A Gorgeous Goddess

As I've been doing lots of travelling and haven't wanted to take all my nail art tools with me I've been using a lot of glittery indies to keep my nails interesting without having to take too many polishes. Most of them haven't ended up being photographed but this one I had to share with you because it's stunning, although it comes with a sad (for me) story. While I think that the rise in indie makers (particularly in the UK) is fabulous because it means they are much more available for us polish lovers it also means that some of the older sellers are unable to compete with the influx any more. One of my absolute favourite indie polish makers, who has been so right from the beginning of my nail art obsession, is closing her doors for good and this makes me SO sad. To use up her supplies she's offering one of a kind 'mystery' polishes on her Etsy shop until they're all gone and I had to bag myself one before she disappeared into the ether. And boy am I a lucky girl-it's beautiful.

This is Absolut Lacquer-Goddess Jenni (she even named it after me-how awesome is that?) and she's a clear glitter topper filled with golden dots and iridescent hexes, squares and shimmers. She's utterly gorgeous and a little camera shy, but I've done my best. I layered her over Revlon-Plum Night to try and bring out some of that hidden sparkle. This is 1-2 coats-for the most part I got a pretty decent amount of coverage with just 1 but sometimes I went back and added a second for extra glitz and glam. (Apologies for the slight tip wear in these)

You can see how many different colours she shimmers and shines, and I couldn't stop moving my fingers about to admire the colour changes and the sparkle-I'm a bit in love. I'm also torn, I want to wear her all the time because she's so pretty but at the same time I know this is the only bottle that is ever going to exist and I want to keep her forever and ever! 

If you want to get your own Absolut Lacquer one of a kind polish then you have to be quick, they're going fast! Visit her Etsy shop here. I, for one, will miss her when she's gone! Thanks for all the awesome polishes Tisha, best of luck in your new adventures!

~Nail Art Novice~

Mish Mash Challenge Week 5-Music

Hello lovelies! I am back from my many adventures and finally posting a Mish Mash challenge mani on the right day for once-hurrah! I had to think about this one, as I like a lot of very strange music and wasn't exaactly sure how I would ever manage to represent any of this on my nails but then I had a much better idea!

One of the reasons I keep my nails short is because I play the bass guitar and find that long nails get caught on the strings and make it really difficult to play. I really love my bass-she's not the most expensive or well made of instruments but she's mine and I think she's really gorgeous (and yes, for reference, she does have a name as well). So I decided to do black and green gradients in tribute to her-plus accents designed to look like the neck of the guitar. Polishes used were: Barry M-Spring Green, W7-Black, OPI-Suzi Loves Cowboys plus the silver Barry M nail art pen. I matted the accents with Rimmel Lycra Pro-Matte Finish.

It's not quite the right shade of green but I love this colour combination and how bright it is, plus the accents which match my bass perfectly.
So there we go! I'm off to jam out for a bit now, laters!

~Nail Art Novice~

If you want to read about my Edinburgh adventures then check out my other blog: http://www.ordinaryextraordinarylife.com/

Don't forget to check out the other awesome participants in the inlinkz:

Rawr!

Hello lovelies! Rara here again, because Novice is off visiting another friend in Devon at the moment-nice for some ey?

Today I wanted to do something fun and settled on the idea of monsters! I wanted each one to have different expressions and personalities. Polishes used were: Revlon-Fire, Barry M-Blue Grape, Spring Green, Mango, Rimmel-Sunshine as well as the black and white Barry M nail art pens. 

I love the orange one with her eyelashes, the red one reminds me of a spider and the green one of a dragon. I'm well impressed with these! So happy!!!!

Novice will be back in time for the Mish Mash challenge next week,

Until next time!

~Rara~

Mish Mash Week 4-New Nail Art Technique-Take Two!

OK, so I really didn't like what I'd ended up with in my first attempt at this week's challenge, and definitely didn't want to keep it on my hands for long. As I started removing it (shortly after I'd finished the post, if I'm honest), I started looking through some of the other wonderful manis done for this week and I came across this wonderful post by A Polished Prance showing the 'drag marbling' technique which looks really fabulous. I decided to try it out on my thumb to see if I could do it and it looked really cool! I then decided this was going to be my second 'try something new' mani, in the hope it would come out a little better. Thankfully, it did!

Polishes used are the same as before with the addition of Barry M-Matt White and China Glaze-Fairy Dust because I fancied adding a little sparkle. I just followed the same video tutorial that Chantelle linked to in her post and it was really quite simple and easy =)

I did struggle a little using my non-dominant hand, simply because holding the needle was a little fiddly but I still really like the end result MUCH more than I did with the acid wash-it's really bright and fun and funky. This one definitely won't be getting taken off straight away! Thanks to A Polished Prance for the idea!

