April Favourites

April has gone by SO quickly-it's really flown past for me, only feels like a couple of days ago we were celebrating Easter and all of a sudden it's May! Wow!
Here's my April Faves!

-I didn't do many Try Something Tuesdays this month so I don't have many to choose from-my favourite was obviously my splatter mani, as my other attempt was a total disasticure!

-Rara's done a lot of Spring time/Easter themed nails for me this month but my favourite has to be her birthday bunnies, which were really awesome!

-I joined Kimber's ABC challenge and was really overwhelmed with the support my fellow challengers gave to me, right from my first post-nautical nails.

-I'm also really enjoying using my new Barry M nail pens as they let me do so much more than I could with brushes-like my night time nails:

-But overall my favourite mani of the month HAS to be my owls-they got so many positive and lovely comments both from fellow bloggers and in real life! I'm definitely going to do them again soon!

So there's my April favourites, and I hope you liked them too!

~Nail Art Novice~

A Few Things

~PIC HEAVY POST~

Hello!
No Try Something Tuesday this week, but for good reasons (explained later, I promise), I thought I should mention a few things instead:

• Firstly you won't be seeing any of Rara's lovely nails for a while because she broke her wrist on Saturday =( She's all plastered up and feeling a bit miserable, so please send her lots of get well messages!
• I'm going to be away this weekend as I am performing in this: http://boxoffice.brightonfringe.org/event.aspx?evId=4891#container at the Brighton Fringe festival, (which you should all come and see if you live nearby =p) so won't be around to post anything from Friday-Monday. Fear not! I have got a guest post lined up for you so there's something fun to look at whilst I'm away =)
• I have now put myself on an indefinite polish ban-until I've paid all my debts off! (To friends, I mean, not student loans!) The reasons for this will become very clear shortly. And as I'm not the richest person in the world this might be for a good couple of months! (The only exception I am allowing myself to this is a white Barry M pen if I come across one, because they're SO useful for nail art, but that's IT.) Also I figure if I tell you guys then I have to stick to it, don't I?
• In other news I have a job interview tomorrow! (Hence why I haven't done the TST I had originally planned, as I need work appropriate nails) It's only for a part time job but money is money and it's better than nothing at this stage! Please keep your fingers crossed for me lovelies =)

Now onto why I decided that I needed to ban myself:

I popped into H&M yesterday to pick up their Matte top coat (I need matte black nails for my show and didn't own a matte top coat) on a recommendation from Charlie from Pocket Money Polishes. Whilst I was there a couple of other polishes happened to make their way into my hands...

L-R: H&M Matte Top Coat, H&M Glitter-Blue,
H&M-Silver Frost

(I realise now I've uploaded this picture that you can't actually see what Silver Frost is-it's a silver glitter topper with small hexes and microglitter in a clear base.)
I'd wanted the Blue glitter since I saw it used on Fairly Charming's blog with underwater themed nail art on it-it's the perfect 'water' colour and really different to anything I've seen anywhere else! I'm not 100% sold on the bar glitter toppers that are popular at the mo, I can't help but think they look a bit hairy, but this is really lovely! All of these polishes were £1.99 so I reckon I got a bargain really!

Then I had to go and get my watch battery changed, and the little stall was right outside a new beauty store I'd not been in before. I went in solely with the intention of asking if they had any acetone (they didn't) but then my eye was caught by the polishes and I was lost.

Top Row L-R: Revlon-Blue Lagoon, La Femme Beauty Unnamed x2,
Revlon-Emerald City
Bottom Row L-R: Cairuo-Green Tea 22, Cairuo-Blueberry 16,
Cairuo-Blueberry 19

Those Cairuo's say they're 12mls on the front, but they're definitely not! They're about the same size as the smaller Rimmel bottles, which are 8ml. They're nice colours though, and were cheap so can't complain (even if I can't pronounce the name!). Geordie Nails has some swatches of two of these shades up at the mo. These were all £1 apart from the Revlons which were £2.50 I think.

