Thursday 5 April 2012

Easter/Spring Nails and THE WORST WATER MARBLING EVER

I'm going away over Easter to see my mum so I probably won't have time to post this tomorrow, which is why it's going up a little early. I'm particularly excited for Easter this year as I gave up chocolate for lent and I can't wait to be able to eat it again!

Anyways, I came up with this little nail design as I was going along and it turned out pretty good...



Colours used:
  • OPI I Vant to be A-Lone Star (blue)
  • American Apparel Factory Grey (lavender)
  • American Apparel Army Jacket (green)
  • An old unnamed Avon pink
  • OPI In My Back Pocket (orange for the beak)
  • Barry M Black
  • Natural Collection Nail Tip Whitener
To do this, you need to first paint the base colour on each nail and let it completely dry before sponging on the lavender and the green. Once this is dry, dot on the white with a dotting tool, pinhead, toothpick, bobby pin or whatever you can find that would get similar results. For the ring finger, paint a pink oval and dot two black circles near the top for the eyes of the chick. The beak can be dotted on too, but you will need a smaller tool (I used a toothpick). The white egg can be free handed with the normal polish brush or you could use a smaller nail art brush. All my nail art bushes are dirty (I'm awful at remembering to clean them!) so I used a toothpick to outline the egg and then just filled it in with the normal brush. Add a topcoat and voila!

Now onto the water marbling...

Wednesday 4 April 2012

Laughing in the Purple Rain

...also known as Illamasqua Stance. 

Yesterday, my friend and I went shopping around Carnaby Street and I ended up buying four new nail polishes that I will be doing something with in the near future. There is a Illamasqua shop there and so I decided to buy Stance from their new Human Fundamentalism collection. The polish is a pinkish purple berry creme and photos do NOT do it justice at all so you should definitely try finding it in person before judging it!
This is sadly the only photo that sort of gets the colour right, although it's a little darker in real life.



Formula wise, it's not too bad. I had to use three coats and there is still a little nail line peeking through if you look closely, but not enough that anyone other than me would notice. It also dried really dull, strangely, but that's easily fixed with a top coat. To be honest, I think I was expecting better after paying £13.50 for one bottle, but I still like it a lot and it's a good summer colour.

P.S my hands are really dry here...sorry!