Peppermint Candy Canes

  For my first Christmas themed manicure, I decided to go with a holiday classic treat, candy canes!  While I was originally planning on doing just red on white, I decided it needed a little bit of green as well...

Outdoors, shade

  For these nails, I started off with two coats of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On, followed by Konad using Fright Night Claw Polish Toxic and Nicole by OPI Stuck In The Chimney on plate m65.  I carefully painted the red onto the solid stripes, and then carefully added the green on the dot-stripes, so that I could more easily get a multi-colored stripe look.  I think it turned out very nice!  Aside from the pointer finger, where you can see I was a little short on my stamping and attempted to compensate with a second stamp... should have just left it alone, haha.  I also apologize for the dry nasty cuticles - the winter is hard on them!  But I picked up some LUSH - Lemony Flutter at the mall the other day and it is already working its magic!  :D

  Hope everyone is having a great holiday season!  I am off to put up our Christmas tree with Dan now!

Happy Holidays Giveaway!

  Well, here is my promised holiday giveaway!  It is just a small one, but I do plan on having a much larger 300 follower giveaway, so tell all of your friends to follow! ;) Here is what I have to offer you for this Happy Holidays Giveaway:

2010 Holiday Giveaway

  For this giveaway, I am splitting these up into two winners, as many of you requested in a previous post.  This gives you a slightly higher chance to win some gorgeous polish!  Here are the prizes broken down.

First Prize

  The China Glaze Merry Mint giftset, which includes Naughty and Nice, Mrs. Claus, and Peppermint Cuticle Oil.

Second Prize

Elf Holiday Nail Polish Trio, which includes Cranberry, Golden Goddess and Twinkle.

  This giveaway is open to international as well as domestic followers, and will run until Friday, December17th.  I will plan on announcing the winner sometime during that weekend, using Random.org to pick the winner as I have in the past.  Fill out this entry form and leave it in the comments section on this post!

Mandatory:

1) You must be a follower of my blog on GFC.  Please tell me your follower name (+1 entry)

2) You must leave me an e-mail to contact you if you win! (+1 entry)

Optional

3) Blog about this giveaway, or add it to your sidebar/giveaway page/etc. Leave a link (+1 entry)

4) Include the first picture from this post in your giveaway post/sidebar Leave a link (+2 entries)

5) Add or already have Polishology on your blogroll.  Leave a link (+1 entry)

6) Follow Polishology on Twitter! @polishology Leave your Twitter name (+1 entry)

7) Tweet about this giveaway, including @polishology in your tweet. Leave the status link (+1 entry)

8) What is a Holiday design you would like to see on Polishology?  It could be specifics, or just color or inspiration ideas.  Stamping, marbling, free hand (which I plan on trying soon), etc ideas all welcome!.  I would love some great ideas from you! (+2 entries)

  This gives you a possibility of 10 entries total!  I may also add one entry to those of you who comment regularly on the blog if you enter, but I will do this at my own discretion. ;) Remember to get those entries in by December 17th!  Thank you all so much for following, I really appreciate it!

Thanksgiving Day Nails

  I had really meant to get these posted yesterday, but my day was crazy!  In a good way, though. :)  We started off by visiting my paternal grandparents for a morning brunch, and after visiting with them went to my aunt's for a huge family get-together of my mom's side of the family, with Thanksgiving lunch.  Then we drove over to Dan's parent's house for dinner with his family.  That is three Thanksgiving dinners.  I think perhaps I am still stuffed?  It was a really great day though, I love that I got to visit with everyone!

Outdoors, shade, no flash

  For my Thanksgiving nails, I decided to go with a beautiful fall orange and gold.  I started off with two coats of OPI Take The Stage, which is a polish I originally had not picked up from Burlesque, but looking at it the other day at Ulta I decided it was a really great fall orange and needed it in my collection - up until this point I only had two oranges, and they were both neon bright, medium-toned oranges.  This gorgeous burnt orange with sparkly foil-like finish had great application as well.

Indoors, artificial light

  On top of this, I used one of my new Christmas presents, Deborah Lippmann Boom Boom Pow.  This is a really gorgeous gold glitter in a super-sheer gold shimmery base, with both large hex and smaller gold glitter.  I used a gradient effect on these, with one coat on the whole nail, a second coat on about half, and then a final coat on just the tips.  I think it gave these nails a really nice look.  I got several compliments from family members, including one from my two-year-old cousin, which was really sweet.

