blog update

I just want to address something which has been bothering me for quite a long time.

I spent all morning modifying my blog to reflect the fact that I no longer only blog about nail polish as I used to. I don't think this should be a big deal, as pretty much all of the nail bloggers I know at one time or another blog about other things in their lives. It was never my intent to become solely a nail blogger in the first place.

As I was doing this, I realized... wow, yesterday was the first nail polish post I had done since January. That is such a long time and I honestly cannot believe so much time has passed. There are a few reasons for this:

First of all, at the time I made the decision to take a little bit of time off from painting my nails to give them a break because they kept breaking and no longer grew long.

Why was I even able to do this as a nail blogger? Because at some point in time, every single one of my nail polish / nail art sponsors dropped me without any explanation what so ever. I find this incredibly insulting because I have worked incredibly hard over the years to do the best I can as a nail blogger, improving my technique, and skills. I find it very unprofessional. I feel they should have at least sent me an e-mail thanking me for my past work and explaining they no longer needed my services. I also find it extremely strange this all happened at once and I for the life of me cannot tell you why this happened. I do not feel the quality of my posts changed at all, my numbers and readers hadn't dropped as far as I know. It's just strange.

The only thing I can think of which did change is at about that time I started blogging about other topics as well as nail polish.  Since then, I have of course let those new topics take over and run their course but this is mostly because I haven't felt like blogging about nail polish at all. It's no longer fun when most of the industry is filled with pictures of "perfect" nails aka Photoshopped pictures or just those with better clean up skills than mine. I won't apologize for this, as I am ever improving. I'm a work of art in myself. I do the best I can, always.

Anyway, I have made it a personal goal to get back to blogging about nail polish because of course I still love polish. At this time, however, I don't expect to review anything nail related anytime soon because for one I just don't care to. If the opportunity to do so arises, of course I will consider it. It just no longer is a top priority for me.

I am more than nail polish, and like me as an individual this blog shall continue to grow and change to reflect this.

I realize odds are most if not all of you will never read this, and that's fine. This is what is currently on my mind and sometimes we all just need to vent.

Social Media Request

Today I just have a social media request for my readers. I just need a handful more followers on my various networking platforms, and I will have more options open to me for reviewing products. That means more product reviews, and new content for my blog. If you like reading my reviews, please help support me by following me. Thank you!

Bloglovin
https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/11295419

Google+ - follow me and I'll follow back
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117333299134392422966/posts

Twitter - follow me and I'll follow back
https://twitter.com/MetalMinky315/

Thanks! <3

Tweepdash makes it easy to follow your Twitter followers!

I have nothing to disclose.

I'm working on managing my social networks a little bit better. Twitter has been an eye sore for me for a long time now. Because I was so involved with the giveaways for so long, I quickly reached the 2000 limit for how many people you can follow. (Did you even know there was a limit? I sure didn't back then!) My follows are no where near that high so obviously not everyone follows me back in return, which I find quite annoying. I understand it, but when you follow 2000 people and only 400+ follow you back, it's extremely daunting to think about how to even go about unfollowing people.. after all, Twitter doesn't exactly make it easy to tell if people are following you in return, now does it?

Fortunately, today I found Tweepdash. They make it really easy to manage your Twitter followers! Tweepdash works by linking up with your Twitter account. You will see three columns:
Celebs: "You follow them but they don't follow you back"
Fans: "They follow you, but you don't follow them back"

Friends: "You follow each other"

It's still kind of a pain to have to manually go through and unfollow people but at least this way I'm not unfollowing people who follow me! I'm sure it will get easier once I get my "Celebs" down to a more manageable number :P I did lose a couple of follows when I first started using this, but those were probably just bots. 

