Halloween 2015 | Kitty Skulls & Glitter!

Happy Halloween!

(click to enlarge) :)

Orange Shimmer & Stars

Good day, good day :)

Spring is here! It's getting warm and lovely outside, and while I really don't ever stop wearing neons (being confined to seasonal trends is sooo not my style), it seems extra fitting to wear them now! So I've created this bright yet simple mani with neon orange, glitter, and stamped stars!

Alphabet Challenge: R is for... Right and Rapid Rhinestones

Good evening! Back to the alphabet challenge, and I wanted something simple yet striking. I've had red-with-black-tips kicking around in my head for a while, and it just so happens that both of my favourite polishes in those colours start with R, so this one pretty much took care of itself!

Indoors with flash. I think this combination is so lush yet edgy!

I actually cut my length down for this one! I thought this would look better on shorter nails.

The base red is a single coat of Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Rapid Red. The polishes in this line are well known for being great for one-coat coverage and quick drying. (And they work for stamping wonderfully too!)

The tips were carefully painted on with Piggy Polish Right BLACK At Ya. And finally, two small black rhinestones on each nail. I got these from dollarnailart.com. (I got some other things from them too--can't wait to show you one of them next time!) Topped with Seche Vite for über-shinyness.

And outdoors in sunlight.

The wear time on these was really great. Black tips mean visible tip wear is pretty much unavoidable, but I wore this for a week (this is insane for me!) and all the gems stayed on perfectly :D

Thanks for stopping by! Join me next time for the letter S and me playing with a new-to-me nail product. Can't wait! xoxo

Clash of the Finishes: Holo Pink + Matte Black nails

Hallo! Eep, been nearly a week since I posted! I actually kept my birthday design on for five whole days. Whaaaat? Who does that?

But they were so fun :D

I did promise a cool new challenge, and I've already done a couple of manis for it! But before jumping into that, I want to show you a few others I had been saving. This is one I wore a few weeks ago. I love contrasting-finish manicures that use different types of polishes, and I always love wearing holographic colours! So, this happened:

So rainbowy and fantastic!

Simple yet mesmerising, eh? The pink base is the fabulous Color Club Miss Bliss. Two effortless coats, amazing linear holo effect even after adding topcoat. Perfection in a bottle.

I swiped on the diagonal-French tips with Piggy Polish Right BLACK At Ya. It dries quickly and to that cool matte finish on its own. Originally, I hadn't been thinking about it and was going to topcoat this, but then I thought NO THIS LOOKS FLIPPIN' SWEET.

Another, beacuse I couldn't decide between this pic and the first one. Can you? *_*

Both of the above pics were taken indoors with flash, because unfortunately, the sun didn't come out when I had it on. But you know, these Halo Hues are so amazing you can see the linear holo even in low, indirect lighting! Check this out:

aww yeah it's a friggin KOOSH BALL, why yes I am awesome thank you very much

See that? No flash, just indoors with some weird fluorescent lighting (hence the odd skin tone). And still, the rainbow effect is so brilliant they seem to glow of their own accord. I just love these polishes. Also that Koosh ball. (Seriously, that above pic makes me so happy. Haha.)

So yeah! I might have another post or two before I start the challenge, because I was given some beautiful polishes for my birthday and I need to show them off! See you next time xoxo

Challenge Day #30: Inspired by a TUTORIAL

Well, hello there friends! Sorry for the long delay! I have been travelling and then busy/jetlagged/working/catching up for the few days I've been back. But I have not neglected my nails, so I have a few manicures lined up to show you soon! Today's will be a very special one--something super blingy for an occasion I attended last night, and the fulfillment of challenge #30: inspired by a tutorial.

As you can see by the right sidebar, I follow a lot of nail-art blogs. I also subscribe to loads of talented artists on YouTube! One such lady is Anna, aka JapanNailsAndMore. She does some of the most dramatic and gorgeous nail art I've ever seen, often inspired by the Japanese (hence the channel name... duh). They go above and beyond what Westerners call nail art, applying lots of gems and 3D acrylic designs that often extend well off the nail in all directions and even include the fingers! She also has some of the most creative techniques I have seen even for regular painting and decorating. Go check her out, she's fascinating! And has a lovely soothing voice in which she explains everything to boot. ^_^

Anyway, as soon as I saw this video, I was in love. Was just waiting for the right time to recreate it, and that time was last night! I attended a charity ball hosted by the Margarita Society, a local organisation that raises money and Christmas toy donations for charities all around the area. Having grown up very poor and benefitted from this sort of charity in the past, it is a cause that is dear to my heart and I always try to do something like this around the holidays. Doesn't always come with a fancy party, though! But since it did this year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to go crazy and recreate Anna's blingy design!

Epically shiny!

Anna explains the process in her tutorial, so I won't go into exhausting detail--go watch her video! But the black I used was Piggy Polish Right BLACK At Ya, and the glitter is Sally Hansen Gem Crush in #08 Glitz Gal. I then used a pack of oversized, sticky-back scrapbooking rhinestones very similar to hers, and some nail glue to attach them. Few layers of Seche Vite topcoat sealed them all in. This was so fun to wear--they were catching the light better than any of my jewelry!

