My Halloween 2011 Nails

Sometimes I think it's weird to make graphics like this.
Then I think about the rest of my life and think this
is about as normal as I get. :D

A VIDEO!! OMG, I cannot even begin to explain how far I've come in video editing-land, and how far I have yet to go. Still, I'm so happy to have this finished and ready to move on! I'm hoping to keep moving forward with this, because I do like being able to have video with my posts. Let's be honest, I'm a total ham and I love being able to talk to you!

This process, though? So confusing. Who knew it'd be so hard to do a voiceover for video? (Ok, I know... I've done it, so I know, but still!) I ended up having to script half of it, play the soundless video while I recorded my audio into my video camera, then move that video to the computer, download the latest version of Audacity so I could strip the sound from the video, then cut it up into chunks I could then place in the video timeline. Oh, and I had to download FFsomething or other libraries too, and install them.

Sound confusing? Yea, that's because it was! But it's DONE, and now I sort of understand what I'm doing, so I'm going to start editing the next video tomorrow! Maybe it won't take me three years to get finished... :D

So, on to the pretty stuff... the nails! Oddly enough, I wasn't interested in doing anything too flashy or anything, partly because I was running out of time and partly because I was really wanting to try the gorgeous polishes Melissa from the Daily Nail surprised me with. She'd noticed I've been down and not posting as much lately, so once day I checked the mail to find the cutest package all bundled up in orange paper waiting for me!

I'd be lying if I said I kept my cool. I alternated between squealing in joy and wiping tears away because it was such a touching gift. She filled it with all sorts of goodies, and I've kept them all in their box for now, to decide what to do with them. But Halloween was the perfect time to try two of them... Sally Hanson Salon Black Orchid and NYX Pink Avenue.

Black Orchid is a fairly basic polish, a deep charcoal grey shimmer that is lovely on its own. It's not totally black because the shimmer plays with the light a bit, but I like this. I also like that it's a cool-toned charcoal without any warmth to it. It's a typical Sally Hansen Salon polish- good coverage, good wear.

Pink Avenue was the star of this show, though. NYX definitely made a winner with this one, a mix of glitters in a clear base. It's a combination of lime green and orange flake glitters paired with microglitter in the same colors. I think some of the glitter changed colors in the light, depending on the angle, but it was hard to tell.

Regardless, this was a stunning polish, and I couldn't resist adding three coats of it, just to build the sparkle to insane levels. What can I say, subtlety is not one of my strengths!

The end result was almost impossible to photograph! Even the video didn't quite capture the way the light played with the glitter. It was hypnotic, and I was in absolute love! My niece loved it too, and wanted me to do her nails... shame I didn't have it with me, or I would have!

Since it's 5:30am and I haven't been to sleep yet, I'll let the rest of the photos speak for themselves. Click' em for larger pics. They're worth it!

So... thoughts? Too glittery? Not enough? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Polishes were provided by Melissa at The Daily Nail because she's AWESOME!

See my disclosure statement for more information.

Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure- On eBay!

Hello my lovelies! Just a quick post to let you know I've got a bottle of Sally Hansen Complete Salon Hidden Treasure on eBay for $6 as I write this right now. I was hoping to be able to post a video here as well, but I guess this is better than nothing.

I've also got some photos from my personal bottle up as well!  Check them out, and if you're interested in owning your own bottle of this gorgeous polish, head over to my listing.

When you apply Hidden Treasure over a dark polish like black,
navy blue, or hunter green, the flakes come alive, flashing shades
of red, orange, green, yellow, and more. It's magical!

Hidden Treasure over lighter colors tends to bring out softer shades
in the flakes, like pinks, icy blues, and golds.

Clearly, I absolutely adore Hidden Treasure over black. There are no words
to describe how happy I feel when I see these flakes on!

Sally Hansen's Hidden Treasure is long gone from the stores, as it was a limited edition release last year. It's a dupe for Gosh Rainbow, and closely resembles the Nfu-Oh flake polishes, or so I've heard. This is definitely a special polish, so if you want to own it, you need to act fast. It's not always available!

Til next time!

This polish was NOT provided by the manufacturer for review.

See my disclosure statement for more information.

Test Nail- Crystals and Mermaids and Dragons Oh My!

I'm absolutely exhausted tonight so I'll let the photos do most of the talking. I've had several sleepless nights in a row now, and I'm managing maybe an hour or two at a time before I'm awake and miserable again, so my brain is sort of melty at the moment. But the photos rock.









I was kicking around ideas in my head, and this is simply one of the ideas I've been toying with. I think I'm happy with it...

