Random Picks – China Glaze Westside Warrior & OPI Embarca-Dare Ya

I’m continuing my mission to use up all of my untried polishes, and today my random picks from my untrieds drawer are China Glaze Westside Warrior and OPI Embarca-Dare Ya. I was unsure about how to bring these two together in a mani as they're both so different. I initially thought of doing a floral type design, but I didn't give myself enough time, so I then decided to the stamping efficiency of the OPI polish.

The base is two coats of Westside Warrior, a dark, camo-green creme. I’m in the habit of painting my coats a bit thick, so I might have gotten away with one coat, but went for two to be safe. I then stamped a tribal hand pattern MoYou London's Explorer 11 plate on random spots on my nails, using Embarca-Dare Ya, a lovely magenta shimmer. I topped it off with one coat of Glisten & Glow HK Girl for a super shiny finish.

I really like both of these colours – in the bottle, Westide Warrior looked like one of those love-them-or-hate-them ugly colours, and I’ve been really attracted to these colours recently! I got Embarca-Dare Ya in a 4 pack set of the OPI San Fransisco collection; I got the pack mostly for Alcatraz…Rocks (a gorgeous blue/purple texture polish, also still untried!), and I probably wouldn't have bought Embarca-Dare Ya on its own, but I'm glad I got it in the set. I want to use this as a full mani soon, to see what it’s like on a full nail. It's definitely a winner for stamping though, I had no issues using this on the plate, and the design came out really well. I’m also in love with MoYou’s stamping plates, I need to pick up some more!

All in all, a pretty successful mani, and another two polishes out of the untrieds drawer!

Freehand Baroque

My local Penney’s store recently restocked their Essence stand with lots of new polishes, and I find it increasingly more difficult to walk past it without buying something, so I've bought a few of their new colours over the last few days. It’s a really good thing that they are so cheap!

Today, I wanted to use a lovely deep, forest green called Deep Sea, Baby. The opacity of this is really good, I’ve painted just one coat as the base here. Could be down to my shorties though! I decided to try my hand at some freehand baroque patterns, I’ve seen some lovely freehand baroque manis and wanted to try it out. The pattern is painted with A-England Saint George. I thought having it in the same colour family, and with a bit of holo goodness would be a bit different. The next time though, I’ll paint the design under direct light, so I’ll be able to see what I'm doing, lol!

The actual design isn't great, I could have benefited from being able to see what I was doing, but I like the flashes of the holo green against the dark base, even if you can't see what it is :p

Random Picks – W7 Mosaic and Sally Hansen Jaded

I recently sorted through my stash and separated out all of the polishes that I haven't gotten around to using/swatching yet, and I was a little surprised at the amount that I had. I was able to fill a whole drawer of my Helmer with them!

In the few weeks since I've done this, sadly, I still haven't touched the drawer, and I'm still buying more polishes, so I've decided that I’m going to try to stave off my polish buying and use up some of my untrieds. So, I'm going to try and randomly pick two polishes from the drawer every week, and create a mani using those, to get my stash used. This consists of me holding my hands over the drawer with my eyes closed and picking two random bottles. I’m sure I look great doing it. Heh.

This week, my hands randomly picked Mosaic from W7 and Sally Hansen's Jaded. Both of these polishes are quite sheer, and I was initially stumped as to what to do with them. Eventually, I decided I would try jelly sandwiching them, since their formulas were perfect for the technique.

Mosaic is a sheer blue base with a scattering of blue and gold glitter. Jaded is a lovely, jade-green jelly. I painted 2 alternating coats of each, starting with Mosaic and finishing with Jaded. Because I can’t leave well enough alone, I also applied a diamond tile-styled stamp from Bundle Monster plate BM-203, and Barry M gold foil. Initially, I wanted to do some type of fishy, underwater style stamp, as the combination reminded me of the green you'd see under the ocean, but I didn't have any, so my eye was drawn to this stamp. I actually think it works really well, it makes it look quite mosaicy to me (if that makes sense…).

Again, I forgot to take a picture before I stamped (d'oh!), so I hope the stamp doesn't cover the paint job up to much, that you can still see the two polishes together. I think they look quite good, and it turned out better than I thought it would.

Happy days!