Here's a close up shot of those pretty glitters, I'm so sad they don't have names though! (As far as I can tell they don't even have numbers!)

The one on the left has purple microglitters with turquoise and gold small hexes, and the one on the right has green and blue microglitters with hexes in red, pink, yellow and blue. 

Then when I arrived at home worn out with my day's shopping I discovered I had a package from Fragrance Direct with my new OPIs in-I couldn't resist when I saw them up there for only £3.99! They've got most of the Texas and Holland collections, with a few others.

L-R I Don't Give A Rotterdam, I Juggle...Men, I Have A Herring
Problem, Thanks a Windmillion

I've wanted Windmillion for ages now, it's a lovely shade of green. I couldn't choose between Rotterdam and Herring Problem so got both, and Juggle Men is a pretty iridescent shimmer topper which I think will look awesome over darker colours! 

Finally, after all that, I knew I had to do a post with them all in. But THEN when I woke up this morning I'd received some Awesome nail mail from Above the Curve with my beautiful new indies in, so I thought I'd add those too. For those who don't know ATC you should check them out, they make some really beautiful glitters and holos, and $1 from every bottle of polish is donated to a charity that helped the founder when she was younger.

L-R: Mother Earth, Field of Tulips

Can you believe that this is my FIRST EVER holo polish? I'd wanted one for ages and never really could afford one, or find sites that shipped them to the UK so I treated myself when ATC had a sale on a few weeks ago. It's a beautiful browny/coppery coloured holo with the full rainbow effect and I love it! It's what I am going to wear to my interview tomorrow because it's neutral enough to be work appropriate but still incredible!
As for Field of Tulips? I don't understand why I can't find any swatches of this floating around the blogsphere, it's so pretty! In the photo the glitters have settled where it was lying during transport but on the nail it has all those colours in a pale minty green base and it's lovely! I took a couple of swatch shots to show you them better too.

Field of Tulips, 3 coats

Mother Earth, 2 coats

So yes. I definitely am no longer allowed to buy polishes, especially as I have another 3 on their way to me in the post, Royal Mail permitting! I dread to think how much I've spent on polishes this month-Fragrance Direct have had a lot of it, so they're going to wonder what's happened to their profits over the next few months! But it's something I definitely need to do because I really don't have the money to spend on them, and I can't really warrant it when I owe lots of people lots of money. 

So that's you all caught up! I'm gonna head off now, but will try and get another post up before I leave on Friday!

~Nail Art Novice~

Ask A British Nail Blogger II

Time for another British Bloggers question! This week it's:

How Do You Store Your Polish?

Easy answer-in these!

Yes that is a Christmas tree in the background.
Yes my room is full of stuff that really needs sorting.

When I was at uni I used to keep all my polishes in my makeup bag, although that was getting more and more impractical as I bought more. When I came home for good, I decided I needed somewhere to keep them more permanently and as luck would have it I found these Ikea drawers again. I've had them for years and they didn't really have much in when I first rediscovered them but now the smaller one on the left holds all my "extra bits" and the one on the right holds my ever expanding collection of polishes!

This is how my polishes are arranged-the swatch wheels live in the appropriate drawers and I group the polishes together by colour. Top left is purple, grey and white, top middle is red and brown, top right is glitter toppers, indies and crackle effect types, middle left is blue and black, middle right is green and yellow and the bottom drawer is currently pinks, silvers, oranges and nudes, plus extra bits such as base coat and top coat. The groupings do keep changing based on how many of each colour I have though! (I don't know what I'll do when I end up with altogether too many of one colour!)
I also tag the top of the bottle with a sticker swatched in that polish, so I can see exactly what I want when I'm looking from above. 

The second, smaller set of drawers has all the non-polish bits I need-decals, stampers, swatch sticks (which I use to practice designs on), sponges, extra remover/cotton pads, Seche Restore, tape, stickers and brushes. I also have a stool next to my work area that has become a home for the polishes I'm using at the moment, my remover and topcoat/basecoats. It's not the best set up in the world (as I routinely knock it over!) but it'll do for now, until I move out!

