Legend of Zelda Triforce Nail Art

Just to, you know, really drive it in that I'm a huge geek.

Let me tell you a little story about my first Legend of Zelda experience. I was 12 and I was staying at my dad's apartment for the weekend. I had brought my Nintendo 64 over for entertainment purposes (not that he wasn't entertaining, exactly, he was just studying to be a paramedic) and we had rented Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I haaaated it. My problem was that I couldn't find the frigging Kokiri Sword. I played for all of 20 minutes, decided the game was lame, and went about my life.

Fast forward a year; waiting at a bus stop with my friend from elementary school's big scary sister. I was a freshman in high school and I didn't belong anywhere. This big scary sister and I started talking video games, and she lauded about a game called Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was like, girl, whaaaat? That's shit's lame. And she's like NO. So she let me borrow it (and helped me with the sword) and thus began the most epic journey of my life up to that point and a best-friendship that's still intact to this day.

We defeated Ganondorf during New Year's Eve of 1999/New Year's Day 2000. EPIC.

Ocarina of Time is very near and dear to my heart (I say it's my favorite video game of all time but I'm pretty sure that's just in a sentimental way... it's definitely in my top 3). That's the end of my story.

Courage! Wisdom! Power! I know I'm holding a GameCube controller here (I don't know where my N64 controller is, thanks) but just go with it. Windwaker was pretty great too, if we're going to get all crazy about it.

Colors used were:
Zoya - Storm & Raven
Sinful Colors - Ruby Mine & Emerald Envy
Ciate - True Blue
OPI - Oy-Another Polish Joke!

I was going to freehand the Marks of the Goddesses instead of just the individual Triforce bits but I just so happen to be taking a medicine that makes my hands kind of shaky, which is also super awesome for doing nail art.

I was going to re-take the pictures after I reviewed them because I kind of hated how they turned out, but I was going to do it after we went to the grocery store. But then something suck-filled happened, which you can read about tomorrow </3 

HTF Blue OPI Spam: Blue Moon Lagoon, DS Sapphire, Sonic Bloom, Absolutely Alice and DS Fantasy!

I don't have, like, a faint-inducing polish collection or anything, but I've been fortunate enough to get a hold of some lovely older, harder to find colors (pretty much exclusively from dusty hunting in which I either kept the found gems or swapped for other HTFs). As I was admiring my pretties (as I like to do from time to time like a true weirdo) I noticed that most of the HTF OPI polishes that I own are blue.

Blue's always been my favorite color so I'm almost positive it's cosmic polish fate. Which is a thing.

 Blue Moon Lagoon, DS Sapphire, Sonic Bloom, Absolutely Alice, DS Fantasy

I haven't done a plain ol' spam post yet sooooo why not, right? Why the heck not. At least half of my polishes are untried, anyway.

First we have Blue Moon Lagoon, from OPI's 2003 Summer for Shore collection. It's a super sheer light turquoise-leaning blue linear holographic polish.

UHHHH. Where the heck did my pictures of this go??! Of course I would have lost all my swatch pictures when my computer died and they weren't backed up anywhere because I'm a true genius. Sad! I'll have to reswatch. Anyway...

Next is DS Sapphire which was released in 2008. It's a pale, cornflower blue linear holographic polish with a pretty pink flash. I know sapphires are blue, and this polish is blue, but it doesn't really evoke the image of sapphires for me. Maybe, liiiike, DS Hydrangea. It sure it pretty doe.

Here's Sonic Bloom which looks cray in the bottle which I was completely unable to photograph. It's from the 2006 Brights collection. It's a sheer sky blue with a strong electric green flash and sometimes, in the subtlest way, shows a bit of pink too. I've heard this one called a duochrome but I don't know that I'd call it that. The green is pretty much always there unless you're in the dark.

I almost got the pink, there. It's kind of peachy, but maybe you get the idea.

