33 Day Challenge: Lines

Day 28 of The Crumpet's Challenge called to create a 'lines' mani. A line mani could be anything and seeing some of the manis that have been done with this prompt, I figured it'd be good to get myself inspired. After some (quick) online research, I decided to create a tangent lines mani with some new polishes I got last week. I was almost gonna use a very similar palette to the geometric mani from last week so I figured I better change it to keep things interest in this blog. I'm a bit undecided in the end result, it looks good from afar in real life but the colour scheme doesn't rock my boat that much. Plus there's no oomph element to it... And I just didn't know what to add to it.

So, I started with one coat of Essie's Good as Gold (got it for $12; about six months ago they retailed for $19 in AU) and let it dry completely. I put on a circular sticker on my index finger and used striping tape to create the tangent line. The green polish is Essence's The Green & The Grunge and the coppery one is Mister Rusty by the same brand (paid $1.65/each which is SUPER cheap for polish anywhere, yeah?) and tried to be really quick at taking the sticky bits off my fingers. I continued to repeat the process one finger at the time and topped it all off with one coat of Seche Vite when I was done colouring my digits in.

The index finger turned up pretty crisp on my first go and that's what got me going with the rest. I had to redo my ring finger twice due to ripping the base off with the sticker and a smudge. 

I'm thinking I could have done some stamping on the gold base or used different colours.  I really don't know; I could say I'm a little stumped creatively. :(

I just had a thought of putting tiger/zebra stripes in the circles and did try it but I just made it worse... Not a good nail day for me. Is that worse than a bad hair day? Thought for you. In the meantime, check out the other talented ladies' manis for today.

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.

33 Day Challenge: 3 Colour Gradient and Pattern

I'm back on the challenge which means I have a lot more free time to play with polishes :). I was a bit conflicted with the three colour gradient and a pattern prompt for day 22 of the challenge because my gradient attempts can be a bit of a hit and miss and I had just done an awesome one a couple of weeks ago. I created a three colour gradient last night but it turned out to be a miss and I couldn't recycle the last one because it didn't have a pattern plus that's not really the point of a challenge, is it?

I stuck to what I knew would work for me and chose three Topshop polishes for the gradient and striping tape. I started with a two-coat base of Queen of Green (QoG), which you may have guessed is the green closest to the cuticle. I then sponged on, from cuticle to tip, QoG, Wisdom and Zodiac and smoothed out the gradient with a coat of Seche Vite. I  wanted to put a little extra effort on the pattern side of the prompt so I tried to create some triangles with striping tape but as I was putting on the tape on my ring finger, I knew the triangles (some just polygons) weren't gonna be regular shapes. I applied one coat of Ulta3 in Black Satin over the tape and sealed it with one last coat of Seche Vite.

I wish I had done the green strip a little bigger so the difference between Zodiac and QoG would a little clearer. QoG is a silver based pastel green shimmer and Zodiac is greenish gunmetal grey shimmer with gold bits in it and they are both beautiful but I couldn't quite capture the beauty of them.

Or did I?

I really like the way this mani looks but it was a pain in the ass to clean up. Have you ever tried to clean shimmer polishes? The shimmer goes everywhere and it sticks to the skin like nothing else. I used PVA around my cuticles to avoid some of the mess but the cuticle lines weren't as clean as I'd like them so I took out the acetone. Bad move. After I managed to get as much of the shimmer of my fingers as I could with clean up brushes and cotton rounds, I still had silver bits all over my fingers. I had to use a nail brush to scrub up my fingers and use some cuticle remover to get rid of the stray shimmer. Lesson learnt: If I'm playing with shimmer polishes, I need to be ready to do a lot of clean up.

I just realised tomorrow's prompt is geometric but hopefully I can come up with something good and get my nail mojo back. Till then, check out the other timely participants of the challenge.

Till next time, 

Laura

33 Day Challenge: A Pattern In Your House

Well... Day 12 of the 33 Day Challenge called to use a pattern in your house to do some nail art. I looked around mine and all I could see were the plain bright or earthy colours but no patterns, even the towels and sheets are all one single colour. I found this pillowcase that colourful that I bought ages ago at the back of the cupboard and saw the manicure for today straight away. 

