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.

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