Mommy's Mani Monday - Inspired by Your Kid's Halloween Costume: Rainbow Piggies

Today is another MMM! This week the theme is to do a mani inspired by your child's Halloween costume.

My daughter chose her costume this year, and she wanted to be a pig. Of course everything is better in rainbow form, though, so I did five different colored piggies instead of making them all pink!

Glitter Placement Tessellation

My idea for this mani came from Polish All the Nails and Jaunty Juli (I recreated her hand-painted version here) who I both saw tessellation manis from that I loved!

So for my glitter placement tessellation, I used Finger Paints Louvre This Pink as my base, and NOPI Be Awesome for the glitters.

Cervical Cancer Awareness Mani

Since January is cervical cancer awareness month, I decided to do a teal mani in honor. I went kind of random with this one. I wanted different combos on each nail and divided them into quarters. Once I was done, though, I decided it needed just a tad more, so I added the final center square in another shade of teal.

Twinsie Tuesday - First polish you ever swatched on your blog

My very first posts here were horrendous attempts at nail art, and the first polish I ever actually swatched wasn't until November 11th, 2011. NailsLikeLace was nearly a year old! Granted, I only posted a few times a month in the first year, and actually skipped Feb-June altogether!

I think I had something against swatches for quite awhile. I rarely did swatch posts in the beginning, and almost always tried to include nail art pictures in the same post.

I guess I thought they were boring and pointless, so I stuck with (a poor excuse for) art.

My swatch from two years ago:

*gag*

Matte and Shiny Zebra Print Combo Fail

It is official: If you have e.l.f.'s matte topcoat, once it gets down to about half, and is all thick and goopy, don't bother with thinner, just throw it out! I used Khloe Had a Little Lam-Lam from NOPI and wanted to create a look that I have yet to do, the matted base color, with a shiny print on top. But oh no, e.l.f. wouldn't stand for that!

 

Teal Toes for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month

Don't worry, you will not be seeing my feet in this post! In fact, I can hardly even see them myself at this point, so I went with fingers instead!

Teal Toes is an ovarian cancer awareness website, and the idea for raising awareness is to paint your nails teal in August Septmeber (I swore it was August, but apparently I was wrong. It is okay, I guess I'm just a month early! ^.^).

OPI's All Ears with 11 In"Spider"ed Shades

During the next two months, OPI will be releasing two new limited edition polish sets. The first one, in May, is based on Spider Man, and the second, in June, is inspired by Minnie Mouse.

Sadly, none of these polishes seem very exciting or original, though. That's terrible, considering I love blue polish and there is one in there. They're all pretty been-there-done-that. The only one that is slightly interesting appears to be a sparkly pink base with heart bits in it, and has already been done a hundred times in the NOPI line.

Although I don't plan on picking anything up from either of these, I'll let you decide for yourself if they're worth getting or not.

The Minnie Mouse set has four polishes. According to the OPI press release, they are a heart glitter confetti, a pink creme, a shimmery fuchsia, and a red frost:

Nothing Mousie Bout It

Khloe Had a Little Lam-Lam

From the Nicole by OPI Kardashian Kolors collection, I have this wonderful dark green/dark teal/forest green/dark emerald green color to show you. I can't decide which of these is most accurate. It's not exactly forest, nor emerald, nor teal, but kind of all of them at once. =P

This polish was doable in one coat, but I used two for good measure. Nice consistency, very smooth, decent brush and average drying time. The color of this polish is absolutely gorgeous! It is lovely for fall, winter, St. Patrick's Day and I am sure for many other occasions, too; it's very versatile. I don't own many dark colors, other than black, but I am definitely glad I picked this one up!

The polish is actually a little darker and a little less teal in real life than the pictures show:

Dos Más

I went ahead and got Kendall on the Katwalk, a blue base with blue, purple, green and teal glitter and Khloe Had a Little Lam-Lam, a dark green that some call forest green, but I see it as more of a dark teal (in the bottle, anyway); both from the Nicole by OPI Kardashian Kolor collection.

My expectations for Kendall on the Katwalk were too high, though. Disco Dolls, the gold glitter, was wonderful, but this glitter was less dense and took 2 thick coats for opacity. The more I see it on my nails, though, the more I like it. I don't have another glitter like it, nor have I seen another glitter like it!

There's a First Time for Everything

I have never been let down by Sally Hansen before... Until now. I found a display with their new Diamond Strength line bottles and there were only a few that I liked. Of course Diamonds is my favorite glitter, but I am currently stocked up on that right now.

I realized there's a color that I don't have. A peach. So I picked up Sweetie Pie. It was very peachy in the store, but when I got it home it was slighty peachish pink in the bottle and on the nail, pretty much straight pink. And not even a pink that I would select (Plus it takes 3+ coats to be opaque, it was streaking, it's thin as water and flooded my cuticles like crazy, and the brush wasn't even wide enough to attempt painting my tiny pinkie in one stroke); almost a mucky, nasty, muted, bland pink. I once made a franken that turned out looking like you went to change the baby's diaper and he'd eaten a huge container of red glitter, and it was better than this poor excuse for a bottle of nail polish crap. Just sayin'. It was so bad I didn't even bother photographing it on my nails.