Taking photos inside didn't work that well. The color really didn't show, although you do get an idea of how it looks in low light.

So I took things outside and fastened the nail to my poor dirty car with poster putty. It was late afternoon and there was no direct sunlight, but you can still see the color much better.

So now I think I'll make a full set to put on Etsy. I love the way they catch the light. They make me think of shattered crystal shards, of mermaids, of dragons. The cool thing is that I can make them in multiple colors... I can see these in red, green, black...





So that's my post for today/tonight. Hardly my usual, but I hope the photos make up for it. Now I get to sleep, and hopefully to stay asleep for more than an hour. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think: should I make a full set of these for Etsy? Should I make them in different colors? What color would you like to see?

Enough! Take off that polish already! TAKE IT OFF!!

Back again? I know, you're dying to figure out just what else I could add to my manicure... It was pretty blingy and over-the-top as it was, could I actually do much more with it?

Silly lovey, of course I could!

I got an incredible package in the mail from KellieGonzo (who writes Also Known As, a rather kick-ass blog). See, we're been Twittering back and forth for a bit now, and she's as sweet as can be. Out of the blue she asks me for my email. Turns out, she says she's got a few Konad plates that she unfortunately hasn't been able to figure out how to use, and she wondered if I was interested in them. She'd noticed that I'm having a ball figuring out all the things you can use a Konad set for.

Well, I get to the mailbox the other day and find her package. Turns out her idea of "a few plates" is 14 plates, a holder, and 3 special Konad polishes! I kid you not, I squeed like a mad person! My husband just laughed at me as I went over and over the various bits, because it was just like Christmas! Honestly, y'all, I wanted to hug her!

Thing is, once I had those plates in hand? I couldn't let them just SIT there... I had to USE them. So I dug through til I found something I thought would be simple enough to go over what was on my fingers, but still fun enough to do, and simple enough I would be able to do it. First time Konading on my own fingers you know? So I picked out a simple dot pattern, and sure enough, 15 minutes later I had cuteness on my nails! I photographed it without topcoat, because I was afraid the Konad would smear and be ruined.

It wasn't, though. It survived just fine under my Sally Hansen topcoat, whose name escapes me at the moment. It's in here somewhere, though...

Problem is, those patterns are awfully small, and my thumbnails are awfully large. First I tried stamping my thumb vertically, but that left 1/3 of my thumbnail blank, which just ... I'm not ready to match up a pattern yet. Getting it on straight was enough excitement for the day! I cleaned off the stamp and started again, this time putting it at the base of my thumb. That left a bit of space at the tip, which I covered with the swirly bit there. It'd be nicer if I hadn't smeared it, but... meh. Bite me. It's my first time, and that's ok!

And there you have it. How I put more layers of polish on than any one person should EVER have on their fingers at one time. And it looked CUTE, too! Of course it finally chipped, and that chip made me crazy, so I had to take it all off, and now my nails are bare as ever. Funny how that happens... but I've got a lot of birthday polish and Konad plates to play with, so I'm sure they won't be bare for long!

Gosh Rainbow over Wet n Wild Eggplant Frost

Hi again! Lots of craziness at Chez Laynie, and I'm having such fun documenting it all. Around the blog, there have been a few changes- I've added a box on the left so you can ask me questions at Formspring! I don't know how well that's going to work, or if I'm going to keep it, but hey, it's a good start, right? Also, I've incorporated Google ads to the blog. Don't worry, there are no big flying graphics or blinky things to annoy you. But if you see something interesting in the text ads, feel free to click. I've already seen a couple of things I'd like to click!

I've also added a counter for my feedburner (holy wow, I had no idea so many people had signed up!!) as well as a cute widget showing off my Etsy listings. Not sure if I'll keep the Etsy one. What do you think? Is it a keeper? Ah well... let's get to the nails, shall we?

Oh my gosh, this has been the HARDEST look to photograph!! Seriously, I have taken more photos of my nails this time than I think I ever have, and that's saying something! Of course, that means you have to look at more pictures, but hey... it could always be worse, right? I could have broken more nails, or...

...oh wait, I did. Meh, no big deal. Worst case scenario, I always have nail tips, right? :D

Ugh, I'm all over the place right now! Let's start at the beginning, shall we? As soon as I picked up Eggplant Frost, I knew it needed a coat of Gosh Rainbow over it. I wanted to see how the deep warm purple affected the Rainbow flakies. (For the record, Gosh Rainbow and Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure are dupes... one has slightly larger flakes, but there's no real reason to own both, other than the fun of it!)

