Plate XL B

Good afternoon, Dear Reader!

I had a great big fail stamping a pattern from XL B for today, which completely proved wrong my recent statement that I find the quality of engraving is equivalent between Chez Delaney and Konad plates.  Konad never fails me!

I took pictures, but promptly did a do-over on the manicure because it was really bad.  For the second I also went with a pattern from XL B, but the second one I chose was composed of thicker lines, from which I generally have a much easier time getting a clean stamp.  The messy one had thin lines, and the few stamps with didn't have extra polish all over have bald spots, and since the stamping was in black over China Glaze Shocking  Pink, it looked pretty shabby.

Plate XL B over China Glaze Shocking Pink Nail Polish

My ring and pinky nails have bald spots in the middle of the filled in sections, and the others, which I didn't scrape as hard to avoid that, have the extra Konad polish.  It looked gross enough to annoy me, so off it came.

The next attempt was Color Club Wicked Sweet with white Konad polish, and I love how it turned out.  A cashier at a place I often go asked about it this morning and admired the manicure, but there was a huge line behind me and she's usually really slow without a distraction (perfectly nice lady, she just doesn't mind having twenty people glaring at her while she makes small talk), and she asked about it using an "or" where neither option was correct (is that A or B?).  That meant my answer would require an explanation, and since I didn't want to lie I just muttered unintelligibly to get out of explaining Konad with the line of people hating me.  That often works surprisingly well, by the way, and it did this morning.  Here's the manicure that's nice enough to make a line of people wait for small talk.

Plate XL B over Color Club Wicked Sweet Nail Polish

Much better!  I love the polish, the stamp, and it's all the better since it smells really nice.

That's what I know today, Dear Reader.  Until next time, love and nail polish to you!

Essie Smooth Sailing and XL B

Good morning, Dear Reader!

For today I tried out Essie Smooth Sailing, one of Essie's Summer 2011 releases.  It's a really pretty kind of slate blue with a great shimmer, and it applied very well and only took two coats.  I bought this bottle at a retail store, and it's weird to have an Essie without a label on the bottom (it's on the top of the bottle), but what's weirder is that there's not a capital letter to be found on it.  It's as if it comes from Essie's e.e. cummings Collection.

I used Smooth Sailing after a chop to even my nails out again, which it's no secret I hate doing.  As has become the custom, I used a full nail pattern I couldn't normally use to perk myself up a bit and take advantage of shorter nails.  I tried to get a picture of Smooth Sailing for you alone, but I had to use artificial light and the polish looks distinctly bright blue in every single one, so they're no good - the inclusion of any one of them would just make this post confusing as to what the polish really looks like.

The pattern I used to stamp them is from Chez Delaney's plate B from the XL series, one of the plates with great big tip patterns.  I'd decided to use Konad White Pearl Special Polish for the stamping, and the reason I first stopped at this pattern was that I thought it could look like waves in water if I used it sideways.  When I looked at it sideways to evaluate that idea, I realized it's a series of S's, which sealed the deal on that choice since it would give me heavily monogrammed nails.  The pattern is the one on XL B that looks like this, only sideways...

Essie Smooth Sailing with Chez Delaney XL B

The pretty shimmer shows in the bottle, and it's not hard to see in the plain polish on the nail, which was the failed set of pictures.  So now I have wavy, monogrammed nails while I adjust to them.  You know, the big thing that I just wait out after a chop is that since the actual tips of my fingers, on the very top of them, usually never touch anything since there's normally a great big talon in the way, they're uncomfortably sensitive after a chop.  If it were purely aesthetic, it wouldn't bother me that much - otherwise they get cut off, they grow back, and any chronological set of pictures of my nails looks like a flip book of nails growing as a result, but none of that's an especially big deal.

That's just about all I have for you today, Dear Reader.  Until next time, love and nail polish to you!