40 Great Nail Art Ideas - Orange Purple Green + Negative Space

This week I got a winning combo. I love negative space manis and the selection of hues was one of my favourites. As I read the prompt for the first time, I started recalling what exact polish I wanted to use for each colour. Orange  would be Revlon's Lady Luck, Purple would be the beautiful Plume and Green Room for er, the green, the last two from Topshop.  I know the orange looks like pink and the purple leans more towards the blue side  but I figure that this is more on the pastel side of the spectrum.

I started with no base. I know, right? What craziness is this, more on that a bit later. With some stripping tape in place, I painted on some shapes and stripes with some Max Factor's Purple Haze to give Plume a base as the latter can be a bit sheer by itself. Then painted on Green Room covering the purple with tape and finally applied Lady Luck using the same technique. Applied HK Girl Top Coat to smooth it all out and seal it in.

I managed to smudge on of the thin purple lines just after topcoating it but with the help of my trustworthy (and very frayed) striper brush I managed to fix it pretty well. It's hardly noticeable now. Can you tell which one it was? Hehe.

The photos above show my second attempt. My first mani (below) was actually freehanded but it felt too rough to put it up on the blog. I liked the fact that it had more polish and less free space but I figured it would take me forever to clean it up or do it with tape so I just enjoyed it for what it was and reattempted it. And because I was in such a hurry to get the next one done, I forgot to put base on. That's my story.

Till next time, 

Laura

YouTube Inspired...

Hello, hello! I'm sporting a couple of broken nails and it might be a while before they recover to a bloggable length so I'm bringing out some manis from the vault. 

We all love nail art, right? That's the reason why we are here on this wonderful thing called the internet right now. Not to be left behind, big cosmetics companies have jumped on the bandwagon and created YouTube channels to promote their products. I enjoy watching beauty/nail vloggers on the video-sharing website but all the Google algorithms have caught up on this preference of mine so I'm constantly bombarded with the aforementioned companies' ads and videos. I usually skip them as they lack the genuineness and creativity of the vloggers and they seem over-stylised which really puts me off; there's a reason why I'm on YouTube and not on your site!

For some reason or another, I ended up watching one and liked the colours they had shown together. Being the rebel I am (teehehe), I didn't go buy their products but instead used some older polishes from different brands to recreate the very simple tape mani they had presented.

I started with one coat of Maybelline Mini Colorama in Peach Cocktail, let it dry then taped off half my ring finger nail and applied one coat of Max Factor Mini in Purple Haze. I added a coat of Seche Vite to all my fingers and let it dry before applying stripe of Sally Hansen's Big Money over the very rugged edge I created on my ring finger. 

Tadah! Super awesome and original. 

The highlight of this mani was actually reusing Peach Cocktail. When I bought it a few years ago, I had no idea what a good formula was but I remember it being runny and having to use a 2-3 coats to get it completely opaque. This time it applied in one beautiful, buttery coat and the flakies/shimmer still showed up within the depth of the polish. Man... this polish has turned out so good, I didn't even have to clean up. I can just hope all my bad formula polishes do the same in a few years.

Is that shimmer on my thumb? At least you know, I don't retouch my pics...

If anything came out of watching that nail-polish-company YouTube video was the rediscovery of some cool polishes. And also having some vault manis for rainy days. I'm still gonna avoid them as much as I can though.

Till next time, 

Laura

33 Day Challenge: Shapes

Today's vague 'shapes' prompt was a little bit too much for my over thinking tendencies so I jumped on Google to give myself some direction. One search lead to another and I ended up with an idea completely different to what I had googled but it all turned out for the best. Have any of you girls played with a tangram at some point in your lives? I remember having a couple when I was younger and when I got my first smart phone, one of the first games I downloaded was a tangram. I finished 200 levels of this puzzle in less than a week and went ahead and got myself another app that had different shapes. Thinking about it, it's kinda lame how excited I am about tangrams and doing a mani about them. Well, lame I will be because I really liked putting the shapes of the tangram on my nails.

I started with two coats of Sally Hansen's White On and a coat of Seche Vite and let that dry completely. I then used striping taping on my fingers to create the shapes of the puzzle, one finger at the time. Most of the colours I wanted to use were a bit sheer, so instead of putting layer upon layer of the same polish, I used some undies on all fingers but my thumb. Colours used (base first, top colour second) on each finger:

Pinky:  Sinful Colours in Innocent and Topshop in Eclipse

Ring:    Max Factor Mini in Purple Haze and Topshop Plume

Middle: Essence in Flashy Pumpkin and Sally Hansen Lustre Shine in Lava

Index:   Max Factor Mini in Candy Blue and Sally Hansen Lustre Shine in Scarab

Thumb: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Golden-I and Revlon in Fire Fox 

I didn't use any topcoat after creating the shapes to keep the slight 3D effect they have. 

This is the picture I based the tangram shapes on. There are a lot of variations of this puzzle but this configuration is the one I remember playing with. Disclaimer: The shapes in my manicure are for illustrative purposes only. Scale may vary in real life . :)

Source

Only shot I got in sunlight. I think the colour's a bit off but it shows the shimmer well enough.

In a slightly related note, there is a Topshop opening tomorrow in my city and I am sooooo tempted to go raid their polish display but I'm thinking that may be a bad idea. I may end up poor and I hardly have any  polish rack space as it is... This story will continue.

Check out the other ladies' manicures for today's prompt. 