Then there's Absolutely Alice from the 2010 Alice in Wonderland collection. It's a full-coverage cobalt blue glitter peppered with gold and is the only non-black label polish in this post. This is also the only polish I used a topcoat with to smooth it out.

Finally here's DS Fantasy also released in 2008. It's a ridiculously pigmented navy blue polish with almost hidden linear holo. I think this one should have been the sapphire, if we're getting real here. Have you seen a blue sapphire? It's pretty much literally this color exactly. 

So there it is, I guess! If you were even mildly curious, I can tell you how I came about them.

BML: Dusty Hunted (found two bottles, actually! Swapped one for EP A Little Fishy Told Me like super early on in my polish days. I was soooooo pummmmmped).
DS Sapphire: Given in a Valentine's Day swap by a super rad lady.
Sonic Bloom: A polish friend saw it being auctioned in a group I wasn't part of so she bought it and then I bought it from her.
Absolutely Alice: Dusty Hunted (same place as BML... the owner apparently wisened up to the value of old polishes after a while because I went in to buy the second bottle of China Glaze DV8 she had and she was like 'nope!'. Broke my little heart).
DS Fantasy: Swapped for.

Ha ha, I can remember the stories of each one of my babies. If I didn't already have an actual human baby I think I would be seriously emotionally attached to these little bottles.

...of love

...

Fresh Paint - Gold Medalist Swatch & Review (and my 100th blog post!)

GUYS GUYS GUYS. I LIKE HARDLY EVER COMMIT TO ANYTHING!!! I can't believe this is my 100th post. I guess that's only like 3 months' worth of daily blogging. BUT STILL, DANG! I feel like my posts are less-sucking, and I'm somehow slowly managing to gain followers (thank you thank you thank you thank you!) and I've only broken one nail on my swatch hand recently so I'm not embarrassed by my swatches! Ye blog gods seem to be finally nodding in approval!

This is the kind of thing my feels are doing.

I wish I would have thought enough ahead to swatch a, like, significant polish. Like maybe one I had been lemming a while orrrr a favorite color even, or did some nail art for the occasion. Nope! Not one of those things. :/

I do have, however, another polish from Five Below called Gold Medalist. I guess Fresh Paint had kind of an Olympics-themed collection because there was a blue polish there called... uh... I forget what, but it had to do with the Olympics. Cool story, right?

Gold Medalist is a sheer yellow base with gold and pink shimmer that is difficult to photograph but is much more apparent in real life. In the store, this polish looked like a duochrome but it's not, really. It never isn't gold, it just has a strong pink sheen to it in certain lights.

Below shows three thin coats (except on ring finger which is one coat over Zoya - Raven) with Essie G2G topcoat.

I also layered one coat over OPI - Love.Angel.Music.Baby (only on my ring finger) to get rid of VNL without straying too far from the original color. Although it's subtle, the polishes play soooo well together.

Gold Medalist kind of reminds me of Orly - Space Cadet without the blue base. I think this would be a fun polish to franken with, especially for how inexpensive it is (3 for $5 at Five Below).

You know what? This polish IS kind of acceptable for this post! It's like I've symbolically given myself a gold medal for being first place in Actually Following Through! Yeah! Go Brandy!

OPI - Push and Shove Swatch & Review

IlikednodoubtwhenIwasyoungerandIkindoflikedthatbananassongbutI'mprettydisinterestedingwenstefanigenerallyspeaking.

Hey, Push and Shove was on sale at Sally Beauty for half off! And I almost bought it at Ulta for zero off! Bullet dodged 4 sho.

Do you remember that Maybelline Mirror Image nail polish set from the 90s? Or was it the early 2000s? Well, this is pretty much that.

Push and Shove is a reflective chrome polish that is sold with a mini base coat called Lay Down That Base that essentially smooths out the nail's surface since the polish highlights every little teeny tiny flaw on the nail. It works all right but I buffed my nails prior to application for full mirror-ocity and you can still see a bit of wonk on my ring and pinkie fingers. I tried, okay? Geez.

