Glitterati and other NOTDs

Today: wearing Illamasqua Glitterati - two coats over one coat of Manishma Rambling Red. I just am not very interested in cremes lately - if it's not a texture or a shimmer or something, I just end up putting something else on top of it! I knew the minute I put it on (the Manishma, I mean) that I was going to end up with something on top of it, but at first I was thinking I would do a flakie. Then I remembered Glitterati, which is a similar(ish) dark red. I really liked it when I swatched it on the nail wheel, but I hadn't worn it yet.

This picture really picked up some of the glitter, anyway:

The glitter's not as scattered as this makes it look, though. There are bigger round pieces that are the ones you see flashing there, but then there are a lot of small bits as well. The colors seem to vary but I see red, blue, purple, for sure. Maybe some very tiny green pieces. The overall effect is pretty great, though.

Glitterati is available in a gift set along with Viridian, which I think is left over from last Christmas but which is still available at Sephora (and marked down, too) at least for the moment! I got mine last summer in the same order with the S-by-OPI closeouts, but it just looked so Christmassy (Viridian is a lovely emerald green) that I decided to save it til now.

Last weekend I decided to try out something I had seen online called a "syrup mani" - or I think I also saw it called a jelly fade, someplace. I did it with WnW Gray's Anatomy, which is not a jelly but is super-sheer so I figured it would work fine, and it did. Here's the tutorial but once you see one up close I think it's fairly obvious what you do, really. It looked good with Gray's, and then after a couple of days I tried to do a glitter fade on the bottom half of my nails with In Through the Out Door on top of that, which wasn't too great as glitter fades go but ended up looking pretty cute anyway. Gray's Anatomy seems to be a good base for that kind of thing.

Before that... I have to go look at twitter to see what I had on! I think I did two manicures worth of SOPI I Only Shop Vintage - the first one by itself and the second one with Decades of Shades for a base, to darken it a bit. (Here's Stephanie of Short 'n Chic's pictures. I wonder if she isn't why I bought this shade in the first place. I remember googling around looking for swatches of these when they first went on sale...)

And before that, I wanted to try out my new bottle of Glitter A-Peel, and I was experimenting and I ended up doing this thing with Daul and G-Listen to Your Heart (another SOPI) in layers. Glitter A-Peel worked great, except that I tore a nail and messed everything up trying to file it down. I'm going to have to be more careful next time! Daul and G-Listen to Your Heart looked better in tandem than I thought - Daul always looks less red in the bottle than it really is, I remember commenting on that before. (I'm not saying that it's actually red, you understand, but it does have a red-violet base, even though it doesn't look like it in most lights.)