Serum No. 5 swatches & review - Pink Peonies, Shrinking Violet, and Poppy Fields

Hey guys! Today I have swatches of three Serum No. 5 polishes to show you. I got these three a few weeks ago along with two of her awesome glow-in-the-dark polishes, and I decided to break them into two different posts because they deserve it!

Serum No. 5 Pink Peonies is a sheer pink base filled with a heavy gold shimmer and white, pink, and holographic hex glitter. This was a little more sheer than I was expecting, so this swatch is four coats (with one coat of Seche Vite). Usually I get grouchy with polishes that take more than three coats, but the Serum No. 5 brushes are really nice (fairly wide and flat) and the formula was very easy to work with, so application was a breeze.

I love how dainty and girly this looks, and the holographic hexes (impossible to capture on camera of course) made it so sparkly in real life!

Serum No. 5 Shrinking Violets is a milky, very light lavender base filled with gold shimmer and purple and blue hex glitter. This one was also more sheer than I thought it would be, so I used four coats for opacity (with one coat of Seche Vite for smoothness), but application was equally as easy as Pink Peonies because the formula was so nice.

This is my surprise favorite of these three polishes. It bothered me at first because some of the larger purple hexes are slightly curled (as you can see in the photos), but with topcoat the polish is totally smooth and you don't notice a lot of the curling, especially in the glitter that's buried under the milky base. I love how delicate and pretty this polish is! It (and Pink Peonies) would both make good layering polishes, too.

Serum No. 5 Poppy Fields is a red jelly with black and gold circle glitter and red circle, hex, and square glitter. Circle glitter! This swatch shows four coats plus a coat of Seche Vite. The application was a little more troublesome than with the other two polishes, I think maybe because it's thinner and the glitter is bigger - I had to work a little harder to get the glitter where I wanted it, but it wasn't too bad.

I really wanted to love this polish, but I just can't. The red base isn't quite enough to build up on its own - with four coats you can still see a little VNL in person - but since it's so red, it's hard to layer it over a color that makes the base look nice while still keeping the glitter visible.

The main thing that made me dislike this polish, though, is the curling glitter. Some of it is reflective curling, but some of it is real curling, and a lot of the glitter seems to be affected by it. The curling was more obvious in person than it is in these pictures.

I tried it over black on my thumb to see if I'd like it more that way. It definitely looks cool! If you like the look of sheer jellies like this and don't mind some curling glitter, you'll love this polish. It just isn't for me!

You can get Serum No. 5 polishes from their website or Etsy store. Every month, they make a charitable donation in an amount equal to 20% of their profits from polishes sold, which I think is so nice!

My picks are Pink Peonies and Shrinking Violet. What do y'all think?

Products in this post were provided for review.

The Digit-al Dozen Bling Week day 5 - glitter polka dots and chains nail art

Hey everyguys, happy Friday! We've reached the final day of Bling Week and I'm actually a little sad about it. I wish I had done more of my manis in advance this time only because I ended up loving them all so much that I wanted to wear them for more than a day. Luckily I get to wear the nails I'm showing y'all today as looooong as I want (so like... two days instead of just one haha!)

I knew that for one of the days this week, I wanted to use chains. I've had a package of chain that I got at the craft store sitting around for a really long time just waiting to be glued to my nails, and I figured that Bling Week was the perfect excuse for it. I didn't really have an idea of what I wanted to do WITH the chains, though... I thought about stripes or florals, but that just didn't seem right for some reason.

Then last night as I was preparing to start on these, I thought about doing polka dots in loose gold glitter  to match the chains and got pretty irrationally excited about it. My semi-OCD brain didn't want to use the same thing twice for bling week, and I already used loose glitter, but I couldn't think of anything else that made me as excited so I just went for it.

I started with Maybelline Turquoise Paradise, another color I picked up from the summer LE collection that I'm pretty much in love with - I'm doing a swatch post of all three colors soon, so I'll talk about it more in depth then (spoiler alert: I wanna wear this color all the time forever).


