Manicure Monday - Barry M with dot details

Happy Manicure Monday, friends!

I don't actually know, but apparently it's a thing on Instagram? Well, I'm going to be a rebel and not do it on Instagram. And I can because it's my birthday. Also because the wifi at the beach house I'm currently staying at in Portugal is refusing to work on my phone and I actually can't Instagram. I know. It's hard. Like a true addict, I'm going through severe withdrawl symptoms.

These are all the Barry M gel nail polishes that I picked up when I was in England. I'm glad I was able to get my hands on them, but I'm still not completely sold. They're great for the price, but the color selection is quite limited and you really need to thickly coat them to get a smooth finish. You can also fudge this using a top coat, but I can't always carry a top coat around with me when I travel ;)

// What's on your nails this week?

Nail Polish: OPI vs American Apparel

I may not always be the most fashionable when it comes to clothes- I usually stick to black or denim trousers with a neutral top- but when it comes to nails, more often than not, they will be painted. 

OPI was really popular in college so most of my collection is OPI, though Dior is now my favorite. However, neither of these brands are particularly cheap. I wanted to try out a mint nail polish, but didn't really want to spend more than $10. There's an American Apparel between my office and the subway so I popped in to see if they had nail polish- they do! They're under $10, don't have DBP, toluene or formaldahyde in them AND it dries really quickly.

Since I like to do an accent nail or two, I used both the colors in the photo above. 

Pink = OPI, Mint = American Apparel

and look what happened to just the pink nails! Both of my accent nails were ruined. 

I can't get over how fast the American Apparel nail polish dries, and the color is just like you see it in the bottle. The only downside being that they have mostly trendy colors and their range is not great, but next time I need a trendy color, I know where to go!

I ended up redoing just the accent nails (and painting one with a purple/gray color from Lancome instead) and then having some fun decorating them. I ended up loving the mint and light pink combination so much that I used the same two colors when repainting them the next time. 

Check out the designs below!

//  Do you have any great nail polish/makeup finds?

Hot pink with Turquoise dots

aaaand pink again, but this time a hot pink that I got as a bachelorette party favor. I think it's from F21. Goes on surprisingly well. I always use my Dior Ivory #108 as a base coat.

This time I went with turquoise dots to accent. At first I tried it on all fingers and trust me, my fingers looked like a creepy dinosaur.

Yes, I realize that the only two posts on this blog right now are about my nails. I just needed a couple posts while I formatted and such. Much more interesting content coming soon, I promise!

I've been into pink nails these days... and apparently my pink striped socks from Costco.
Since I move around a bit, I try to not buy a lot of colors so I let myself splurge when I do.

This was also one of my first experiments with loose glitter instead of using a bottle of polish with glitter in it so you can control the concentration of sparkles a bit better. Yes, yes it's time consuming, but doing my nails is my own form of therapy :)

Dior Ivory #108
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Loose Glitter