St. Paddy's Day Nails

I thought that I would go ahead and give my rendition of the gradient nail tutorial. I usually clean up my nails the morning after doing them.




Theory:
The tutorial that I first used had a transparency/opacity gradient and a slight light gradient (glitter). This tutorial has 3 dimensions: shade/hue, analogous hues, and transparency/opacity.
These three things need to be taken into consideration if you're going to alter the colors because you need to have the right type of formula. For instance, you might not want to lay down your transparent color first and then put your fully opaque colors on top because it might be harder to get a fade. If your doing the analogous hue shift and shade/hue shift, you also might want to consider which is the cooler of the colors is cooler and which one is warmer. Some warm colors have very murky shades (think yellow+black) whereas almost all cool colors have vibrant shades.

Ok, so onto the tutorial:
Step One: Get a base coat on.


Step Two: Add a full on black base. The best black polish for this IMHO is Sinful Color's black polish.


Step Three: Mix a bit of transparent teal and a cheap clear polish or if you have transparent micro glitter polish use that. Take the darkest green and bring it up 3/4 of the nail. Use the transparent teal polish to cover the rest of the exposed black and go slightly over the dark green.





Step Four: Take a green that is closer to the hue and a little more yellow and bring it 1/2 way up the nail. At this point you can slightly go over the line with the dark green to help the colors blend.






Step Five: Once this has dried a bit, I take the yellow green and put a bit of it down like a tip. I let it get a little tacky before blending it out with a glitter polish that has both peridot colored glitter and emerald colored glitter.






Step Six (Optional): Add a black french tip. I will do this one today:D

Step Seven: Top Coat

Gradient Nails

I did my nails several days ago following a modified version of Celly's nail tutorial: http://www.makeupbycelly.com/2011/02/tutorial-gradient-nails.html
Queen of Blending has a similar nail tutorial with glitter polish and rhinestones which is the one that I used to this point:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTVR1tDoHsc

It is a gradient nail that starts neutral and gets more intense as you get closer to the tip of the nail. I used black as my neutral color and made a fade from purple to red-violet. I used a nail polish by ORLY that has a pinkish micro glitter to tie the colors in with each other and finished off with a black french tip.





Also, dinner was nice tonight. I made chicken with herbs and added it to pasta with feta and a dash of meyer lemon. Once I was finished cooking everything I added some arugula. I had made a winter fruit blend for salad, but I put some of it into the pasta. That's why there's grapefruit and blood oranges in the pasta.
Aaah yeah.

More Black Lips

I cannot get enough of MUFE's new black lipgloss. I just love how it changes the texture of black lipstick without taking away from the color. The only problem that I have with looks like these is feathering. They eyes and the blush are different from the last post. Also the lipstick that I used is Mac's Black lip mix this time.







Note to self: I really shouldn't wear this color out for drinks unless I have a straw.

Janell Monae and Kellindo Parker Acoustic Cover

I love Janelle Monae and I like her cover of this song. Fashion wise she always looks sharp, but so does her guitarist. I'm totally digging Kellindo Parker's manicure and might copy it.


Note: the guitarist is Kellindo Parker, not Andre 3000

Collection Remix: Style Black

So this was actually a bit of a surprise for me. I thought I was going to redo a different collection until I stumbled upon something that I have been dying to get for quite some time: a nice black lipgloss. *drool* MUFE, I love you so much right now.

Black Gloss Swatches

I just had to post this today! I went down to my local Sephora and picked up MUFE Metal Lab 00. Talk about a gorgeous black gloss! This is exactly the kind of black gloss that I've been looking for. I like it more when worn over black lipstick, but it's one of my favorite combos now.

Gloss alone:




Gloss over black lipstick:




For a comparison with Wrong Spell over Black:

Purple Look

This photo is a little late (I've been meaning to post this for some time now). I did it on a whim following Youtuber xxsgtigressxx's Arabic inspired makeup. I went with purples instead of greens and threw some glitter in there too! The eyeliner is one of MAC's cromographic pencils in a concealer shade because white is just too stark for me.
Unfortunately because everything was at night, I couldn't show the kind of depth that I would have wanted to.