Happy 2014!

First post for 2014! I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Years and enjoyed your break (If you had one) I thought I would share some manis done over 2013 that I never got round to posting.

Spots & Glitter French tips
I wasn't as happy with these nails, because they didn't turn out how I imagined them in my head.
Simple french tips, which I then used a dotting tool to dot on the pink spots and swiped a bit of silver glitter on top of the tips.

Love nails
These nails were simple and cute.
Painted white nails with love written on the ring finger and a little red heart on the middle finger

Purple, Blue & Flocking Powder nails
Have a look at one of my previous posts about using flocking powder

What manis have you done lately?

Fruity Nails

I saw these kawaii fruit nails by Nancy Mc, check out her picture. I thought why not try to re-create them. Mine didn't come out anywhere near as cute as hers, but hey I was happy! I think I like the apple and banana the best.

These were very difficult to paint as I didn't really have the best tools for the job. My nails aren't all that long and they are thin, so there's not a lot of room for painting the fruit.

Which fruity finger do you like best? 

More Jelly Sandwich Nail Art

I absolutely love to do Jelly Sandwich nails, they are so cool looking and so simple! If you'r unsure about how to do it then check out my previous post on it to get an idea. Now that you've done that here are my newest Jelly Sandwich creations.

Base colour: Essence Colour & Go - Sweet as Candy
Glitter:Models Prefer - All That Glitters

Base colour: Essence Colour & Go - Sweet as Candy
Glitter: Nicole by OPI - Spring Romance

Base colour: Essence Nude Glam - Cotton Candy
Glitter: Australis - Fairy Bread

Base colour: Essence Nude Glam - Cotton Candy
Glitter: Australis - Glitter Strikes Back

Which one do you like best?

Happy Cucpcake Nails

A while back I saw these adorable nails by The Crafty Ninja and thought they would be awesome to re-create. Check out her post to see how she did hers and see how I did mine below.

They weren't as difficult as I thought they would be, but I found that my black nail polish was getting a bit stringy so that ruined my middle finger's eyes.

Other than that, I loved trying to re-create them and putting my own spin on them.
I even posed with one of my cute cupcake lolly jars - very kawaii!

Have you been inspired by someone else's nailart and tried to re-create it? 

I'd love to see yours

Galaxy Nails

Galaxy Nails are all over the Internet at the moment. There are lots of different ways of doing it and plenty of youtube videos to show you how to do it, My friend even did a post over on her blog.

So I'm going to show you a few pictures of what I did. The base colour was ChiChi - It's Raining men. After this was completely dry I used make up sponges to sponge on all the different colours. I used 6 different colours to try to re-create a outer space look.
The colours were: OPI - Not like the movies, Revlon - Minted, Revlon - Pink Ice, BYS - Thank god it's Friday, Maybelline Colorama - Urban Orange & BYS - Sunshine. To finish it off and give it that little something extra I added a light sparkle polish which was ChiChi - Paparazzi Princess.

As you can see I got a bit carried away and didn't take any photos of putting Orange & Yellow nail polish on but you get the idea. I used a dotting tool to make the white dots or planets/stars.

 This is the final product. I'm not as happy with this, but it was very easy so I can always try it again with different colour combinations.

Have you tried this mani before? Let me know, I'd love to see it!

Flowers & Flocking Powder nails

I've seen people using flocking powder on their nails for a while, so I bought some flocking powder off eBay and I finally decided to give it a go. It took me so long to get round to using my flocking powder because I wasn't sure what to do! My pack has 12 different colours so you can imagine it was difficult to decide.

Finally, I decided to do the mani above. I think light pink and mint green look great together but I wanted to do more. I thought sweet white & pink flowers would just top it off.

I started the flowers by doing the middle part and then the petals. To achieve the middle of the flower I used a dotting tool to blob on orange and once that was dry I did the same step again with yellow. Use a small brush and do small brush strokes to create the flower petals. I did the pink flower petals first and once they were dry I did the white petals.

I watched this great video to get an idea of how to put the flocking powder on my nails. The effect of the powder on the nail is awesome! Unfortunately it didn't last long for me, It lasted only a couple of days until most of it had rubbed off. That won't stop me from doing it again because it's very simple and looks fantastic!

Have you used flocking powder before?

Face Of Australia - Glitterati Nail Enamel Swatch

Face Of Australia have released their new Glitterati Nail Enamel and in this post I will show you two of those polishes. The polishes from left to right in the above picture are: L-R Dancing Queen, Studio 54, Saturday Night Fever, Lookin' For Some Hot Stuff, Disco Inferno, Boogie Wonderland, Heart Of Glass and Funky Town.

The two polishes I will be showing are Heart Of Glass & Boogie Wonderland as pictured below.

In Australia it's hard to purchase Franken Polishes because most of the best Franken polishes are made in the U.S. and they don't ship overseas. While I was shopping in my local Priceline store I saw this gorgeous collection of nail polishes. It was so hard to pick which ones I liked the best but I finally decided on theses two. But with a price of only $4.95 you could almost buy them all!

This is 'Boogie Wonderland' and as you can see it's jam packed with all sort of glitters. With only one coat I noticed how much glitter came out with one stroke. This polish is a milky lavender base with long white & green glitter, big white hex glitter and orange, purple, dark blue and pink circle glitter. This is with three coats of the polish and I love it, it's so much fun! My only problem with this polish is the long green glitter sticks up, they're scratchy and get caught on things.

This is 'Heart Of Glass' and is so beautiful. I was lucky enough to pull out a heart glitter on my middle finger, very cute! This is another milky polish with a baby pink base and so many different types and colours of glitters. There's small silver round glitter, small purple square glitter, small pink glitter, medium silver stripe glitter, large red square glitter, large pink hex glitter, large purple hex glitter and large red hearts. Phew that's a lot! This is also three coats and looks gorgeous.

