Craft Fair Cometh

  Hey friiieennnnds, time for a little bit of shameless shelf promotion!!  I've got a booth at the local Capitol Hill Indoor Flea Market this Saturday, November 24th, from which to hawk my various wares!  I'm teaming up with my fabulous friend Vi, who makes adorable plushy penises which she fashions into ornaments and catnip toys!  They're charming and hilarious - nothing like watching your precious feline prince fellate a catnip cock to give you the giggles! 

Here, for your edification, is my fat pet Nigel with his newest chew-toy.

  Meanwhile, I'll have my schizoid collection of gaudy costume jewelry to tempt you with.  Featuring a fanciful array of shrinky-dink charms and the always-classy gold glitter tooth pendants, plus some super-exciting one-of-a-kind goodies, like itty-bitty wearable aquariums!  It's the perfect place to start your holiday shopping and deliver something unique and special!

Come visit me on Saturday!!

MOAR HALLOWEEN!!!

  Halloween is seriously my fave holiday, I never want it to end.  In fact, I'm going to another costume party today, this time with my awesome family!  Also, why didn't I post this picture with my last post?!  It's awesome, if I do say so myself!

  You always get to do the best makeup on Halloween, and this year I made sure to get deep in that MUFE flash palette, since I paid for the damn thing, I might as well get the most out of it!

  My beautiful friend Britt let me beat her face for a 'harlequin clown' look, and I gotta say I'm pretty proud of how it turned out!  I have a lot of experience painting my own face, but I tend to get the shakey hand when trying to do anyone else's!

 

  The whole face is MUFE flash palette, set with all-important Swagger finishing powder.  As I live and breathe! TELL ME that is not the cutest clown you have ever seen!

  Oh my gosh, how cute is this outfit, too??  Crinolines for life, babies!  I have a gigantic steamer trunk full of pantyhose and tutus, I LIVE for that shit!

Happy Halloween!

  Ahh yes, boys and ghouls, it's the most wonderful time of the year again!  I'm talking about Halloween...what did you think I meant?!  I can't get enough of kitschy decor, fake blood, and fun-sized candy bars!!

Such a shame I didn't get a proper shot of my lovely neck scar, which you can barely see here!

  OK first let me just talk about my costume makeup for just a second here.  I was really pleased with how this look turned out!  I wanted a green face without having to cover myself in greasy makeup, but I didn't want to end up with a bloodless zombie face, so powder was out!
  I have this epic palette of high-end grease paints from Make Up For Ever that I am absolutely obsessed with!  The green on my face is straight from the palette with no added tints.  The colors are rich and beautiful and I absolutely adore it, but caveat emptor: these paints are greasy as fuck.  Now, I'm an oily-faced lass to begin with, but these are pretty insanely slippery when you first put them on!  This means a few things, both good and bad.  Happily, this makes it insanely easy to apply and also to fix any mistakes once you've got it on your face.  Unfortunately, it also means you need to give it proper time to cook, girl.  Gotta let that shit just SIT THERE for a good hour before I feel confident.   
  Additionally, it pretty much requires a finishing powder, so you're stuck with a velvet finish whether you want it or not.  I use Swagger finishing powder, which I ALSO freaking love.  Now, I love MUFE, but their finishing powder is half the size and twice the price, and it is made of exactly the same thing!!  WHAT in the WHAT, girl!   Don't be dumb, comparison shop.  And support small business!  The whole Swagger line is handmade by the divine Blake Karamazov in San Francisco!  We will be revisiting her again soon, to be sure...
  The lips are Jamaica by Ka'Oir, which is pretty great, too.  It's pretty creamy, and suuuper pigmented, so you don't have to put a heaping ton on to turn normal-girl-colored lips green!  I'm not crazy about the way it smells, but it's a small quibble.  I mean, it's not like it stinks.  It's fairly long-lasting and comfortable to wear, so I would recommend it.  The brand has all the freaky colors you have been wanting but unable to find.
  The eyeliner is a cream liner by MUFE, which I used on my stitches as well.  This shit is the BOOOOOMB!!!  I will never use liquid liner again, I swear to you.  This stuff is the total opposite of the paint palette - it's super waxy and dries quickly!  It stays richly black and flexible all day, too - no crusty, flaky business.  PLUS it doesn't require a powder to stay in place. Hurrah! Well worth the price.  I love it so much I would marry it. 
  My skin has nothing but mineral powder and the soft, forgiving sheen of my webcam's meager flash.

 

Completing the look with a Bride of Frankenstein bouffant and some gangrenous sutures!

  Now I've been dying to try a little spooky dripping blood look on my nails, but red just wasn't gonna match my Frankenstein ensemble, so I went with neon orange and green spooky slime!  I love neons, but they are almost always a slightly translucent gel, which is not great for coverage over dark colors, and naturally I needed a black backdrop for my Nickelodeon-colored slime nails.  Solution?  Mix one drop of white polish to four or five drops of neon polish, and viola! You have opaque neons!  Sure, they end up being a slightly paler hue, but once you've got it on your hands, no one will be the wiser!

