Pretty Peacocks

I recently received a long awaited order from Born Pretty Store which I have been waiting for since September!
I bought two of their new stamping plates and had to try one out!

This is Born Pretty Plate 04 'Dancing Peacock'. This plate has some lovely images on it. It is well engraved and my stamper had no problems picking up the details of the image.

I started with a base of George Natural White on my middle and ring fingers, with Revlon Aquamarine on my index and pinky fingers. I then stamped the peacock using Sinful Colors Kissy and added a Born Pretty green stud to my index finger. I felt the bottom of my ring finger needed something so I created a glitter gradient with H&M Blue bliss, also adding this on top of my pinky finger. I finished with a coat of Barry M Diamond over my middle, ring and little fingers to give a bit of sparkle. :)

Use code EHG10 to get 10% off these and other items at the Born Pretty Store.

Silver Rose

With Christmas in the pipeline I am starting to introduce a bit more sparkle into my mani's, christmassy without being full-on!

For this mani I used Ciaté Boudoir and Ciaté Fit for a Queen as christmassy colours. Then to tone it down I used my MoYou London Mother Nature Collection Plate 01 to stamp the rose. The Ciaté polsih didn't stamp too well so I ended up painting over most of it again to make the colour stand out! I then finished with a matte topcoat by Jess Polish.

I really like how this turned out. I don't wear silver polish very often, but I really like this one. Just a shame the red isn't more opaque so that black stain didn't show through.

This could easily get away with being a Valentines mani, 3 months early!!

Born Pretty Haul

The postman came this morning with my latest order from the Born Pretty Store. :)

It's so long since I ordered it that I couldn't remember what I had ordered, making it more exciting!!

Looks like Blogger has decided to start rotating my pictures itself again. Annoying!

4 sets of pretty water decals. :) I am excited to use the Panda's! No idea what for, but they are super cute!

Black and White Stamping Polish. 

I used to have no problems using my Barry M Matte White for stamping but recently I haven't been able to get it to work, so I bought these to see if they are any easier to use. Hopefully I'll be testing them out soon! 

And a cuticle pusher. I generally just leave my cuticles alone. Or use my other nails to push them! But I figured I should start doing it properly!

I also ordered a '3 Item Lucky Bag'. I didn't expect much from this! I actually got 4 items though and 2 of them I will definitely use. 1, maybe, the last, no way! Unless it fits in with a fancy dress theme somehow!!

I got this cute stamping plate with little japanese (?!) characters on.

Some Water Decals. On the left are butterflies, on the right are cobwebs. The butterflies will defo get used and the cobwebs will be perfect for Halloween!

These false nails. I can honestly say I will never, ever wear these! Not my thing at all! If anybody would like to swap these for something feel free to get in touch!

Not sure what to call these... Nail Decorations?! I like the Hello Kitty ones, they are cute and will definitely be worn at some point. Although I'm not sure how I would attach them, or how long they would last. The bows would be nice if they didn't have the dangly bits. I might wear them. Or I might try and pull the danglies off first!! Haha!

All in all I'm quite impressed with this lucky bag. For 60p I have got 3 things I will probably use. Not bad! I'm quite impressed  too that they have looked at what else I have ordered. All of my order was for nail things, so they have only sent me nail things in the lucky bag.

St Patricks Day Nails

Tomorrow is St Patrick's Day (and my birthday!), so I thought some appropriately themed nails were in order!! I also wanted to use these as my Tri-Polish Tuesday Nails. I know its only Sunday, but I rarely have time to do them on a Tuesday, so I've tried to stick with Purple and Green, two of the colours for the challenge this month.

The top picture is the closest to the real colours, the next two are without flash and the one right above this is with flash. The green I used is Sally Hansen Kiwi Bikini and the purple is Barry M Silk in Heather. I then used Kiwi Bikini again to freehand a clover onto the purple nail.

 I also had another fight with one of my new, disappointing BornPrettyStore stamping plates! This time I tried to stamp a rainbow. I tried with a white and a black Barry M polish but neither of these would work with the plates, even though they both work fine with my MoYou plates. So I ended up using a No.17 dark silver, as this was the only colour that worked. It doesn't show up very well on this coloured nail though, so below I have included a close-up for you!

