Juicy Raspberry Mani

I've had a busy couple of weeks. Between having a lingering cold, a lot to do at work, and a family gathering out of town, I'm a little behind on posting. All this rushing to and fro has also meant a number of simple manicures without much nail art. Instead, I've been using some colors that pop to keep things interesting.

The primary color in this mani is Color Club Raspberry Rush, a medium, bright pink jelly with a light, fruity scent. the application on this polish was good. It went on smoothly and was easy to clean up. It looked nice and juicy after two coats, but I applied a third because I'm still growing out some stains on my nails and needed full opacity. The scent was pleasant and hung around for about two days. For my accent nail, I used an unnamed Hot Topic grass green, which was a pleasant surprise. In the bottle, it looked darker and creamier, but on the nail, it has a juicier semi-jelly texture and got brighter as it dried. Combined, these made for a nice, summery mani; however, there was one problem.

Despite going to bed a good two hours after finishing my mani with a coat of Out the Door, I woke up to this horror show of sheet marks. Since they are limited to Raspberry Rush, I assume that my top coat and polish didn't play well together.

I've been using Out the Door pretty exclusively until now, but I think it's time for me to branch out and start experimenting to find out which top coats work best for different types of polish. Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

Polish Milestone

This week, I reached a polish milestone: 100 polishes in my stash. Lucky number 100 was this unnamed Hot Topic grass green polish, which was a gift from one of the circle of lovely ladies who gather from time to time for Nail Night. As Nail Night is where my interest in polish started, this is highly appropriate, and I like that the milestone was reached with a gift. So, thanks to Ms. A for bringing my stash up to a big, round number.

 

Of course, having reached such a milestone, the logical thing to do was to pick up a few more. I've been looking forward to the OPI Pirates of the Caribbean collection for a while, and they've hit Athens this week. For some reason the Georgia Square Mall Trade Secret did NOT get them in, but the Regis salon, almost right across the mall from Trade Secret, DOES have them, so I snapped up a couple. The first thing on my shopping list was Silver Shatter. I also wanted Mermaid's Tears, and interesting greyed green, which seems to be one a lot of people are eagerly awaiting. I expected to want Plank You Very Much, since I love purple, but in person it was pretty similar to some other shades I have. I ended up with Steady As She Rose, a very light and also sort of grey-ish pink, as it was the color that was the most different from anything I already have (well, except for the one that totally didn't appeal to me, i.e. Skull and Glossbones).

And with that, I intend to stop adding to the stash for a while, as there isn't anything (that I know of) coming out that I have to have. So, now I just need to get busy and do some cool mani's with my new-and-improved  100+ stash.