MUD Swatch & Review, Part 1

Hiya! If you're seeing this, it means I am in sunny, hot Perth and Blogger's post scheduler is working properly ;)

I was at Coles (a local grocery store) recently, and saw a brand in the cosmetics section I haven't seen before. It's probably common here--I just have avoided buying much makeup because it's so much more expensive here than I'm used to! But this was reasonably priced, so I grabbed some eyeshadows and then all six nail polish colours I could find. The brand is called MUD (Make Up Daily), and it's all surprisingly good quality! I will show you three shades today and three next time :) So click the jump below to check 'em out!

Gilded Imperial Nails

Hello my lovelies :)

It's been an exciting week over here! We're almost finished with the paperwork needed for me to have permanent residency in Australia *yay* and on Wednesday I went to the piCture pOlish HQ and met Jules East, the company's founder!! It was really awesome to see where the magic happens :D and she (and the rest of the Girls) are so nice! It was also really awesome to buy lots of polishes and not have to pay for shipping ;) Check out my Facebook post if you want to see pics from the PP Headquarters :D

Obviously, I had to have an appropriate manicure for the visit... so I pulled out their Imperial again, and gave it the royal treatment it deserves :)

 

#31DC2014 - Day 30 - Inspired by a TUTORIAL

Hello :) day 30 of the challenge, where we take inspiration from a tutorial. I watch so many talented ladies on YouTube, and follow so many awesome bloggers, it was really hard to choose one for this! But a recent video by ArcadiaNailArt caught my eye. She did three Halloween looks, and this second one called Vintage Vampire is so beautiful, I decided to use it!

I won't go into too many details of how I created this look--it's fairly simple, and you should watch her video to see it! But I used a striper brush and three China Glaze polishes for it--Adventure Red-y (red creme), Liquid Leather (black creme), and Ruby Pumps (red glitter). The pearls are both from different craft-store sets. :) Oh, and it's topcoated with KBShimmer Clearly On Top.

I am sorry to report that my hand burst into flames after I took the last photo. (Because... vampires... sunlight... yeah...)

I will bandage it all up and crank out one more pretty manicure for the last day of the challenge tomorrow! See you then! xoxo

#31DC2014 - Day 25 - Inspired by FASHION

Bonjour! Day 25 of the challenge is "inspired by fashion". Here's my nail look!

I think I am fairly stylish in my own way, but I am not trendy or fashionable, and I do not care about designers and brands and such. So I did a simple Google image search for "fashion", and found inspiration on the very first page of results!

(image found on trendingtrendsnow.com)

This image is from Tumblr. I do not know how to Tumblr. I looked everywhere trying to find a source, but there is no artist name here and I couldn't even see who uploaded it. A Google image search was also fruitless. I am more than happy to give credit to the artist if I can figure out who it is! Any help from you lovely people on this topic would be very much appreciated! (Update: didn't find an artist, but traced most instances of it to the URL above, so I'm sticking with that!)

Anyway, I very much fell in love with the look on the far right, so I did half moons with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Mellow Yellow, and painted the rest of the nail white with Orly Pointe Blanche. Then I added vertical stripes with my black Stripe Rite polish. Finally, some pretty half-pearls along the line, and Seche Vite to top it all off.

Indoors with flash

Outdoors in sun (it's finally sunny again!)

I wore these out for cocktails with a friend (hi Suzy!) and, by total coincidence, my nails matched the decor in the place! I'd never been there before, but look at the pattern on the seats...

Grainy phone pic, but I couldn't NOT take one

So you know, maybe it was the strawberry-basil martini talking, but I felt pretty sophisticated. ;)

I hope you like these--I sure do! See you next time xoxo

Tinsley's Gilded Pearls

Hello, my friends :) welcome back!

Today's design features yet another previously-untried polish in my collection... and now I cannot believe I waited this long to wear this beauty!

Outdoors in shade/indirect light

Alphabet Challenge: V is for... Vampy Victorian Vixen

Hello, lovely people! Back to the Alphabet Challenge, and today I will be showcasing the letter V.

Click for full view on these :)

This has quickly become one of my favourite manicures I've ever done. It feels so elegant and Victorian-era, which is kind of what I was going for.

To create this look, I painted my index and middle fingers with two coats of Dollicious Polish Violet Vixen (part of the Dollicious by Fredericks of Hollywood line--I covered three of these here!), a nice metallic/foily lavender. I then used striping tape to create the criss-cross pattern over it. This takes some patience, getting the small strips cut and placed just perfectly, which made me glad I decided to only do this as a double-accent on each hand and not a full manicure!

Anyway, after that was masked off, I painted all the nails with piCture pOlish Vampire, an awesome vampy red! I did two coats over the first two nails, and three coats on the others to reach this opacity. (It still wasn't totally solid at the base of my ring and small fingers, but I didn't want to do a fourth coat--and anyway, I like this look.) When the polish was still wet I used tweezers to carefully peel off the striping tape and reveal the criss-cross pattern. And of course, after that dried, I dotted topcoat onto the joins and added some baby pearls from dollarnailart.com. Sealed in with Seche Vite, and voilà!

avec flash!

Très belle, non? :) So lovely. One more pic, because I thought it would look neat in black and white...

and I was right, yeah?

Well, now I must be off to have tea and crumpets with the queen, and discuss the finer points of... whatever it is that royalty discusses. It must be something fancy with nails like these ;)

Have a great weekend, and I'll see you next time! xoxo

Delicate Stripes + Pearls

Good day my lovelies :) After all the blingy crazy St. Paddy's nails, I decided to go soft with some simple, delicate, feminine nails. And I've been wanting to use these half-pearls for ages... Although I discovered they're a bit too large to do what I originally wanted to--must acquire some smaller ones!--I did find a way to use them and it still look nice:

Baby blue, stripes, and pearls :D

I just realised this would be perfect for a baby shower if the baby were a boy. Haha.

Base colour is Essie Bikini So Teeny. It has a lovely subtle matching shimmer to it, but it didn't really show up in these photos. It's a really pretty periwinkle, though, as you can see. I just think "delicate" any time I see it :)

I then added the white stripes with my Stripe Rite striper polish. You may notice they sort of get thinner in the middle, and then fatter at the tips. Want to know why? Because instead of having a C curve that goes "under" like most people, my nails tend to grow upwards. Isn't that weird? The nail bed is straight, then it hits the free edge and starts angling upwards. So no matter what I do, there's sort of a "crease" there that makes it hard to do nice vertical lines.

Anyway, the last step was to add the wee half-pearls. I did two on the thumbs as well. They are sticky-backed pearls by a brand called Queen&Company; I found them at a craft store.

Sealed it in with some Seche Vite and was good to go. I took the next two photos with the new case I got for my Samsung Galaxy tablet--an old friend has an Etsy shop and does custom covers, and she made mine with some space-patterned fabric, perfect for a Galaxy! :D

I love this star-shaped button she used for the closure! It's a bit finicky to use sometimes but totally worth it.

Hope you enjoyed today's post! I'm curious, do any of you have the weird funky "inverted C curve" thing going on like I do? I need to do some research and find out if this is a thing. Haha. See you next time! xoxo