Rosey Stripes

Hey!
Unfortunately I'm having to rely on false nails this week. I went climbing with my dad yesterday and so I had to cut all my nails short, otherwise they would have been broken anyway.

I really really love how these turned out though and I hope they last and don't all pop off tomorrow!!

I used some striped falsies from Primark to start and a plain white false nail on my index fingers. Then I painted the index fingers pink using George 'Raspberry Forest'. I dug out some old Born Pretty decals I had which matched the pink polish and added a few of these to jazz up the mani a bit! 

Lilac Chevrons

Sorry I haven't been around much since completing the 31 Day Challenge. After all that I needed a bit of a break! Plus I seem to have been really busy.
I have still been painting my nails regularly (though not every day!), just not blogging, so now I have a few posts to catch up on.

The first is this simple stamped chevron design.

I used Barry M Matte White as my base colour and stamped the chevrons with MUA Frozen Yoghurt and Born Pretty Store plate QA91.

Remember, you can get 10% of anything from Born Pretty Store using discount code: EHG10.

I was pleased with how clean the lines were from the stamping, as I was uncertain whether vinyls would have been a better purchase. Vinyls would have been much more fiddly so I am glad this plate stamps well!

31DC: Recreate a Favourite Blogger

I can honestly say I don't have one single favourite blogger. There are a handful of favourites. So I spent some time looking through them all to find a mani that I felt like recreating!

In the end I decided on this vintage rose mani by Gianna @NailStorming.

I was really pleased with how this turned out. It is the sort of style that I always wore when I first got into nail art just over a year ago, though it's not a look I wear very often anymore! In fact, on 20/1/14 I created a very similar mani using two of the same polishes which later became my first blog post. If you are interested you can find that here, though I'll warn you now, the photography is horrendous!

I used Barry M Blueberry Ice Cream as the base colour. The spots and stripes were painted with a white Nail Art Pen from Migi Nail Art. For the roses I used several pinks: Sally Hansen Pinch of Punch, Sally Hansen Fuschia Flare, Ciaté Strawberry Milkshake and white acrylic paint as well as Models Own Emerald Green for the leaves.

Why not have a look at some of the others amazing recreation's below:

31DC: Tape Mani

The prompt for day 2 is 'tape mani'.
I do love tape nail art, but very rarely have success doing them myself. However, I think today's was one of my more successful attempts and I really like how it turned out. :)

I used two Colour Couture polishes, which I got as part of a Christmas present: Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

I love the black polish, it has the perfect hint of gold shimmer.

Rocky Horror Nail Art

It's time for the Llama Nails challenge again! This week the promp is Cult movies/books.

I have based this mani on a film which is amazing, but the show is even better!!

It's The Rocky Horror Picture Show!! I hope you can tell from the nails!

These are defo not as good for real as they were in my head! I just could not get the corner of the lips right, or the teeth, although I am pleased with my use of striping tape.

I used Ciaté Boudoir and Barry M Matte White. The black is acrylic paint, as I am visiting my parents for a few weeks and couldn't bring my entire collection! I also topped two nails with L'Oreal Confetti in Amour and used striping tape to create a fishnet look on the index finger. I finished with a few dabs of Rimmel Space Dust in Aurora on the ring finger.

Check out the other amazing entries in the challenge:

An InLinkz Link-up

Africa Inspired: Tiger Nails

Next Saturday I am going out to Africa, to teach in a school out there. So this week I wanted to do a few mani's inspired by Africa, as its a good excuse to Google pictures and get myself even more excited!!

But yesterday my bf came home with a new polish he had bought me :) He really liked the colour and was desperate for me to try it out. I thought, maybe I'll see tigers on safari, they're orange! So I went for a Tiger mani. I have since found out that tigers tend not to live in Africa, so I probably won't see one but shh! We'll just forget about that!

I started off with my new Sally Hansen Nail Nutrition base coat. I'll be doing a review of this in a few weeks, once I've been using it long enough to see how well it works! I then did two layers of Rimmel Golden Hour. This didn't really need two coats as it covered really well with just one, but I did another anyway, out of habit really. Then I sponged a little Barry M Matt White onto my thumb and ring finger, to create those little white patches tigers have! Next, I got a thin striping brush and freehanded some stripes on using Barry M Black. I didn't want these to be too neat and tidy, as that wouldn't be realistic! Finally, I finished off with a Barry M topcoat on the Thumb and ring finger. The Rimmel polish is so nice and shiny I didn't really need topcoat on the other nails.

I didn't think I'd say this when I first saw it, but I really like the colour of this polish. In some lights it's a vibrant orange, but as you move your hands, there's a lovely gold shimmer to it which isn't immediately obvious but makes its very pretty! You can just about see this on my little finger in the below picture.

My First Tri Polish Tuesday

So a few days ago I was looking around for nail challenges to take part in, without having to do my nails quite every day! I found Crumpets Nail Tarts on Facebook and their challenges: GOT challenge and Tri Polish Tuesdays. Although I have a few old polishes, I only got really into having fancy nails in the past year so I don't have enough to use old ones regularly. But I thought the Tri Polish Tuesday Challenge sounded good, and it allows me to do whatever design I want. I know it's the last Tuesday of the month, but I decided to have a go this week, so here's my entry:

I've never done any sort of Aztec design before, but wanted to have a go. And I thought these colours lent themselves quite nicely to it. I don't like it though. Not sure if its the colours, the design, or just that I need more practice for it to look anything like, but I'm not a fan!

Anyway, the polishes I used were Revlon Stormy, as the brown/nude base colour, Sally Hansen Pinch of Punch for the pink stripes and a Boots 17 polish which is unnamed, but is a dark metallic grey/silver. I also used some black striping tape and finished it with a matte top coat.

I'm really not sure. I like the idea of aztec nails, I just can't do them!! Maybe I need a stamping plate design so the hard bit is done for me!!!

Silk Stripes

Today I bought one of the new Barry M Silk polishes in Heather. It's such a cute colour I got excited and painted my nails straight away. Then realised I had no plans what else I was going to do with it to make my nails pretty! So I had to find something I could do after I had already painted them! And something I could do quick, as I've had so much work to do this weekend!
This is how they ended up:

I used some blue striping tape to make stripes on one nail on each hand. Then I thought, wouldn't it look better if they were actually stripes. So I used Revlons Chroma Chameleon in Aquamarine which is almost the exact same colour as the tape and filled in alternate stripes. I then painted one more finger on each hand in this colour, so it was a little less random! 

I actually really like this. Nice and simple, without being just plain boring. I really like these two colours together too.

The Silk polish is quite thin and pale. I had to use 3 coats to get a nice even coverage and it is still a really light colour. It has a nice sheen to it though.

Magnetic Nails

Today I thought I'd try my new Sally Hansen magnetic polish in Cosmic Blue.

I've never used a magnetic polish before and when I was putting it on I was very disappointed to see that rather than 'Cosmic Blue', it was a boring grey colour. However, I carried on and when I put the magnet over my nails I was pleased to see they turned a lovely deep blue. All the grey moved into lines and they had quite a cool 3D effect. This was really hard to photograph well but here are a few that show the effect (Typically, the best photo to show the effect and colour is slightly blurred!).

I'm not sure about this look. It's really good considering how quick and easy it is to do, so perfect if you're in a rush but want something a bit more than just a plain colour. But I find it a bit boring compared to my usual nail art and am not sure how much use I will get from this. Maybe I just need to find a more interestingly patterned magnet!
Or it could look quite cool with some nail art over maybe. That might be something to try!