You Dotty Girl!

Another lovers' affair, broadcast for my viewers to see. This is truly getting out of hand.

This time, I have a reason though. I'm going to enter one of my nail designs in Sarah's (Chalkboard Nails) nail art contest. She's encouraging her readers to participate in an all-dotting tool themed contest. The winners are chosen by Sarah and her panel of judges, so this isn't a plug for your votes. In fact, I think you all should enter! Entering your designs will inspire other designs for everyone to try out, so in a way, everyone wins a little. Plus, everyone knows how to use a dotting tool, homemade or store-bought. It's a great, fair way to allow nailers of all skill levels to enter and possibly win a $20 gift card to Llarowe.

Llarowe sells some of the coveted international polish lines like Glitter Gal and HITS to United States customers who can't get these polishes elsewhere. Good news...Llarowe ships just about everywhere else as well!

With that awesome prize and an additional two mystery prizes valued at $10 up for grabs, I had to enter.

I've done lots of dotting designs, so I had several to go on, but I wanted to enter something new. Hopefully I made the right choice with this design.

The base for this design is Skull and Glossbones (OPI). The various dots were done using my reliable dotting tools and Grape Pop (China Glaze), Planks A Lot (OPI), and White On (Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear) (in order of darkest to lightest). I chose to go with a purple theme to match the dotting tools themselves. Dang those little guys are inspiring!

Paws on my paws

So as I was telling you the other day, I felt that my ELF Desert Haze manicure was too neutral and plain looking, so I decided to spice things up with a little nail art. I painted the paws with stencil stickers from the local DM (Drogerie Markt) store and S-he Stylezone 500, a taupe color, also found at DM.

 

I think this manicure turned out pretty cute and I've gotten a lot of compliments on it. Sorry for the bad quality pictures, but I think they were done at night.

Going nude with ELF

ELF Desert Haze is a 1 $ polish from their Essentials collection. I have been eyeing this one for a while now and I finally got it in my last ELF UK order (we actually pay 1,5 pounds for the product, which is almost two and a half times more than the US price). It’s my first ELF polish and I was really curious as to how they would behave. I’ve heard good things and bad things about them.

Color:

Well I guess you could call this a nude crème. Maybe a greige. I don’t know cause I’m not very good at describing colors. It’s certainly a sand type color. A color that I’ve always rated as boring and “work appropriate” (man I hate those). Surprisingly, after putting it on, I really liked it, especially on my freshly cut nubs. This is a very neutral look for me and I still feel kinda dull with it on my nails. It’s so plain that it screams nail art to me.

Application:

This is not very pigmented. It requires at least 3 coats for opacity. I did 3 but I probably should have done 4 in order to cover all the bald spots. It applies easily and dries pretty quick. The packaging though is definitely showing it’s cheapness. The brush, which was pretty big, had 2 longer bristles that created streaks on my nails while I was painting. I will probably trim them in the future, but was too lazy to do it at the time. The bottle cap is square, big and slippery and so not confortable for holding. It was the first time I’ve dropped a bottle cap since I’ve started to paint my nails. This makes me worry about the H&M polishes that I have and didn’t use yet, that also have a big square cap like the ELF one does.

Durability:

For a polish worth one buck, I have to say this is pretty good quality. I wore it for a week and it only started chipping after about 6 days. Of course by that time I had applied some nail art (which I will show you soon) and one more coat of top coat. But all in all it is a pretty stress resistant polish.

Verdict:

Nice color, decent application and good wear time. I guess this is a winner in my book. I’m glad I bought it and took the chance.