Rubies and Amber - Born Pretty Holographic Marquise Nail Studs, Pretty Serious Forbidden Zone

It's time for studs~ For some nail studs. ;)

[Born Pretty Holographic Marquise Nail Studs
Base: Pretty Serious Forbidden Zone]

Simple to do and looks quite fancy, in my opinion.

[Pretty Serious Forbidden Zone]

[Born Pretty Holographic Marquise Nail Studs
Base: Pretty Serious Forbidden Zone]

I started with Pretty Serious' Forbidden Zone as the base, which is a deep red jelly nail polish with gold hex glitter of varying sizes. It takes two coats to be mostly opaque.

[Born Pretty Holographic Marquise Nail Studs]

Then I used Born Pretty's Holographic Marquise Nail Studs to liven the mani up. There are six colours, one colour for two sections; gold, pink, green, red, silver, and aqua. These nail studs are really holographic and shiny by the way.

I dabbed a little clear nail polish on the spot I wanted, then I pressed a nail stud down on that spot. Hold it in place for a few seconds and then leave it be. Rinse and repeat for all the other nails. Once you're done, you have to seal in all the nail studs with a thick top coat (or multiple coats of a thinner top coat).

[Born Pretty Holographic Marquise Nail Studs
Base: Pretty Serious Forbidden Zone]

I took a slightly blurry photo above so you could see the holographic shine.

[Born Pretty Holographic Marquise Nail Studs
Base: Pretty Serious Forbidden Zone]

So, that's a variety of different things you can do with the studs.

But if those are too over the top for you, I think the studs can be used in really simple ways that still look pretty good.

[Born Pretty Holographic Marquise Nail Studs
Base: Pretty Serious Forbidden Zone]

How simple is that? But I love how it looks too. I think the marquis shape really lends itself to versatile patterns, from simple but fancy to more detailed and fancy. This is possibly my favorite kind of nail studs of all.

If you like what you see here, you can get the Holographic Marquise Nail Studs here at Born Pretty and you can get 10% off on full price items if you use the code above.

Tick Tock - Born Pretty Time Travel BPX-L023, Hit the Bottle Spun Gold, Pretty Serious Dupe

Let's gear up for a little steampunk!

[Tick tock]

Right off the bat, I'll tell you that I really like how this turned out. The different gears on every nail and the colours just came together very nicely, in my humble opinion.

Let's start with my base. I used Pretty Serious' Dupe, which I swatched last week. Here it is again:

[Pretty Serious' Dupe]

Then I stamped over that using patterns from Born Pretty's Time Travel BPX-L023 stamping plate and Hit the Bottle's Spun Gold, a light gold stamping polish. Time Travel BPX-L023 has got a great variety of gears, in different styles and sizes.

[Born Pretty Time Travel BPX-L023 stamping plate]

I decided to use the gears in the big clock, because I thought the gears there had an awesome level of fine detail and the variety would keep the mani organic looking.

[Base: Pretty Serious Dupe
Stamping: Hit the Bottle Spun Gold, Born Pretty Time Travel BPX-L023 plate]

Okay, first off, I broke a nail on my left hand, which is why I'm kind of obviously blocking it in that first photo. Then on my right hand, I managed to smudge the stamped pattern towards the tips of my nails when I painted on my top coat. I dragged it a little too much, oh dear...

And here's some close-ups because I think they show off the stamped pattern against the blue-purple base pretty well.

[Base: Pretty Serious Dupe
Stamping: Hit the Bottle Spun Gold, Born Pretty Time Travel BPX-L023 plate]

I really do love the little gears on this plate. I love the gold gears against the purple-blue-green glitter. The sharp lines on the teeny tiny gears stamped so nicely as well. I got more compliments than usual on the mani, and a couple people stopped to look at them from close-up. Even I kept examining my own nails. What a fun mani this has turned out to be.

If you want your nails to look like the inside of an old timey clock, you can find Time Travel BPX-L023 here at Born Pretty. As usual, you can get non-sale items with a little discount if you use the code above!

Midnight Violet - Pretty Serious Dupe

What I've got here is a pretty shiny, pretty dark nail polish from Pretty Serious.

[Pretty Serious Dupe]

This is Pretty Serious' Dupe. As you can see from the second photo, it has a midnight blue crelly base and is chock-full of glitter. It's got blue, green, purple and magenta glitter, slightly bigger purple and blue glitter, and there's also purple microglitter throughout. The glitter combination makes the nail polish lean purple overall.

Dupe is fully opaque with two coats and to be honest, application isn't very smooth. It goes on pretty thick and gloopy, which makes it dry textured. I guess that's how you get so much glitter in one polish. So the nail polish is pretty thirsty and if you want a smooth finish like the one in my photos, you need to use some kind of top coat.

Here's my tip for getting a smooth finish for thirsty nail polishes without wasting too much of your good quality top coat. Let Dupe semi-dry, and then apply any clear nail polish of any brand on top of Dupe. It can be a base coat or any cheapy clear polish. Then, immediately apply a quick dry top coat. You'll get a smooth, non-bumpy finish. You don't need a special top coat for glitter polishes and you definitely don't need two coats of quick dry.

[Bottle to nail: Two coats of Pretty Serious Dupe]

Looks pretty fancy~

[Pretty Serious Dupe]

I do love the overall look of the nail polish and it's one of the fanciest dark nail polishes that I have.