Essie Smooth Sailing and XL B

Good morning, Dear Reader!

For today I tried out Essie Smooth Sailing, one of Essie's Summer 2011 releases.  It's a really pretty kind of slate blue with a great shimmer, and it applied very well and only took two coats.  I bought this bottle at a retail store, and it's weird to have an Essie without a label on the bottom (it's on the top of the bottle), but what's weirder is that there's not a capital letter to be found on it.  It's as if it comes from Essie's e.e. cummings Collection.

I used Smooth Sailing after a chop to even my nails out again, which it's no secret I hate doing.  As has become the custom, I used a full nail pattern I couldn't normally use to perk myself up a bit and take advantage of shorter nails.  I tried to get a picture of Smooth Sailing for you alone, but I had to use artificial light and the polish looks distinctly bright blue in every single one, so they're no good - the inclusion of any one of them would just make this post confusing as to what the polish really looks like.

The pattern I used to stamp them is from Chez Delaney's plate B from the XL series, one of the plates with great big tip patterns.  I'd decided to use Konad White Pearl Special Polish for the stamping, and the reason I first stopped at this pattern was that I thought it could look like waves in water if I used it sideways.  When I looked at it sideways to evaluate that idea, I realized it's a series of S's, which sealed the deal on that choice since it would give me heavily monogrammed nails.  The pattern is the one on XL B that looks like this, only sideways...

Essie Smooth Sailing with Chez Delaney XL B

The pretty shimmer shows in the bottle, and it's not hard to see in the plain polish on the nail, which was the failed set of pictures.  So now I have wavy, monogrammed nails while I adjust to them.  You know, the big thing that I just wait out after a chop is that since the actual tips of my fingers, on the very top of them, usually never touch anything since there's normally a great big talon in the way, they're uncomfortably sensitive after a chop.  If it were purely aesthetic, it wouldn't bother me that much - otherwise they get cut off, they grow back, and any chronological set of pictures of my nails looks like a flip book of nails growing as a result, but none of that's an especially big deal.

That's just about all I have for you today, Dear Reader.  Until next time, love and nail polish to you!