12 Days of Christmas: Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?

Today's prompt for the 12 Days of Christmas Challenge is Snowmen.
Of course, being a primary school teacher I had to paint everyone's favourite snowman of the moment... Olaf!!

I used a Primark Blue Glow in the Dark Polish for this. It doesn't actually glow, but the colour is just beautiful. Although the polish is blue, it has a very subtle gold shimmer which appears in certain lights. I also added a coat of Sally Hansen Sugar Coat in Royal Icing on my index finger. Olaf is painted using acrylics.

The snowflakes were sent to me to review by Born Pretty Store. 

They arrived in a little plastic pot which was actually a lot bigger than I had expected.

They are very cute and sparkly. Because they bend easily they sat quite flat on the nail, meaning they stayed on around a day... which is longer than I manage to keep most 3D type things on my nails! I would say they are definitely worth the £2.33 they are on the website for!

Get 10% off these here or other items at the Born Pretty Store with voucher code: EHG10.

Check out the other entries to the challenge here:

An InLinkz Link-up

Glow in the Dark by Primark

A few weeks ago I bought two glow in the dark polishes in Primark. One looked yellow in the bottle but was a clear topcoat, the other was blue.
I didn't expect much from these. The blue barely glowed at all, as I expected.
But the clear topcoat was pretty impressive!

Here are my nails in 'normal' light:

I started with a base colour of Rimmel New Romantic. This was followed by a coat of the Glow in the Dark polish. Once all was dry I stamped on top using MoYou London Princess plate 08 and Rimmel Right Royal Red and topcoated with my usual Essence Quick Dry Topcoat.

Now you'll have to excuse the picture quality, photographing glow in the dark nails is so difficult!! I took around 100 pictures and this was the best I got.

But wow, I was amazed when I saw this in the dark! I did not expect it to be so bright! If you want a glow in the dark topcoat on a budget I definitely recommend this! Bargain!

Nutra Nail Gel Perfect

A few weeks ago I spotted this 'Gel' nail polish in Poundland.
It claims to be a gel which requires no UV light and dries in 5 minutes without smudging.
I was rather sceptical, so I bought it to try out. The colour I picked up was 'Ginger'.

I have kept a diary of my thoughts on the polish over the week:

Day 1:
Having just applied the polish, I found it was fairly quick and easy to apply. Basically each time you want to apply a coat of polish you have to apply a coat of activator first.
Each coat dried within about 30 seconds and once dry there was definitely no smudging despite my best efforts at scraping the polish on the side of my desk!! It is rock solid, as advertised!
The application is a little streaky, but not hugely so.

The main downside of this is the activator. Basically, it smells and feels like I am just applying super glue to my nails! I guess I could be for all I know?!
Also, neat application is key. Although I put the polish on neatly in the first place, I wanted to see how well it would clean-up. In all honestly, once it is on it seems to be staying on! So I wouldn't recommend this if you like to make a mess in application and just clean up afterwards!
I ended up with a strange sort of lump of polish on my thumbnail. Tried to clean this up with Acetone, no chance! The lump is staying for the foreseeable future!

Day 2:
OK, last night I did a quick Google on this polish and found that the activator which I said smelt like superglue literally is just nail glue. Great, I've just covered my nails in three coats of glue!

Anyway, day 2 and my nails are still looking good. No chips or tip wear.

Although, my thumb nail is missing a chunk of polish but that's my fault really... that big lumpy bit I had on my thumbnail was irritating me, so in a conference today I picked the lump off (Clearly I was having loads of fun and concentrating well!). Now it looks like I have 2 weeks worth of growth and need my nails re-doing!

Day 3.
I woke up this morning and it all went downhill!!
I haven't done anything much different to yesterday, yet my nails now look like this:

(Excuse the completely different lighting! I promise it is the same polish!)

 Also, my cuticles seem really dry. Probably because I basically applied 3 coats of superglue to my nails!

I think its safe to say I will be taking what is left off today!

This polish came off reasonable easily. It was no more difficult than a glitter polish, definitely not like removing gel.

Overall, I would not recommend this polish! Yes, it looks pretty at first, but I can get more than 2 days wear from a normal polish and the glue-like 'activator' wreaks havoc with your nail/cuticle health. Don't bother!

H&M Peachy Girl Swatches

Today I have got a review of the H&M polish, Peachy Girl.
I picked this up in their sale last week for £1, along with another H&M polish, Blue Bliss.

Here it is! 

This went on really easy and smooth, no problems. As I was applying it I thought it seemed a bit streaky, but once on the nail it seemed to smooth itself out as it dried. 

Drying time was quite fast, faster than I expected for a cheap polish, probably faster than most of the polishes I own. But not too fast that it was difficult to apply!

I did find the brush a little bit awkward to hold, as the lid of the bottle is rectangular, but the brush itself was good.

This polish lasted really well too. I wore it by itself for a day. I then painted my Yorkshire Rose nail art on top of it and kept this on for two days. When I took it off at the end of the three days there were still no chips, and hardly any wear on the tips either.

These pictures are taken with two coats, no topcoat, in natural light. It is definitely not a one coater, but two coats is perfect. You can see it is super shiny and smooth. The colour is gorgeous too, I don't own any other similar polishes either which is always good!!

