Showing posts with label funky fingers. Show all posts

"Jinx" Nail Polish Strips Review

Posted by Erin on 8/28/11. Filed under: , , , , ,
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Nail polish strips appear to be all the rage these days. Obviously Minx started this trend, but there are now tons of knock offs out there that people can do at home for a fraction of the price that Minx costs at the salon. Sally Hansen is probably the most popular option, as it's extremely accessible and relatively inexpensive. Personally, I was never very intrigued by the Sally Hansen strips because for $9 I can buy an OPI polish and keep it for years instead.

BUT...while perusing the nail polish section of Five Below yesterday, I came across these strips called "Jinx", which is obviously their attempt at a cute play on Minx. But whatever. They had some cute patterns and only cost $3. I snatched 2 packs. One houndstooth pattern and another with white stars on a baby pink base. I left the store expecting the worst.

Inside each pack (which I did not photograph because I wasn't really expecting to be writing this to begin with) is a small nail file, orange stick, the strip of decals, and a bizarre and seemingly useless strip of silver foil sticker. I still have no idea what the silver foil is for...

I tried the pink and white stars strips first and did a half assed job at applying them. I didn't bother to buff my nails first (which they instruct you to do) and didn't do a great job at evening out all of the air bubbles. Despite that, they still came out decent.

Not too bad...

Now if doing a shitty job applying these could give me okay results, then imagine what they would look like if I took my time and applied them carefully...

Awesome.
Jinx are extremely easy to apply. They're basically just stickers made of dry nail polish, and they were almost the perfect size for my nails. The most difficult part is smoothing them out so that no air bubbles get stuck between the sticker and the nail, and even that part is pretty simple. I wasn't sure if these worked with top coat, but I applied a coat of Seche Vite on top of them anyway and  it worked out just fine.  I'll definitely be buying these again. I hope to go back to Five Below next week once all of the trees and branches are cleared from the roads (and my car...).

I do have a giveaway coming up once I hit 100 followers, and I was thinking of buying a couple of packs of these for it. Would anyone be interested in getting these in a giveaway? What about Funky Fingers polish? They now have the FF crackles at my local Five Below, as well as the entire Island collection. Let me know!

NOTD: Vintage Rose Garden

Posted by Erin on 8/9/11. Filed under: , , , , ,
3 Comments

 I love me some floral nail art. It's my go-to nail art design when I'm running low on inspiration or try something new that didn't quite work out as well as I'd planned. I really love this mani, although the cuticle drag from the base color leaves something to be desired. Still, it's a win in my book. How can you go wrong with yellow and purple?








The yellow I used is Lemon Icecream from Barry M. As I mentioned before (and as you can see), I did get a good deal of cuticle drag with this one. The consistency on all of the Barry M Icecream colors is a bit odd. They're kind of a combo of a jelly and a creme, which ends up being sort of....milky? They cover exceptionally well though and the colors are fantastic. The purple I used for my ring finger and as one of the colors on the roses is Cheshire from Funky Fingers. It's a gorgeous color with a neon finish, which makes it difficult to photograph. The lighter purple color that I used on the roses is Berry Icecream from Barry M.

Are any of you partial to the floral manis? Show me some links of your work! :)



NOTD: Tequila Sunrise Gradient

Posted by Erin on 8/5/11. Filed under: , , , , , ,
2 Comments

Summer is sadly coming to an end in a few weeks. It never lasts long enough for me. Someday I will leave these 9 month long New England winters behind and head west. But until then, I'll have to prolong my love of the sun with manicures like this one:


try to ignore the little white baby hairs on my thigh in this one...




I actually swore off gradients a few months ago because I did one that required literally over an hour of clean up. Fuck that! I love the look, but I'm just not patient enough to deal with all that. But then I remembered that I used a totally different technique that time and that my old trusty technique never left me with such a horrible mess to clean up afterwards. So I tried again, with pretty awesome results (if I do say so myself). The only real issue I have with this mani is the fact that I got extreme tip wear and lifting on my middle finger, which is likely due to the massive chip I have in the side of the nail.

I used Funky Fingers' Cayman Island for the yellow base, N.Y.C.'s Times Square Tangerine Creme for the orange overlay and a coat of Sinful Colors' UFO for the glitter. I then topped it off with 2 thick coats of Seche Vite.

Kleancolor Chunky Holo Clover and Black

Posted by Erin on 7/28/11. Filed under: , , , , , , ,
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I ordered Chunky Holo Clover and Chunky Holo Black by Kleancolor a few days ago and they finally arrived this afternoon. I was psyched to try these out because from the swatches I'd seen online, they appeared to have a unique quality to them that reminds me a little of flakie polish. 

Here is 4 coats of Chunky Holo Clover:




Clover has a very sheer kelly green jelly base. It's pretty but because it's so sheer it is lacking in wearability. However.....



it's quite charming when layered over a dark green :) This was 2 coats of Last Chance by Sinful Colors with 2 coats of Chunky Holo Clover layered over it. Not bad at all.

