Zoya Miranda

Good morning and happy Saturday! I hope everyone is having a good weekend so far. Ours has been good. This morning we took our cat to the vet for a check up and nail trim. I was pretty nervous about this because she's 11 and this is only the 3rd time she's left the house. And because she tends to be a bit grouchy. But, she did much better than I expected. She didn't try to bite anyone, she only hissed a little, and held mostly still while they trimmed her tender problem nails. So much better than I expected, so I have high hopes for a good weekend! :)

Today I have another Zoya PixieDust polish to show you. I know I've said it before, and I'll say it again and again and again. I love these polishes. I love all of my Zoyas, but these Pixies are so sparkly, the texture is perfect, and the formula is amazing. I could go on and on about them. 

Today's color is Miranda. Zoya describes this polish as a "rose sparkle". It's a lovely pinkish mauve shade, with just a hint of coral. At least that is how it pulls on my exceptionally pasty complexion. It's very pretty and subtle. 

On to some pictures. I'm going to show you this polish both matte and topped with glossy topcoat. PixieDusts are sparkly straight out of the bottle, both matte and glittery. Adding a topcoat changes it completely, and turns the glitteriness a whole new dimension. It's kind of like getting 2 polishes in one. 

This is 3 coats of Miranda on its own with no topcoat. All in the light box. 

Then I added 3 coats of my favorite topcoat, Glossy Glam. Textured polishes are very "topcoat hungry", so it takes a bit to get it all smoothed out. But I wanted a glassy finish on this, so I'm glad I added that extra coat. 

Here is one with the flash to show the extra sparkles. Sorry, I had just used cuticle oil so it's a little greasy around the edges. 

Sparkle sparkle! :) 

So what do you all think of this color? I love it. It's a "safe" color, but still fun with all of the texture and sparkle. 

Thanks for reading! 

~casey

**all polishes in this post were purchased by me for my own personal use.**

PixieDust Leopard!!!

Good morning polish lovers! I hope everyone is having a good day so far! 

I have to say, I am super excited to bring you this manicure. A few weeks ago I ordered the entire Zoya Pixie Dust fall 2013 collection. Around the same time I did my first Leopard print mani... and then I realized I haven't seen anyone do an all PixieDust leopard mani! I knew I had to do it. I love Zoya, I love PixieDust polish, I love nail art... so being able to combine all three was such an exciting idea for me. I didn't mention this leopard idea to anyone, I just kind of kept it stewing in my brain. Then last weekend I was playing with my nail wheel and tried it out. It looked great to me, but I needed my good friend Alaina's opinion. (aka TheLittleCanvas) I sent her a picture, I knew she'd be honest with me if it totally sucked. She loved it too, and after we threw ideas back and forth for a bit we decided it would be a great opportunity to do some #BestieTwinNails for Instagram. Alaina is way more experienced than I am with blogging and nail art, and she's got a special gift with PixieDust nail art... so I was thrilled to do a little collab with her. Go check out Alaina's blog and Instagram as soon as you can, she's great and super sweet. Her version of these turned out fantastic! 

Here is our stitched photo for Instagram, both with topcoat. We were pretty matchy matchy huh? :)

Now for some solo shots of my version. I took pictures of this both with and without topcoat. For the textured look, you need to leave the topcoat off. But adding a topcoat gives you a totally different (and more sparkly) look. 

First I'll show you the textured look.

Full Sun, textured

Full Sun, textured

Full Sun, textured

Light Box, textured

And here it is with a couple of coats of Seche Vite. 

Full Sun, topcoated

Full Sun, topcoated

Light box, topcoated

Light Box, topcoated

For this look I used the entire Zoya Fall PixieDust Collection and Pixie Dust in Dahlia from their first PixieDust Collection.

Here are the colors and names for you:

Black - Dahlia

Gold - Tomoko

Blue - Sunshine

Green - Chita

Orange - Dhara

Purple - Carter

Pink - Arabella

I started with a base of 2 coats of Tomoko on all nails. Then using a medium size nail art brush I started painting the colored spots. Some colors required two coats (Carter needed 3 in some spots), then using a fine nail art brush I painted the lines in Dahlia. I used 2 coats of Dahlia on all nails so that it would really pop as black. I think leopard print nails are one of the absolute easiest types of nail art to do. You don't want it to be perfect, the less perfect your spots are the better. So it's pretty fail proof! 

I highly recommend Zoya's PixieDusts. They are by far my favorite of all of the textured polishes out there. They are textured but not too rough, matte but also sparkly, and the colors and formula are fantastic. 

What do you all think? Do you like this? I was very excited to do it because it's the first time that I came up with a mani that I hadn't seen before. I've seen lots of textured nail art, and it all inspires me. But I hadn't seen a full textured leopard design yet. You should give it a try! If you do let me know because I want to see! You can tag me on Instagram or send me a message on kik or email! 

Instagram & kik: caseylanelovespolish

email: caseylanelovespolish@gmail.com

Thanks for reading! 

~casey

**all polishes in this post were purchased by me for my own personal use**

Hotter Than a Fantasy

Hey polish friends! How is everyone's week going so far? It finally stopped raining here and we are finally going to get a few days of nice weather.

Tonight is a quick swatch and review post that is pretty picture heavy. This is the 3rd Pipe Dream Polish that I purchased, it is called Hotter Than a Fantasy. This polish is part of April's Just a Girl Collection - all of the polish names are taken from song lyrics by female artists. This title is taken Alicia Keys' Girl on Fire. April describes this in her shop as a sapphire blue base, but to me it looks more purple. Either way, it's really pretty. The glitters are varying sizes of pink and orange. Plus April's awesome, shimmery iridescent little pieces of glittery goodness that I love so much.

