My Very First Swap! China Glaze Shaken Not Stirred...

A lovely board member from The Netherlands and I recently exchanged some polishes and one of my lemmings was fulfilled...China Glaze Shaken Not Shirred. This shimmery polish is perfect for summer. I used a coat of white polish underneath as a base to hopefully make the colour pop-as I've never used the polish before, don't know if the results did it or not?

(Feel free to click on image for larger image-view cuticles at your own risk!)

After a couple of pictures, I topped with one thin coat of OPI ds Shimmer-holy smokeys-the sparkle is soooo cool! No manicure is complete until stamped-at least in my world! I didn't want to use a stamp that would cover the fantasticness (is that a word?) of this layering and sparkle, and was eyeing this stamp and design for a while but chicken to try it would as I would think it would not be forgiving if slightly not just so...and I was right. This is Amisy fauxnad D02.

(this was taken in full sun)

(Cause the sparkles made it difficult for the camera to focus, I took a pix in the shade just to capture the stamping a little better.)

Now I've had plenty of nail fails with stamping and those who do it knows it takes a bit of practise to line up and place the stamp where you want up. I nailed the first stamp -perfectly centered and straight in thumb...but ....it went downhill from there. Thank goodness you can use hand santizer immediately after swatching to remove stamp with no ill affect to the polish underneath! (A couple of nails I removed stamp a couple of times until it was just so and lined up decently. Priceless information for anyone not doing this already!) Stamped using Konad special polish in Royal Purple. I was happy with the end result of the stamping with them lining up pretty good and centered on the nail.

All in all, I was thrilled with how this sparkly mani turned out! Loved using ds shimmer for sparkly topcat-which was the first time -and am sure there will be many more mani's using it!

Thanks for looking!