Everyday Nail Art #3: Real Silver Glitter

Before we head into spring colors and designs, I wanted to share with you one of my manicures using this beautiful, rich shimmer polish from the Gelish Marilyn Monroe Forever Fabulous collection. The polish is called I Prefer Millionaires, and it’s one of my favorites in the collection.

For the design I tried out a new product that I read about in Nails Magazine awhile ago; It’s genuine sterling silver glitter from 24byRGI.com. You can buy one gram for $12.95 with free shipping. To create a block of glitter, I taped off the area before applying the glitter using Top It Off (I wanted to be able to soak it off later), and then used a striping brush to hand-paint the lines around it with Arctic Freeze by Gelish.

This design turned out really well…very striking in person.

The polish applied beautifully and worked well with the glitter.  I really liked the glitter, too, and will probably buy more products from 24byRGI.com. I love being able to buy real metal glitter, and they also offer their glitter in 24K gold. They also have a 24K gold nail polish, which is their signature product and namesake. The loose glitters must be suspended in a top coat or adhered during application, and there are probably a few methods for doing so. I’ll post a short video soon to the Smoke & Mirrors YouTube channel explaining the method I used for this design, so stay tuned!

 

Let’s Get Frosty!

 

Happy new year!

This is Gelish Let’s Get Frosty over Nailite’s UV gel polish called Sand (which I believe is a retired color).  I used ASP Form-a-Nail nail forms to add a protective layer to my natural nails using Nailite’s Sand, then applied 3 coats of Let’s Get Frosty.  (Note that Let’s Get Frosty is more silver than you see in the photo above; applying it over the colored gel altered the final shade a bit.)

The photo was taken after about a week, so you can see how well these held up. I was really happy with these; I kept them on for about a week and a half, and the only reason I re-did them is that I wanted to have time to do a new set before I go back to work in the new year.

I love my Gelish! What about you? Are you wearing any colors from the Gelish winter or Holiday collections?

Silver carve

For this design I painted all my nails, except the middle fingers, with Gelish Tinsel My Fancy from the holiday 2015 Red Matters collection.  I painted the middle fingers with two coats of Gelish Black Shadow and cured each coat thoroughly.  Then, I painted the middle of these nail with a thick coat of Tinsel My Fancy and carved the design into it using a small dotting tool.  When I was happy with the design, I cured it.

Silver Lightning

For this design  I used Minx nail apps in Silver Lightning:

As you can see, my nails are very short but I still had problems with the apps bunching and wrinkling.  I heated the apps on a lamp before apply and I found that it helped during application, but about three hours later new wrinkles had appeared.

Bottom line: I was very disappointed by this professional product.  I’m sure I’d have to use acrylic or gel to “flatten out” my nails in order for them to look any better.

I’ll try to remember to post an update later about how long they stayed on and how well the apps held up.

UPDATE: After three days the nails looked terrible and I simply peeled off the app.  The edges were worn away and tattered.  Yuck!