Aggies Do It Better

Hey Guys! Things have been crazy for the past week since school has been out. I don't know how I'm going to keep up blogging during the summer but I'm sure gonna try! I've had these for a week and and am just now getting to swatch them and get them up here! Today I have the newest of the Zoya PixieDusts! They are continuing with the "Magical Pixie" formula that debuted earlier this year. I picked those up during the Zoya Earth Day Sale so I would have them to compare with these! :) I haven't swatched them officially here but I have used them in a few tape mani's! (you can see them here with Lux and here with Vega )  I did include them in the bottle shots at the end for comparison! The formulas on these are very consistent. There are larger chunks and fine pieces of the pixie dust in tinted jelly bases. They are definitely "chunkier" than the original Pixie Dusts, and really sparkly. For me they have more the consistency of a glitter top...

Hey guys! Happy Friday! This is the second week of my vow to do watermarbling once a week so I can get better at it. Doing pretty good so far! This time is used 2 of my Picture Polishes. As soon as I got Totes I knew I wanted to do something with it along with Honeydew, because they remind me so much of melons! This came out ok, I don't love and yall don't have to either :/ Totes seems a lot more opaque than Honeydew, so the green kind of gets washed out. It almost creates a bit of an ombre effect with the white base, I guess that's cool? I don't know how some ladies hold 2 bottles at a time and look graceful! I can not!  shade  sun I thought this would look cool with a matte topcoat, I think if the green was more opaque it would. Anyhow, this Picture Polish matte topcoat is one of the first PP's I got, how awesome is the name? Genius, and it makes me giggle.  matte

Hey guys! These are my nails for the #LLGarden prompt on Instagram! I knew I wanted to do something with my new butterfly punches, but this came out totally different than my original plan! I still might do that some day. My favorite butterfly is the Blue Morpho. They are huge blue butterflies with black edging around their wings. I was going to use one of my iridescent blue OPI's for this, but changed my mind! I took artistic license and used Orly Macabre Masquerade , which you can see on its own at the end of this post. I wore it for a day and them used my new larger butterfly punch out as a reverse stencil and painted over it with OPI Black Onyx. One layer of Seche vite topcoat and that's it! I really like how it turned out-very different for me!   sun   shade Here is the Orly  on it's own. It's Macabre Masqueradea blue jelly base with micro red and silver glitters. This was part of the Orly holiday collection that came out this past winter, and ...

Hey guys! I have another one of my new Picture Polishes! This is Badass made in collaboration with Shelly of SassyShelly.com. BOY did this one knock my socks off! Let's just gawk for a minute. I mean really.  sun  shade As soon as I put this on the first nail I was like OMG IT'S THE CREME VERSION OF ALCATRAZ ROCKS! I've mentioned it before but my number one fav polish of all time is OPI Alcatraz Rocks. (So much so that when it went on clearance I bought 1 or 4 more for backups) I grabbed my current bottle for a quick comparison.  comparison Now since Alcatraz Rocks is a texture they aren't exactly the same. I always think it has such a charcoal colored base until I see it next to an actual charcoal colored base and then realize how purple it is. In these pictures the OPI is on my ring finger.  sun  shade I'm not wild about wearing texture on  my toes so now I can wear this! I love this soooooooo much I'm pretty sure I...

Hey guys! Happy Memorial Day! What are yall's plans? We are gonna just stay around here, probably go to the pool and grill some burgers! The usual! Today I have my very first Nautical nails...and I have to say....I'm in love!!! I had something way more complicated planned, involving a different design on each nail, a mixture of dots and stripes and all that. When I started working on my white base, this just sort of happened on one nail and I decided to just keep it simple and keep all 3 the same! And I Love it so much! For the anchor nail the base is China Glaze First Mate ( of course I'm using my nautically named polishes since I have them, right?) and I just used a small dotting tool to make the anchor with gold polish. I used OPI Honey Rider, which is  a texture, to make it stand out more. For the other nails, the white base is Island Girl Pineapple Plantation. Kind of on the fence with this one, it's almost a neon white, if that's even possible! It was ch...

Happy Friday! Woo hoo for holiday weekend. Today I have another so-so attempt at watermarbling. I don't know why I'm having so much trouble with it lately! I'm going to try to do it every week on Fridays to try to get better. I know it takes a lot of practice! At least this time I didn't have any air bubbles, so that's improvement. This design is by Colette of My Simple Little Pleasures. She has a million You Tube tutorials on watermarbling, seriously, check her out! But....wait until you have some time because you will get sucked in! I discovered her channel searching for tutorials and found this one first. It's supposed to look like Watermelon! I don't know why my pink kept disappearing :( and my nails are super short right now so that's a challenge also! But I know I can master this look and technique on short nails so I'm  going to keep practicing! Search My Simple Little Pleasures or Watermelon Watermarble on You Tube if you want to see the lo...

