13 Days of January Nail Art Challenge #1: Follow a Tutorial

Happy New Year all!! And welcome to a new nail art challenge here on the blog. I've wanted to do some more nail art but I'm not ready for a full blown 31DC, so when a group of my blogger friends and I got together to think up a challenge, we opted for a modified version of The Crumpet's Nail Tarts 31 Day Challenge for January 2015 - naturally with Debbie's blessing ;).

I saw Jacki's Polar Bear nail art tutorial a couple of weeks ago and instantly knew I was going to use it for this challenge.

For my version of the polar bears I used:
Dior Porcelaine
Rica White Out
Rica Gloomy Sunday
Cult Nails Never More

The rest of my mani is the absolutely gorgeous Girly Bits Scandilous that Pam Heil created for the Scandinavian nail polish group on Facebook. The snow flakes are a total nail fail made with the equally gorgeous Girly Bits nail polish Bette Davis' Eyes. I chose not to top coat them since I liked the textured feeling I got this way, somehow it represents the more rough nature of Greenland and the North Pole.

I think the polar bears are really cute even though there are some minor details that I struggled a bit with - but overall I am quite ecstatic with this mani!!!

And here you can take a look at what's to come during January:

Remember to drop by and take a peak at all the rest of the tutorial manis - click a pic and you will be directed instantly to the blog of your choice :).

Have a lovely day,

Marie-Luise

Fancy Friday #76: Tutorial (video or pictures)

Ha, this was awesome. Had oodles of fun doing this video tutorial.

Here is the final design:

And here is the video:

                              

                              

Så er det Tutorial tid her på bloggen. Jeg har lavet en videotutorial og det er første gang - og jeg havde det super sjovt med at lave den.

Husk lige at kigge ind hos de andre piger og check deres seje tutorials!!!

An InLinkz Link-up

52 Week Pick 'n' Mix Challenge, week 4: Gray+Colour

The two prompts for Pick 'n' Mix this week are 70's and Gray+Colour - and today I'm doing the colour prompt.

I love gray nail polish and have quite a few of them but obviously I'm not using them enough. Enter my Nail Tart Challenge and I am finally wearing gray again ;).

Rescue Beauty Lounge Stormy is a golden oldie and I wanted to give it a touch of Halloween, so I searched through other golden oldies in my stash that would fit the bill and came up with: Illamasqua Gamma - an almost neon orange, Lime from Dior for the green dots and finally Electric Violet from Dior for the purple dots.

If you spot some wobblyness in the dots it is because I used my non-dominant hand. I still struggle with my dotting tools even though I practise frequently.

In the pictures on my phone the purple dots were colour correct but on my computer screen they look a bit more blue. How do you see them?

Make sure to check out the other Nail Tarts Pick 'n' Mix mani's - there are some awesome combinations going on!!

An InLinkz Link-up

Fancy Friday #42: Love is in the Air

And my second Valentine's day mani is part of the Fancy Friday challenge - if you need to recap why this is a darker version of a Valentine Mani you can go read my little rant here.

As I wrote in my last Fancy Friday challenge I wanted to try the fan brush gradient with regular polishes so I did that as a base. I started with a layer of China Glaze Pelican Gray and when it'd dried I used the tutorial at Neverland Nail Blog I talked about last week using Pelican Gray, YSL Gris Orage, and Dior Gris Montaigne. The look can best be seen on my ring finger on the picture below:

It became the perfect base for the rest of this mani I think, I'm just bummed I totally forgot to take pictures of it. I love that the effect is so subtle that you hardly realise it is a gradient.

I used MoyouLondon Princess Plate 10 for the girly skull and heart doodle stamp and VividLacquer plate VL007 for the kissy lips - and like my other VDay mani I also used Leighton Denny Indulgence as stamping polish here.

And La Pièce de Résistance: Elevation Polish Yeti's Broken Heart - an awesome glitter topper with a wide variety of white matte glitters and heart shaped glitter in white, black and purple. Add a little bit of holographic micro glitter pieces and you got a killer polish. I think it is a brilliant polish with a slight nudge to all the Valentine frenzy...

 

Lastly here are all the polishes together that I used for this manicure:

China Glaze Pelican Gray, YSL Gris Orage, Dior Gris Montaigne, Elevation Yeti's Broken Heart, Leighton Denny Indulgence

Ugens Fælles Fredag udfordring er Love is in the Air - det er Valentins dag og det fejrer jeg ikke ;). Jeg kan ikke rigtig få armene op over en begivenhed som er blevet indført af rent kommercielle årsager, en dag som vi aldrig har haft tradition for at fejre før i Danmark. Og nej, vi fejrer heller ikke Mors og Fars dag i den lille familie ;). Men det skal da så ikke forhindre mig i at lave en Valentinsmani med et twist - min base er en grå gradient i stedet for en lyserød eller rød lak, som jo ofte bliver brugt i den sammenhæng, og så har jeg valgt en anti-valentinsdagsneglelak til at toppe et par af fingrene: Elevation Polish Yeti's Broken Heart.