So there you have it. If you want to know how more sensible people store their polishes then check out the links at the bottom.

~Nail Art Novice~

31BPC 8-Biggest Pet Peeves

I am a person who has a lot of pet peeves, I'm sorry to say. I just get annoyed really easily by little things and  end up ranting about it on Twitter sometimes! Picking just one for this post would be impossible:

1. People who play their music out loud on public transport.
Also if their music is so loud I can hear it over their headphones, that's just as bad for me. It's just so rude. The wonderful thing about music is that everyone has their own bands/songs that they like and dislike and it's a very personal thing. Which is why it really annoys me if I can hear your music blasting out over the top of my own/the conversation I'm trying to have-because you're assuming that everyone else around you wants to listen to the same things as you, or worse not caring if it bothers anyone. It drives me mad because it ends up being all I can hear and I have been known to move to an entirely different train carriage before to get away from someone being this inconsiderate.

2. Poor spelling and grammar.
In particular mis-use of apostrophes! I see it everywhere and it makes me twitch. Now I'm not necessarily talking about blog posts and FB posts here-I would never correct someone's grammar in this situation because I realise that a lot of people are sensitive about it, and you just come off as a bit of a nobhead (s'quse my French!) if you do. But in public or in a way that's supposed to promote a service you offer? It's ridiculous. It looks so unprofessional to have apostrophes to make words plural or the wrong use of 'your' in an advert or something. For instance there's a tattoo parlour near me that has 'TATTOO'S' in large black letters over the door. I'm really not sure why you would choose to go and get something inked on you FOREVER from a tattoo parlour that can't even punctuate its own sign correctly-I mean would you risk it??

3. People who assume I'm going to have children.
This is a very personal one, but one that really gets on my nerves. I'm don't want to have children, for a myriad of reasons, but it's something I've thought about a lot. This is why it drives me so mad when I tell people this and their response is "Oh but you'll change your mind when you get older" or "It's different when it's your own though". I would much prefer them to respect my decision rather than telling me that I'm too young to make it yet, or just being shocked that I know I'm not going to have any. The worst ones are people who respond with "you'll get all broody when the hormones kick in in 5 years time though" as if just because I am a woman with ovaries I am destined to want to have children one day. It's my choice and my body and my life, and if one day I do change my mind that will also be up to me and not anyone else. I can't see it happening though!

I'm going to stop there because there are so many more that I have but it'd take me forever to type them all out!

Until next time,

~Nail Art Novice~

Find the other 31BPC posts here:
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven

Night Time Is The Right Time

A week or so ago Rara told me about a contest on Avon's Connect site for night time nails (here, hopefully) and I really wanted to enter but couldn't really think of much that I would be able to pull off well (I was going to do my owls again but wanted something different as it was so soon!).
That all changed when I received some surprise nail mail from my friend! He'd borrowed my Barry M nail pen at the weekend to decorate his girlfriend's nails with and ended up using it much more than I had so he offered to buy me a new one. When the package turned up yesterday, not only was there a black pen but also a silver one and Barry M's Gold Foil Effects-I've been thoroughly spoilt! Having the silver pen made all the difference to this mani!

Polishes used: Rimmel-Midnight Blue (the darker of the two blues), Barry M-Denim, London Girl-Unknown (The sticker's come off the bottom! It's a very sheer pearly white), Collection 2000-Look At Me!, Barry M-Black, plus the Barry M nail art pens in black and silver, and a little bit of glow in the dark glitter polish called Astral Lights that I've had for YEARS. I actually only ended up using the London Girl polish on my thumb because I had forgotten how awful the formula was-it takes forever to dry and needs lots of layers to build up to a decent colour. All the rest of the details were done with my silver Barry M pen instead!

This really shows how good those pens were-this was done
with my left hand and still looks OK!

Just to prove they glow

I rather like them, but I couldn't have done them without a lot of help from Mr. Barry Mero and his wonderful nail art pens (and of course my lovely friend who bought them for me!)