Till next time, 

Laura

33 Day Challenge: Favourite Pattern

Day 29 of the 33 Day Challenge is here. I seem to have gotten on the 'creating OK nail art bandwagon' again and I'm pretty glad because I'd been looking forward to the favourite pattern prompt for a while. I didn't even have to think about this one. I  love houndstooth anything, even this Lady Gaga ensemble (I wouldn't wear any of it but it's cool) and I'd been wanting to do a nude/neon houndstooth manicure for ages after seeing it in a blog (the name, I cannot remember and I can't find it on Google) and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world. However, I didn't own a good nude or an opaque enough neon colour to recreate what I had seen but thanks to my little haul last week, I have finally created a mani inspired on that one I saw many moons ago.

I started with two coats of My Island Home (MIH), a great-nude-for-my-skin-tone, textured polish from Face Of Australia, and let it dry for about an hour before I started stamping. It didn't need to dry for that long but I find the texture shows a lot better when the polish has fully dried. And I wanted to be absolutely sure I wouldn't have to redo the base from stamper pressure smudges. I have ruined bases many times that way and it looks like I have learnt a lesson. :)

For the houndstooth pattern I used the BM-322 plate and one coater polishes. From green to orange I used: 

• Essence in The Green & the Grunge
• Sinful Colours in Blue By You
• Max Factor Mini in Purple Haze
• Konad Special Polish in Red
• Essence in Flashy Pumpkin

Hold on, wasn't this supposed to be a nude AND neon manicure? Well, yes but... The one coater-ish neon pink I have didn't stamp that well and it looked like a greyed out pink over MIH. Plain black houndstooth was gonna be boring so I created a sort of rainbow effect with two of my new polishes and some old ones I knew were one coaters and had the potential to stamp well over the nude. I even gambled a little and brought out the shimmer Blue By You because I wanted sparkle. Look at it below, it worked and it looks so pretty in the sun.

Sun. I finally had the opportunity to do my mani early in the day and come out to the sun to take photos. I get to sit on the grass, enjoy the birds singing, the wind in my face, listen to the peace and quiet of the outdoors and not feel guilty that I'm procrastinating uni work. Yay for summer holidays!

On with the manicure... I didn't use any topcoat because I LOVE the texture of MIH but it makes me sad the stamping will come off quicker because of that. 

Did anyone notice that the pattern on the index finger is upside down compared to the rest of the fingers? Applying the colours to the plate to create the rainbow was sort of automatic but when I thought about it and was about to stamp the index finger, I thought I had it the wrong way on the stamper and redid it. I only noticed it when I was taking photos. I'm gonna say that's an accent finger. That'll work. ;)

I also noticed this mani fitted that prompt for Friday very well but I have no idea what I'm gonna do for that one. I'll have to do some brainstorming. Until then, check out the other ladies' manicures.

Till next time, 

Laura

33 Day Challenge: Geometric

This idea I had of catching up on the challenge this week sort of went out the window and I happen to be running a day late with the prompts that I haven't skipped. Anyway, the prompt for day 23 for the challenge was geometric. I'm trying to stay away from just stamping as much as I can so I was a bit short of ideas. I had this triangular origami box lying around and I thought that would be a good, simple idea to recreate. OK, so the execution wasn't great and I managed to take a chunk of polish of the green part on the index finger as I putting the bottle of topcoat back in its place but I figured it was still decent enough to put it up (and I didn't want to miss another prompt).

I started with two coats of Essence's Piece of Forever, let it dry then used striping to create a triangle. I painted W7's It's Pink, Max Factor's Purple Haze and Ulta3's Frog Prince outside each side of the triangle and used a Topshop black stripper for the inside lines. I topped it all off with one coat of Seche Vite.

This is the box I based the mani on, I couldn't figure out how to photograph the whole box in my tiny lightbox so I'm just showing you the colours. It's also a bit crumpled from handling it for photographs, so excuse the wrinkles.

I wasn't overly happy with the mani but it was fun to wear for a few hours. Yes, I have taken it off already and started on tomorrow's mani, which means that I may be on time.

Max Factor's Fantasy Fire

I'm sure we're all aware of the existence of Max Factor's Fantasy Fire. When I first saw it in real life, I fell in love with its rainbow coloured shimmer and jelly appearance. It was perfect in the bottle and I wanted the effect on my nails. 

I actually purchased this bottle a little while ago for 72 cents at Big W but had waited a loooong time as I couldn't really justify spending $5.95 for such a little bottle. 

Aren't those colours pretty? 

I've tried a few ways to use Fantasy Fire to maximise the amount of colours seen and so far, layering over Max Factor's Purple Haze has worked best. This polish has a very similar to the jelly in Fantasy Fire so there's no streaks or bald patches. I used two coats of Purple Haze and two coats of Fantasy Fire in the swatch below.

I have to admit, the polish in the bottle is amazing but it didn't blow my mind once it was on the nail. You could say I was... disappointed. Only one colour shimmer can be seen from a particular angle and to see the others, you need to move your hands around so the light hits the nail differently. Too much effort in my opinion. 

In one last effort to fall in love with it, I applied my trustworthy Rimmel Matte top coat.

Much better...

I'm sure that if my nails were cubical, all the colours of Fantasy Fire would show like they do in the bottle. Until then, I'll just have to  live with the matted version and hold that little bottle up to the the light to admire its greatness.

Do you guys own Fantasy Fire or any of the many similar polishes out there? Are you in love? How do you wear it?

Til next time, 

Laura