Now I can finally follow people again which makes me happy! I didn't like having people following me when I couldn't follow them back. Hopefully my Twitter will be much more manageable from now on as well. :)

Have a Twitter page? Please follow me and I promise to follow you in return!

https://twitter.com/MetalMinky315 

Now if I could find something similar to Facebook to make sure I'm following all of those new likes I've received from #sharethelove !! ;) 

 

Blog update

Sorry for the massive amounts of blog updates as of late.. I just wanted to post for a second and apologize for the lack of nail polish posts this past week! I'm working on cleaning up my blog a bit and doing some behind the scenes stuff to improve my blog, make it easier to navigate.. all of that fun stuff. It's taking up quite a bit of time because I do have a lot of cleaning up to do, so I will be back at it with the nail posts in a couple of days :)

I have 3 Halloween polishes to share with you (because I just got them recently) and hopefully a couple more posts for National Epilepsy Awareness Month, plus I hope to do something special for Thanksgiving.. then it's on to my favorite time of the year! Christmas manicures, woohooooo!!

Bloglovin

OK, I'm a dork. I didn't think about the fact that I could just contact Bloglovin and have them switch over my new URL. So thanks to those of you who are now following me on the new account! I have contacted Bloglovin and hopefully will get this sorted out sometime soon so I don't loose all of my old followers :)


SOOOO good lesson. If you change your URL, don't just link up to the new URL. contact Bloglovin and they will switch it for you so you don't lose your followers :P

Social media request

Please follow me on my new Bloglovin feed!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I also just updated my Facebook username:

Find me on Facebook here!

blog update

Hi guys, I just want to mention real quick that I'm going to be changing over the blog url to reflect the actual name of my blog now.. something I should have done ages ago, huh? :P

So.. I'm not vanishing on you!

Let the watermarking begin!

I've held off on watermarking most of my pictures for so long because we have Linux.. which means I can't use my beloved Photoshop and I'm stuck with using Gimp which I've found isn't very user friendly. Unfortunately, I've found quite a few pictures of mine have been used elsewhere.. some with credit, some without. I'm not going to call out anyone but I do want to mention that I will now be watermarking all of my pictures. That translates into more time spent editing pictures, which means less time to work on my actual blog, among other things. I'm not very happy about this! I'm especially not happy that some people were taking my Voxbox pictures and adding them to their own boards. Yes, with credit.. but isn't the entire point of getting the Voxbox to use your own pictures?? Maybe I'm just being over sensitive about this. But all of my photos will now be watermarked.

Blog update

I just want to mention that I switched comments over to the Google+ system. I also added the Pinterest code so now you can pin any of my pictures on there :) I'm also adding a bunch of my pictures to my Pinterest account.. something I've been slacking on :P

I should probably also update the blog layout sometime.. hmm..

Hope you like the new changes!

Here I am!

I haven't posted in awhile, so of course now I'm behind on my posts. I had a migraine every day for about a week and a half so I wasn't really doing much of anything for half of that time, the other half of the time I've been spending time with my family just relaxing and enjoying some of the nice weather. As you can see from my picture, we've been enjoying the beach at Lake Michigan quite a bit.

So anyway, I'm still around and still painting my nails. I have a few manicures to share with you soon.. as soon as I feel like blogging about it. I have one really awesome polish to share with you so I hope you'll continue to read my blog :)

Nail haul, Revlon polishes and some updates

I have nothing to disclose.

OK, so first of all.. I've been very unhappy with the quality of my pictures as of late. Thank you Narmai for suggesting I clean my camera lens (can we say duh?) I think that was part of the problem so look forward to some better quality pictures from now on!

I have a few things to blog about today, but I'm going to start with my newest polish! I had a coupon for Sinful Colors at my local Copps grocery store - just 98 cents per polish and I could use it to buy up to 8 polishes! I only bought one because their selection isn't very good.. so I just bought the one I've had my eyes on for awhile now - Cloud 9.

Speaking of my camera, Narmai also gave me some suggestions for photographing glow in the dark polish. I tried once again, but as you can see.. it just isn't happening. :( At least you can kind of see the bottle glows really well!

Anyway, I have a couple more polish pictures to show you today. I took the butterflies off my fingers a couple of days ago and I decided to play with my new Revlon polishes.