To paint the slime, I used a combination of a thin, stout nail brush, and a small dotting tool.  The dotting tool was great for applying even coverage and achieving the drips.  In fact, the dotting tool is the most useful for this look.  I highly recommend using something similar, but in a pinch, a nice toothpick or even a dry (and cleaned!) ball-point pen will do lovely!  Be sure to wipe the tip every couple of dots to keep your tool precise and your polish from getting gooey.

Pretty sure these pants are the backdrop to 50% of my photos...

Double Dots Day!

  Well, it's been a wacky couple of weeks since I last updated, and since I made sure to buy a round-trip ticket to Crazytown, I was happily able to come back!  I've since done quite a lot of "housekeeping" in my life, and now I think I'm ready to come back to getting my happy on about my nails.  And, and, aaaand!  I have some exciting new designs to share in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!  Not only that, but some hotly-anticipated mail will be arriving soon to my mailbox, and I'll finally have something other than manicures to share!!

  But enough chitty-chatty, let's get down to the business of polka-dots!  I adore polka-dotted nails, but I'm not keen on the stamper (I ordered some piece of shit version that doesn't work as well as my friend's "As Seen On TV" version - bah!) and dots are so hard to make with a brush!  Happily, whilst trolling Amazon I found a set of ball-point pens in various sizes, specifically for making dots and water marbling!  These little mofo's are a revelation, I tell you! 

  Let me warm you up by showing you how my stinky toes turned out!  I was attempting a comic-book gradient with a pepto-pink background (some new Revlon that I can't recall the name of) with white dots.  I used a few different sizes of the pointer tool to achieve a variety of sizes of dots - I tried to graduate the sizes to give the impression of a fade - to limited success, I think.  As always, the rest of my toenails get an abridged version of the design...they're just too small to give a shit about!

  Not quite finished with the comic-book theme, I decided to try out a little party-nail action on my fingers.  I used Sally Hansen's Smooth & Perfect in Dune as the base coat.  I have mentioned this color before, and I think I'm gaining more of an appreciation for it - it's nearly clear, and it works like a mineral powder - just makes my nails look like a more perfect version of their natural selves!  Also, it's not a pink-tinted sheer, which makes it unique!

 I've done a slightly-offset two-color diagonal grid pattern here.  The offsetting is what gives this look it's graphic, Lichtenstein-esque quality.

  Surprisingly, the higher contrast color combinations ended up looking a lot better - my favorite combo ended up being the orange/blue (left ring finger).  I had initially thought a more subtle blend would be the answer, but you can see on the yellow/green green/orange combination, that this was kind of a fail.  Perhaps a brighter background would have given the colors some pop, but you know how I feel about white nail polish....

50 Shades of Grey

  Let me start off by saying I hate myself for that title, but I just couldn't think of any other puns on the color grey.  So, I'm sorry, but the awful title stays, because it's too perfect for a post all about how much I loooooove grey nail polish!!
  I love it because it's perfectly neutral without being all gothy and black, and it just looks soooo classy!  Besides, mattes have been really in this season and grey is just so hot right now!  I also love grey as a base when doing really any fun nail designs, because I find that it's easier to use than white polish, both in terms of number of coats needed and quality of polish,* but it's almost just as bright, so you can make your detail colors really pop.  (*Seriously, can we talk about white nail polish for a second?  Like, why is it always, no matter how much you spend on it, the thickest, goopiest crap of all time?  I mean it - my Wet 'n' Wild is equal in quality to my OPI.  They're both fucking horrid.  Sometimes I think we were better off back in the WhiteOut-as-nail-polish days of yore.  And streaky.  Always streaky, so you need at least two coats to make it even.  But it's so thick that it's way heavy at even just two coats, which makes it start chipping the moment it dries?  Ugh. Ugh. Ughhh.  Anyway...)

  Now that I've finished talking about how much I hate white nail polish, (not the way it looks! I love that part!) here's a look with white nail polish!  Super simple white half-moons.  I love a good monochromatic manicure, too, so bonus!  The white is OPI, the grey is Revlon Top Speed in Hazy.  Love this shade, it's one of my favorites.  White half-moons are typically done on nude nails, like a reverse French, but I love using a surprising shade for the main color.  It's playful while remaining totally chic.  Perfect.


  My current nail obsession is ombre glitter.  It's incredibly easy to do right and make it look like a pro job!  You want to use a glitter with a clear polish base - the great thing about clear bases is that any brush strokes and roughness is magically erased with a top coat - not so with colored gel bases.  And you are going to need a top-coat to gloss over the mountain of glitter if you try this look.

