NOTD: Azalea + Alpha Nail

In the spirit of Easter (sort of), I give you another of my "semi-pastel" or "passes vaguely for pastel" manicures:

This is Zoya Azalea and NPB Alpha Nail on top. Azalea is just your basic sort of rosy pink color - Zoya calls it "a classic spring pink with a captivating white and fuchsia flash" and they also call it metallic, but it's not really what I think of as metallic. It seems to me to be more like a sort of pearlescent thing going on in there. I mean, presumably Zoya knows what's going on with their own formulas but it just doesn't look terribly metallic to me at all. Maybe I'm seeing the white and fuchsia flash and picking that up as pearly, I don't know. And then Alpha Nail just basically gives it some extra sparkly kick - it's a topcoat with blue & purple shift, says NPB. Both of these are currently available polishes. (There's also an undercoat to this mani which I'll talk about below. I don't think you see much of it here anyway.)

I don't know what the heck I did to my hands last night, but not only is the finish marred in this picture like I went to bed with it still wet (which I don't recall being the case) but also the nails on both of my index fingers were trying to come off at the quick - and so I just got out my good nail scissors and trimmed everything back to being really short again. They were just now getting to be a halfway decent length, so it figures. I'm pretty resigned to just having short nails forever, though.

OK, here's the full sequence of polishes here:

The one hovering off to the edge on the left is not actually in this manicure, I'll probably show that later on, since I did some swatches. The actual sequence is OPI Japanese Rose Garden and then Azalea and Alpha Nail. This didn't start out to be an Azalea manicure at all; I was really thinking of something paler and I got sidetracked, mid-manicure. I don't think Japanese Rose Garden is still in the OPI lineup - it's a slightly dusty rose color (from some long-ago Japan collection, presumably) which is a one-coater. I'm sure there are things pretty similar to it out there. And like I said above, I don't think much of that polish shows here at all, anyway.

I don't truly love Japanese Rose Garden but it's a good basecoat to put under other pinks - Aphrodite's Pink Nightie was my old standard for what to put over it.