Galaxy Nails: Tri Polish Tuesday

This week for Tri Polish Tuesday I tried something I've wanted to try for a while but never gotten around to... Galaxy nails! And I remembered to post it on the Tuesday!!!
After looking at a few galaxy mani's online I thought Blue, Green and Purple were the perfect colours to use for galaxy nails so I found a sponge and went for it!

I used Barry M Black Multi glitter as the background colour, then blended Sally Hansen Kiwi Bikini, an unnamed purple shimmer Animal Polish and an unnamed electric blue H&M polish.  I then used a BornPretty stamping plate to stamp stars onto my nails using another unnamed Animal polish in silver. Finally, I used a Kiss glitter polish as a topcoat to add a bit more sparkle.

I love this mani and it was so easy to do! Even better, its completely impossible to reproduce exactly the same!

Bows and Lace - Very late Tri Polish Tuesday!

This design was done earlier this week for the Tri Polish Tuesday Challenge, I'm just a little late posting! This months colours are Blue, Purple and Green, so this week I'm just using Purple and Blue.

After my delivery last week I was desperate to try my new stamping plates. So I did a base of Barry M Silk in Heather and decided to stamp some cute lace designs over it.
I do quite a lot of stamping with my MoYou plates, and usually they work pretty well, I like to think I'm not bad at stamping! But this was so difficult! I tried a few of the different lace designs and the stamper really didn't pick the patterns up very well off the plates. I'm not sure if it was the plates or the polish (Maybelline Dark Denim) I was trying to use but it just wasn't working. :(
So I decided on a bow across my nails instead, which was a much simpler design. This was a little easier and did work to an extent. It just didn't seem up to the same quality, they were a bit hit and miss, some bows came out really well whilst others were patchy and had bits missing.

I know I should have expected this when they were so cheap but I didn't think they would be this bad. I'm going to have another go at some point with a different polish which I know usually works well for stamping but I don't have too high hopes any more. I'm also hoping some of the other stamps are a bit better.
Hopefully the water decals will be more successful too!!

Born Pretty Haul

A few weeks ago I first came across the Born Pretty store. I had heard of this before but never actually though to look at it. Boy, have I been missing out!!
I could not believe how cheap you can get things on there, so I went a little crazy!!

I absolutely love my MoYou stamping plates and have been thinking of getting some more for a while, but I can't afford to spend £5 on one plate at the moment. So I was amazed to see that I could get plates for approx £1!! I got a little over excited and bought 6! Hopefully they will be as good as MoYou's.

I also invested in some water decals. I have never used these before but they looked so pretty, I couldn't resist buying some, so I got 3 packs of them. Two sets of flowery ones and a set of feathers. Hopefully they will be easy to use and last well, but we'll see!

I haven't had chance to use any of these yet as they just arrived, but I'm sure they will be featuring again on my blog soon! The only downfall of this website is the time things take to come. It took exactly 4 weeks between ordering and arriving. Not that you can complain when delivery is free, but I was starting to worry they would not arrive! I will definitely be ordering from here again though, probably soon!!

Dandelions

So today I've got an old mani for you. This one's from the beginning of January, it was very cute but I'm afraid I only have one good picture, so it's going to be a short but sweet post today!
Here it is:

This is the Maybelline Dark Denim polish #630, then I used Barry M Matt White to stamp the dandelions, using the MoYou Pro Plate #04. The colour is much closer to the top picture in real life, but I wanted to include the zoomed version as it shows the stamping so much clearer. :)

My nails are such a perfect length on this picture, I wish they could always be this long and never snap!!

Valentines Nails

I'm sure everyone agrees, Valentines day is the perfect time to make your nails so pretty! And there's so many cute patterns and colours you can use for that gorgeous girly look!

Here are my Valentines Nails for this year:

 

To do these I used Barry M, Matt White as the base coat and Rimmel's Urban Purple for the stamping. For the stamps I use MoYou's Mother Nature Landscape Plate 01 and Princess Collection 08.

I think these are really cute! It's not very often I have different patterns on each nail as I tend to think it looks too busy, but I really like this combination of patterns together.