Sigh, stupid camera.  Top photo has most accurate color.

  It's a simple process: I did my longest layer first, letting the brush drip heavy at the base of my nail, and taper off to nothing by the time I got to the tip, actually stopping the brushstroke before I reached the end of my nail.  After that base layer dried, I just dabbed with my brush, concentrating at the base, and using the brush to really push the glitter into the places that I wanted it.  It's easy to play around with the glitter to get it looking just how you want it.  Finish with a nice, thick top coat.  Looks awesome starting from the tip, too.

  This is the same grey as above, only looking totes diff!  Awesome!  The glitter is Sephora by OPI in Spark-tacular!  (God, these names....)  But really, this is an awesome polish, and I love it so much I just might marry it.  The photos barely do it justice, but I tried, which is why you get to behold it in blurry realism and also with wrinkle-and-blemish heightening flash!  How lucky for you!

  Now, I really thought I had more lovely grey manicures to share today.  I guess this is not much at all like 50 Shades of Grey, except that trying to photograph that grey was torture.  (Ba-dum tsschhh!  I'll be here all week...)

Matte Magenta Moons

  All the nail blogs say the easy way to do a moon manicure is to mask off the moon area with one of those round-sticker-binder-ring-protector-thingies to make the moon shape.  They're easy to find anywhere, and they're not so sticky they'll peel up your base coat, which I suppose makes them fairly ideal.  I've always been a bit skeptical about it - are the circles the right size?  Will they stick well enough to prevent leakage?

  So I decided to find out.    

  I thought the overall effect was...okay.  I'm not thrilled, and I think I could do a nicer job by hand after three glasses of wine, even.  Hey, sometimes I get better at this shit when I'm drinking!

  Anyhoo, there was minor seeping, especially at the corners!  In fact, the binder rings are rather thick for a sticker, and they kept trying to pop off the edges of my nails!  I have very curved nails, so if you have a flatter nail plane you may have more luck.  This was a total pain-in-the-ass for me.

  To conclude this experiment, but not this post, I would say that I prefer not to use a masking method for the moon manicure, or at least not with binder rings.  However!  This method is useful if you want a 'moon' that is a lighter or sheerer shade that won't work as a top layer.  For this mani I used Sally Hansen Smooth Perfect in Dune as the moon color, which is a lovely sheer nude that would never show up over anything!  The top is Revlon Plum Seduction, which is a really lovely magenta.

 Finally, I decided this would be a good look to try with the new matte top coat I just got!  Inspired by a shiny-black on matte-black french manicure I saw, I have been dying to play with matte colors!  It's about time a matte top-coat was made readily available!  I've always hated how the oh-so-necessary protective top-coat always ruined the finish of a matte polish.  BUT NO MORE!  Behold!  The matte-ness!

Regular polish on top; with matte top coat on bottom.

 Yeahhh!  I think it turned out puh-retty sweet!  It's a bit less drastic a difference due to my camera's overactive flash, but I think it's a pretty good representation of what we're working with, here.  I paid like, ten bucks for this matte top coat, goddamnit, so it better work!
  Oh yeah,  it's Sephora by OPI brand, if you are interested.  It was the only one I could just walk to a store and buy, because no drugstores seem to have caught on yet, but I work a block away from Sephora.  (Danger ranger!)

  You can really see on the thumb in the bottom image, how the light diffuses much more softly on the matte finish.
  The only downside to the matte is that it tends to highlight any imperfections in your base.  I felt like uneven spots or brush streaks were more apparent after I applied the matte, so that's something to think about if you're gonna try it!  Nonetheless, I'm excited to try some new looks with this stuff!  One day I'll make the black-on-black look as good as the pros...my attempts so far have been too embarrassing to share - I'm sure you understand.

So, THIS happened...

 Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to a rousing adventure in WTF-land!

 So, I keep my vast collection of nail polish in a plastic bin with a lid that barely stays on anymore.  It's about as deep as it is wide (approx 1.5 feet square), so when you have as many nail colors as I do, you have to dump out the whole stupid bin every time you want a color that isn't on the uppermost layer.  One day, I'll buy myself one of those classy-as-fuck clear acrylic racks that salons use to display their laquers.   I'll mount it on my goddamn living room wall, and forever after enjoy manicure convenience.  Until then, though, I have this shitty bin. 

 Now, despite how much pressure the bottom layer is surely always under, I've never had any issues.  I mean, shit, any polish you buy is like 50% super thick glass bottle!  Those things are indestructible!!

Right?

....

......

Ahem.  So, with this line of thinking, you can imagine my surprise when I dumped out the box and found this.

Shit, and it's an OPI color, too!  I usually only get those as gifts, since I don't like spending more than six dollars on a bottle of polish.  RIP Yes I Can-Can, you were a great color.  Now I need a new sexy dark red, STAT!