Which one do you like best? 

Linkin Park nails

Since 2001 I have been a fan of Linkin Park when I first heard 'One Step Closer'. I have been to see them live twice and tomorrow is going to be my third time, I'm so excited!
What better way to show my love of them than painting my nails with their band logos.

I started with my base colours of black & blue as shown below

Then I applied the same blue nail polish to a make up sponge and dabbed it onto the middle of my nails that have the black nail polish. Using a very thin nail polish brush I did the first logo on my thumb. The picture below is my nails and the logo I tried to re-create.

Once that was dry I did the final touches to the first logo to make it stand out a little bit and did the second logo on my ring finger all using the same thin nail art brush. Below is the logo I tried to re-create.

Now I can't have a post about Linkin Park without having one of their music videos for you to enjoy.

Do you like Linkin Park? What's your favourite song?

Terrestrial Nails - Nail Polish Swatches

Franken Nail Polishes are all the rage now in the nail polish lovers world, so of course I HAD to jump on the band wagon.

Terrestrial nail polishes are my first handmade polish purchases. The three polishes I purchased are 'Alice', 'Piggy' and 'Vampy'.

There's not many people in Australia making their own Franken nail polish so you'd be looking at paying a little bit for postage from America but if you find something you love it's worth it!

This is my swatch of 'Vampy'. I used it as a Christmas nail art design.

This is a milky white base with very tiny gold glitter, small red hex glitter and red star glitter.

This is 3 layers of the polish and I kind of wished I had put it over some white polish because then you could have seen the red stars in it a bit better.

It was pretty easy to apply and the stars came out without having to struggle to get them out.

This is my swatch of 'Piggy'. It is a very light pink base with tiny pink & gold glitter, small pink hex glitter, medium gold hex glitter and large black hex glitter.

This is 2 layers over a very opaque pink polish and I liked it because a good amount of all glitters came out in one application.

I like how this colour looked. One thing was that it looked like a matte polish once I was done so I applied a top coat to make it shiny.

This is my swatch of 'Alice'. It's a milky white base with tiny gold glitter, small black round glitter, very large gold hex glitter, large gold stars and large blue diamonds.

This is 3 layers over an opaque white polish. This polish was VERY runny so the bigger glitter was very difficult to get out. I had to shake the bottle every time and fish out the big glitter.

I don't know why this polish was thinner than the other polishes I bought but I still like it and it was worth the extra work to get the bigger glitter out.

Which one do you like best? Let me know if you have a favourite Franken polish.

Yummy Lolly Nails ~ Whimsical by Revlon

I love Revlon nail Polish and I've been wanting this one for ages but have never been able to find it in the shops. So I went to trusty eBay and found a fairly cheap one for sale.

Whimsical #430 is a very light blue jelly like nail polish which it is extremely sheer. It would be perfect for layering over nail polishes to give them that something extra. It has baby blue and pink hex glitter as well as smaller pink hex glitter pieces and even tinier iridescent blue glitter spread throughout.

I decided to put three coats over a white nail polish & pink nailpolish as you can see in the above picture.
I think this would look really pretty over a baby blue nail polish which I might try another time.
The amount of glitter you get each coat is quite good and it's easy to move around the glitter with the brush.

I named these my Lolly nails because they look so edible and sweet don't they? Overall I do like this polish and I think it will be a favorite of mine.

Do you have a favorite Revlon color?

Rainbow Gradient Nails

"Rainbow: An arch of colors formed in the sky in certain circumstances, caused by the refraction and dispersion of the sun's light by rain or...Any display of the colors of the spectrum produced by dispersion of light."

Here's another nail post for all you nail lovers out there! Things that you will need to achieve this manicure

• White nail polish
• Multiple colours nail polish (I chose blue, green, yellow, orange and red)
• Make-up sponges
• Cotton buds
• Nail Polish remover
• Top & Base coats
• Glitter top as desired

 

{All the nail polishes I used except for top & base coats}

These nails look so amazing in real life but they were such a hassle to do. I thought to myself "Gradient nails using a sponge looks easy, I'll give it a try". But I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong!

Firstly I started with just a base coat and applied all the colours to the makeup sponge in a line (like the picture below) and pushed it onto my nail but nothing seemed to come off. So I applied a very thick amount of the 5 nailpolish colours and tried again, only to achieve the same results.

I then had a thought "Maybe if I applied white nail polish it would work", it didn't! I have no idea what I was doing wrong and why the polish wasn't going onto my nails in a rainbow pattern. The only colors that seemed to be rubbing off the sponge and onto my nails were the blue and red.

So, I removed all the nail polish and then re applied the white and started all over again. This time I used separate make-up sponges for each of the five colors like the picture below.

Below are the step by step pictures of how I applied each of the colors.

1. Apply white nail polish

2. Apply the yellow with the sponge to the middle of your nail

 

3. Apply the orange using the sponge toward the tip of your nail

4. Apply the red with the sponge to the tip of your finger.

5. Apply the green with the sponge to the top part of your nail.

6. Apply the blue with the sponge to upper part of your nail but still leave some green.

As you can see in the above picture that it was quite messy using the sponges (especially when that is my right hand pictured so I was using my left hand to apply the colors). I poured some nail polish remover into the cap of the bottle and then used LOTS of cotton buds dipped in the nail polish remover to rub away the excess color on my fingers. Below is the end result.

I decided that a glitter top coat would give my manicure that extra bit of something, 

What do you think?