EDIT: Asked Rara what she thought of my owls, and she said she thought they were cats! Made me laugh, oh dear =p

Tata

~Nail Art Novice~

Don't forget to check out the British Nail Blogger ladies this week:

ABC Challenge: P is for Purple Phishtail Plaits

So I may have taken a little liberty with the name there ;) Forgive me?

I was going to do penguins originally for this mani but thought they would be too similar to my owls in the end. Also I've been working at my friend's Dad's factory this week and am frankly too exhausted to do anything fancy-so I've done a simple fishtail. I love these manis, they're so effective! Also I apologise for not doing a Try Something Tuesday post this week-the simple fact is that I fell asleep for most of Tuesday night when I got in and therefore didn't do any nail art!

Polishes used were Rimmel-Marshmallow Heaven (pinky-lilacy colour), Rimmel-Purple Addict (shimmery purple loveliness) and Marks and Spencer-Blue (dusky purpley blue). Incidentally it bugs me when people call what are clearly purple polishes 'blue'.
After I'd finished the mani I felt like it was missing something, so I added a layer of Absolut Lacquer-Maybe I'm Crazy to my non-fishtail nails and I think it's really added something magical. It's basically a rainbow glitterbomb in a pot-every colour of glitter imaginable and it's so pretty. It's also the first indie polish I ever bought, so it has a special place in my heart!

It's a really simple mani but I reckon it's really quite pretty too! I just noticed the chip on my middle finger though, boo =(

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out what the other particpants have done this week:

L'Oreal Color Riche Collection-608 Luxembourg Garden

Here's my second post of swatches from my (random assortment of the) L'Oreal Color Riche collection and today's is number 608-Luxembourg Garden. This is another difficult one to describe-it's sort of dark greeny grey with lots of green shimmer running through it, so it sort of comes out as a metallicy green. I realise that doesn't make sense, but it's a bit of a chameleon, it seems to change colour depending on what you put it next to!

For instance, on my green swatch wheel, it looks distinctly out of place and very dark, hardly green at all:

Luxembourg Garden is number 1
(If you want to know any others, just ask!)

(Incidentally it makes me really happy that I've not found any colours the same as each other during my swatching, means that all my polishes were totally justifiable!)

But on my fingers it definitely looks quite green:

Natural light shot

This is again 3 coats without topcoat. This one definitely needed the three, unlike Rue Montmartre, which could have escaped with two-this is a lot more sheer. It's not as shiny either, it's definitely more on the metallic side of the spectrum. Application was easy and dry time was pretty fast! I really like these long flat brushes, it makes the polish really easy to control-again this required no clean up (except on the accent nails, but that's because I was being naughty and polishing horizontally across the nails!).
I even remembered to take a picture of the brush this time:

As you can see it's super long and very wide, it splays out quite a lot when you apply pressure and covers your nails easily in two strokes (one for little finger) but without getting polish all over your cuticles which get a massive thumbs up from me, coz I hate cleaning up!

I got my Color Riches from Fragrance Direct for £1.20 each but they're also available in Boots and Superdrug (although they don't seem to have all the colours anywhere!) for about £4.99! You only get 5mls in each bottle, so you have to really want one for that price!

Thanks for reading!

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out the lovely British Nail Bloggers magnificent work this week:

ABC Challenge: O is for Owls

Following Tuesday's total disasticure I am pleased to say that this mani is probably my favourite piece of nail art that I've ever done-I'm totally in love with it and don't want to take it off ever! Sorry if it sounds like I'm bragging but I'm just really proud of myself that I've done something that looks so good, I was so surprised how well it turned out!

So this week is 'O' in the ABC Challenge and I knew what I wanted to do straight away-something I saw a while ago and knew I would recreate. Before I even started my own blog I found these amazing owl nails by The Little Canvas and loved them. I finally got around to doing them myself!

Polishes used: Essie-Mojito Madness, Barry M-Lychee (finally I own this beauty!), Collection 2000-Look At Me! and Rimmel-Tangy Tangerine. Details were added with my new Barry M Nail Art Pen (I LOVE being able to spend my hard earned Boots points on awesome things!) which worked like a dream. 