Again, don't forget to check out the inlinkz,  it just goes to show you never know what you might find as inspiration =)

Until next time!

~Nail Art Novice~

Mish Mash Challenge Week 4-New Nail Art Technique

I had originally planned to try out the dreaded water marble for this week, but that would have meant being awake enough to get dressed and go and buy supplies for it and I just couldn't be bothered in the end =p

Instead, I attempted the acid wash technique which is something I'd been wanting to try for a while. Polishes used were all Barry M-Passion Fruit, Mango, Key Lime, Guava, Blue Grape, Prickly Pear and Plum. I followed this pictorial by The Crumpet (because for some reason Youtube doesn't want to work on this computer today) although I can't really claim it as a successful endeavour!

I think the nails with orange in look pretty cool but all the others are a bit dark and gloomy and haven't really worked as well. I think I needed to make my original 'slices' a bit wider so you got the full effect of the different layers of colours, also maybe use only two layers under my top colour rather than three. I dunno, I just don't really love them and won't be keeping them on for long. But hey, at least I've tried them now! I will do them again someday, hopefully with a little more success. Hopefully the other awesome challengers will have had more luck, check out the inlinkz to see!

~Nail Art Novice~

Also congratulations to Raquel who won my giveaway!

A Flying Visit!

Hello lovelies!

This is just the quickest of quick posts to say that I am not going to be posting over the next few days because I have (semi-spontaneously) decided to go up to Edinburgh to see some of my friends performing in the Fringe Festival-and I'm super excited because it's amazing! (I was in it last year!) It's going to be a very mad, theatre-packed, sleep deprived couple of days but hey, life is for the living right?

As a result of my shenanigans I am EXTENDING my giveaway of one set of Sethir's Shinies beautiful false nail sets until Wednesday when I return, exhausted and broke. For more details go to the original post here and to enter just fill in your details on the Rafflecopter below.

I will see you in a few days, hope they're as fun for you as they will be for me.

~Nail Art Novice~

For more examples of Sethir's work go here or here

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Mish Mash Challenge Week 3-Metallic

I thought I'd keep it simple for this week's mish mash challenge and did a design loosely inspired by Kimber's awesome tape mani from last week. I started with a base of Revlon-Silver Screen (two coats) on all my nails and then applied some Seche Vite to help it dry. Once this was done I added some scotch tape to my nails leaving a triangle free in the middle-which I filled in with Barry M-Cosmic Glow which is a gorgeous magnetic green polish. It's full of multi coloured glittered flecks and I think it's really pretty. I used the diagonal line magnet with them too.

I really like these, simple and relatively easy to do. They look a bit like Christmas trees I think, so I might pull this one out again at Xmas time.

Don't forget to check out some of the other awesome Metallic manis in the inlinkz below!

~Nail Art Novice~

There's only 4 days left to enter my giveaway so make sure you've got your entries in here!

Quack Quack!

Hello Lovelies! Rara here again. I've got some fun rubber duck nails for you all today.

Polishes used were Avon-Grey Flash (a beautiful grey colour with shinies in, and it only needs one coat!), Avon-Inspire, Barry M-Atlantic Road (one of their textured polishes), Barry M-Mango (from their Gelly line) and Barry M-Sequinned White plus my Andrea Fulerton Dot and Flick in black.

I fancied something cute today so I decided on rubber ducks-a firm favourite theme between myself and Novice.

I used a dotting tool to create the ducks and then a small brush for their tiny wings. And who can say no to a few sparkles? So I added the bubbles above the ducks with a sequin in each one. 
I love these already and they've only been on my nails for about 10 minutes-I can tell I'll be staring at them all day at work tomorrow!

Until next time, 

~Rara~


Don't forget to enter Novice's Giveaway here! 

Mish Mash Challenge Week 2-Taping

I have to apologise for my lack of posting over the last week, I was hanging out with my other half and didn't remember to blog-hopefully you can forgive me!

Time (already!) for the second mani of the Mish Mash challenge and this week it's taping. I was bandying some ideas around with the Mr. and we came up with the idea of doing bright colours and black together. He wanted to choose the colours so I let him pick five that looked good together-Barry M-Passion Fruit, Mango, Spring Green, Blue Grape and Rimmel-Sunshine, plus Barry M-Black over the top. I decided to mix it up a little and did one hand with the colours underneath and one with them on top.

(Apologies for the crappy clean up on these, it was really late!)

