Keep Calm and Paint Your Nails

With all the stress of the ongoing technical issues surrounding my blog lately, I took some time yesterday to do something that always seems to calm me down: play with nail polish! 

I decided to go through my collection of China Glaze polishes and find two sparkly polishes that I haven't used in a while: Blue Hawaiian and Shooting Stars (note: all of the polishes featured in this post were purchased with personal funds).

China Glaze Blue Hawaiian was impossible for me to capture in photos, but the most accurate representation of this shade is actually in the blurry photos below:

 Blue Hawaiian is a beautiful blue jelly with TONS of iridescent glitter. The above pics were taken after four coats and the pic above is probably the most accurate in terms of the glitter you actually see when this polish is on the nail. It's stunning!

 Next up, we have four coats of Shooting Stars:

 

Naturally, my camera went crazy trying to focus on the scattered holo in this polish. So the best pics I could get to capture the holo effect were the last two blurry pics above. This is just such a fun polish--I don't have the words to describe how happy I get when I look down and see this on my nails.

And now, time to play with my China Glaze Crackle polish in Fault Line:

Here's the deal with this crackle polish: it's unpredictable for me. This is the not first crackle I've owned, but unlike my Barry M. crackle, this one seems to behave differently every time I use it. I ALWAYS apply a thin layer, and I'm ALWAYS careful not to go over my brush strokes more than once. But sometimes this polish cracks the way I want it to and sometimes the results a bit different:

The above pics are close-ups of my thumbs. As you see, when applied over Blue Hawaiian, the cracks are thicker and are mostly in a vertical pattern. On the right, the cracks are thinner, more abundant and they go  both vertically and horizontally. Sometimes I think this has to do with the actual polish used underneath the crackle, but the thing is, I used the same top coat in both of these pics, which I applied BEFORE I used the crackle (then again after the crackle). So..who knows?

Actually, if you look closely at the pics of me wearing Fault Line over Blue Hawaiian (especially my pinky finger) you'll see that it's almost all vertical lines. So weird, huh?

Anyway, I LOVE the purple shade of Fault Line and I'll take it any ol' way I can get it. The unrpedictablity kind of lends to the "excitement" of using a crackle. You never quite know what you're going to get!

Thanks for reading!