Without further ado then (I took lots of pictures because I love them so much!):

Sadly this guy suffered a surprise zip attack shortly after he was
finished, hence the dint

This one really makes
me giggle!

So there we have it! I think next time I do these (there will be a next time!!!) I'll put a neutral base on over my nails first, just because the green makes my natural nail colour look a bit weird and purple (see my thumb on the first pic). I really love them though! They're making me really happy =)

Hope you like them as much as I do!

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out the other 'O' posts by these lovelies:

Try Something Tuesday-Full Nail Water Decals: A Disasticure

~Before I begin I just want to wish Rara a very Happy Birthday, coz it's TODAY, Yay!~

PIC HEAVY POST

So the other night I went out to a comedy gig for Rara's birthday, and I wanted to co-ordinate my nails with what I was wearing-my beautiful black and white polkadot rockabilly style dress. I've done plain black and white spotted nails before and wanted something different so I chose some fun spotted full nail decals from YRNails which I thought would look pretty good. I watched their 'How To' video along with Lisa from Geordie Nails' tutorial video (which is really helpful if you've never applied full water decals before!) and got all my equipment ready to go. 

I started by painting my nails (badly) with two coats of Revlon-Black Star which is a lovely black with a silvery shimmer running through it to give a base colour if I needed one.

Then I set about applying my water decals and...here's where it all went wrong. Now I'm definitely not blaming the decals for this, I've seen lots of people use them well and get great results, I think it was my atrocious technique that was to blame for the mess they ended up in. 

Firstly, let me show you how they were supposed to look, with a little help from the lovely Wendy from Wendy's Delights:

Find her superior review of these decals here

I'm a bit ashamed of how badly mine do not look like the ones above really. Any how, here goes:

They don't look so bad from a distance do they?

Up close though you can see that I really did a terrible job!

And don't even get me started on my right hand!

I experienced SO many problems with these that I don't really know where to begin. I think my nails on my right hand were a little short (thanks to my Sheffield trip) because I struggled to get rid of the excess decal on my index and middle fingers simply due to how close to the ends of my fingers the nails are. Obviously I didn't cut them down as well as I could either, I didn't want to take too much of the widths so that I wouldn't end up with bald patches, but I should have been less cautious and they would have fitted my nails much better.

However even with the sizing difficulties I didn't manage to get these to stick to my nails at all. I followed all the directions to the letter, but they just sat on top of my nails and slid about no matter much I tried to get them to stay put by smoothing them into the corners. Even my right hand ring finger (which is probably the only one I cut to the correct size!) didn't stick down on its own, I ended up putting a layer of top coat underneath them all to hold them into place! I don't know what I was doing wrong. I also covered them in layers of topcoat, and they still lifted away from my nails.

As you can see only two of these are completely flush with
my nail! 

I ended up with lots of rough edges, lifting sections and creases and they just didn't look very nice. I went for a shower about an hour after putting these on and they all just lifted off so much that I just peeled them off in the end.

This happened just from picking up my towel! They all ended up
like this though =( =(

I'm really sad I wasn't able to make these work for me! I think they have the potential to look so amazing, and all the other blogs I've seen with people wearing them have been beautiful, I've never seen anyone else have this amount of problems. I am determined to try these again and get them to work, but maybe not for a while because I'm so disheartened by this first attempt =( I think next time I'll try them over naked nails to see if that helps, and obviously cut them down better.

In the end, because I was running out of time to get ready for the evening I ended up wearing something very simple (but lovely) over my Revlon base-two coats of Absolut Lacquer-Mrs Claus' Night Out. Although this is technically a Christmas polish, one of the reasons I bought it was because it had the potential to be used all year round, and I was right! These pictures were taken the day after so there's a bit of tip-wear but they're still in better condition than my decals were! I really like this combo =)

So there ends the sorry tale of my first attempt at full nail water decals. I hope you've at least enjoyed looking at my total failure, and if you have any hints or tips as to how I can make them work for me, please let me know in the comments!!

