Sailor Mercury Themed Nails!

Because I'm going to a wedding tomorrow, I wanted to redo my nails so they look good for it. My old nails were chipping pretty badly so it was time for new nails anyways. A week ago, I finally got my new nail embellishments!! Silver hollow nail bows!! They're so damn cute! I also wanted to do a blue color and thought it would be great if I could use my new blue nail polish that has pink iridescent glitter!! The color of fairytales. I used this chance to look up some nail designs on Pinterest and wanted to use something with negative space. I've been into negative space nails lately. I found one where it had negative space as a big strip horizontally across a nail with lace behind it. I took this idea and expanded on it. I wanted to do alternate designs, so two nails use the middle hollow negative space and other two nails has a lace background with blue tips (it gives it a nice design that would look good with the silver hollow bows). The middle nail, I wanted to make as a solid colored nail, an accent nail. I took this chance to use my new Sailor Moon nail art stamp plate!! Because it's going to be blue themed, I had three choices, I can do Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury or Sailor Neptune. Sailor Neptune is a but more on the turquoise/teal side and the stamp plate didn't have her symbol! So it was either Sailor Moon or Sailor Mercury. We've been having wet weather lately, all his snow, so I figured, hell, I'm going to do Sailor Mercury! She's my top favorite scout and she doesn't get enough attention.

Original nail idea:

The nails I came up with:

This design is pretty simple. It did take time but it's not hard to do at all. I painted the middle finger with light blue nail polish, two coats, then did a coat of the light blue with pink glitter. All of the other nails, I stamped with lace white designs on the whole nail. I then painted a clear top coat over it so seal in the designs because I will be working with tape and french nail stickers. The next step, you might've guessed, was to tape off a strip in the middle and then apply the french tip stickers to the other two nails. Painted the uncovered parts and tips with my light blue nail polish with two coats then topped it off with the light blue polish with pink glitter. Afterwards, I thought it looked too plain so I painted white stripes on the edges of the negative space. After that, I thought the nails with the tips looked too plain and dotted the edges of the tips to resemble pearls. ....I still thought the nails with the negative space was too plain so I stamped some lace borders on the stripes.
So now that I was satisfied with all of the nails, I can work on the middle one. I used my nail art stamp plate to get the Sailor Mercury star with her symbol in the middle of it. I kept the design on the rubber applicator and scraped off any access designs that I didn't want (the designs are really close together on the plate). I then filled in the star with yellow nail polish and made sure it was thick so that way it's not transparent to where if I were to apply it, you could see through the yellow so it would turn green from the blue paint underneath. After that was done and dry, I applied clear polish on top of the design and peeled it off the stamper. I didn't apply clear polish to my nail before applying the design because I'm nitpicky, so I would've messed up the design by trying to get it perfect on the nail before the paint dries. I just applied clear paint ontop and that dissolved the clear polish on the design. It came out flawless.
For the embellishments, I took a nail polish remover pen and took off the center polishes on my thumb nail so when I apply the nail glue and bow, it will really stick to my nail good. I tried glue and embellishments on top of nail polish before and it easily came off from everyday wear. I applied the nail glue and bow then extra glue on the bottom and top sides of the middle of the bow. For the middle nail, I applied light blue and light pink rhinestones. With these, I applied top clear polish and positioned the gems on top then sealed them off with about 2-3 layers to clear top coat to keep it from coming off. I like to be super thorough with embellishments because I have horrible luck with them. They always come off. I don't live a rough, hard life but for some reason, my hands seem to think so.

Industrial Piercing Bump

So last year, I decided to get more ear piercings. Before that, I only had 2 lower lobe ear piercings in each ear and one industrial piercings on my right ear. I decided to get another industrial on the left ear and a 3rd lower ear piercing for each ear.

The problem that I had this time around were bumps! Granted, I figured that healing would take a lot longer if I decided to get all four piercings at once (industrial = 2, 3rd lower ear lobes = 2), especially having 3 all in one ear BUT this time I had some issues. I got bumps on all four piercings! I knew one for sure was an infection because of how it looked. The other 3 were questionable because they didn't feel or look the same as the one lower ear lobe bump that I can definitely tell it was an infection.

To treat them all, everyday I cleaned it with saline solution, made sure to clean the crusties off after I showered everyday and the one that I could tell was an infection went down in a couple of weeks so that was no biggie.

As for the other 3...well...those took a lot longer. The other lower ear lobe piercing took another month to go away! It didn't look like an obvious infection but had a bump. I was afraid it was a hypertrophic scar or keloid! So thank goodness it went away after awhile.

The industrial was a whole nother monster!! There were 4 total bumps! One on each side of the piercings! The piercing on the top of the ear were smaller than the one on the side though. I've tried sea salt soaks and it didn't seem to do too much. It did feel good and felt like it kind of helped the infection come out when I put a warm wash rag on it soaked with the sea salt solution. I tried to do it as many times as I could in a week, but with work and all, it just didn't happen. PLUS, when I did it, there would be leftover salt residue on my hair! So it would look all white and weird. If I stayed at home, I didn't care about it and you can kind of rinse most of it off but it was still slightly visible...so I prefer not to go outside with it unless I jumped in the shower first.