I applied a coat of clear polish and used an orange stick to place the loose glitter as I usually do. This was actually the easy part - it took me a minute or less per nail to place the glitter. It's so much easier when you aren't Tetrising it together like I did in my other glitter mani this week!

The part that was surprisingly difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating was gluing the chains on. I pre-cut pieces of chain off using little scissors before I even started painting my nails so that I wouldn't have to do it when my nails were wet and risk ruining them and crying forever. After I finished the glitter on each nail, I put a drop of nail glue at my cuticle and used an orange stick to spread it around a little. I ended up flooding the cuticles on several of my fingers with nail glue, but it came off pretty easy with acetone.

I used tweezers to place the chains, and doing that was a lot harder than I had anticipated because the chain kept kinking up and twisting around and individual links would stick up weird and it was just kind of the WORST. I think it was more annoying because I had expected it to be super easy, but it had a steeper learning curve than I thought it would. After a few nails, though, I kinda got the hang of it. My left hand took me probably 40 minutes to finish the glitter and chains, but my right hand took under 20!

Look ma! Both hands! I'm super happy with the way both of my hands came out, except for one tiny thing... a rogue piece of glitter managed to attach itself to my right ring finger and I didn't notice until I was already in the process of topcoating over it haha. Oh well.

Even though these were a little more difficult than I thought they'd be, I am basically obsessed with the result. I don't know what it is about these, but I can't stop looking at them! What do you guys think?

The Digit-al Dozen Bling Week day 4 - tri-color glitter gradient with Shimmer Polish

Hi friends! We're almost to the end of Bling Week and today I have a ridiculously sparkly tri-color glitter gradient manicure to show y'all. This will be another post that's relatively light on the text portion since I've once again found myself with way too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. The good part is that it's mostly because we're going to the mountains this weekend so I've been getting ready for that, so... I can't really complain. :)

On to the nails!

Last night I got started on my nails pretty late, so I was like, what can I do for maximum blingage but (relatively) minimum time expenditure? GLITTER GRADIENTS, of course! My next thought, of course, was how I could make them cooler than usual and also a little more time-consuming than regular glitter gradients. TRIPLE GLITTER GRADIENTS, OF COURSE!

As soon as I had the idea I knew I wanted to use all Shimmer Polishes for the gradients because they are all awesome and sparkly and perfect. I pulled a few out and started trying to figure out a color combo I liked. These three colors weren't in the initial running at all - I never would have even considered them together, but when I had all my options side-by-side I fell in love with the way these looked together.

I started with two and a half-ish coats of Shimmer Polish Sarah, a complex mix of glitter that reads mostly teal. Then using the polish brushes, I did the gradient in Shimmer Polish Karen and Shimmer Polish Carmen. Karen (the purple) wasn't popping quite as much as I wanted it to, so I dabbed on a bit of Shimmer Polish Vicki (a mix of holographic and lots of shapes and sizes of pink glitter) over it to make it stand out a little more. When I was done I thought it might need a little something extra (because there wasn't enough sparkle or something? Am I a crazy person?) so I added three black rhinestone hearts from Born Pretty Store to each nail. I finished with two coats of Seche Vite to smooth everything out.

I think I might be in love with these.

Here's Sarah on her own. Ugh, can you guys even handle the sparkle? My camera literally couldn't.

Aaaand here are all the polishes I used! From right to left: Sarah, Karen, Vicki, Carmen. Please enlarge this picture and drool all over the glitter. You'll thank me later.

These didn't take very long at all and I seriously LOVED the outcome. They were so thick though haha! All those layers of glitter and topcoat really added up. I felt like I had gel nails or acrylics on. It didn't bother me, though, because they were so smooth and shiny and not lumpy at all! What do you guys think of these?

Products in this post were provided for review.

The Digit-al Dozen Bling Week day 3 - nail art with loose glitter

Happy Wednesday, my loves! We're halfway through Bling Week and today I have some mega-glittery nails to show y'all. I'm not gonna be too wordy tonight because I have so much to do, but I have plenty of pretty pictures!