~Nail Art Novice~

Birthday Bunnies!

Hello lovelies, Rara here again!
It's my birthday this week =D so for the past month and a half (probably longer actually) I scoured the internet for a new dress to go out in. [Novice-She did-I kept getting hundreds of FB messages with just links to pretty dresses in, and all the ones I liked were the wrong ones!] I found loads of beautiful dresses but not one that made me go 'WOW, I NEED THAT ONE IN MY LIFE!!!'
I tend to buy the vast majority of my clothes from Dorothy Perkins so I was determine not to get a dress from there this time. Last weekend I went into town and dragged my sister into every shop that sold (reasonably priced) dresses and found none =( In the end I gave in and went into DPs and lo and behold there was MY DRESS!!! I should have just gone in there earlier and saved all the bother. It was even reduced from £45-£25 so it was even better!
Inspired by my new beautiful dress I did a mani to match!

My dress design

It was really simple, I only used three polishes including the top coat but I love it and loads of people have commented on it at work and around and about-even the old men collecting their pensions! (I work in a post office.)
The black I used was Sinful Colors-Black on Black which was only £1.99 in Boots (yay!) and Barry M-Matt White plus Barry M-Basecoat and Topcoat. The rabbits were done with a dotting tool.

I LOVE this mani, especially as it matched my birthday dress perfectly and all night I kept placing my hands against my dress to admire the effect.
Hope you like it as much as I do!

Until next time, 

Rara x

~

Aww, I love these bunnies! They did go perfectly with her dress too. I think my favourite is the tiny cute bunny on her index finger, he's got a little stubby nose and everything. Also enjoying the bunny-who-ate-all-the-carrots on her ring finger! And because she's truly dedicated, she even did matching toes too, even though they weren't going to be on show.
I'm always impressed with Rara's nail art, she's a natural! Can't wait to see what she comes up with next!

~Nail Art Novice~

Lovely Liebsters and Other Things...

I recently came across this picture, I think it's my
favourite Liebster pic of them all!

I got nominated for a Liebster award by Megan at Megan Box Nails and then on the same day also got nominated for a 'Best Blog' award by Kate at Pimped Out Nails and on reading them they seem very similar so I thought I'd skirt around the rules a little and combine them both together. I found a bit of background to the Liebsters on this blog, if you have no idea what they are-chances are though you've come across some on other people's blogs before.
So what I'm going to do is skip out the 11 facts part of the Liebster (if you're bitterly disappointed check out my first 31BPC post instead) and just answer the 11 questions from each of the lovely ladies who nominated me.



Megan's Questions:
1. What was your dream last night?
Heh, I always have really weird dreams. I can't remember all of it but I know at one point I ended up getting my ear pierced four times even though I had originally gone in for an entirely different piercing. There was a lot of running and hiding from things too, I seem to recall. ODD.

2. Do you believe in love at first sight?
I believe in lust at first sight, yes, not so sure about love. I think you can't love someone properly without knowing them well first, but you can certainly fancy them from the first meeting!

3. Did you have a fear when you were little that terrified you, but now you couldn't care less about?
Erm...no, not really. I was a pretty fearless child. I've actually got more afraid of stupid things since I got older, although I've never liked crowds, even as a child and definitely not as an adult.

4. What's one thing you like about yourself?
I like quite a lot about myself, really. I'm quite a confident person, and I like the fact that I will talk to anyone, even in awkward situations.

5. Favourite clothing brand?
Most of my stuff comes from Dorothy Perkins so I guess there, or Qwertee T-shirts!

6. What's one word you use the most?
This changes fairly frequently, but I know at the moment I am definitely over using the word 'marvellous'-sounds ridiculously British but I kinda like the hint of eccentricity =p

7. What's the last movie you watched?
Erm...I actually had to turn my TV on to see what was in my DVD player. Apparently it's Gnomeo and Juliet, which is a very excellent film =)

8. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Stratford-upon-Avon, Britain. I sort of fell in love with it last time I went, I want to live in a tiny Tudor cottage with a higgeldy-piggedly roof and lots of beautiful knick-knacks inside. When I get rich. Other than that I'd settle for wonderful Sheffield! (I'm a home bird, I have no desire to live anywhere except this wonderful rainy little country!)