This polish is just whoa... glitter bomb like crazy, jelly sandwich in a bottle. For my pictures I used 3 coats and topped it with two coats of Glossy Glam. It is harder to work with than the other two Pipe Dreams that I've posted. But, it should be harder to work with; this one has a lot more glitter and includes the larger, harder to work with pieces. It's just the nature of polishes like this. But it is so worth it! It is so packed with glitter that you don't have to place anything, the only difficulty I had was that it was a bit thick. Quick tip for ya, if you have a chunky glitter that you know you're going to be using soon, try storing it upside down for a little while before polishing. This makes the big glitters come to the top, so when you flip it back over to paint they are right where they need to be for the brush to pick them up. 

This polish is gorgeous! The squishy layers... ugh. I just can't. I'm gonna let the pictures speak for themselves. The sun and light box are the most true to color, but I had to include the shade pictures too because they were too pretty to pass up!

Full Sun

Full Sun

Full Sun Macro

Shade

Shade Macro

Light Box 

Light Box Macro

I love this polish. I love every polish I've purchased from April and I'm getting ready to place another order very soon! What do you think?

Pipe Dream Polish can be purchased through her Etsy store here. 

Thanks for visiting! I hope you all enjoyed this one! 

~casey

**the polish in this post was purchased by me for my own personal use at a discounted price in return for an honest and unbiased review**

It's Not Sane

No, it's really not sane. :)

Happy Monday morning everyone! This morning I've got an extremely cheerful mani to brighten my Monday, and hopefully brighten yours too. 

I recently discovered Pipe Dream Polish on Etsy. You can see my post on Pink Elephants and Lemonade to read more about how much I love this shop, today I'll try to not ramble too much. 

This yellow beauty is called It's Not Sane. I have never been a fan of yellow polish, I like it in theory, and on some people it looks great. But I've never found one that looked right on me. Actually I don't even wear yellow clothes. I love the color, my handbag is daffodil yellow, but yellow clothes just look weird on me. So I'm really not sure why I picked this color out, but boy am I glad that I did. I was only planning to wear this as accent nail or two every now and then. I was planning to swatch my left hand but I never saw myself wearing an entire mani of it. That all went out the window as soon as I got it on one nail. 

It's Not Sane is a bright lemon yellow crelly with a lovely subtle shimmer that softens the yellow just a bit. It is jam packed with a mix of medium hex glitters in orange, a pretty turquoise blue, fuchsia, purple, and iridescent. Let me tell you about these iridescent glitters. I didn't realize they were in there because when I ordered this I didn't read the description. I saw the picture and thought "want" and bought it. So when I was applying this I thought I had a couple of pieces of dud glitter on a couple of nails. I couldn't really tell, but I kept powering through. I try to never judge a polish until it's top coated. After topcoat these little things turn into the prettiest little subtle hint of color. I couldn't capture any of them in pictures but trust me, they're awesome. As I said in my last post about Pipe Dream, April really has a knack for the "jelly sandwich in a bottle" type of polish. Her polishes are jelly enough to show the glitter in every layer, but opaque enough to build to full coverage. 

For this mani I applied 3 easy coats of polish and topped it with one coat of Glossy Glam. I didn't have to dab this glitter at all.

Light Box (sorry my hands are a little lobstery)

Light Box Macro

Bottle Macro

Sunlight

Sunlight Macro

What do you all think of this polish? I am so in love with April's polishes and can't wait to order more!

Thanks for reading! 

~casey

**the polish in this post was purchased by me for my own personal use at a discounted price in return for an honest and unbiased review**

Zoya Storm

Good morning polish friends! I hope everyone is having a happy Saturday so far! I have to say that last night was the first time in about 6 weeks that I feel like I really slept. So I'm feeling pretty great right now. 

For today's post I have a review of Zoya Storm. I bought my first Zoyas last spring when they were doing one of their "just pay shipping" sales. Honestly I wasn't super impressed with the polishes that I got. BUT, since then I have learned a lot about painting my nails, technique, working with different formulas, and ways to make a mani last. I think that my lack of interest in those first two polishes was more my fault than Zoyas. In the last year they have really been stepping up their game in my opinion, and all of my lovely blogger and Instagram friends have been posting these AMAZING swatches of all of these amazing colors and formulas they are coming up with. So a couple of weeks ago I totally splurged and placed a huge online Zoya order. (12 polishes huge... yeah, big splurge. :) ) Storm was in this haul. 

Storm is incredible. It is a beautifully pigmented black polish loaded with this amazing holographic glitter. To me this type of glitter almost looks like shards of diamonds, its amazing. I'm a sucker for a good black polish, and this one is great. I put it on right after trimming my nails down to super nubs and I absolutely loved how it looked. We've been having some super dreary weather around here lately but there was about 5 minutes of sun the other day, so I took my break, grabbed my phone and macro lens, and ran to the car to snap a few pics. 

And of course here is a light box photo, because I just can't help myself.

For this mani I used 2 easy coats of Zoya Storm and added 1 coat of Just Ricarda's Glossy Glam topcoat. What do you all think? Do you love Storm? I think its really classic but still unique, I can see myself pulling this one out over and over for a classic and elegant mani. 

Zoya can be purchased from their website and some Ulta stores. 

Thanks for reading! I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

~caseylane