One Year Blogiversary Guest Post!

(Hi everyone! Today we have another guest post from Amanda of the Nail Polish Enthusiast blog. It's a special one as today is my one year blogiversary and also her birthday! Thank you all for your support over the last year! Enjoy!)

Hello again, Janna's readers!

I'm here with a very special post for you: Janna's 1 year blogiversary post! (It also happens to be my birthday, but let's focus on the important stuff here.) Janna is in Spain and has given me the honor of her one year post, so we decided on a celebration theme. Instantly, Janna and I both thought of Milani Gems, a dupe for Deborah Lippmann's Happy Birthday. It's a sparse glitter with a variety of colors in it, but we'll get to that soon.

Step one was figuring out what color to layer it over. I couldn't figure out what color scheme I wanted to do, since Gems has so many colors and I wanted all the glitter to stand out. I swatched it over Zoya Phoebe, Misa The Grass is Greener on My Side, OPI Chapel of Love, and Color Club Pucci-licious (I still don't understand that name, by the way).

 

For some reason, Zoya Phoebe stuck out to me as the most celebration-y of the bunch. The blue and glitter just seemed to scream cupcakes and celebrating and fun drinks (okay, maybe the last one is more of an adult celebration technique...). Here's Phoebe on her own:

 

 

Phoebe is a matte polish from one of Zoya's summer 2011 lines, Mod Mattes. This is shown with 2-3 coats and no topcoat. It dries with a shimmery finish, something unusual for a matte but somehow very appealing. (Ignore the poor cleanup, I wanted to wait until I put Gems on to clean up completely.)

 

Finally, I added Gems to my index and thumb, two coats each. I thought I would add it to all my fingers but I thought it stood out more as an accent than on every finger. Then I just added topcoat to all my nails. (I now see that my cleanup on my middle finger wasn't as good as I thought in person. Hmph. That's the trouble with up close pictures, I guess!)

 

Blurry to show the sparkliness and shininess with topcoat, mmmm:

 

 

What do you ladies think? Would you have chosen Phoebe, TGIGOMS (what a long name, Misa!), Chapel of Love, or Pucci-licious? Would you have done all nails with Gems?

xoxo,
Amanda

(Thanks again, Amanda! I love the accent nail and removal was probably much easier =] But Gems looks great over all of the colors! And Happy Birthday! Thanks for reading everyone! -Janna)