 Revlon Sugar Glaze

Revlon Mint Gelato

 These didn't quite dry correctly for some reason, so I did mess up the Sugar Glaze manicure. Oh well, it happens! These polishes were a bit thick and a bit difficult to get on easily. But, it's funny.. I went to sleep and woke up a few times trying to figure out why I kept smelling bubblegum - the polish! I'm still not sure what Mint Gelato smells like, as I'm not smelling it.

Thanks for reading :)

Remember this?

I've heard second hand, as well as after the fact, about quite a bit of drama in the nail blogging world the past few days. Several different incidents, different individuals involved. I don't know the details nor do I want to know. I don't know what's going on that has every one so edgy and attacking people but I don't think it's cool. I thought now would be a good time to step back and reflect on a promise that I and many other bloggers made several months ago. I know you still have this icon on your blogs. I hope you haven't forgotten why it's there.

Regarding giveaways..

I'm not going to post giveaways on this blog anymore. I created a new blog for doing so.. but don't expect me to keep track of everything like I used to. It got to the point where it was basically a full time job. Just too much to keep track of and it wasn't fun. I don't have much time right now for blogging as it is, but I will try to blog about some giveaways over on my new blog when I can :)

Just thought you might want to know ;)

I've been thinking about doing this for a long time now, and with Google announcing GFC is going bye - bye.. I figured now would be a good time to make this move.

http://melaniesfanciesgiveaways.blogspot.com/

I hope you'll continue to read this blog, but if not I hope to see you over on the new one as well. :)

My blog is 1 year old! Part 2

In October, Samples by Entaeyen was no more. This blog became Melanie's Fancies! I figured this was a good break to continue on with my retrospective of my manicures for the past year :)

My October Halloween nails are still two of my favorite manicures I've done!

I also showed you some of my older polishes. Here is Sally Hansen Diamond, from the Nail Prisms collection.

Speaking of SH, I won some of the Sally Hansen HD polishes and showed them off in October.

In November, I reviewed Tip Top Nails South Africa polishes, all of which you can see here. I also did my Epilepsy Awareness post.

This is my favorite Christmas manicure I did from December of course. It's also my first attempt at a braided manicure.

In January, I played around with a couple of indies.. but OH Beachcomber I still have nightmares about you being stuck on my nail... for what was it again? 2 months???

I also started doing the Pokemon nails in January!
Here are some of my favorites:
Charizard

Psyduck salt nails

my Butterfree nails

my Electabuzz nails

lastly, my sandshrew which was the last Pokemon nails I've done. Hope to get back to it soon!

I also made my first Franken this past January.

I've been doing a lot of plainer manicures as of late.. so if there's one thing I've learned from this post is that some of my favorite manicures I've done were my nail art! Guess I need to get back to it soon :)

My blog is 1 year old! Part 1

My blog is now 1 year old, so I thought I would take a look at the past year so I can see how far I've come as a nail blogger. One of the first things I'm working on is improving the functionality and layout of my blog, so adding better labels is one feature I've already started with. So now you'll see labels for individual brands and techniques and not just the default "manicures" or no label at all!

Here is my first nail polish related post, and it's also my first water marble.
From April 24, 2012: Water Marble Nails. Don't ask me what colors I used because I have no clue.. I did manage to get a couple of really pretty nails that turned out great but haha look at the last two nails. So lumpy! Now I remember why I haven't done water marbles in so long! I should definitely do more of these so I can improve my technique. Here's my second attempt. Improved technique, worse color selection!

Sadly, since I just had to cut off my nails, I think they're just about as long as they were a year ago. They're definitely healthier though!

Here's my first actual nail art, from May 9, 2012: Black Leopard Nail Art. This is still one of my favorites of all the manicures I've done.. I think I should do another some time!

Looking back at some of my early reviews, I'm cringing... I didn't even post pictures! I've come a long way, to be certain!

While we're at it.. enjoy this quote from my boyfriend from last May: "You have enough polishes to last a life time." my response at that time:  "54 polishes, a lifetime?? pah!" haha I have almost 250 now!

In June, I had my first experience with a shatter/crackle polish. Still one of my favorite crackle manis! OPI Black Shatter.

 In July, one of my favorite manicures was the one I did for Independence Day using Julep America. Looks like I'll have to break this one out again in a few months!