They did end up a little messy and on any other day I would have probably taken a couple of them off and redone them, but I was tired and just couldn't be bothered, oops! My bf also wanted to get in on the taping action (because he's basically awesome) so I did gradients on his nails and taped over the top...and they actually turned out so much more awesome than my nails! I was a bit jealous because they looked fab!

I'm definitely stealing his idea at some point in the future, haha.

Anyway, I'm going to try and get back to blogging properly again now, starting with checking out all the other awesome tape manis in the inlinkz below.

~Nail Art Novice~


Don't forget to enter my giveaway here!

Sethir's Shinies Review

~Pic Heavy Post~

A good friend of mine has started making and selling some gorgeous nail art on false nails on Etsy and I promised him that I would share them on my blog. He (yes, he's that elusive thing-a man who enjoys nail art!) started off doing nail art on his girlfriend's nails and has since produced some really gorgeous stuff.

Photograph courtesy of Sethir's Shinies

Photograph courtesy of Sethir's Shinies

Photograph courtesy of Sethir's Shinies

His nail art is really fab and he is more than prepared to make custom orders for people if you don't see what you fancy in his shop. There are more examples of the stuff he's done over at http://pixieledmakeup.wordpress.com/category/nails/

The nails I received were these peacock ones, only I asked if they could be done on a lighter base so you could see the colours better. A few days later they arrived and they're really gorgeous! They were beautifully packaged and wrapped up well too, so they arrived intact, and got here only a couple of days after they were posted-Fab!

My camera refuses to pick up the gold shimmer in each feather 'eye' but
it's definitely visible in real life!

You get 12 nails in each set and they're all slightly different sizes so that you can match them to your own nail beds. Because of this each set comes with two thumb nail accents to ensure that you can find one to fit you. I haven't actually worn mine yet because I'm saving them for a special occasion, but I've sized them to my nails and found that there's easily one to fit each of them. A friend of mine with (to quote her) "very busy hands" ordered some of these and hers lasted 4 days, so I imagine you could get them to last a week if you weren't doing too much hard work (perfect for holidays!) They come with a tube of nail glue which you will need some sort of solvent (like acetone) to remove, which might damage the nails. Alternatively if you wanted to wear them on more than one occasion without damaging them (though not for as long) then you could use sticky pads to attach them. Either way you'll be getting some really great nail art to treasure.

~Nail Art Novice~

Mish Mash Challenge Week 1-Purple

Hurrah, it's finally time for the Mish Mash challenge to begin! I've been looking forward to this for a while, and I reckon it's going to be pretty fun! For more details, go here.

This week's prompt is 'purple' and although I've only just done some minion nails for the OMD! Challenge, I couldn't resist rocking them again when my friend invited me to see Despicable Me 2 for the 2nd time (I just love those movies!)-only this time, of course, I did the purple 'evil' minions to fit with the theme.

Polishes used: Barry M-Prickly Pear, Matt White, Topshop-Cloud, Revlon-Electric, Maybelline-Dark Denim, L'Oreal-Valiant plus my Barry M Nail Art pens in black and white.

These were super fun to wear for a few days and I got a few compliments on them which is always good! And the film was brill too, of course!

Don't forget to check out all the other purple entries in the inlinkz below. So excited to be back, woo!

~Nail Art Novice~

An InLinkz Link-up

BK GLOW IN THE DARK Polishes

~This post is pre-scheduled because I am currently away~

I am a bit excited about these, there's just something awesome about having something glowing at the end of your fingertips when you turn the light off, haha. That's the main reason I bought them-I'd seen a couple on other people's blogs and wanted to join in the fun myself! I found them on ebay here but they are also available on the Born Pretty Store with free shipping (although the glow in the dark ones are currently unlisted-sorry!).
I got myself 3 colours because I wanted to see if you could really see the difference in the glow colours- #5 (Bright green), #6 (Bright Blue) and #10 (Fuchsia sort of colour). I applied these over a couple of coats of Barry M-Matt White because they are fairly sheer and have a jelly consistency. I'd never understood why people say jellies are 'squishy' when they dry but now I've used these I understand-they're not glossy and shiny like most polishes but aren't matte either. Squishy is perfect!

Anyway, pictures! The first is taken under natural light, the second with flash and the third in the dark to show you the glow, all with a topcoat of Seche Vite.

They do actually glow a little brighter but I was finding it really hard to capture. You can sort of see the differences in the colours though-the pink definitely is glowing a different colour to the other two. They were bright enough to cast light onto my pillow in bed at least!

Honestly? I love these. The formula isn't the greatest and they did take about 3 coats to become properly opaque even over the white polish but I can forgive them because it's just so much fun having glow in the dark nails and they weren't especially expensive! I couldn't stop playing with these in the dark-TOO FUN =D

~Nail Art Novice~