 The polishes I used are: Sinful Colors in Hazard, Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Pacific Blue and White On and finally China Glaze in Sweet Hook. Topped it all off with Seche Vite before letting it all dry for the next step. I hadn't shown striping tape in a mani for a while so I decided to do the smaller stripes of the pillowcase with it. I have 20-ish rolls of this tape and I'm sure that's almost a life time supply; I guess I better start using it.  

The execution and clean up wasn't great but it served its purpose. This mani reminds me of a school sports shirt or flag, at least the three middle fingers do. Maybe if I could reuse the polish base for another mani... 

Here's the pillowcase. I just realised I should have turned the pillow around so the colours would correspond to the ones on my nails but you get the idea. 

Check out the other talented ladies in the challenge.

33 Day Challenge: Art With Oldest Untried

Are you ready for some bad nail art, dodgy lines, topcoat shrinkage and colour inaccurate pictures? if you're not, you may wanna stop there. 

It's day seven of the 33 Day Challenge, which called out for art with your oldest untried and I may have struggled a bit with it because:

1. I smugly thought I didn't have untrieds, but oh boy! I was wrong.
2. I'm pressed for time.
3. The post I had originally prepared didn't work for some reason or another.
4. The formulas of my oldest untrieds was pretty bad.
5. I had no inspiration at such short notice. 

I have this habit of trying on polishes as soon as I get them to test them out and relish on the fact that I have new pretties. That's why I thought I had no untrieds until I went through my stash and discovered three of the 5 ml Essence polishes that I had no recollection of wearing. I know they are my oldest because I went through a period some time in the middle of last year where I bought a heap of Essence polishes because I was amazed at their price. 

However, when I put on C'est Le Vie!, the peachy orange creme, I remembered why they had been sitting in my rack for so long untouched. I had tried them but the formula for C'est Le VIe! was pretty thin and took four thins coats to reach full opacity and even with a coat of Seche Vite, it took forever to dry. I even dented my middle finger but managed to patch it up. I soldiered on an decided to do a tape mani with Let's Get Lost, a blue creme that sometimes looks teal, and Break Trough, a purple creme. The formula for these two polishes is thicker but it drags and it can pool on the nail. 

I topped it all off with a coat of Seche Vite, which made it all smooth and kinda looked better until I got massive shrinkage from it on my index and middle fingers.

Closeup of the nail, I though looked good. My cuticles might be telling me otherwise.

At the end of the day, this is still wearable and it looks good from a distance. Go check out the other ladies' manicures. There are some good ones there and you may even forget about the bad experience you just had.

I'm hoping chevrons turn out better. 

Till next time, 

Laura

33 Day Challenge: Mexican

I had high hopes and lots of inspiration for this prompt. I don't think I've mentioned it but I was born in Mexico and lived there for more than half my life (just!) before moving to Australia. This should have been my scene!!! I thought of a lot of possible designs I could create and settled for one idea  but the execution was poor. Actually, it was OK until I added top coat. Have a look for yourselves. 

I based my design on my home state's traditional dress called 'China Poblana'. The (short version of the) legend says there was a Mongolian princess that was kidnapped at the age of 8 by 17th century Portuguese explorers and eventually taken to Mexico to be sold as a slave. Due to her beauty, she was originally going to be sold to the viceroy of New Spain but a higher bidder came out of Puebla where she was finally taken. She was given the Hispanic name Catarina de San Juan and was sort of adopted, but remained a slave, by the Soza family and was taught how to saw, among other things. Even though the origin of  the dress is very hazy, most versions of the story say that Catarina was the designer of the dress, which was a fusion of her natal Mongolian attires and Mexican influences. When the patriarch of the family died she was sent to a convent and after she died at the well into her 80's, she was worshiped as a saint in Puebla until the church banned popular saints. There are as many variations to the legend as there are variations of the dress and I don't claim to be an expert. That's the story I remember from school and bits I researched on the world wide web.

Back to the nails, I used a heap of polishes and tools so I'm just going to list them.