Fancy Friday #27: Ikat Nail Art

I was a bit on the fence with this week's challenge and had a hard time finding colours for my mani that would make this one pop. Most of the tutorials and pictures you find if you do a search on Ikat nail art didn't really speak to me. So instead I made a search using the term Ikat pattern - and then the images got a lot more interesting.

And then I saw this pattern:

and thought: Hey I have polishes that matches these colours perfectly. And then it was basically just pulling out some brushes and stripe away...

 I broke the nail off on my middle finger last week and the nail apparently decided to flake off a bit - which I didn't see until after I'd taken pictures.

They actually look a lot cooler in real life but I think you get the basic thought behind this.

 

I used the following colours:

a-england Galahad

Dior 438 Mango

Maybelline Colorama Urban Lemon

Dior 781 Purple Candy

nails inc floral street

Remember to check the other girls' nail art and find some inspiration for your own Ikat nail art.

Stamping Saturday

I think this is going quite well, the fact that I'm able to keep up with this on a VERY regular basis is something that I am quite thrilled about.

Today I have a marvellous new Dior colour called Lilac Colorvision. This is supposed to be a Sephora exclusive and is a re-release of this Japan exclusive. I don't know if Lilac Colorvision will be in the European Sephoras but I am lucky to have some wonderful American polish friends who will shop for me when need be ;)

 

 I have a lovely mint green konad stamping polish that the lovely Karine gave me as part of a birthday gift, that I just knew would look awesome on top of this gorgeous lilac polish. The stamping plate is, again, a Vivid Lacquer plate. These awesome skulls are on the VL plate 001.

Pardon my terribly wrecked cuticles, I totally forgot to moisturise them before I took these pics, that is how excited I was with this mani :D
 

 

 I have tons of fun with this stamping experience, I can highly recommend it :D

Untried Sunday

It's been a while since I showed you my untrieds so this week I'm going to show you two in one :D

As you know Dandy Nails is one of my favourite indie brands - in my top three actually - and this polish really is the epitome of a marvellous glitter bomb.

What you may not know is that my favourite high end brand is Dior. I have yet to come across one that is not nail polish perfection - and this is no exception.

Behold Dior Gris Perle topped with Dandy Nails Like Disco Lemonade:

I love the tapered flat paddle brush in the new Dior bottles though the brush in this one is the broad normal one.  It is of really high quality and very easy to work with, and the polish itself is really opaque, I put on two thin layers for this mani.

Like Disco Lemonade is an awesome glitter bomb in a clear base and it has so much going on. Green and orange micro glitters, black squares, holographic hexes, all making this polish unique in my collection. I've got more complicated glitter bombs than this but the combination in it is outstanding.

As usual it was a polish that was easy to work with, I didn't have to use the dabble method to get good coverage from one layer - actually I don't have to dabble any of my Dandy Nails glitter bombs which is one of the reasons why this brand is in my indie top three.

And here are a couple of close-up's of the two beauties:

 

I think this combo is awesome and lends something great to both polishes. What do you think?

If you want to know what's on my ring finger you can tune in next sunday for another Untried Sunday manicure.

Challenge Week 37: Remember 9/11

The gray dust from the falling towers that fades into black despair.

China Glaze Pelican Gray

Dior Gris Montaigne

YSL Tuxedo Gray

And I was one minute late...So now it is September 12 here in Denmark....

Oh, I squared my nails.

Challenge Week 26: Neon Mani

Hey I'm on a roll here, so I'll post another challenge mani now. I checked my stash and realised I really didn't have a proper neon polish - that was until I saw the writing on the Dior box for my Aloha polish: Flourescent. Haha, I thought , that counts for neon don't it? Yes it does, hooray I can showcase this on the blog!!

It had incredible wear time. I work as a film technician and I open quite many film cans during the day which means chipped manis every other day. But this beauty held up though being heavily abused for four days. Yes I loved it so much I kept it on for as long as I could :D




As some of the more perceptive of you might have realised by now...



...the ring finger shows slight discolouration...

...which stems from it not being Aloha but Maybelline Sunset Prisms 330



...though not the same as this Sunset Prisms

 I'm not a corally girl, but I really like Maybelline Sunset Prisms, my accent ring finger nail, which was RAOKed me by Sheila from Pointless Café. And though I'm usually not a big fan of VNL (Aloha is three layers and you can still see the nail line), Aloha is such a wonderful polish that I REALLY don't care :D