Birthday Haul & Optical Mixing Fail

 First off, I WON A GIVEAWAY. WOO. My first ever giveaway :D Many many thanks to the lovely Fingers (who is also having a blog sale)! Super excited about that :D

So. I figured I'd follow up my birthday mani with some pics of what I spent some birthday moolah on (despite my birthday now being a month ago LOL).
I'm not sure how I failed to realise that the one drug store chain I never visit in town was the one with the BEST SELECTION, carrying brands that I thought I couldn't get here. However, this has been rectified. First trip:


You know what the *best* part of that trip was?

I hate how the sale stickers are a bright, unsightly orange... like being on sale is a BAD THING! Look at those beauties. My first OPIs, half price. My first Sinful Colors. My first Milanis (my mother actually slipped BOTH of them into my basket). My first LA Colors. And see those tiny little tubes on the end? Those were discounted down to 99 cents per pack of two (which also came with a stamping plate)!! I went back the next day after trying them out with my Konad plates, and got 4 more. They work beautifully, they're 99 cents and they come with themed plates! The only downside is that the plates were meant to be used with some sort of machine type system, and most of the designs are in two or three parts on the plate. But really, $0.99 for 2 nail colors and a plate, WHO CARES. I can just brush up on my alignment skills :D

And now for some nail art, because there needs to be some of that:

It kind of failed. It kind of didn't. Really depends how you define "failed".
First off, you know it's time to file your nails when they're too long for the stamping design LOL.  This is L'Oreal Yellow Seahorse as a base color, and Konad Special Purple on top. Yellow Seahorse is a nice warm yellow with gold fleck glitter (?) that sometimes shows a tiny bit of orangey-pinkish, but that could just be weird lighting on my end. Normally I'm not a huge fan of yellows, but this one was *super pretty*.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T TELL. I covered it up too much! :( Plus, after I don't know how many years of art classes, I totally forgot about optical mixing. For those unsure of what that is, it's when your eye blends colors together to create new colors. Wiki article here on pointilism which made use of the effect, and also this guy, "Lucas", a portrait by Chuck Close. Chuck has some phenomenal work involving optical mixing with portraits.
ANYWAY. I was going for high contrast, and thought that purple and yellow would contrast well. I was right. However, because of the colors and *especially* because of the stamping design I chose, the colors blended and just looked brown (or, as it was repeatedly pointed out, my nails looked like popcorn). Not sure how I feel about that. But anyway, here it is in all its glory :)

I've spent about 4 hours, no joke, getting more and more frustrated with the pictures on here. Anyone else have that problem? I've given up trying to left-align my text, it seems like a lost cause. Photobucket apparently hates Blogger, so that doesn't work. :(


<3Oreo