So, after wearing Wet n Wild Eggplant Frost for a day, I put a single coat of Gosh Rainbow over the top, then a layer of topcoat. This stuff was so insanely pretty that I simply couldn't stop looking at my fingers, watching the colors change as the angle of the light did. My husband laughed at me on more than one occasion for being lost in thought, just looking at my nails...

I also need to apologize for these first photos. I was so excited about this combination that I decided I had to take pics for twitter, even though I hadn't even cleaned up and was still oily from my quick-dry topcoat. (Speaking of, that's a post for another day... I'd be LOST without it, and it's cheap!) So the first few pictures are sloppy and embarrassing, but they show the colors so well. Forgive me?

The next day I went outside and sat on my front steps with my cameras, taking photo after photo, trying to get a video to show how this stuff interacts with the light. No go, though... the videos were all blurry, and utterly useless. I haven't given up on video yet, I'm just not at a point I can do it well enough. I'll get there, though, and as soon as I do, you'll see video!

I imagine the neighbors must have thought I was insane, sitting on my steps taking photos of my hands. I often wonder what my neighbors think. Once I'd gone to visit my dad, who lives at the end of a dead end, and there was the cutest turtle just sitting there in the road. I had my husband stop the car, grabbed my camera, and soon was lying in the road, camera on the ground, taking face-to-face photos of the turtle.

Before long, one of the neighbors came out of her house, terrified. She asked if we needed her to call 911, so that an ambulance could come. She must have thought he hit me with the car! We both said no, everything's fine, there's a turtle in the road! She looked at us as if we'd lost our minds...

Maybe she's right. I have more stories like that than the average person should, I think, but it's fun. I wouldn't want to change the way I do things... it's what makes me me!

My poor camera, though... it had the worst time trying to photo this combo. You really do need to enlarge at least a couple of photos, if for no other reason than to see the amount of sheer amazingness. The purple shimmer in the Eggplant Frost seemed to really step up with the Rainbow flakes, so there was an amazing amount of just ... I don't know. Prettiness? Downright crazy understated blingy goodness? Sexiest nail treatment since holographic polishes? I have no idea, I guess... I'm totally at a loss for words, at least coherent ones!

 So yea, I consider this to have been a very successful layering experiment. But do I stop here? Heh... those of you who follow me on twitter will know the answer to that one! Tomorrow, my lovelies... tomorrow you'll get to see what else I did to this!

Petites - Dare

Some days are just too good to be true. I've been lemming for a blue flaky polish for absolute AGES now, and whining to my husband about it sadly. Right now, I'm not able to send off for any of the Nfu-Oh polishes, no matter how much I'd love to. So until then, I've been dreaming wistfully, and drooling over pictures online.

Until last night. We'd gone for a walk at our local WalMart and decided to wander through the clearance department. I'm *SO* glad we did, because there in a small box of clearance cosmetics, mixed in among the off shades of MaryKate and Ashley blushes and who-knows-how-old lip glosses was a bottle of Petites polish in Dare.

It was such a pretty shade of blue, and with the Fourth of July coming up so quickly, I decided to carry it with me through the store while we walked, considering if I really wanted to buy it. Yea, it was on clearance, and it's not terribly expensive to begin with, but I've found that carrying something with me for a while lets me decide if I really want to buy it, or if it's just one of those spur-of-the-moment purchases.

But the more I looked at it and saw how glittery and perfect the color was, the more I realized I wanted to bring this little polish home with me. It was perfect for a patriotic manicure, and it was totally the right price. But once I got home and started to apply it I started looking more closely at it. Could it be, I wondered? Are those really little flakies?!

It IS! Beautiful little flakes of glitter, mixed in with a mix of tiny microglitters in shades of silver, teal, and pink, of all colors, float in a gorgeous sheer blue that builds to opacity in three coats. I can't stop looking at it. And most of all, I am loving the fact that I almost put this little gem back on the shelf!

Every now and then I make a good decision! ;)

That prompted today's mani. I wanted something patriotic, but not too over-the-top. I wanted to use the ZOMG gorgeous blue, along with my favorite red glitter polish.. Actually, I pulled out something like 10 bottles, trying to figure out what to use.

I settled on Petites Dare for the blue, Heaven Nail Lacquer for the red, my Art Deco white striper, and an unnamed Sally Hansen Salon silver that came in a 5-pack of minis that I got on sale. The silver did an awesome job of covering the red and white stripes in one coat... talk about fantastic!

Finally I added a single rhinestone (albeit a rather large one!) onto each nail, mainly to cover up the white dot I screwed up on the tip of my left hand. You would know I messed up the one I could paint easily! But whatever... it worked out. :D