Below is a picture with the two closest polishes I could find in my collection, just for comparison. On the left is OPI Where did Suzi's Man-Go, in the middle is Barry M Papaya and on the right is H&M Peachy Girl.

Overall, I really like this polish. It will definitely be well used and it is making me very tempted to buy more H&M polishes!

Sinful Colors: Savage

Anyone who follows my Facebook or Instagram will know that a few days ago I bought a new polish... Sinful Colors in the colour Savage which is a turquoise greeny colour.

I love the colour of this in the bottle and was excited to put it on my nails!

This is two coats.

But I got a shock when I put it on to find it was a matt polish. Why would they have no indication of this on bottle?! So strange! I don't own any other matt polishes as I always think if I want it matt, I will use a matt topcoat! I do prefer the colour of the polish in matt though. When I put topcoat on it seemed much greener.

As always, I added some nail art on top of this. I really wanted to try a tribal/aztec type design as I thought the colour lent itself to this, but at the same time I really didn't as my only ever previous attempt at this type of art was horrendously bad! If you REALLY want to you can see it here. But I'd really rather you didn't!!

So I decided to have a go but to try and keep it fairly simple and this is how it turned out! I used white acrylic paint for the pattern.

I actually quite like it. My lines are fairly straight and its not too busy! My right hand is not appearing today as I discovered I can't paint straight lines left handed! Although, I still think it's better than the previous attempt!!

I did try to add some glitter  to the stripes on one nail using Pretty Scatter effect polish, which I wish I hadn't done but apart from that I am pleased with it!

A little girl at the school I work at today told me my thumb and little finger looked like they had Christmas tree's on them!! I can see where she was coming from but no, they are not christmas trees!!

Neon Pink Sinful Colours

Today I bought my first Sinful Colours Polish, in Cream Pink, which is actually a gorgeous neon.

The photo's are two coats. I love how bright this polish is, and its such a lovely shade of pink. So summery, perfect for today! It went on nice and easy. Was touch dry very quickly, but I soon realised it wasn't completely dry underneath when I managed to smudge my thumb!

  On my accent finger I did a layer of Barry M Diamond Glitter, followed by a coat of Barry M Crystal Glaze. I managed to get this amazing macro of this nail and it looks so good!! Unless you look really close it just looks glittery but I love the detail in this picture!

Jess Polish Review

Today I bought new nail polish!! Standard Saturday!
I'm just going to tell you about one of them at the moment, which I tried out this afternoon.

This Poundland 'Jess' polish. I was just looking at what colours they had and I fell in love with a purple polish called Madison. I'm not usually a big purple lover, therefore don't have many purple polishes, so I thought 'why not!'. My biggest issue with this polish was it's inability to appear the right colour in photo's!

This first photo I edited, to try and make the nails look the colour they actually are!! My skin is not actually this yellow, it's a side-effect of the editing!

They definitely are not this blue at all, I tried several camera's and several different intensities of light to take the photo's too, but no luck... just imagine they are the same colour as above!!

I absolutely loved this polish! One thick-ish coat was enough to fully cover my nails. I began adding a second coat to some nails, out of habit, but realised I could tell no difference whatsoever, so I stopped again! As you can see, the colour is really intense, even in just one coat. It went on so easily and smoothly too! I can't stop stroking my nails, as they have not been so smooth in such a long time! 

 I love how super shiny the finish is too! These pictures are without topcoat and they look so good. This polish also dried really fast. By the time I had finished one coat, they were dry enough to add a second coat straight away, so this mani literally took me 5 mins! Although, I do think this dried so fast, it might cause problems if you like to take your time painting your nails and it would not be very good for stamping.

All in all, I would definitely recommend this polish. Well done Poundland! I think I might be going back tomorrow to pick up a few more, as it is much better than some of the big brand polishes I have, and all for £1!

Feather Effect Pretty Polish

A few weeks ago I reviewed this glitter 'pretty' polish from Poundland. I was surprisingly impressed with the results and wanted to try more of their polishes.

So I bought two more:

• The first is a purple feather effect polish, with long pieces of purple, white and silver glitter.
• The second is a scatter effect polish. A white base with blue, pink and red pieces of glitter in.

First, I tried the feather effect polish. I used a Barry M Matt White base coat on the thumb, middle and little fingers. On the ring and index fingers I used Sally Hansen Grape Race. I then painted the feather effect onto just two of my nails. 

The first picture is the most true to colour. This mani was incredibly hard to photograph to get the full effect of the polish. Again, I was impressed with this polish, considering what it costs. It was easy to apply, with a nice even spread of the feather pieces. The different coloured pieces within it created a pretty effect, which seemed less flat, as they were not all the same. I used two coats to get a nice, thick coverage of the feathers, but I think this would look even better with more coats. The only downside of this polish was drying time. It took an awfully long time to dry compared with most polishes. Even once it was touch dry, it was still extremely easy to smudge for a long time afterwards. I ended up making a complete mess of my left hand!

Overall, I am again impressed with the 'pretty' polishes and will definitely consider buying more.