Scales On Blue - Nubar 2010, LA Splash Midnight Rain

It's the Year of the Dragon! Happy Chinese New Year to all who celebrate it! :D

I had plans for an appropriate Chinese New Year nail polish, but as with all plans made before a holiday, that got scrapped in place of delirious packing and much rushing around. As I'm travelling, I couldn't bring my beloved collection of nail polish with me, so I can't do anything special now. :(  Excuses, excuses, I know.

In any case, here's the mani I'm wearing, done a week ago and photographed then.

[Base: LA Splash Midnight Rain; Top: Nubar 2010]

I had been swatching LA Splash's Midnight Rain, which has generous scatterings of red glitter amongst a dense dark blue glitter base. Ev and I might do a joint review on that nail polish in the near future, so watch out for that!

When I realized I didn't have time for a new mani, I decided to try a quick, cheating attempt at dragon scales, by using Nubar 2010 over Midnight Rain. I did a couple layers more than usual (except for the last finger, no idea why) just to get a denser distribution of flakes. My attempt at duochrome dragon scales...erm, not terribly successful.

[Base: LA Splash Midnight Rain; Top: Nubar 2010]

As always, Nubar 2010 is gorgeous, with its duochrome gold-green flakes. What's interesting is that you can see the red glitter coming through from Midnight Rain.

[Base: LA Splash Midnight Rain; Top: Nubar 2010]

You can see a little of the blue and red glitter from Midnight Rain peeking through the flakes here.

I think overall, it didn't do a fabulous job of being dragon scales, but it was still a very gorgeous mani.

And now, let me do a little random, unpaid promotion work. :P  Well, not like anything here is paid. I'm without my usual image editing programs here, so I used Pixlr to resize and brighten these photos. I've used Pixlr for all sorts of basic editing in the past before, but this is the only time I can actually talk about it. Pixlr is an online image editing program, and its layout is very similar to Photoshop's, though it has less features. It's really awesome and easy to use when you want simple editing, so I highly recommend it.

You can also choose to do retro vintage effects on the photos as well. :D  Such as...

[Vintage effect on LA Splash Midnight Rain and Nubar 2010]

Yes, that's a little silly, but what's interesting is that the photo quality was pretty low but hitting it with a teal tint, some blur, a little shadow and lighting effect...voila! Not too horrible! I can't take any credit for the effects, because you just hit one button on Pixlr's Retro Vintage Effects to get it. I really like how the flakes and red glitter look like flames here. The mani did look something like that in very low lighting, so it's nice to see it replicated here.