Week 28 - Yellow

I had a few ideas for this week's Yellow theme (bumblebees were on the table but I'd want proper striping tape for that). I settled on doing something simple, easy, and pretty. I was originally thinking - Orly's Hook Up as the yellow base complemented with some of gold stamped pattern using my new bottle of Orly's Luxe. I'd seen lots of really good turn-outs with Luxe for stamping, and I was all gung-ho to try my hand at it. I mean, how hard can it be to paint your nails yellow, and then stamp a little sun or something cute and call it a day? Oh no. Oh ho ho no. Scroll down to the end of this post for a rant about Hook Up.

What I have on for this week's challenge is Champagne Bubbles by China Glaze from their Winter Holiday 2011 collection!

 

This polish is so pretty and has even gotten me several compliments from random strangers! As you can see, it's a very yellow-gold metallic base with a generous speckling of very fine, square, silver glitter (the bubbles!). It applies and dries smoothly. Here, I am wearing two coats.

Here are some other pictures to give you a good idea of the glitter distribution. (Click to expand)

 

  

 As you can see, the glitter-ing is quite subtle, but very much there. This is my first time wearing this polish all on its own and I really dig it.

Rant below:

So like I said, straightforward yellow base + some gold stamping/accenting. Should only take an hour tops, what could go wrong?? Three and a half frustrating hours later, I took it all off and admitted defeat. This was 90% the fault of Hook Up, which was so delicate (and pearly-streaky) that if you so much as looked at it wrong, it would crinkle or smudge and you'd have to start all over. Also, I couldn't get Luxe to transfer successfully, but I chalk this up to me needing more practice rather any fault with the polish. This would be all well and good - I'm patient enough for multiple stamping attempts to get something right - but Hook Up would not cooperate.

General rule of thumb for stamping attempts: with a coat of Seche Vite over the base color, you can remove up to two botched stamping attempts with non-acetone remover and a q-tip; you can do this without affecting the base color (because you're just removing the layer of top coat, not the color beneath it). After two removals, just apply a new layer of Seche Vite to dry, and you're good to go for two more attempts.

But no, during my second (gentle) q-tip rubbing with non-acetone, I ended up smearing the yellow polish base coat pretty significantly. Sigh. Take off, reapply, rinse and repeat until I got fed up enough and just took it all off.

And just to add insult to injury? For the measly ~3+ hours it was on my left hand, bam, stained yellow. First world lacquerista problems, man.

Since my nails were now stained, I couldn't NOT go without some sort of polish on my talons, so I decided to try my bottle of Fast Track from the Hunger Games collection and, of course, it applied beautifully and looked awesome. I didn't take pictures because in my lacqueraaaage I had scrubbed Hook Up into my cuticles and nail bed, and even my post-manicure shower didn't remove it all. : / So, pretty color to swatch (Fast Track), but it looked as if I had just finished peeling an orange or something.

So I am now in the market for a new go-to yellow, preferably a cream...