Vampy Red Gradient with Nails Inc Victoria

I've been doing a lot of glitter mosaics lately and sometimes you have to do something a little different. I've done some gradients in the past but never had too much luck, mostly because I thought I knew more better than the makeup sponge technique. Turns out that it's the best for smooth gradients, I'm silly and should listen to the internet more. Just as well I did because now I get amazing vampy red nails!

It seems that the trick to gradients is the base colour. Light colours need white, dark colours need a dark base with a solid creme polish as the lighter colour. Here, I started with two coats of Nails Inc Victoria, a beautiful deep, dark red jelly. Once it was dry - seriously, let it dry otherwise you get dings like on my ring finger - I painted a stripe of Essie Fifth Avenue on a makeup sponge and laid a thinner stripe of Victoria next to it. I then dabbed it on my nails, working up and down ever so slightly to get a nice blend. I was having some difficulty building up the opacity in the red tip so I ended up just straight applying Fifth Avenue to the tips of my nails then blending it in with the gradient.

The Verdict: I love this so much I can't really believe how well it came out. It does take a while and a few layers of gradient-ing to get it smooth but it's so worth it in the end. Mmm, vampy.

Review: Sephora X Outburst

As you can imagine, I was pretty excited when the new Sephora X polishes came out. Not only were there a million of them, but I could go see them in person, circling the huge stand and singling out my prey. I'm not the most happy that the good ones are FIFTEEN dollars each but what am I going to do, not buy any?? That's silly. I have few now but my favourite so far as to be the incredibly Outburst. LOOK AT IT:

All the ILNP Ultrachromes! Like Shiny Beetles!

Guess what guys, it's not glitter today! Instead, I have the incredibly amazing ILNP Ultrachrome polishes to show you! I saw a picture of these on the ILNP site and gasped out loud when I saw the colour shift. I totally didn't sit for an hour at work, refreshing the page when the preorders went up. That would be silly. I was so excited when they arrived as they looked as amazing in the bottle as they did on the site. I swatched each polish over black, took the photos, but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get the finish to a place where I was satisfied. I'm sure it's something about the way I was applying it, but there would be little bumps or inconsistencies in the finish and it was annoying. So I didn't post them. I gave them another shot in a taped mani and YES THIS IS BETTER LOOK:

Pink Mega-Sparkly Nails!

It's hardly a secret how much I love sparklies. If it were at all practical, I would make my middle name Sparkly. Laura Sparkly Tucker. That does have a nice ring to it. Anyway, this adoration of all the sparklies means just about my favourite thing ever is dazzle glitter . It's like a bunch of tiny pieces of glitter were smushed together into a larger piece. And oh, so sparklies. I've done red and silver manis using this glitter before so that's the perfect excuse to use the pink. That makes sense, right?

Polish All the Nails

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