I had about a million ideas for bling week since I'm kind of obsessed with all things sparkly, but last night when I was about to start my nails I had the idea to do these diamond patterns and little flowers with glitter and then I couldn't get it out of my head so I just went for it.

The base is Lime Crime Milky Ways, which I love because I can't get enough off-white polishes in my life. I like how this one has a verrrry soft pink tone. This is three coats and it was still slightly streaky after the third, but I knew I'd be covering most of it with glitter so I didn't really worry about it.

When my base polish was dry I put a coat of clear polish on one nail at a time and used an orange stick to place the glitter. I messed up my middle nail the first time I did it, so I had to do that one TWICE, which I was not happy about. Otherwise I'm pretty much in love with these. The only bummer is that when I topcoated, it sort of pulled the milky polish color over the glitter in a streaky fashion... you can hardly tell at all in real life, but of course the close-up pictures reveal EVERY FLAW.

Oh well, though. Sometimes these things happen!

Also, before you guys leave comments about how long this must have taken and how much patience I must have, I'll just tell you that it really didn't take that long! Maybe 30-40 minutes, which isn't bad considering the amount of time I've spent on my nails in the past haha. Doing hand-placed glitter like this always looks mad time consuming but once you get rolling it's kind of just methodical and quick.

That's all for today! What do y'all think?

The Digit-al Dozen Bling Week day 2 - floral, framed and studded nail art

Hey loves! It's day 2 of bling week and today I have some nails that aren't sparkly, but I'd definitely still qualify them as blingy.

The day before I did these, I got a package in the mail from KKcenterHK with round studs and these 3D acrylic floral ovals (that sounds weird but I have no idea what to call them!). I really wanted to use them together and I thought they'd be perfect to include with the theme this week.

Originally I wanted to do the floral ovals on my ring fingers and then frame the rest of my nails with round studs, but the package didn't have enough studs in it for me to do that. It had probably 40-50, which I thought was just because it was a sample sent for review, but when I just checked the website the listing was for a package of ~50 studs.


The studs are nice quality and I was surprised by how much I loved the way they look. The only drawback is how small the package is - I mean, I need a lot of studs, okay? I also would have expected a lot more for the price ($4.23), especially considering how many studs/rhinestones come in the packs sold on other websites.

I started with a base of three coats of Maybelline Poolside, which is a beautiful super-light blue that's part of the summer LE collection. I framed my two middle nails using a striper brush and China Glaze Secret Peri-wink-le, and I framed my pointer and pinky by painting the darker blue on top of the lighter blue (sort of like a ruffian) and then adding a French tip. I've never tried that way of framing before, but I definitely prefer it... it's a lot easier and less anxiety-inducing.

I added a layer of clear polish to my middle and pinky fingers and stuck the studs into that while it was still tacky. I used nail glue to attach the acrylic oval to my ring finger. I love the way this looks SO much! The only problem was that 2 came in the package but one was pretty unusable (at least for me)... the top was sort of melted down and cloudy and it probably wouldn't have been noticeable from a difference, but it really bothered me.

See what I mean? The one on the right is the one I used, and the one on the left was the wonky one.

I freehanded the floral design on my pointer finger to echo the acrylic floral. I kind of want to do a whole mani with that design!

I don't know why, but I completely fell in love with these nails and I was pretty sad at the prospect of only being able to wear them for a day. Once the studs started popping off I wasn't as bummed to change them, but I still wish I could have worn them a little longer!

I do really like both the round studs and the 3D acrylic floral ovals that I got from KKcenterHK, but I was disappointed with the quality of the acrylic ovals and I don't really think that a package of this few studs is worth the price. I can imagine that my wonky oval might have been a fluke, but I'm not positive about that. If you want to order from KKcenterHK you can use my discount code DRESSEDUPNAILS for 10% off!

What do you guys think of these?