Without flash, so you can see the shapes and placements of the gems better.

I got so many compliments on these! My dress was a strapless black floor-length ballgown, corset-ish around the middle and then larger at the bottom, with a simple white band across the top. I felt a simple dress was perfect to accessorise this way, with lots of fun jewelled accents on my bag, shoes, fingertips, etc.

With my bag and one of the shoes, so you can see how well they went together!

And one more, so you can see that both hands match:

I'm glad to be back on here! I hope you missed me a little bit at least :o I'll be away the last half of next week, but as I said, I do have a couple of manis lined up that I plan to post, so I won't leave you as long again! Next post will be the last one of the challenge, a recreation of your favourite day. Then I'll be free again to do nails with only my own imagination as my guide. :D Yay! xoxo

Challenge Day #25: Inspired by FASHION

Hallo! Welcome to day 25 of the challenge. This was the hardest one for me so far: inspired by fashion. I am not a very fashionable person. I am a stylish person, although my style is all over the place (pink top and long frilly skirt one day, black bondage pants and a Black Sabbath shirt the next, etc). But fashionable? Trendy? In tune with "what's in season"? Heeeeeelllll naw. So I did what a lot of nail bloggers did for day 25: turned to my best friend Google for some inspiration, and found this hot little number from a designer called Alexander McQueen:

Look at those beautiful gold and copper dragonflies! And the chain! On that black! I want this dress, nao plz. (Image found on style.com)

Isn't that just lush? I love metallic + black, and I just happened to have image plates with dragonflies and chains. So I came up with a manicure that looked awesome in person, but of which I could NOT get a decent pic to save my life:

I swear it was so nice in real life. Blah.

I started with one easy coat of Piggy Polish's Right BLACK At Ya. I really like this brand--they're all one-coaters and dry super fast, making them perfect base colours for stamping. I then used two Revlon metallic polishes (yes, again. because they're awesome, that's why) in gold (#925 Gold Coin) and copper (#932 Copper Penny) to make the design. I used my trusty detail brush to make small strokes of the colours near the base of the nail at first, to represent the areas where the dragonflies are more concentrated at the top of the dress. I then used the dragonfly image from Mash plate #41 to stamp them several times in the same two polishes, dabbing both colours on the plate randomly for the two-toned effect. On the accent nail, I used the chains from Bundle Monster plate BM12, then sealed it all in with Seche Vite topcoat.

The only other half-decent pic I could get. This one's clearer, at least. It was so shiny, my camera had trouble focusing on them!

If I were doing this one again, I'd probably be less lazy and actually fill it totally in with the dragonflies instead of "cheating" on the bottom part. But I like this look too, even if it was more elegant in my imagination.

Oh well. Moving onward! I'm already wearing the next design, inspired by a pattern. Can't wait to show you--this has been popular with my co-workers; we'll see what you think. See you soon! xoxo

Challenge Day #14: FLOWERS

Bonjour monde! Today's challenge is flowers! I wanted something simple, classic, modern-looking... Decided on a black-and-white design, and I loved it... but then I ruined it, as you can see:

Unforgiveable topcoat smearing :( and zomg, my right hand, nowai.

I wore it for the entire day because I didn't have time to re-do it... so I'm counting it for the challenge, but I am not happy with it. Shame, because it was such a nice idea (IMHO). I started with one coat of Right BLACK At Ya by Piggy Polish. It's a great one-coat polish that dries with a "suede" finish, and super-fast, making it a great base on which to stamp. I used Konad special polish in white and Konad plate #m60 for the flowers just stamping in random areas here and there. I think it had a nice modern-yet-retro feel to it. However, I then decided a little pop of colour in the centre of the flowers would be nice, and I had these large hex glitters I got from Born Pretty Store that I hadn't even opened yet! (They can be acquired here for a very reasonable price--and free shipping!--just like everything on their site.) So I added a drop of clear polish to the middle of each flower, and used a toothpick to pick up the individual glitters and place them in the centres. At this point it still looked nice, see?

Pre-topcoating. See how neat the flowers were? I also think it looked nice with that semi-matte finish. I would have left it like this if I wasn't afraid the flowers and glitter would rub off. In retrospect, should have just done that and took the risk.

Previous pic was with flash, this is without. The colour of the glitter pieces shows up well here.

But then, like I said, I had to go ruin it. My lovely Cult Nails Wicked Fast topcoat is normally so good over stamping--but Konad white and black special polishes are notorious for smearing. And then to make things worse, even though I used not two coats of topcoat, I still lost a few of the glitters by the end of the day. Go figure O_o

The black base + blue glitters + white details matched my phone, so I posed with it! The smearing isn't quite so bad on this hand. But still. *pout*

Oh well! You win some and you lose some. It was still a cute mani, and as I said, I did wear it all day. Despite being all frustrated with it in this post, I actually didn't mind it too much. I'm just too much of a perfectionist about my nails, haha!

Hope you'll join me next time for some pretty delicate nails :) Until then, bonsoir et au revoir! xoxo