Chunky Holo Black was not even worth applying by itself. I tried, and it looked too gross to even take photos of it. So here you have 2 coats of it layered over Black on Black by Sinful Colors. 




Beautiful. The base of this is every bit as sheer as Clovers and it's grey. Not black, but grey. I'm not even sure why they call this Chunky Holo Black, because even in the bottle you can see that the base is anything but. I suppose it doesn't matter that much since it's so gorgeous over a real black base. 

My one question is why they made the glitter in Chunky Holo Black truly chunky with multi sized pieces of glitter, but left Clover (and presumably the rest of the Chunky Holo set) with just a standard medium sized glitter. I think Clover could have definitely benefitted from some of the super chunky pieces that are in Black.

Curious as to what Chunky Holo Black would look like over other colors, I decided to layer it over (from left to right) Ruby Ruby by Sinful Colors, Volts by Funky Fingers, Funky Dunkey by OPI, and Port Royal by Funky Fingers.


 

I will definitely be using this over Funky Dunkey in the future!

NOTD: Tie Dyed and Hot as Hell

Posted by Erin on 7/22/11. Filed under: , ,
10 Comments

It's 100 degrees here today. Luckily I got my AC unit fixed last night, or else I'd be melting. And because it's so hot, I figured I'd try something summery on my nails for the day. Here are my tie dyed nails! (Excuse the messy cuticles. These are hard to do in a neat manner).






I used the following colors: Wild Child, Port Royal and Cheshire from Funky Fingers, and Fiercely Fiona from OPI.

EDIT: I wasn't able to find the exact tutorial that I saw on this a few weeks ago but I did find a really good one that should help you girls do this on your own. Here it is! If you try it out yourself, please shoot me a link to your blog so I can see!

New URL + Funky Fingers Island Collection Swatches

Posted by Erin on 7/19/11. Filed under: ,
4 Comments

I mentioned something on my now old blog about wanting to make the move over here to blogger. This past weekend pushed me from wanting to move to needing to move. I don't know what the fuck happened on the blogs backend, but shit stopped working right...and other things stopped working completely. Big thanks to Amy for shooting me an email to let me know that my comments were no longer working.


I finally figured out how to transfer all of my followers over to this blog, so everything is fine. I do (kindly) ask that if you have me linked that you change it to this address to avoid confusion. And if I don't have you linked but you'd like to be, please shoot me an email or post your url in the comments. 

Now that we've got that out of the way, I can show you the Island Collection from Funky Fingers! 

Did you know that these smell? Well, all nail polish smells, but these smell like food. Fruit to be precise. I'll be honest with you though- these don't smell good. A few of them are downright nauseating. And this is coming from someone who paints her nails in an air conditioned room with no ventilation whatsoever (I know. I'm smart.). The colors are pretty cool though and most of them are worth the stench.





Port Royal is a super bright fuschia creme neon. (Remember that word neon, because I'm going to be using it a lot in this post). It applied about as well as a neon possibly can, and for that I am thankful. I had to use 3 coats for opacity and it was still a bit streaky, but again- what more can you expect from a neon? The shade itself is pretty awesome and looks badass with either black or any array of purples that you fancy. I likely won't ever wear this on it's own but I have big plans for it when it comes to nail art. Oh, and this one actually smells kind of nice. Like raspberries I think?





Cayman Island is by far my favorite, but yellow always is. This yellow is unlike any other color in my collection though. It's a bright dandelion (neon) shade with the most amazing teal green shimmer that gives it this odd kind of 3D effect. It's a total bitch to apply, but I was expecting that. It took 4 coats for semi opacity and is incredibly streaky. It also smells like something that crawled out of my ass. I don't even know if the scent is supposed to be banana or lemon. Can't say that I care though. I love this one to bits. 




Curacao bored me to tears in the bottle, but when I put it on I was amazed. It's absolutely gorgeous! It's a bright turquoise blue and is infused with teal green shimmer. Stunning. This also smells the best- like blueberries :) This was opaque in 2 easy coats.




Tortuga is not a neon to fuck with. This sucker is so bright that it practically glows in the dark. I'm not sure I'd wear this one on it's own. It's a bit too much, even for me. It smells the worst out of all of them. It's obviously supposed to be lime scented, but it ends up smelling like that nasty green slime shit that they used to sell in gumball machines in the 80's. Come to think of it, it kind of looks like that stuff too!



Kingston is a very bright coral neon that applied really well and was mostly opaque in 2 coats, but you'd never know it from the pictures. I don't know what the issue is with this, but this color HATES the camera. I tried every angle and every type of light to try and capture this color accurately and nothing worked. For some reason it came out looking like a crazy shimmer even though it has no shimmer at all in it. Strange. These few pics that I did manage to get are not accurate either. It's much more orange than this. Sorry! :( I have no idea what kind of fruit this is supposed to smell like either.