A couple of weeks back I noticed and commented on a photo on Instragram from @katherinelb12. She was wearing a gorgeous gold encrusted nail wrap that looked amazing.  She said she found them cheap at our local price line and they were Revlon Marchesa nail wraps. Then she asked if I would like to try them.  I thought about that for about a millisecond and then suggested we catch up.  Kat lives in the same suburb as me, so we arranged a coffee catch up to talk about nails.

Nearly three hours of nail talk later, I was back home and ready to play with the nail wraps that Kat very generously gave me. She gave me half of this set, as well as half of the Evening Garnet set.  We are planning some bestie twin nails very soon with those ones.

These nail wraps are called Gilded Mosaic and they feature textured dots is various shades of gold and pewter on a dark blackened brown base.  These nail wraps don't dry out, so I decided to just use three wraps for this mani. One full wrap on both my ring fingers and one wrap cut in half on my middle finger.  On all  my nails I put on aEngland Holy Grail, which is a sparkly antique gold.  I finished the design off with a row of round gold studs along the edge of the wrap and a black and gold stud on my other nails.

I really loved this mani, I actually wore it to work for two days in a row.  People at work even wondered what was wrong because I don't changed my polish over night.

These are thicker than other nail wraps made of nail polish. I'm not sure what these are made of.  They removed easily with acetone, but they don't dry out.  Because they are a little thicker, you need to work the wrap around your nail gently so you don't get wrinkles.  Mine worked out quite well.  If you don't like the textured feel to them, you can add top coat to smooth them out.  I had top coat on the nail with the stud down the middle and no top coat on the full wrap nail.  They lasted the two days I wore them perfectly, and I could easily got another 2-3 days out of them

I actually hadn't even heard of these Revlon Marchesa nail wraps until I saw them, and now that I have googled all the design, I absolutely love and need to wear them all.

As promised, here is the watermarble I recently created with the Dance Legend Chameleon multichrome polishes.

The day I created this mani I actually felt like doing a water marble.  Unheard of for me! I wanted to step up to the challenge and create something awesome, like all the designs I see done by Mucking Fusser.  Let me tell you that my enthusiasm did not last for very long.  I'm still convinced that the majority of my problems with watermarbling is to do with the brand of polish.  The brands that I have lots of creme polishes are Ulta3 and Picture Polish, but I was not able to get either of those to work for me.  All the brands that I've read that work really well, like China Glaze, Essie and Sally Hansen really don't make up that much of my stash when it comes to creme polishes to marble with.

I was about to throw in the towel on the wasted hour I had spent (not to mention the approx. 50 drops of polish that wouldn't spread and form nice bullseyes on the water). My last attempt was to watermarble with the Dance Legend chameleons.  I used the exact same technique I used for my previous 30 attempts, but this time it worked.  I was too excited to see that I was actually able to get something to form the bullseye that I didn't even focus on getting a similar design on each nail.

Certainly compared to my previous effort at a multichrome watermarble, I was really happy with the result.

A few weeks ago when I received my box of Dance Legend polishes from Russia, I excitedly showed you one of the Dance Legend chameleon polishes - Knight (the limited edition one).  You can check out my photos of that one here.  Tonight I have swatches of the six other shades in this collection, and I warn you this is a picture heavy post.

All my photos are in natural diffused sunlight.  If you want to see some amazing swatches of these polishes with direct artificial lighting, you must check out Sam's post at Fashion Polish. They look totally different in different lighting.  This his how they looked most of the time whist indoors for me.

Boggs - medium blue base with a  pink to purple to orange to gold color shift. This was three thin coats on it's own, but if you wanted to save the polish you get plenty of colour pop with just one coat layered over black.

Boo - a warm coppery red base and a yellow gold to green color shift.  This one was more opaque than some of the other and only needed two coats for opacity on it's own. Apologies for the state of the bottles in these photos. They are all still covered in dried flakies and polish from the breakages in the package.

 

Celia - darker blue base with a purple to orange to gold color shift. This was three coats on it's own.

Roz - a rose coloured magenta base with a gold to green color shift. This was two coats on it's own.  Other than Knight, this would be my favourite in the collection as it was so shifty in real life, and it's a different colour shift combo from the usual blue to purple ones.

Sulley - a turquoise blue  base with a pink to purple to gold color shift. This one was the most sheer of all the polishes, but it was still opaque at three thin coats.

Wazowski - a golden green base with a green to blue color shift. Probably the least shifty of all the polishes in the collection, but a gorgeous colour combo non the less. This was two coats on its own.

On Friday I had one of my sister's in law over for some polish play.  She had asked that I run through a few nail art techniques with her so she could get to real time advice about what to do.  We started with a regular two colour gradient.  She was a bit worried about it as she was going along, but I promised her it would turn out great once she had added top coat.  Of course it did work out perfect!  I then showed her how to do some stamping.  After a bit of trial and error in learning how to pick up the image fast enough, and then stamp it on, she was hooked.  She did an awesome job and I've promised to get her some stamping supplies for her upcoming birthday.

Because of her excellent work on her nails, she didn't want to remove it to try other techniques, so I grabbed a few swatch sticks.  We did some two toned tape mani design on one, some dotting on another and then on the third stick we created the same design as I put onto my nails below.

I started with a black base and then marked out the crosses with tape.  I then sponged on two textured polishes, Zoya Solange and OPI Jinx.  We then pulled off the striping tape and marveled at the beautiful sparkly colours contrasting against the black. Although clean up was a PITA because of all the gold sparks in Solange and Jinx.  I wish I had some some to photograph this one in, because it was truly beautiful.