Shown below is one thin layer of Lay Down That Base (per instructions) with two coats of Push and Shove (also per instructions) without topcoat.

I really like this polish. It wears awfully (my tips are chipped and I just put it on five hours ago. To be fair, OPI does state that it's only a one-day kind of deal. Also to be fair I did a crap ton of dishes in those five hours, so I mean) but it looks real neat. The formula is nice and it's pretty fast drying -- note that immediately after application it looks kind of like a brushstrokey nightmare but the brushstrokes diminish once dry. Hooray!

Also it gives me robot fingers kind of! Anything that gives me robot fingers is all right in my book, you know?

OPI - I Like Boys-enberries Swatch & Review

Hi! I like hi. I'm sticking with hi.

I received this polish in that Valentine's Day swap I told you about. It's called I Like Boys-enberries, and I guess it's just the renamed, unaffiliated version of The One That Got Away from the Katy Perry collection (you can read more about that here).

On a side note: I didn't know that places like TJ Maxx and Marshalls were a haven for mysterious polishes. I just saw the most beautiful swatch of an Orly texture polish called Pink Crystal (looky here!) which apparently wasn't mass-produced. A mainstream oops! I went to Marshalls today and found nothing exciting, sigh. But then I went to K-Mart and bought a bottle of Essie G2G and Apricot Cuticle Oil for $2 each. So, that ruled.

I Like Boys-enberries is a vibrant raspberry glass fleck. It reminds me of Christmas... wrapping paper specifically, I think. Application was delightful-- no problems to report. There are a few areas of slight transparency in certain light but it's nothing major. For as pigmented as this polish is, I would have guaranteed that clean-up would have left my cuticles pink, but that was not the case, even a little bit.

Shown below is three thin coats with a layer of Essie G2G on top. 

Once upon a time I saw an OPI polish packaged with one of those bangle bracelets with the little polish bottle charm simply called "Blue". I wish I would have got it, as I can't find anything about it online anywhere. Plus it was a nice shade of blue, to boot.

Nail Art (Super Loosely) Inspired by Rangoli

Hiya!

Colorsutraa's hosting a giveaway that has two ways to win: via Rafflecopter and by submitting your nail art that's inspired by a category chosen by a blogger. I chose 'Inspired by India' (which was, of course, prompted by Colorsutraa) for many reasons, but mostly because of how freaking awesome Indian color palettes and designs are.

After much Googleage, I found information on an art form called Rangoli, which is where beautiful designs are made on floors using materials like colored rice, flower petals and sand during Indian festivals. There's a lot more that goes into it, but that's the Lazy Brandy description. Anyway, it's awesome, and I totally wish I could have dedicated more time to my design because actual Rangoli is super intricate and stunning and my nails are, you know, neat and all but pretty watered-down. Hence the super-loose qualifier in my title, there. Ha.

I used sixteen colors of polish (most of which were Sinful Colors) and topped it all off with copious amounts of Essie G2G to try to hide the insane amount of teeny tiny brushstrokes. I love this and I wish I was ambidextrous.

Side note: I don't know if it's my hand anatomy or what but doing the claw hurts me. It, like, tugs on this tendon in my arm. My thumb doesn't rotate like a normal person's, or something. Buuut you get the idea, even if it's presented in a gimpy way.

Look. At. How. Crooked. My index finger is. What the heck? I've never broken it or anything. Yet my nail insists on growing straight up, parallel to the rest of my fingernails, like a tree growing on a hill. It's weird how woman-y my hands look in pictures. Is that a strange observation to make? I always thought I had little girl-looking hands. I guess I am almost 30 and all, perpetual sigh/vom.

Tape & Texture Polish Rainbow Chevron NOTD

I love chevrons, okay? Like, a lot.
They make even sad, small nails look rad. And they're easy with tape.

