Saturday Nail Art - Golden Giraffes

All the polishes this week went pretty well with each other, so I did a more elaborate look than last week. I took step-by-step pictures for this week. I can't guarantee I'll always remember to take step-by-step pics, but I will try to do it every once in a while.

I started with a base coat of Monday's polish, OPI 50 Years of Style. I decided to do a smoosh mani using 50 Years and Wet N Wild 9021Orange. I painted my ring and pinky nails using Nicole by OPI A Heart of Gold. The smoosh marbling didn't work super great because 9021Orange is much thinner than 50 Years of Style.

To combat the sheerness, I blobbed the polish directly on my nails and then smooshed it with my stamper. Eventually, I just dabbed 9021Orange onto the nail and left the blobs to dry. It's a fast dry polish, so this actually worked. In the last pic, I've got 9021Orange on A Heart of Gold, and all my nails have been mattified. At this point, I had kind of a gold and orange giraffe thing going on, which, it turns out, nicely complements the stamping image I put on last. 

Stamped with Konad Black + Wet N Wild Black Creme

BP-L010 is the strange Born Pretty stamping plate I used. On the website, it's called "Aztec Plate," yet the images are dreamcatchers and giraffes and pi inside a target that's partially covered in bacon? It's a very, uh, interesting plate. It's good quality, and picking up the images was fairly easy (even with my worn out stamper). I like the way this mani turned out! It was just dumb luck that these polishes ended up being in the same week, and I think doing this weekly nail art is going to get more challenging and I will probably end up cheating and rearranging polishes to avoid making anything too hideous. Monday will be another first: the first indie polish, not counting that horrible picture of Vapid Spellcaster in the first post.

Nicole by OPI A Heart of Gold

Today's polish has a bad reputation. I mean, the specific polish has no reputation that I know of...

It's Nicole by OPI A Heart of Gold

But it's part of two controversial categories. First, it's a NOPI. NOPIs aren't popular, and I believe it's because of the obnoxious bottle shape. It's got a rounded back and a flat front, so NOPI bottles don't fit in any drawer with any other polish or indeed with others of its kind. The brush in mine also sucked.

This brush has a more pronounced C-curve than my nails

I don't think I've talked about where I've gotten most of my polishes, but I will say where I bought this one. It was at a Walgreens, for $2.19. This Walgreens no longer carries NOPI, so I guess I bought it during a stock liquidation, As an aside, you know what store does still carry NOPI? My local Ulta. Why? Why can't they focus on their Zoya selection or getting new China Glaze collections faster? 

The second divisive aspect of A Heart of Gold is that it's a textured polish. Textures are a love or hate proposition for a lot of people. AHoG has a fine, sandy texture similar to a Zoya Pixie Dust, my favorite kind of texture. I have some chunkier textures that kind of bug me. Of course, if you're anti-texture, you can always slap on some top coat.

Like so

AHoG is sparklier with top coat, since like most textures it dries matte. One coat of Seche Vite is enough to smooth it completely because of its fine grain.

 So I don't like NOPI as a brand, but I do like textures and I like the formula of this polish. These pictures are three fast-drying coats. Sadly, I also don't like the color that much. It's gold, but it's such a yellow gold that I don't like the way it looks on me very much. I had some problems with my lighting, apparently, because no two of these photos turned out to be the same color and they were all too dark. So I know you can't tell what color this is from my photos, but it is not very gold and not metallic at all and not shimmery. It's a yellowy texture. I had more positive feelings for this polish after I swatched it, but before I wrote this post. I'm surprised I wrote so much about this! I think if I write any more about this polish, I'll talk myself into hating it! That's all for A Heart of Gold. Tomorrow is nail art Saturday, so read to see how I put this week's polishes together.