Light Green:  Ulta3 in Jelly

Dark Green:   Ulta3 in Frog Prince

Red:             Revlon in Fire Fox

'Skirt' glitter: Rimmel in Disco Ball 

White:          Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in White On

Yellow:         Ulta3 in Honolulu

Gold:            Sally Hansen in Golden-I
Light Brown:  Essie in Hot Coco

Topcoat:       Seche Vite

Smallest and small dotting tools and striping tape from eBay. Sticky tape from the supermarket. :)

This is one of the many versions of the dress. 

Source

I also included my thumb to represent the ribbons that are braided on the hair. I find thumb shots awkward so please excuse the following bad photo.

Before I added a topcoat of Seche Vite, there was a bit of texture on my index and ring fingers, which looked a lot better than the smooth versions. I added a final coat of Rimmel Pro Matte Finish to try and save it but it just made my mani chip very quickly. :(

I'm not sure what to think of this mani. I kinda like it because it made me think outside my comfort zone, especially the index that represents the shirt, but it doesn't look great altogether. If I hadn't applied topcoat, I would've been happier. I guess that teaches me to photograph every step of the mani!!! 

Check out the other talented ladies of the challenge.

Till next time,

Laura

33 Day Challenge: Tape Mani

Don't forget to enter our giveaway here!

A tape mani was my introduction to nail art about 15 years ago and I haven't looked back since. They're easy, quick and the amount of designs that can be created is endless. I even created my first post for this blog with a tape mani. I know I've had to restrain myself from creating 33 different tape manis for this challenge and just sticking to it when absolutely necessary. Luckily for me, the third prompt called for a tape mani. Yay!

I wanted to create a skittlette manicure using Maybelline Color Show Sequins in, er, Sea-Quins as a base and Models Prefer in Midnight Madness. There's a bit of a story about Sea-Quins after the page break but I'll explain how I did the mani first. I started with two coats of Sea-Quins, topped it off with two coats of The Awesome Topcoat to make the glitter smooth, taped my middle and ring fingers and applied one medium coat of Midnight Madness. I took off the tape immediately after, let the two fingers dry and finished them with one coat of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri topcoat. 

For my short polish story and a matted version of this mani, click on the page break.

Valentino Inspired Manicure

I love (virtually) rummaging through the online New York Mag fashion sections for inspiration for manicures. Think all those designer collections that appear on Vogue and Elle but at your, er..., fingertips for free. Today, I've got a manicure loosely based on the one of Valentino's Couture Collection dresses for the 2013 Fall.

I look at the details, colours and textures to see how they can be translated to the nails without being too literal. When I came across the above dress I knew I wanted on my fingertips!!!

I must warn you, the details of the nail art wasn't great but I liked how it all looked together and that's the main reason I'm putting the photos up. I know it's not perfect but this blog is also part of the journey towards amazing manicures... Deep, aren't I? Haha!

I started with four coats of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Peatal Pusher for the nude base then stamped the pattern only half way up the nails with Bundle Monster's BM-201 plate using Konad Special Black polish. I sealed it with a coat of Seche Vite to make sure the stamping wouldn't come off when I placed the stickers for the half moons. I don't actually know if that would happen but I wanted to be safe rather than sorry. 

Once the Seche Vite was dry I put on half of a round sticker in each finger and striping tape on the tips as french manicure guides. I carefully painted  Ulta3 Black Satin on and removed the tape and stickers as soon as I was done with each finger. Finished it all off with one last coat of Seche Vite.

There was a lot of smudging, crooked half moons, bad and excessive clean up, major shrinkage on my pointer and the french tip lines weren't as crisp as I had hoped.

The photos weren't turning out either and each of these photos were taken at different times because I just couldn't take a good one. I could keep going about how this was a bad experiment but one thing I managed to accomplish was to get out my comfort zone and think how I could create a mani from a dress. I think this is one of the most creative things I've come up with and that makes me a tiny little bit proud. I would  usually shy away anything that involves creating arty things.

What do you guys think? Do you have sources of inspiration?  I hope you guys enjoyed the mani.

