From the Vault: Fancy Friday #88: Striping Tape

I have been in a nail funk for some years, and have been posting mostly to instagram during these last three years. Earlier this year my account got hacked, but I managed to throw the hackers off. Unfortunately Meta has serious problems with some of its functionality so I can't log on to the account at the moment. Thought I'd take some of my postings over here, then.

I went to my drafts folder and found some stuff I hadn't posted last I did a draft purge.

This one is a really old one - from back when some of the Danish nail bloggers had a nail art challenge: 

I was searching deliriously through my nail art supplies and simply couldn't find any striping tape - I was so certain I had at least two rolls of it somewhere. And since I had an idea for this challenge that I really wanted to show you, I decided to grab some nail vinyls instead of skipping this challenge...

So here goes...

I used Elevation Polish Pic du Gar as base which was really hard to photograph - it kept turning blue. So these pics have been filtered in order to get the colour closer to what it really looks like.

The textured polishes are all JulieG Gum Drops: Hot Cinnamon, Crushed Candy and Ho Ho Ho - which due to the colour change is leaning a little too green...GAH you simply can't win!!!!

Nail Art Challenge #3: When Colours Collide - Black Negative Space

 

The third When Colours Collide nail art challenge was Black Negative Space. I ended up with a super cute nail design if I may say so - and I got to showcase two of my favourite indie nail polish brands: Darling Diva and Girly Bits.

I decided to do stamping and I found one of my Sugarbubbles plates that I thought would be great for this challenge.

Stamping plate: Sugarbubbles SB015

Stamping polish: Girly Bits Little Black Dress

Black polish: Darling Diva You're so Hot You Melt the Plastic in my Underwear

Here is the collage of all of our designs:

And here is my design:

That Darling Diva polish? One coat black nail polish!!! Goes on like butter and overtakes both of my two previous favourites for one coat black polish: a-england Camelot and Cult Nails Nevermore.

Nail Art Challenge #2 - When Colours Collide: Mint, pastel pink and gold

5th of July was the next date for the When Colours Collide challenge and I was going to go outside my comfort zone 'cause I don't wear pink or gold that often. Besides that I of course had to throw myself into an entirely new nail art technique.

I have seen fluid nail art on occasion in my instagram feed and since I also shop extremely frequently at Polish Pickup I have also seen that Baroness X has started to make polishes to use specifically for fluid nail art. But I do not own any polish that will make this challenge any easier so I started to research and found out that Kyong Lee has a youtube channel where she has all sorts of fluid nail art tutorials. There I found she has created her own clear polish to use mixing a clear nail polish with Garnier Fructis Sleek and Shine Anti Frizz hair serum. And somehow I instantly knew this would not be available here in Denmark - so I did an ingredients search to see which components in the serum would match any of my own hair products. The two main ingredients in the product are cyclopentasiloxane and dimethiconol both are types of silicone. And I am happy to report that I had a product with both as main ingredients: Inecto Smooth Me Coconut hair serum.

I followed the instructions in her video and within a couple of minutes I had a working fluid art clear nail polish. And then I started to play with it. It took me a couple of tries before I got it to make cells that were visible, I just kept on adding drops of my fluid nail art polish to the drops of the other colours. I used a piece of acetate to mix the colours on and ended up with enough to make several decals. Then I cut them out with patterned scissors and painted my nails in base colours to match the decals.

Base colours: 

Mint Green: Pretty Serious Bunny Foo Foo (for some reason it draws blue insted of green in my picture)

Pastel Pink: Paint Box Polish Fragola

Gold: Guerlain Divinora 00

Fluid Art Colours:

Mint Green: Morgan Taylor Mint Chocolate Chip

Pastel Pink: nails inc. oxford circus

Golds: Guerlain Divinora 00 and YSL Manicure Couture nail polish duo 03 (the gold polish)

And the collage where all the manis are collected together:

I was really happy with the outcome of this and will probably do fluid nail art again soon. I have bought some Baroness X fluid nail art polishes from the Girly Bits preorder in June so those will be arriving some time in September - I have a PPU rewind order on hold with Pam and will have a enormous shipment coming this way then, haha. Be sure to keep an eye out for that post.

See you soon.

Nail Art Challenge #1 - When Colours Collide: Purple and Yellow

I have been member of a Facebook nail art group for years that is called When Colours Collide. Each fortnight they publish a colour combination and you then have two weeks to come up with a nail art mani with that specific colour scheme. You then upload your picture to the group album, they create a collage and on the date provided all participants share on social media.

As I said I have been part of that group for years, probably since its very beginning but for some odd reason I have never participated in any of the challenges. Recently I have felt an urge to get back in to nail art so when I saw the challenge for June 22nd which was purple and yellow I decided to jump right in.

I used pipe dream polish harlequin as my purple base and Girly Bits Silly Daffodilly - a lovely pastel yellow stamping polish. The stamping plate I used is Creative Shop 14.

Interestingly, the pastel yellow stamping polish turned out egg yolk yellow after I top coated the mani. My theory is that when the polish got wet again the pigment in harlequin mixed with Silly Daffodilly and made it look totally different.

Lastly, here is the collage that the moderators in the group made with all the manis from the participants:

#52weeks52polishes - week 1

One of my favourite Danish nail bloggers resurfaced last week - Rijah/Maria from Polishing the Nails. She took a break from nail blogging two years ago but I have kept up with her on instagram where she has mostly posted a mix of beauty related pics and pictures from her private life.

She spoke about wearing polish again and what she would like to do with her blogging this time around. And she suggested a small challenge so she could keep up with doing her nails: Posting once a week, showing a polish she hadn't shown her readers before. Which I thought was a wonderful idea and I decided to hop on that challenge since I have so many untried polishes I need to wear.

So after a poll on  insta Maria decided to call the challenge #52uger52lakker which translates to 52weeks52polishes - and here we are. I am already a week or two late which is just so typically me but I am trucking along anyway.

For my first polish I decided to go deep down and trawl through my old indies. One of my favourite brands - and one I was sad to see leave the indie nail polish world - is still Dandy Nails. Considering she left three years ago her polishes are still awesome and she had perfected her formula.

I am proud to say that considering the amount of nail polish I own this is still a one-of-a-kind in my collection: Bathed in Light. A light gray with a huge amount of maroon shimmer and a dash of holographic glitter to give it some oomph when the sun comes out - so gorgeous!!!

The polish seemed to be rather sheer on the first layer, but was almost opaque in the second. But I loved the maroon shimmer so much I had to add an extra layer and ended with 3 for this mani.

The stamping polish is Moyra Metallic Gold and the stamping plate is Moyou London Arabesque

Will you join us in this challenge? If you post on instagram remember to use #52uger52lakker and #52weeks52polishes.

See you around - have a great weekend :).

Fancy Friday #91: Text

Another Fancy Friday post from the draft vault - I didn't have any pictures of the polishes, so I have no idea what I used for this mani :D.

Thank you for keeping up with me, see you soon ;)

Fancy Friday #90: Blobbicure

Another old Fancy Friday post from the draft vault -  but it was just a blank page. So I took a look at my old pictures and found the ones I was going to use for this prompt :D.

I was never really good at blobbicures, but this one I think I did okay with.

And I still have a lot of vault posts to share with you guys :), so keep checking in to see more.