Manicures with Friends Part 2: Tot's Dots

The most recent hand model for Rouge Required is my friend Tatiana. We call her Tot or Tater Tot as nicknames, thus Tot's Dot's. She wanted something that she wouldn't do for herself, and we were having trouble deciding which polishes to use, so we used several of the top choices for this 'dotticure'. 
*Products shown below were either purchased by me or received in a trade with one of the other members on makeuptalk.com. I am not affiliated with nor compensated by any of the brands mentioned in this post.*

 

I first painted Tot's nails with a base coat of Orly Bonder, then two coats of Essie Play Date. I applied Poshe quick-dry top coat before creating the dots.

The dots were created with my Martha Stewart dotting tools that I bought at Michael's. These photos are before I applied a final coat of Poshe over the dots, indoors under artificial light. If you choose to do a similar manicure, I recommend waiting longer than you think you need to before applying the last top coat. The dots are thicker than a normal coat of polish, so they tend to smear if you top coat them too soon.

The polishes used for the dots:

Blue--Essie In the Cab-ana

Green--Essie First Timer

Lavender--Julep Renee

Purple glitter--Zoya Aurora

*Products shown above were either purchased by me or received in a trade with one of the other members on makeuptalk.com. I am not affiliated with nor compensated by any of the brands mentioned in this post.*

Photos of Zoya Aurora

Zoya is my favorite brand of nail polish so far (there are many brands yet for me to try). They recently had a deal where you could buy 3 polishes from their website for 'free', and just pay $10.00 for shipping/handling. Since the polish usually retails for $8.00 each, it sounded like a sweet deal to me. I took advantage of the opportunity, of course, to get my latest most-wanted polish, Aurora.

Isn't she beautiful? Aurora is a red-leaning purple with gorgeous holographic sparkles. I used 3 coats for full opacity.

I couldn't completely capture the beauty, but as you can see by the amount of photos, I kept trying.

Bright sun and a little blurring helped to show off the holographic sparkle below, on my thumbnail.

 It appears darker and bluer in the shade, but the sparkle is still intense.

Ah, still lovely in artificial light, as shown above. The artificially lit photo shows the true color quite well, at least on my computer's monitor.

Aurora is from Zoya's Ornate Collection. Check it out here: http://www.zoya.com/content/38/category/Zoya-Ornate-Winter-Holiday-Nail-Polish-Collection.html. My other favorites from this collection are Blaze and Logan.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite nail polish brand? I have heard that Deborah Lippmann and Butter London are fabulous, but I have yet to try them. You will read about it when I do; I own several, they are just Untrieds.