This is how my nails looked in July.. I can tell you right now the condition of my nails has greatly improved since then! I'll have to remember this so I can do a 1 year comparison :)

 I also got my first Voxbox in July and got to play with my first (and only) magnetic polish.

I played with loose glitter for the first time in August. I've seen a lot of similar manicures like this ever since then.

I also did my first acid wash manicure, which I loved!

In September, I got to review a couple of polishes from Monster Mixers & Elixirs! My first and only official Indie polish review.. I hope I'll be able to do more in the future, I really want to!

I'll have more to show you tomorrow so please check back then :)

I just did the unthinkable....

One of my nails broke right above the pink. Since my thumbnail was already cut back I decided to just cut them all. So you'll have to please parden my nubbs for awhile :-(
I've been getting lots of facebook comments lately about how long my nails were getting... I guess this is a good time to find out how long it takes. They are growing out healthier and stronger so I guess this will be a good chance for them to grow in even healthier?

Goodbye Hello Cotton

In case you haven't heard yet, Hello Cotton also recently announced they will be closing soon.

If you follow me on Hello Cotton, I would love it if you follow me on Bloglovin' instead. You can find all of my social network info at the sidebar on the right if you want other options as well.

How to import your Hello Cotton subscriptions to Bloglovin:
1. clear here and log into your Hello Cotton account
2. then, go back to the headlines page and click where it says download OPML file.
3. log into Bloglovin'
4. click here to go to the Bloglovin import page and then simply click on the OPML/XML button and locate your OPML file on your harddrive to upload it.

Quick and easy!

So, all things considered, I will be removing the GFC and Hello Cotton follow options from my blog tonight.

I also just want to briefly mention that I changed the comments settings on my blog because I'm tired of getting so much spam. It shouldn't effect you at all but if you have any problems feel free to head over to my Facebook page and yell at me ;)

edit: also, if there are any blogs you really love, make positive you're following them through Bloglovin'. Double check. I've already found quite a few which I *should* have been following because I followed them via GFC and for some reason I wasn't following them on Bloglovin despite importing my subscriptions :(

Don't be me... GFC update

For the past several days I've been feeling overwhelmed by this whole GFC/Bloglovin' thing. I follow over 800 blogs on GFC. I've been trying to add each of these blogs to Bloglovin' manually. Let's just say that after about doing about ten manually, I gave up. This is going to take forever!!!

Finally, today I saw some other users post. Bloglovin can import our GFC subscriptions, yay!!!!!

Go here to import your GFC reads to Bloglovin.

Follow me here.

Please continue to support my blog, thank you!

Important, please read!

First of all, if you don't know by now Google has announced that they are doing away with the Google Reader on July 1, 2013. So if you're not doing so already, I would really love it if you continue to follow my blog in some other way. You can find all of my connections on the sidebar. There are a number of options: Facebook, Twitter, Bloglovin, HelloCotton.

I personally will be slowly adding all of the blogs I follow on to Bloglovin. Fortunately for me, I already follow a lot of the blogs on Bloglovin. Ironically, I've been using Google Reader more than anything else lately, and I had planned on weeding out my Bloglovin reads.. guess I'm glad now I didn't do that yet!!

Anyway, I'm going to have my hands full with that, but also Midnight Manicures just posted something about the FTC changing their guidelines for bloggers receiving samples so if I ever have a chance I'm going to have to read that..

So, considering I've had very little computer time lately and when I did have time I just didn't feel like blogging... I'm going to have to take a hiatus from blogging. Right now I'm just going to say I'm going to take a break from posting the giveaways. I do have some other things I hope to blog about soon but right now I'm just really tired of the giveaways.. it's just not fun right now.

I hope you'll decide to continue to read and support my blog.

Thanks for understanding!

Layout update

Please pardon the layout mismatch at the moment.. I *thought* I had a header I could use here on blogger but I can't seem to find it in my folders and since I don't have ready access to my computer files, I'm going to have to see if I can make a quickie using Gimp which I haven't really used before.

(also sorry for the run on :P)

... and done editing!