Out of Character Nail Day (Zoya Dea)

i was painting nails last night with a girlfriend and she pointed out the many untried bottles of polish i have sitting in my polish box, so i let her choose my color for today. She chose Zoya Dea. i believe my exact response was, "poop brown? awwwwwwwwwwwwwww." which is a little silly of me, because i bought it and lets face it i have excellent taste. 

so dea, uh-mazing application. a lot of my Zoya creams are on the thick side and tend to apply a little like my high school white out manicures (come on, you know you did it too) if i'm not super careful. *i'm looking at you Snow White* however, Dea was an absolute dream.

Zoya Dea - Lamplight 

i finished my manicure and kept glancing down, a little disappointed at the lack of sparkle on my out of character mani so i reached for my newest bottle of American Apparel polish. Meteor Shower is soooo pretty! it is a gorgeous gold foil flakie that applies relatively easily considering how randomly sized and shaped the flakies are. as it dried i used a toothpick to pat down any stray corners and then put like 5 coats of topcoat (china glaze and then sally hansen) to get a smooth and shiny finish. 

turned out kind of cute if you ask me ;) 

and in the end, not at all poop brown-ish.

Zoya Dea & American Apparel Meteor Shower

NerdLacquer Fun Week!

After Resolutionary, i decided to go ahead and play with all of my NerdLacquer haul :) i still have two more to go, but here are Hyperspace Bypass, Crunchy Frog and Cyance Friction.

So, i have had so many issues with Zoya Pippa. I love it in the bottle, LOVED it on a girlfriend of mine...but on me? not so much. once i get it past the streaky phase, it looked really odd on me. so it has just sat in my box staring at me wistfully... so i combined it with Hyperspace Bypass and then spent the next two days wiggling my fingers around just to catch glimpses of the silver hexes and black micro glitter. it went on super easy and the picture above is lamp light (sunlight was almost impossible to capture) with only two coats of Hyperspace Bypass. I do have to note, that i'm currently rereading the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe so the nerdgasm level on this right now is officially at SQUEE!!

This is two coats of Crunchy Frog over Zoya Dea. it dried super smooth, compared to my other NerdLacquer purchases, but i still did a coat of Gelous and one of SV over top. The name is super silly, but the combo is so unusual that i can't help but love it. The base on this somewhere between caramel and chocolate, so it made the Dea (which is totally milk chocolate) a little less meh for me.

MyPerfectPolish swatched this last week (find it here) and had a hard time getting those gorgeous champagne colored flecks off the sides of the bottle. my super technical fix for this was just to screw the top entirely back on between each nail, shift the bottle back and forth a bit and then lay the brush lengthwise down each nail (More Nail Polish did a really good video on the technique here, using The Glittering Crowd by Lynderella *LE DROOL*) . technique worked pretty well and this is only *one* coat of Cyance Friction. The base of the glitter was speckled with tiny coppery glitter so that mellowed out the Hard Candy Frenzy a ton. only issue, it totally gobbled my Gelous+SV combo which is annoying the hell out of me. i am a sucker for a glassy shine.