Challenge Week 12: Skittle Mani

I have done skittle manis for longer than I have known them as such. Back in the '90s I had a thing for blues and greens, and still have. As a student I couldn't afford much else than the really cheap no names, but the wonderful thing about them was they came in all the colours of the rainbow. I think I had 10 or 20 polishes in varying nuances of blue and green and I LOVED doing my nails with one colour on each finger. And trust me, back then everybody I knew thought 10 polishes in the same colour range was crazy (won't even begin to consider what they would think about my collection now :D)

These days I only do five different colours and I still LOVE doing it!!! I tend to do colour gradings or colours-that-look-great-together when I do them, so I had great fun doing this one.

It seemed spring decided to take a short trip to Denmark so we have had quite good weather this week and I certainly didn't have any problems chosing my colours.

I bought a great amount of BarryM's last spring, but haven't used them all yet, amongst the untrieds are two Ice Cream colours that are soooo yummi to look at. Unfortunately Berry Ice Cream were sold out back then so the ones I had to use for this mani were:

Blueberry Ice Cream
Lemon Ice Cream
Strawberry Ice Cream
Mint Green
- and as a rather nice substitute for Berry Ice Cream I chose OPI's Done Out in Deco, which I think is fairly close in colour.

I have had some staining issues with a BarryM colour (yes I am looking at you Spring Green!!!) so I poured on base coat (in this particular instance Cult Nails Get it On) just in case...

Considering these were all pastels they are remarkably easy to work with. These are all two coats, and even the yellow leveled out at second coat. I can highly recommend getting yourselves some BarryM's, they are VERY affordable, and at only 2.99 £ it is hard NOT to buy them!!

But surely you must be here for some picture spam, so sit tight and enjoy:

I am a huge sucker for colours like these, and think pastels look rather lovely on me. I wanted to eat my fingers all the time, 'cause they reminded me of candy :D

Hunger Games Nail Art

The nail community seem to be flooded with Hunger Games themed blog posts today and no wonder: There are US nationwide midnight showings of the movie tonight.

But as a special treat, the Danish distributor got permission to show it at a red carpet event last night and I was lucky enough to get tickets for it. Naturally I had to do a mani that matched, since I am such a big fan of the books also.

As previously noted nail art and me don't always play well together, but the further I get into my 52 week challenge the more I seem to grasp free hand and other techniques. And I am happy to report that this came out rather fine.

Since I don't have any of the China Glaze Capitol Colours yet, I went on the prowl in my collection. I naturally wanted to do some Katniss, the Girl on Fire inspired nail art and I decided to try a couple of different techniques.

The colours I chose were:
Base: Cult Nail Living Water
Flames: YSL Surreal Yellow, Milani Orange Burst, China Glaze Phat Santa
Letters: nails inc. westminster abbey

I did a google search on flame mani tutorials and thought I would try a needle marble since all the videos I found made flames look awesome done that way.

I am a big fan of Cute Polish's youtube channel, so I decided to head over there to get some inspiration, and just because of her video I also did her version:

And now on to my nails:

I almost ruined the middle finger flames because my layers were too thick. Instead of an hour, they needed an entire night to dry properly :D

During the needle marble the flames on my index and little fingers didn't look as if they'd turn out good, but as soon as they got a got layer of top coat they looked really cool.

I have purposefully used Gale's nick name for Katniss here to signify the importance he has, though not so prominent in the first installment of the movie trilogy.

So did you do a Hunger Games mani? What theme did you use? Or couldn't you care less? Feel free to comment, I love hearing from you!

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 Weeks 8 and 9: Corset and Vintage mani - picture heavy

I finally got my transfer cables for my dslr - which means I can finally get these up and running.

I was excited to see I was supposed to do a corset mani - I love corsets and think they can look absolute stunning. So I searched a bit to find some great tutorials and found nihrida's tutorial that makes this a very easy nail art challenge to master:

I did it at little bit different though, since I wanted it to be a bit more colourful. The colours I used were

Milani Totally Cool
a-england Camelot
Essence Stamp Me!! Silver

I made some mistakes but I still liked how it turned out:

I decided to do four lace holes which is not to be recommended when you have rather short nails

The crosses tend to get cramped together and do not look like crosses AT ALL

The one that looks like a Southern Whore has gotten her sh**faced punter to do her up

Though a very dark pic it actually captures the purple shimmery goodness of the Milani polish

These were taken on one of the first sunny days in a long time here in Denmark - and still it was hard to catch the right purple shade, it comes off slightly more blue than in person.

Now on to the Vintage Mani of Week 8 - and I am certain I was not the only one that had to do a google search for this particular nail style :D.

Basically, back in...back in olden days (I love me some Eddie Izzard!!) nail polish was a luxury commodity and if you owned it you were more than likely going to try to get it to last a very long time. In order to do that it was not uncommon to leave the tips and moons bare. And since red was the name of the game your nails would have looked something like this:

Courtesy of Brook Owens

And here is a short tutorial by Super Kawaii Mama:


http://vimeo.com/3950676


And now on to my Vitage Mani. Since I don't have really opaque moons and my nails are peeling like there is no tomorrow, I decided to do a slight variation on the theme and came up with something I have been really happy about.

Recently I got Josie from Glitter, Glam, Sparkle, Shine to pick up a Lucky Dip from nails inc. (you pay a ridiculously low amount of greenies, they pick your polish colours) for me and I decided to take two of them for a spin.

Two colours that I usually won't fall for, but these two are beautiful - montrose place is a blue toned pink that flashes blue clearly in sunshine and flash light, and the awesome gold foil that is westminster abbey

This looks coral but you will soon see this is an in-your-face pink shade

And now to the nails - please marvel at the pink-blue gorgeousness that is montrose place:

And it is even more awesome in person!!!

I actually did this in free hand, Yay me!! If you have read my ealier posts you will know I suck monkeys balls when it comes to anything where I have to apply my free hand skills - but this was actually quite easy to work with, I blame it on the polish which was nothing but perfection regarding application and opacity.

Well this is it from me for now, hopefully I will get back on track with the blogging.