As Seen On... Once Bitten

(This is a scheduled post. I'm on vacation!)

 

Again, good morning! Isn't it nice that these posts are all scheduled in the morning so you all can see them when you wake up? I like morning posts but lately I'm too tired to make them.

Today's spotlight is on a blogger I don't know too much about, other than the fact that she did some hardcore awesome snakeskin nails that I needed on my own nails.
The blogger is Once Bitten, the post is here, and along with the nails was a tutorial!
She takes lovely photos of her nails, I love the way she positions her hand. (That was a nerdy polish-aholic thing to say.)
Oh, and I also love the way she used Happy Birthday in this mani. Check that out too.

So, my polish stash was missing a few of the key ingredients to her recipe... er, mani.

What do you do when you need a light gray but don't have one? You franken!

I've been wanting to franken a light gray for a while but never got around to it. This was just what I needed to motivate me to do it!
I had a small bottle of white from "The Color Institute" which was a drugstore "manicure set" my aunt gave me for Christmas. It came with 9 small bottles of polish and some nail care tools.
As a white, it was decent, but I prefer my Sally Hansen white. So a franken it became!
I added a small amount of black, and a few drops of China Glaze Below Deck. I'm not sure if the Below Deck did anything though.
Either way, I love it! It's perfect.

The next step is to blob on a bunch of other colors.

It sorta looks like camouflage! 
My blobbing colors were:
China Glaze - Below Deck
OPI - Skull And Glossbones (pretty soon I think I'm going to cave and get the full size of this.)
China Glaze - Recycle
And my gray franken!

Then you add the snakeskin stamp.
Now, Once Bitten used China Glaze VIII as her stamping polish.
That made me mad because many times I have picked up VIII but said "Nah, I don't need that" and put it down.
But apparently now I needed it.
Alas, back to frankening.

Tada!
The stamp is from BM-215 and to get the dark purple stamping polish, I blobbed some China Glaze Midtown Magic onto paper, and mixed in a very small amount of black to darken it just a tad and make it more opaque for stamping. (You can do this to franken all sorts of stamping polishes, as long as they are opaque enough. You need a clean brush to mix it and transfer it into your plate.)

I adore the way it turned out. It's so chic!
If you watch the video in Once Bitten's post you'll see that it is apparently trendy to get an ACTUAL snakeskin manicure. Yes, real skin from a snake, embedded under gel on your nails.

...I'll stick to polish, thanks.

This manicure was actually what started my As Seen On series. I wore this mani for five days and somewhere in there decided it would be cool to recreate 5 more manicures and post them all while on vacation.
(In the middle of my marathon of creating 4 of the manis in 2 hours I felt like it was a bad idea. But I think now it was a good idea. I hope you guys think it was a good idea too!)

Have a lovely day!