These bumps on my industrial piercing stayed on for about a year. After half a year, I was contemplating taking them out and wondering whether I should get it looked at. After tons of research, I saw that having them for about 6 months was normal, if you happen to be unlucky enough to get the bumps. So I figured to not stress it, that it should go away soon. The top piercing did pretty well, those went mostly away within the next couple of months or so (they were just small bumps after a couple of months). I was still doing the saline solution method of cleaning. The side piercing was still large and horrible looking! The side that was outside of the lobe was huge! And that one was problematic because I loved to sleep on the left side and it would occasionally bleed after sleeping. After a few months, I couldn't adjust to sleeping on my right side and would try to carefully sleep on my left. Most of the time it would be ok but a few times, I'd wake up to some dried blood on it. Finally, after almost a year, they're all healed. I don't know why this time around, that I had issues with these piercings because all of my other piercings were completely fine and healed with no problems whatsoever.

My Go-To Eyeliner!

I'm sorry I rarely keep up with this blog. Busy life. I thought school would really free up my time! But instead, after I converted to a career position in my intern job, I've been so busy! And the times I'm free, I'm either playing video games or aimlessly, mindlessly watching tv (I don't even know what I'm watching half the time! Like my brain turned off for awhile). Boy, time sure does fly so fast!!

So this post is to brag about how I found my go to eyeliner now!! I love it!
A little bit about me. I've been trying to find my go to eyeliner that is not that expensive, can create thin lines, is truly waterproof, applies very dark and is smudge proof. Why this is hard for me: my skin is freaking oily and my eyes water like crazy! My eyelids get crazy oily by the end of the day (so does my face). I love to laugh, I'm around funny people and so when I laugh, my eyes tear up a bit, to where the tears chill in the corners of my eyes. I also have always had a problem with eyeliner smudging and migrating into my eyelid crease, probably due to oils and the watery eyes do not help. And recently, for the past year...I've been into think upper eyeliner lines! I've already found my go-to pencil liner, but with these, you can't achieve thin lines...at least I can't. (My go to eyeliner pencil in Covergirl Exact Eyelights in Vibrant Pearl!!)

With all that, I've been searching for a liquid liner for thinner lines. I've tried gel liners and they were really nice, goes on smooth and didn't smudge too bad and was waterproof...but...it's not that dark and doesn't give you that super precise crisp line like a liquid one does.

Vidal Sassoon London Lilac!

It's been way too long since my last post about my hair, since my red hair after using Loreal HiLights/HiColor red or magenta hair dye, I switched to Vidal Sassoon London Lilac!! I was tired of the upkeep of the red, you have to retouch it every 2 weeks or so and that stuff bleeds everywhere! I knew this before I dyed my hair but after awhile...well, I'm a low maintenance kind of gal.
I'm in love with the London Lilac hair dye though! The dye does fade but it is not as drastic as the red and lasts a lot longer. I've also tried the Deep Violet color in the same line and it's a bit of a darker purple color, pretty much almost an unnoticeable difference but I just keep sticking with the London Lilac.
I used this right after my red hair started fading so at first, it was like a burgundy color. Then after that, it was a consistent dark purple color. I love it because it's a nice color that looks good in all lighting. Inside your house, it'll be dark so not too noticeable, then outside it's like a screaming violet color with red tones, and under fluorescent lighting, it's a nice stand-out purple. I also bleached my hair in between to see if it would be more noticeable and to be honest...wasn't that crazy different. I bleached it to a dark dirty blonde. You can see the difference between my new growth hair and the dyed part but no so much right after you dye it. It's brighter but you can't see the difference until the color starts to fade out.
This box also covered all of my hair, I definitely use all of it but I'm able to use it throughout my whole hair. But there's no extra saturation, I know some people like to top off hair dye at the end. My tips for making it through all of your hair is to do ends first (since roots dye faster), comb your hair at the end on each section (I know some people advise not to do it because of breakage), this helps spread the dye throughout your hair and makes sure its even, do sections for sure, if you try to do your hair in one huge section, you will miss the "inside" of your hair!! I also help keep it last longer by washing my hair in warm water rather than scalding hot lie I used to and then after I condition, I rinse in cold water. I am not able to wash my hair in cold water! This dye also isn't too drying to my hair! I've used some hair dyes that made my hair feel like I played with fire!

So here's some pics to show you how it went and a few more times after I used it and when it started fading (I think pics of how it fades is useful! And note, I still have some red undertones, not too sure if it's from the L'Oreal HiColor Red dye or it's just the undertones of my hair since I do have natural red undertones):

Proclaim Hair Polish

It's been too long since I've posted anything and even though I took pictures of stuff I want to post, I've never done it and ended up deleting them. BUT I finally thought, at least do one for this year.
So I have a lot of hair problems. My hair looks dry and frizzy all the time. After a shower, my hair poofs up like crazy and takes a whole day for it to "calm" down. This morning my hair was extremely poofy after my shower. Now, I dye my hair a lot, it's been about 3 weeks since my last dye or about 4...can't remember...anyways, the point I was making was that I do damage my ahir by dying it often. I do not use any heat on it though, no blow drying, straightening, etc. I still get split ends and still have frizzy hair...makes me feel like I might as well use heat if it's still going to act like how it was when I did use all of that.
After a shower, I rub hair oil into my hair. The problem with hair oil is that if you rub too much then your hair looks greasy...like as if I never even showered. Who wants to take a shower to come out looking like they didn't at the end? I didn't shower for no reason! So I rub minimal oil into my ends and on the lower half of my hair. The other problem I have is that lately, I've been showering in the morning and because I don't use heat, my hair comes out different and all different levels of crazy on different days by the time I go to work. (I take a train to work for an hour so I always rush out of the door to catch it then I can't do much on the train.)
So at work, I've decided to also keep some type of hair maintenance...stuff, whether it's oil, leave-in conditioner, etc. On my desk right now is: Proclaim Hair Polish. Sometimes I feel wary of keeping it at my desk because let's be honest...it looks like a bottle of lube. I have to keep telling people, I swear it's hair serum or hair lube.