British Nail Bloggers Halloween Challenge

The British Nail Bloggers are having a mini, no pressure, Halloween Nail Art Challenge, and I thought I'd get in on today's prompt which is 'What's lurking in the dark?' with some simple nail art inspired by My Little Canvas. I used two coats of W7-Black for the base and then added white eyes with Barry M-Matt White. On top of the white I added a coat of Astral Lights glow in the dark polish (it's about 10 years old!) and then 'irises' in Barry M-Mango, Key Lime, Rimmel-Rose Libertine and Revlon-Electric. Once these were dry I added pupils with my black Barry M nail art pen.

Haha, these are utterly ridiculous but I'm really enjoying them! Check out the other cool designs in the inlinkz too!

~Nail Art Novice~

Ask A British Blogger III + Nail Art!

This fortnight's British Blogger question is 'What is the oldest polish in your collection?' and to answer it instead of just taking a couple of pictures of what is frankly a rather boring bottle, I thought I'd do some nail art with it.
Introducing Avon's Fabulous which is about 10 years old I would guess. I can't find any information on it on the internet but I did get a lot of Avon stuff when I was 13/14 so I guess it's from then. It's actually the only Avon one I've got left as it survived the years much better than any of the others which turned into watery messes or hardened to the point where they were un-usable. It's quite a pretty colour though, so I am glad that I've still got it in my stash!

Check out how dated the bottle looks!

I couldn't decide what I wanted to do so I opted for a skittle using various techniques, and using Collection-Electric Dreams which looks awesome against the bronze. This is two coats of Fabulous and it was very nearly a one coater, which I was surprised at! It didn't have a horribly strong smell, but definitely more than newer polishes which I guess means it's not 3-free.

It's also a pain to try and hold comfortably too

The two colours together reminded me of Egyptian artifacts so on my thumb I did an Eygptian-inspired design (the Eye of Horus-Egyptian symbol of protection and good health) with my Barry M nail art pen in black.

I really like my thumbs and also my double dotted little fingers-I think they look quite nice without being too overwhelming. I love the colours together too.
So that's my oldest polish! What's yours?

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out everyone else's posts here:

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~

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:

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:

L'Oreal Color Riche Collection-607 Rue Montmartre

I thought I'd bring you some swatches of some of the Color Riche collection by L'Oreal that I went and bought after I fell in love with Magic Croisette. I purchased them from fragrancedirect.co.uk which is an excellent site for getting awesome polishes for cheapy cheap from-the only trouble is that the colour swatches they use are really inaccurate for the colours the polishes actually are. When I was searching online for better swatches of these polishes, they were really hard to come by so I thought I'd make some of my own. I'm categorically not going to start swatching a lot of polishes on this blog, because there are enough sites out there that do that, with better pictures than I could ever take, but as these polishes seem to be rarer than a lot of others I hope you won't mind too much.

I got four colours-607-Rue Montmartre, 608-Luxembourg Garden, 604-Metropolitan and 502-Purple Disturbia but I'm going to dedicate a post to each so that I don't overwhelm you with pictures all in one go.

Today's offering is number 607-Rue Montmartre, which is a dusky purple/grey. This is 3 coats with no top coat, with accent nails featuring all 4 colours:

Natural light, and probably the closest to its actual colour

It's a bit of a weird one this-it's too grey to be purple and too purple to be grey. In my head it's a kind of 'lavendery grey' so I put it in with the rest of my purples. You only get 5mls in these teeny bottles but for the Fragrance Direct price of £1.20 a bottle I don't mind! I definitely wouldn't pay the full price of £4.99 for such a small amount of polish though. 

Application was pretty good-they have a wide flat brush which splays out a little when you use it-I managed to cover my little finger nail with one stroke and the rest only needed two. I didn't do any clean up on these nails and I managed not to get too much on my skin, which is a bonus and shows that even Novices can use the brushes well! It was fairly opaque in two coats but I put a third on just in case. As you can see, it's really shiny and lovely when it dries and doesn't leave obvious brush strokes behind. 

Overall I do really like this polish, although I think I'm going to struggle to wear it with other colours as it's such an odd one to match. She'll have to be a stand alone girl!

What do you think of my first swatching post? Did I do OK or did I forget something important?

~Nail Art Novice~

It's British Blogger link up time-check out these ladies and their beautiful nails:

Ask A British Nail Blogger

Every two weeks the group of British Bloggers I'm in gets a question to answer about something to do with their nail blogging routine and I thought I'd join in this week because it seems quite fun-I love finding out new things about my favourite bloggers, don't you? I think it's nice seeing beyond the nails to the person who owns them sometimes. There will be a link up at the bottom if you wanted to read other people's answers.

Anyway, this week's question is

What is/are your most wanted polish(/es)?
There are so many. If I could afford it I'd basically just go on Etsy and have a spree of buying amazing Indie polishes because there are just SO many that make my heart beat a little faster. There's also some more main stream polishes that I need but just can't afford yet, and then there's a couple which are just pipedreams!

Photo from Chalkboard Nails

-China Glaze Running in Circles 
Oh man. I have to have this, every time I see a post using it I want it more. It's SO me. Green is my favourite colour, especially this lovely emerald green. And it's glittery. And beautiful. When I get a job I'm going to spend some of my first payday on this beauty. (I know it's not massively expensive but I just can't really warrant £7 on one polish at the mo, sadly!)