9. If you could change one thing about the world regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
Well that's a big question! I'd either make it so David Cameron never came to power in Britain to mess EVERYTHING up again, or I'd make sure that everyone in the world had access to free healthcare and education, regardless of location, gender, etc etc. Y'know, if I had a magic wand.

10. Type of music you dislike the most?
Can I say modern music in general? I don't like most of the stuff that's around today. If I had to pick one genre though it'd probably be drum and bass, it's just awful NOISE to me.

11. If you could eat lunch with one famous person, who would it be?
Oooh, someone awesome like Neil Gaiman or Stephen Fry who I would be able to have an intellectual conversation with and would make me laugh.


Kate's Questions:
1.What is your favourite blog/website to look at?
You mean I have to only choose one?!?! Too hard!
OK so my favourite go-to website for procrastination is notalwaysright.com which is a site where people submit stories of stupid/rude customers to so other people can read and enjoy them. I think it's brilliant, personally!

2. What do you want to get out of blogging?
I really love the communities I have found through blogging, letting me interact with people who have similar interests to me. I want to improve my nail art technique as well as get to know more of these awesome ladies.

3. What made you decide to start your blog?
I'd got to the point where I was starting to enjoy doing different effects on my nails and wanted to share them with people-but none of my friends were ever interested or even noticed! I thought I'd start a blog to help me improve my technique, record all my efforts and hopefully find some people to talk about polish and nail art with =)

4. What is your one favourite nail polish?
Again this is a hard one...and there's so many I love that I don't even own! I've recently fallen for L'Oreal's Magic Croisette though-a lovely royal blue with greeny/aquay/goldy shimmers running through it.

5. If you had to choose one nail design to have for the rest of your life what would it be?
Fishtails/Braided manis, I really love how they look and how easy they are to do, and obviously there's endless colour combinations for them!

6. Do you have any tattoos?
Yes, I have one on my left foot that reads 'All The World's A Stage', which is a quote from my favourite Shakespeare play and also very applicable to my life!

7. What is your one go-to product that you can't live without?
Probably something boring like Vaseline or some other form of lip balm. I have never been able to tolerate having dry or cracked lips.

8. Who is No. 1 on your list of dream dates?
I honestly don't think I have a list of dream dates-is that weird? Oooh I do quite fancy Robert Sheehan though, with his lovely hazel eyes and big pouty lips...OK I may have just started a list of dream dates now!

9. Are you an Apple or PC user?
I am whole heartedly a PC user. I don't own any Apple products (no, not even an iPod!) and I will keep on refusing to buy them until they take over and monopolise everything. I don't really have a good reason for this, I just don't really like them, plus they're SUPER expensive!

10. What is your No. 1 beauty tip?
Erm, I don't think I have one really. I'm very much for loving yourself over changing the way you look so I guess my best tip would be something like you don't have to change yourself/cover yourself up to be beautiful, just change the way you look at yourself and find the beauty that everyone else can see.

11. Are you happy in life and what would you change if you could?
Generally I'm very happy in my life, and wouldn't change much, certainly not much about myself. If I could have 3 wishes though I'd have a job, a home in Sheffield and the ability to drive without having to learn, then I'd be perfectly contented.

So there we are. I'm also going to skip tagging other bloggers in this, because I've not exactly done it conventionally anyway, and I always feel a tiny bit awkward asking someone to do something like this, just in case they don't want to or something. Also I know a lot of people have already received a Liebster award so I don't want to re-nominate anyone by accident.

Thanks a lot to the two lovelies who nominated me-Megan and Kate- I've really enjoyed doing this! Your questions were brilliant and really interesting to answer.

~Nail Art Novice~