Roses are red...

Hi everyone!


Another two weeks have passed and during that time the flu I thought I had turned out to be a rather nasty pneumonia. I got medication, doctor's visits, pictures taken from my lungs (guess what? I have two!! ;), the works and I'm FINALLY on the way up again. During most of the exams you are asked to either not wear nail polish or remove it from your index and middle finger as they stick these thingies on your fingers to check oxygen saturation and stuff. Two bare nails and eight nicely manicured ones just would look too silly so I've been going commando for a while... yep, totally nekkid! So now that all the exams are behind me I wanted to do something really extra special. I did kind of forget that I still have the energy levels of a sloth in hibernation so it took me a lot longer than expected but I don't care about that at all when I look at my nails.

indoors, no flash

My thumb, index and pinky are painted with two thin coats of Colors by Llarowe The Mighty Red Baron (TMRB) and a coat of Seche Vite. If you're still wondering if this polish lives up to all the raving reviews you can read online, trust me it does and even goes beyond. It's a gorgeous classy red with a scattered holo that blows your mind away when direct light or the sun hits it. I've tried to capture the holo in a picture with flash but we all know how good I am at that...

indoors, flash

I also painted my middle and ring finger with a coat of OPI Beyond The Pale Pink (BTPP) and after that I started working on the decals. So I grabbed my trusty baking mat, painted six rectangles with normal top coat, let that dry for an hour or so, stamped roses on the rectangles from Born Pretty plate BP-73 using Hit The Bottle As Black As Night and started coloring in the roses: the red is of course The Mighty Red Baron and I used OPI Green-wich Village for the leaves. I left that to dry for the night and the next morning I painted the entire rectangles with a coat of BTPP so any bubbles that might occur when applying the decals would remain hidden. I left that out on my desk for another night to make sure everything was completely dry and finally, after three days, I peeled them off the mat, cut them roughly to size, painted a coat of BTPP on a nail and placed the decal on the still tacky polish. After making sure it was in the right place I cut off the parts that stuck out as best as I could, cleaned up some more using a brush and acetone and finally covered it with a generous coat of Seche Vite. Repeated that with my other nails and I was pretty happy I made six decals because I messed up two times (note to self: do NOT attempt to move around decal after it has been on nail for more than three seconds).

My nails are totally inspired by (read: copied from) Juanita's manicure. When I saw her post a while ago, I just knew I had to try it too and when thinking of something really special, I immediately thought of her gorgeous nails. I hope she likes what I did, even if I still haven't learned to color between the lines ;)

I hope my next post will be less than two weeks from now but I'm not making any promises. In the meantime, take care!



Colors by Llarowe The Mighty Red Baron was bought from Nailland Hungary.
Hit The Bottle As Black As Night was bought from Hypnotic Polish.