  Hope you all had a fabulous Thanksgiving (if you are here in the USA, of course), and are having a great holiday season!  Expect my holiday giveaway up sometime tomorrow... ;)

Deborah Lippmann! And The Cutest Baby... :)

  Last weekend I was visiting Christy - and her adorable baby Evie!  I just love my niece so much, I swear she is the cutest baby in the world.  Anyway, we went to the mall for awhile and wandered into Nordstrom.. and Christy shocked me by getting me my Christmas present early there - Deborah Lippmann polishes! :D

 

  I got the All That Jazz trio (Some Enchanted Evening, Razzle Dazzle, and Lady Sings the Blues), as well as Bad Romance, Boom Boom Pow and Wicked Game.  I was so excited - these are polishes that I have really wanted to have, but haven't been able to justify buying for myself.  The perfect kind of Christmas present, in my opinion!  Thank you again, Kitty!! :D

 

  There was much internal debate about which to try first, but I finally settled on Razzle Dazzle.  Be advised, I do have nubbins in these pictures. :(  My pinkie nail broke all the way down, and since I was already patching up another break and had recently lost the length of a thumbnail... I decided they just all needed to be short.  But this polish makes even my nubbins looks good!

Outdoors, shade, no flash

  This is three coats of Razzle Dazzle, which is a gorgeous dark berry jelly packed with glitter.  It is really a stunning polish, and I have gotten many compliments on it during the last few days!  Formula, application, and dry time were all great.  I probably could have done two coats if I had used slightly thicker coats, but mine were rather thin.

Indoors, artificial light, no flash

  This one can look really dark or fairly bright, depending on the lighting.  And that glitter really sparkles.  Overall, a very nice polish that I am definitely glad to own!  I am really excited to try out the rest of these!  Here is another picture of my nails:

  You see the nails in there, right?  Haha, okay so this is not really so much a picture of my nails, but tell me that is not like, the cutest baby ever.  She is three months old now, and starting to really develop her personality rather than just be the cute newborn that she was last time I saw her.  I can't wait to see her in a month for Christmas!

  Just because you can never have too many cute baby pictures.  ;)  I also did Christy's nails while I was down there, which I will be posting soon... along with my Thanksgiving manicure (using another Lippmann!) tomorrow and a Holiday Giveaway coming up this weekend!

OPI Simmer and Shimmer

  Sorry for a bit of a delay in posting the last couple of days, I am visiting my sister, brother-in-law, and my adorable niece Evie this weekend!  It has been a lot of fun - Christy and I did some nail shopping and painting, which I am sure you can expect to hear all about in the coming days!

  Today I will share with you another amazing polish from the OPI Burlesque collection, Simmer and Shimmer!

Outdoors, shade, no flash

  Simmer and Shimmer is a really gorgeous, mostly blue glitter polish, although it has quite a bit of other colors packed in there!  This is three coats, which was needed to achieve full opacity.  The dry time was very decent on this one, and although the finish was a bit on the bumpy side, a couple of coats of a good topcoat will smooth this one.  I used the Essie Good to Go again on this one, and without Konad to smudge I really loved the topcoat!  This one did have a couple of small ships after two days of wear, but I have found that to be the case with several of these glitter-bomb types of polish.  This one was so gorgeous I wore it alone rather than continue my Konad-over-chunky-glitter experiment.  Check out all of the colors that are in this beauty!

Rainbow of colors!

  Although all of these colors are seen on close inspection, the overall color of the polish is definitely a nice wintery blue.  I got quite a lot of positive comments on this one while I wore it!  I was also able to help a lady at Ulta yesterday, who was looking at this collection and wondering if it was able to be opaque - I showed her my nails and told her how many coats to get it done.  That was fun! :)

Indoors, artificial light, no flash

  I am really loving these Burlesque glitters!  The only one I have that I have not tried is Sparklicious, and I am excited to try that one out soon.  I am really sad right now about my nails, one of them broke yesterday and I now how nubbins... but the polish I am wearing now makes even these nubbins look gorgeous!  Expect to see them in a day or two... :)