GOT Polish Challenge: Something Tropical

I'm back after week and half long blogging break. I didn't go on a holiday or had a emergency pop up, I was feeling overwhelmed and disappointed with my lack of imagination for innovative manis and the pressure (put on me by me and me only) to keep up with the two challenges I decided to take up on recently. I'd usually see it as a lack of professionalism to just leave for a while without notice but I was just not feeling it. This is supposed to be a hobby that I ENJOY and trying to keep up when my mind shut the creative side out temporarily makes this pastime everything but.

But the break helped and now I'm back with what I feel is a clear head and itchy fingers to get some nail art happening. When the 'something tropical' prompt popped out, I knew I didn't want to just do palm trees or a sunset because well, I'd be too difficult for me to do and I didn't want to get tired on my first post. So I googled tropical and after a few clicks here and there, I decided to do a blue poison dart frog skin pattern on my nails, which live in the tropical forest of Central America.

I started with two coats of Absolutely Blue by Essence and one of HK Girl top coat for the base and let that dry. I then used a wedged make up sponge and created a rough triangular gradient with Essie's Aruba Blue by tapping the sponge lightly over the base and building up the colour (I reeeally need to learn to break up my sentences). Once dry, I used Topshop's Celestial to do the outline of the spots and used American Apparel's Hassid for the black spots. Finished by cleaning my cuticles and with one coat of HK Girl top coat.

Frog used for inspiration. 

Source

This was super quick and easy to do, I would generally have to repeat at least one step in my manis but not with this one. Woohoo!

 

I'm really happy with the way this turned out so I could almost say i'll be back next week. Maybe... I can't promise anything. 

Till next time, 

Laura

Essie Matte About You. Or How I Thought I Was Living In a Lie

If you were to look at the matte tag in this blog, you may notice about a third of all my posts have been matted. I love the matte finish and the soft light it reflects. So far I've been using Rimmel Pro Matte Finish and I was in love. After reading a few blogs, I discovered that the this matte top coat was actually giving my manis a satin finish and not the full on matte effect. I decided to do some research and look for the best matte top coat to ensure I was actually in love with the matte finish and not the satin one. 

This is how I came across essie's Matte About You. I'd read in various places that essie MAY and OPI's Matte Top Coat gave the best results so off I went to this trustworthy eBay seller and only found MAY for sale. I got the bottle of polish today and I had to try it out straight away. 

I knew exactly what mani I wanted to try it with to have a truly matte finish. I started with two coats of Topshop in Celestial, a beautiful periwinkle blue creme that is no longer on sale. There are plenty of dupes out there but the quality of Topshop polishes is impressive so I stuck with this one. Please excuse the crappy clean up I knew, I would have to clean up the rest of the polishes later. They get cleaner, I promise. 

Once Celestial was almost dry, I dabbed one coat of essence in The Huntsman from the Snow White Collection. I even got a long bar glitter that I didn't know the polish included.  Dabbing FTW! This took a while to dry so I applied a coat of Seche Vite to speed up the process. 

This is where I decided to put one coat of Rimmel PMF on first to see it would compare to MAY. Pretty  and soft, right? 

I let the mani dry completely before applying one coat of MAY. 

I didn't really see any difference but the I thought it may have had to do with the layering of matte polishes. So I started again to make sure there was clear difference.

More after the break.