Photo from Ooh La La Polish

-Essie Butler Please/Sally Hansen Pacific Blue
 I don't really care which one of these I end up with, they're so similar-it'll probably end up being whichever one is cheapest! This is such a beautiful shade of blue. Basically I had an awesome idea for a mani a while ago, one I've never seen done before. But I can't do it until I have one of these blues because they're perfect and I don't really have anything similar enough in my collection to use in the meantime. Again, this will be a first payday purchase.

Photo from One Nail To Rule Them All

-Barry M Lychee
I was going to buy this the other day but they didn't have any in the shop, boo. I don't have any polishes that are similar to this and I really like the colour-something that surprised me. I've seen a lot of amazing nail art done with it and I think it's just a staple polish that should be in every stash. Hoping Boots will have some in next time I visit! (I love how cheap Barry M's are for such good quality polish!)










There's more, so many more, that I'd like, but these are the top 3 that I really feel are must haves for me. If money was no object I'd just buy every polish I wanted, no hesitation, but sadly I'm living in the real world so I have to limit myself to only buying polish when I can afford it, sigh.

Oh and here's my pipedream wish, that I understand I'll probably never get but still kinda want anyway:

Photo from Chalkboard Nails

-OPI Black Spotted
I know, I know. I just really like the effects it gives-like Crackle but infinitely cooler. I'm never going to be prepared to pay £20-£30 for ONE bottle of polish though, so I am glad people like CutePolish have come up with this Water Spotted technique (similar to water marbling) so that people who aren't millionaires can still get the look. I still love this though, if I win the lottery...





~Nail Art Novice~

None of the photos in this post were taken by me, all copyright belongs to the original owners, links are provided to their sites and the posts they were taken from. Please do not reproduce these photos without crediting fully to the original sites.

Check out the other bloggers' answers to this question here:

Suddenly I'm Bright And Breezy

Sadly my lovely fishtail (plaited!) mani suffered badly at the hands of my first Scuba Diving lesson last night, so it's time for a change again. Spring is still stubbornly refusing to appear in Britain at the moment (BOO) so I thought I'd wear the brightest mani I could in defiance of our grey skies and rainclouds. I recently picked up some of the Barry M gellies after seeing them on so many blogs and falling for them a little-I got Plum, Satsuma and Greenberry and would have got Lychee too had they had it in the shop! Sadly, no success this time.
This simple polka dot accents mani uses Satsuma and Greenberry which frankly look AMAZING together. I always knew I'd love Greenberry after seeing it on so many blogs and thinking it looked awesome every time, but I am also really enjoying the incredible brightness of Satsuma. Bright orange was the colour of my course society at university and I just so happened to be wearing my hoodie at the time I was painting my nails-it's a perfect match for Satsuma. I love happy coincidences.
Sadly I seem to have picked up the pot of Greenberry that everyone else had used for testing as it had a lot of dried polish around the outside edge of the bottle and so didn't close properly and wasn't as nice to apply as I had thought it would be-hoping a few drops of Seche Restore will sort that problem out though. Satsuma applied very nicely although dried fairly quickly when I was doing the dots leaving me with strings as you can see on my right thumb. Ah well.

Anyway, on to the pictures, featuring the return of my left hand now that my ring finger nail is an acceptable length again, this is three coats of each polish:

There's not much to say about this, I just fancied something excessively bright! I also have a bit of a thing for opposites and patterns so I like the symmetry of the design and the opposing colours, it makes me happy. Simple but effective!

~Nail Art Novice~

Title of post taken from 'Getting to Know You' from The King and I

Check out what some other awesome British Bloggers have got going on this week:

Giveaway Goodies

I recently won a giveaway organised by The Sorting House and my goodies turned up on Monday so I threw together a quick mani to share them all with you.

Here's what I won:

-3D nail stickers-mostly bows with a few flowers scattered through

-Derma V10 hand & nail cream

-Nails Inc Elizabeth Street

-Barry M Cappuccino

-Two stamping plates (A16/A26, not sure what brand. They've got random flowery designs on.), stamper and scraper

As soon as I opened the packaging I tried out the polishes just to see what they would look like on (please excuse the sloppiness of these photos, I didn't bother cleaning up as I just threw everything on in about 5 minutes so they're pretty messy):

Three coats of each

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not normally a pink person-I don't normally wear it or choose it or anything, but I quite like these colours together. (even if they remind me of one of these guys!) I probably wouldn't wear the pink on its own but with the brown it looks quite sophisticated and grown up (well it would if I'd cleaned up!) and I am surprised just how much I like the combination.

I added a bow too, also something that's not very me but looks better than I expected:

They aren't too 3D that I would have problems wearing them-I couldn't wear manis that were gonna catch on things a lot because I'd just end up picking them off-they're actually pretty flat. I can't say I'm a huge bow convert but I might start using them more than I had originally thought because they add a nice detail without being too in your face.

I have to confess though, the bits of kit I'm most excited about is the stamping kit. I have already bought stamping plates from Ebay but the scraper they provided was metal and REALLY scratched up the plate when I first practised with it so I didn't want to use it again. I'm looking forward to using the plastic scraper from this kit and trying out stamping properly! (Coming up in a Try Something Tuesday post at some point I would imagine)
I did have a go stamping but I definitely need a lot more practice in this department as you can't really tell what it is! I love the looks it can create though so I'll definitely be doing it more often.

So that's all my giveaway goodies! Oh and I tried the handcream out just before I typed this out too. Can't tell you what it smelt like (still suffering the end stages of cold, boo!) but it felt really nice and creamy and wasn't greasy at all-by the time I started typing it wasn't even leaving smears on the keyboard which is great. My hands feel very soft too so it seems to be doing its job!

All in all, I'm a happy camper!

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out what some other awesome British bloggers have been up to this week: