Upper and Lower Control Limits (dotted line) were done using Zoya Lola.I'll be swatching them at some point in the future. It is so cool to learn about what every one in our group does for a living. Check out all of our jobs and related nail art below!

An InLinkz Link-up

40 Great Nail Art Ideas - Black & White

Lord have mercy, I am having a heck of a time lately. BUT I will persevere, darn it! So, in the spirit of persevering in the face of so much disappointment in the world...I bring you my black and white for this week. Yeah, it was supposed to post yesterday. But yesterday was the first day in 3 days I didn't wake up feeling like absolute trash, and I had to go to work haha. So, after work, I did this mani. I was too tired to blog about it, so I'm doing it today. I may have slept until noon, but I'm still fighting off whatever illness I had, and I'm up now! The theme this week is black and white, and most of my favorite black and white art is from my dad's favorite artist, M.C. Escher. Now, let me tell you about how hard it is to recreate a pencil drawing with a paintbrush and nailpolish. It's hard. So I went for one of his most simplistic designs - cubes!

I used three basic colors from Pure Ice, SuperStar! (white), Black Rage, and Kiss Me Here (grey). The cubes were not to bad to paint. You just start with a hexagon pattern (like honeycombs), then paint in the rectangles of black and grey. It came out looking pretty cool, although a bit on the sloppy side. I have to start on next week's manicure now so that I can take my time with it!

It looks less sloppy from a distance! haha

Thank you so much for checking out my nailart. Make sure you look at everyone else's black and white nails!

An InLinkz Link-up

Lotus Stamping Nail Art with Orly Fowl Play

Hi everyone! Today, I have a quick stamping manicure for you featuring one of my new Bundle Monster plates and beloved Mundo de Unas again! I love the lotus flower designs on these plates so much. I decided to wear Orly Fowl Play earlier this week because it just seemed so "fall" to me. It is a deep vampy purple filled with flakies and shimmer. I love me some flakies!

After a day, I decided I needed to dress it up, so I tried my hand at some gradient stamping. I used Mundo de Unas Mexican Pink and Lilac. The plate is Bundle Monster BM-XL174.

Thank you so much for looking. I'll be back on Friday with this week's 40 Great Nail Art Ideas post!