The thing about texture polish is that it dries super fast, plus it's textured. It's easy to bump the brush of a different color against the dried already-painted section so I don't have to go crazy with the tape. Loads easier to work with than non-textured polishes and the result is just as awesome.

For this manicure, I used good old Scotch tape aaand (starting at the cuticle):
Sinful Colors - Got a Blush on You
OPI - Jinx
Ulta - unnamed lime green texture
Sinful Colors - Emerald Envy
OPI - Alcatraz... Rocks
L.A. Girl - Sands of Time

And with a couple layers of Essie G2G for good measure:

OPI: Peel Me a Gobi Grape Swatch

What a seriously perfect fall day in NEO. I'm pretty bummed that I have neither car nor stroller to be able to take advantage of it with the wee one. We explored the yard for a little while, but he's not so good about not running towards the street and all that. So it goes.

This'll be my first time wearing PMAGG (do people abbreviate this? It's kind of hilarious... pmagg...) since I bought it when I first started dusty hunting all those (What? Like 4?) months ago. The first bottle I had was BN but I ended up trading it and a BN bottle of China Glaze DV8 for some pretty righteous polishes. It was my first swap, as a matter of fact, and to Canada to boot! After swapping I bought the bottle the salon had on the shelf and it was still 3/4 full, so I pretty much lucked out there.

ANYWAY, here are some swatches. Of Pee-mag. In the sunlight. 2 coats. With SV.

Plum/bronze is my JAM, yo. Isn't it just delicious? And this came out in 1998 when pretty much everything was horrible.

Okay two things:
1. It took me a solid month to realize that DV8 was deviate. I kind of h8 myself.
2. The first time I went to that salon (it was the 3rd salon I had been to and the first that was willing to sell polish off the display shelves) I almost peed when I saw a big chunk of the CG OMG collection. I only bought DV8 that day. I went back like 3 days later and gathered the courage to start going through every single polish (because I was, and still pretty much am, completely ignorant when it comes to be able to spot HTF polishes) and when I picked up Peem-ahg I almost fist-pumped right there, with all the judge-y nail techs eying me. Man. I wish I didn't move an hour away from that place. There're still some polishes I want to pick up. I really need to check out the salons around here. But I get so derrrrvusssss. :(

Okay bye!

Parlez-vous OPI? NOTD

Dear Blog,

This NOTD didn't turn out like I had wanted it to. I intended on using striping tape but when I sat down to do my nails I realized I had left the striping tape in my room which is also the room the (teething) baby was napping in at the moment, so I free-handed it.
Also, It wasn't just s'posed to be a standard triangle-tip manicure but that's what it looks like. I needed to make the second stripe further down on the nail, etc etc blah blah etc.

I USED THESE COLORS:
1. Parlez-vous OPI?
2. Layla: Softouch 11
3. OPI - Wooden Shoe Like to Know? (Tee-hee, cute named polish alert!)

I like the subtle orange sparkle/shimmer in Wooden Shoe.
Layla dries to a semi-matte finish (hence Softouch!).
Parlez-vous is kind of runny, IMO. Ee-moe.

Aaand that's what I have for you.

Love,

Your Friend Brandy

PS The last 4 blog posts I, you know, post... they show up +1'd. Like, immediately. And I'm certain that someone isn't just refreshing their browser waiting for my next post to +1 it. And I'm not trying to actively advertise every single post I make. I guess I'm just this about it: ?

Autumn NOTD

Since having a baby, what summer is has changed for me. It's no longer drinking beers on a patio somewhere, taking night walks and participating in general, warm-weather shenanigans. Now it's more, um, do the same stuff every day except not hate it as much going outside because I'm not freezing to absolute death. I loved summer. Like, loved loved it. I dreamed about it during every other season. And I still do, really, it's just different.

So, the fact that it's going to start getting colder doesn't affect me as much because, like I said, it's not really going to change how I spent my days. No more hiding from thunderstorms or hordes of spiders, so that's pretty cool. Also Fall is my second fave (maybe first fave-tied) so, you know, whatever. It's all peachy. OH PLUS APPLE PIEEE.

