Golden Oldie Thursday #10: Purple

Yay, one of my favourite colours is part of this GOT polish post. I love purple nail polish and we've had some amazing weather here the past week. So I decided to do some holo nail art.

One of my favourite Boutique Brand polishes is a-england. Adina creates amazing polishes with flawless application and buttery formula. They are one coaters and dries amazingly fast - you see why I love them? Lady of the Lake was part of my very first purchase from a-england back in february 2011 and I haven't worn it since I tried it the first day I got it.

Another Boutique Brand I love is RBL and I have a lot of them. Some of them can be problematic to apply, but the two beauties I chose for this mani applied like butter - they are Purple Haze and Insouciant.

Then I thought I'd spice it all up a bit. I applied Girly Bits Twitterpated on Lady of the Lake. It is not meant to be a french tip  but I realise it looks like a failed attempt at that :D. Then I decided to stamp roses on Purple Haze using Hits no Olimpo Dionisio.

Here is an example of how different polishes react differently with the same top coat. It is THE FIRST time I've had shrinkage with my Dior gel top coat - apparently some RBL's don't like it. I'm wearing RBL Insouciant on my index and RBL Purple Haze on my pinkie and thumb. The shrinkage on Insouciant is out of this world, I have NEVER had this much shrinkage with any top coat within less than 24 hours. Though I must say I was at the bottom of my bottle of gel coat and it was somewhat thicker than normal. But still...I do know that RBL can be fickle with top and base coat, I can't use Dior ridge filler either, they will NEVER dry. Hmm, maybe it is a Dior/RBL conflict...

Like I said the shrinkage is out of this world:

The stamped roses didn't really pop, but I don't mind they looked lovely anyway ;)

Insouciant                  Purple Haze                 Dionisio     Lady of the Lake    Twitterpated

I hope you all enjoyed these purple beauties, I really loved getting them back on my fingers :)

Challenge Week 10 & 11: Polka Dot Mani and St. Patrick's Day Mani (picture heavy)

So there seem to be a trend forming now: I have very little time to post, so I do two challenges at a time :D. Well it works for me this way at the moment so I won't beat myself up about it more than necessary...

I love doing dots on my nails, it is a very simple design that looks very intricate and as if you used a lot of time on it. It can make a manicure go from good to WOW depending on colour choice, which is something right up my alley, haha.

Recently I did my first polish swap with Sheila from Pointless Café and was lucky enough to get my little hands on the two Dior Spring 2012 colours Waterlily and Forget-Me-Not. They are rose scented, but not heavily so, and I have been able to enjoy the awesomeness of the two colours.

According to some people in the know, Waterlily is a close dupe to Chanel's Jade so if you have been wanting that for a long time you may feel satisfied with this one. I myself don't own Jade so I can't say for certain. I love my Waterlily I think it is ABSOLUTELY stunning. Forget-Me-Not is close in colour to Dior's own Purple Mix, but F-M-N is lighter and less dusty in tone. If any of you feel like it, I'll be happy to do a comparison post...

I had something in mind with the polka dots, but it didn't manifest itself the way I'd pictured it.

The application was a little bit tricky with Waterlily, it is surprisingly thick, but I managed ok with two coats, and it is worth the hassle in my opinion. Forget-Me-Not was a dream to work with in the usual top notch quality of a Dior creme.

Waterlily is almost colour correct in these pictures even though they are taken with flash, please note the awesome shimmer in it:

In my mind's eye it made all sorts of sense to mix small and large dots, but when I got to my middle finger it just looked messy and not at all cute!!

Unfortunately I was not as lucky with Forget-Me-Not, it photographs darker than it really is:

The minute I realised the small dots weren't working, I dropped them, haha.

Then the other hand looked like this:

This looks much more composed and elegant somehow...

I actually have gotten remarks on this mani, a guy at a ticket booth thought it looked very complicated...I hearted him so much in that moment :D

I need to make a light box or flash reflector - I am getting annoyed with heavy shadows and colour incorrect pictures ;)

I was really pleased with this mani since I got a great design out of very little effort, something that looked really good and noticeable. And the colours are to die for!!

For my Week 11 mani, St. Paddy's day, I have chosen two lovely colours in a layering combo. One is a dusty, dark, forest green polish from GOSH's LE collection called Forest Floor and Lynnderella All Hallow's Eve, a "transparent" green base with golden shimmer, green, gold and black hex glitter in different sizes and square gold glitter. At least that is what I have seen so far...

Recently Lynnderella announced All Hallow's Eve will be discontinued which I think is such a shame. This is green gorgeousness in a bottle and really shows off what is so great about her polishes: Deep, complex and filled with an incredible amount of different glitters in all shapes and sizes. Feast your eyes on these relatively okay pictures:

Hopefully you enjoyed watching these pictures, I sure enjoyed doing these swatches.

What do you think about glitters and Lynnderella? And more importantly, what did you do for St. Patricks Day?

Challenge Week 2: French Tip Nails

So, I am NOT a fan of the French Manicure. I think I have seen too many done nails where it screams fake nails, done badly to ever really be won over. But the concept of using two accentuating or opposing colours and use them in a French Mani...see that is something I think is great. So with that in mind I knew exactly which colours to choose.

I bought Yves Saint Laurent Manicure Couture No. 1: Belle de Jour at a sale in Magasin (something similar to Harvey Nicholls and Selfridges) in spring, and I have worn it once - and what a shame, 'cause those colours are quite beautiful - a clean turquoise and a  true purple, leaning a teensy bit to the blue side.

And I am sad to say they both were agonisingly hard to photograph correctly, both colours are way too blue, so beside my massive free hand fail, the colours aren't too good either.

*Note to self: Always use nail guides when doing french tip manis*

I also need to say something about the brushes in these. Normally I adore YSL polish, because of opacity, formula, ease of application. But these brushes - argh. They made them slightly angular in order to make free hand application easy. NOT so much I tell you when they cut them with so little precision. I had different lenghts on both brushes, but not in an angle!! And the hairs dragged through the polish which is quite visible in the pictures. So one really need to practice with these, which one hasn't!!!

Well off the soap box and on to the pictures - that is what you are here for :D

Artificial light, slightly yellow. As you can see, more blue than turquoise. The purple looks almost like this.

Artificial light, cooler in tone. And the other hand.

So that was the second week, I am actually keeping up :)

Btw, my Week one post will be edited during this week, where you can see all the lovelies I used for that bling-tastic manicure...