Hey guys! I wore this  mani a while ago but never got it up on the blog! I wanted to do a post on it because I really loved it so much. This is Zoya Odette, a really beautiful mauvey purpley creme. It is part of Zoya's Natural collection of nudes that came out earlier this year. This is the only one that really stood out to me so I ordered it as part of the Earth Day sale. I love it so much I might order more from the collection during the next sale!  sun  shade After wearing Odette for a couple days, as I usually do, I added some accents with textured polish! This is my favorite way to spruce up a creme polish mani and make it last a few more days! I just used my wavy craft scissors to cut out strips of blue painters tape, stuck it down the middle of my nail and added Zoya Lux on either sides. So sparkly!!!! GAH I loved this so much.  sun  shade

Hey guys! I have some more polka dots.....I swear dots are one of my fav ways to spruce up nails. You can use just about anything to do them, there's no waiting for a base coat to dry to tape, and they are just so classic! I used 2 more of my new Picture Polishes. Bonkers is a lovely cranberry maroon (it's maroon enough for me to call it that) and Beige is a really pretty nude with a great formula!  Picture Polish

Hey guys! I have some fun nail art today! Last week I picked up some paper crafting supplies at the craft store. I used a butterfly paper punch on blue painters tape to make a stencil to create this look! I used all the polishes from the new Zoya Bubbly Collection. If yall are interested in seeing a tutorial for this kind of thing let me know in the comments!  Zoya Bubbly

Hey guys! Last week I purchased a *few* more bottles of Picture Polish when I found out one of the USA distributors was not going to be carrying it anymore :( Sad but got a great deal! Moody Blues has been on my wish list since it came out! It is a gorgeous blue with micro blue and red glitters in it. Super opaque! On my ring finger is Picture Polish Nude with a dragonfly accent I made using my new paper crafting tools and blue painters tape! Let me know if yall are interested in a tutorial!  Picture Polish Moody Blues Pardon the unimpressive paint job on my thumb nail.....blerg.  so beautiful in the sun!

Hey guys! This is another quick mani using 2 more of the polishes I got in the Zoya Earth Day sale. Breezi is a blue creme and I seriously love it....no shock there. I used craft scissors and painters tape to cut out strips and paint around them with Vega, one of the new magical pixies. It has a different formula than the original pixie dust, which i still  prefer at this point. It's still beautiful though! Lighting:setting sun Sunlight

Hey guys! Today I have a little experiment.... @naildecor did this on Instagram a couple weeks ago and I really wanted to try it.....but I think I got a little overzealous with my side lines.....I don't totally love it! I think I'm sticking with tape and dots from now on...I'm just not that great with free hand "art" :/ Good thing I just picked up some crafty things to use for nail art and so far I'm loving what I've come up with experimenting! The yellow is OPI I Just Can't Cope-Acabana, the black is OPI Onyx, the white is OPI Alpine Snow. sun  shade

Hey guys! Just a quick little update post for you today. A couple weeks ago Zoya did their annual Earth Day sale, which was awesome! I was hoping they'd do it again this year and had been saving my pennies. The concept is really cool...they offer almost all their polishes at 50% off, with the intention of you sending back to them an equal number of old, "toxic" or unusable polishes for them to responsibly dispose of. (not supposed to just throw away polish!) This is what I sent back. It's slightly more than I got, even with the few freebies I got, but I figured....most people are not going to do it so I can take some of their places. :) This is mostly old dollar store stripers that I don't use anymore, for many reasons. A few half done gloopy Seche Vites, and another free top coat I got a Sally that is total crap. Earth day exchange Here are my Earth Day sale babies: to be fair, 3 of them I got for free. :) Aren't they just awesome? Earth Day h...

Hey guys! I have the second half of the Zoya summer polishes for you today! They are glittery and awesome and shiny and sparkly and let's just get to it!  Zoya Bubbly For this first one only, I'm going to show you what they look like with 1, 2, and 3 coats. These can be worn on their own because they are in tinted jelly bases, or as a topcoat with one layer. Keep in mind with my pictures, I only use natural outdoor light for photos and direct sun really shines through the layers of polishes more so than indoor light. Also, if my direct sun picture look a little blurry at times, it's because they are so shiny and sparkly that camera was FREAKING OUT not knowing where to focus ha ha!   The first up is Stassi....super pretty green and to me the first thing I thought when I saw the bottle was....that's like a Christmas tree in a bottle! haha! sun, one coat shade, one coat For most of these, if you were going to wear them on their own, I think 2 coa...