Till next time,

Laura 

Striping tape not only for striping

Every so often I have this idea that it would be great to create a nude mani to have a palette cleanser, sort of thing. The only problem is I only own two nude shades, one being essence in Toffee to Go (see here) and OPI in Barefoot in Barcelona. Toffee to Go takes forever to dry and Barefoot in Barcelona makes my skin look dirty, I think. So I figured if I wanted a nude mani, I would have to get creative with what I had.

This originally was going to be a post about lace nails (my scissors weren't sharp/small enough, ended up too fluffy), then went onto neon/nude stamping (no neon polish of mine was showing enough on the nude polish), after that turned to create half moons with foils (my sticker guides didn't hold up with the foil glue) and ended up, as a last resort, with my 18 pack of striping tape.

After all those attempts, the polish I had on had to come off as there was no rescuing from all the dents left from all the stuff I tried to stick to the nails. I ended up using Barefoot In Barcelona on all my nails. I chose two striping tapes from my lot (from eBay from this seller), one purple and one blue. I almost went for a third one but remembered this was going to be a palette cleanser. I started with a blue stripe along my ring finger and decided to put one purple stripe on each side. For some reason, I decided to keep going and do the whole nail. So it looks like this:   

A close up of the nail.

I applied two coats of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri to make sure my work didn't fall out within the hour, after all, it took me about 45 minutes of patient work to finish the one nail.

Once the top coat started drying, the blue striping tape started fading and heaps of bubbles formed. You can see a how it started below.

 The photo below was after about half an hour and you can see the difference.

I carried on with my activities and after about three hours and a gym class, there was major colour fade on the blue striping tape but not the purple, and pretty bad tip wear. I also noticed my dodgy clean up job. Oops.

It basically looked like a simple nail wrap but I knew the work behind it. Would I do it again? Yeah, it was so much fun, even if it only lasted a couple of hours. I might try it with more colours and combine it with bright, non-nude polishes and see what I can come up with. I think striping tape and I have just become best friends.

What do you think? Would you try it? Or do you have any suggestions?

Til next time,

Laura 

Australis Aqua

As we all may know, Pinterest can be such an inspiration for cooking, decorating, art, nail polish... So i jumped on it to get some sort of colour inspiration and long story short, I ended up checking out these shoes from Sole Society. I am a bit of an impulse buyer and almost, almost bought them but decided to wear the colours on my nails. After all that's the reason I jumped on Pinterest.

Aren't they pretty? I really wish I had lots of places to go to so I could justify spending money on beautiful shoes. So here's my interpretation.

I know, really straight forward but after all my failed attempts last week, this is rather enjoyable. The blue is actually an aqua colour but I don't seem to get the colours right with my camera sometimes. This polish is the happy medium between green and blue. 

Polishes used:

Blue: Australis Nail Colour in Aqua. If this isn't an original name, I don't know what is.

Top Coat: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri

The striping tape I got on eBay from this seller. I got 18 rolls of different colours for $2.60 ages ago. At the time of posting, the seller had similar offers for purchase. Mine came from China and took a little over two weeks to get here but the wait was worth the quality, quantity and price.

I'm gonna check out some more Pinterest pictures for future inspiration. 

Till next time, 

Laura

Too Random Skittle

I've had a few terrible manicures in the last couple of days that were not even worth photographing. I'm talking about extremely flooded cuticles that couldn't be fixed, crooked stamping, smudging of such said stamping, terrible colour combinations and bad gradients. 

This is the first one that looked sort of OK, even though I'm not completely satisfied with the result. I tried using differents textures ( a cream, a metallic and a glitter) in blue, green and pink that I thought would look good together as a skittle mani. Tried tying it all up by having a striped middle finger but the job was kinda dodgy and there's a piece of stray glitter on my ring finger that I couldn't remove!!!!

Anyway, I'll do and learn but here are the pictures.

The obliged matte top coat, which in my opinion, makes polish look a million times better. 

Polishes used:
Pink: B Collection by Bloom in Cologne 
Blue Glitter: Essence in Blue Addicted
Metallic Duochrome: Topshop in Eclipse
Top Coat:   1st pic: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri
                 2nd pic: Rimmel Pro Matte Finish

There you have it. I'm gonna Google Colour Theory and maybe learn a little about what looks good together and keep practicing with that tape.

Till next time, 

Laura