Here's an Autumn inspired NOTD using a bunch of untrieds I have.

Starting from the tip, there's:
China Glaze -Xtreme Thrash
Sally Hansen - Chop Chop Copper
OPI - London Bridge is Falling Brown (also on index finger)
Layla - Softouch Effect 11
OPI - DS Illuminate
and the dark brown underneath it all is Barielle - Coco Bar.

 

Looking through my polish stash on Pinterest, I have sooo many flipping fall colors I haven't tried yet. Geez Louise, guys! I need to get it together.

OPI: Man of La Mancha Swatches

I can't get enough of this multichrome OPI gloriousness (spell check seriously thinks I'm illiterate for the record). I'm a total OPI fangirl and I'm not ashamed to admit it. So, about this polish: Man of La Mancha is also from the Holiday on Broadway Collection. I looked at a thousand swatches of La Boheme (a lemming for me for a while) but after swatching this and Movin' Out I don't think I even need it anymore is how righteous this polish is.

The swatches are 2 coats of Man of La Mancha over German-icure by OPI (which is freaking awesome also), topped with SV.

Overcast Sunlight

One coat made for a nice, sheer, sparkling red-orange topper to the rich shimmery burgundy of German-icure. And I know chromes over black make for the best, you know, color shifts, but I wanted to mess around with the deep red tones of La Mancha. I'll have to try it over black too, as I don't know if it made a difference or not (but I dig the contrast on the accent nails and I much prefer German-icure to straight black). I also wanted the full impact of La Mancha, so I went for the second coat. Instant nail polish obsession time.

Man of La Mancha shifts between ruby to coral to orange to yellow and even to lime green in very certain lights. Example A:

Facing away from Overcast Sunlight

Example B:

Artificial Light

This one has red/orange scatterd microglitter in it too, cuz it's not already amazing. Application was great, or whatever, and I just realized that I didn't lay down a base coat. Bummer. I'll be chipping the crap out of this in no time!

OPI: Movin' Out Swatches

So a tip from a new friend-in-nails (get it kind of?) (HEY visit her blog: lacquerheaded) lead me to purchasing two of my very first lemmings: OPI - Movin' Out and Man of La Mancha. Today I have for you a few swatches of the most excellent Movin' Out, from the 2003 Holiday on Broadway collection.

Yellow Wall, courtesy of 1994

Movin' Out is one of the rainbowest in-the-bottle polishes I've seen. It looks like liquified dreams. I'm holding it right now and in my living room light, it looks like it's got this ectoplasm-green shimmer. I tried taking a picture of it and failed, so you just get to imagine how awesome that looks.

While the spectrum of colors don't translate onto the nail entirely, there's still a huge and delightful range o' colors. I will show them to you now (I used 3 coats of Movin' Out over 2 coats of Orly - Velvet Rope with 1 coat of SV for all photos below.. kind of labor-intensive but wooooorth itttttt).

Sunlight

That looks like a nice bright mauve shimmery delight, yes? The red/orange blurry dots on the leftmost nail give the best color accuracy of the scattered microglitter in this sweetheart.

Shade

The chrome-ality is much more apparent out of direct light (like all multi-chrome polishes, I'm finding out, likely because of ... stuff. Indirect light beams and scattered sun particles and, you know, really scientific things).

Artifical light / Shade

Aaand in indirect artificial light was where I was able to pull the most color shifting from. Plum, mauve, bronze, gold, yellow, green. And that glitter! <3

<3 <3 <3

So, there it is. The scattered glitter is apparent in Man of La Mancha, too. It reminds me of camera flashes in a stadium (OR A THEATER, BROADWAY COLLECTION...). I'm super happy I was able to get a hold of this polish. While it's not suuuuuuper htf, it's still a polish I'm quite pleased with adding to my stash-a-roo.