'Arry Potter!

Hey gang!

Looks like I'm back to posting for a while!
I've had these stored up for a while, about 3 weeks I think and I'm very excited to show them!

As a wonderful three year anniversary present from my boyfriend, I got tickets to go to the Warner Bros tour of the Harry Potter sets in Watford. Now, I am a COMPLETE Harry Potter geek and was so super excited to go to this as I had been wanting to go for ages!
To celebrate the occasion I decided to do some Harry Potter themed nails for the trip, now I don't know if anyone has ever googled 'Harry potter nails' or something along those lines, but there is some seriously impressive stuff out there! I feel like the nails I did are a bit bland in comparison but I did only have limited time in which to do them (... yeah, yeah any excuse!).

Indoors, natural light.

Indoors, sunlight.

For these I did three coats of OPI's Alpine Snow.  Being a white it was surprisingly unstreaky upon application, although it did take 3 coats to get to full opacity with no bald patches!
I think used my Model's Own black nail art pen to do the H and P from the DVD covers and the deathly hallows sign on my index finger.
On my little finger I used an old sally hansen polish I found that was silver before taping off a strip and painting over with China Glaze - first mate, a smooth navy blue polish. This finger was meant to represent the Ravenclaw flag, since that's the house that I was sorted into on Pottermore (what did I tell you?! I am a geek...).
Sadly I found that the addition of my NYC quick dry topcoat did a great job of smearing the black everywhere even though it was completely dry, which is such a huge shame! On my other hand I left out the topcoat and I think it looked better that way as there was no smudging.

Coming up over the next few weeks are a few neons from China Glaze and some blood splatter style mani's!
Stay tuned!

Long time..

Hi guys!
I really feel like I need to apologise for how long it's been since my last post... I've been sitting my final year exams over the last few months and so haven't even thought about blogging! Although I did still do my nails pretty often...!
However, I have now finished uni completely (how OLD do I feel right now?!) and managed to wind down and rest up a bit after all the stress. I even have a back log of cool nail art to say sorry! :D

Let's start with this shall we? Today it's the diamond jubilee of the Queen here in England - that's 60 years on the throne! 60! And since we get two bank holidays (whoopee!) I though i'd celebrate the monarchy on my nails!
These are pretty awesome and I'm genuinely so proud of myself! Over the last few months I have been getting much better at intricate designs, both with my nail art pen and a paintbrush. I've also had a huge improvement when painting my right hand with my left - this totally shows that practice really does make perfect :)

I spent Friday night drawing out designs on a piece of paper until I knew what I wanted on each nail. I then painted the base colours on each nail and today did all the extra work and layers that I needed!

I am a little disappointed however, as I was just finishing these off I checked my blogger roll and saw that Sammy from The Nailasaurus had done jubilee nails that were very similar to my designs i'd drawn up! There I was thinking I was being all original...! It doesn't matter though, I'm still very proud of my execution and to be honest seeing Sammy's was a great help as I had no idea how to get the crown right!

Anyway the colours I used were:
Little finger: Model's Own - Pink Fizz
Ring finger and thumb: OPI - Alpine Snow, Barry M - Cobalt blue and Illamasqua - Throb
Middle finger: Barry M - Cobalt blue
Index finger - Illamasqua - Throb, Colour club - Worth the Risque, China Glaze - Nova and my Model's own/Wah nail art pen.

I used clear tape to mark out the diamond on my ring finger and gold and purple bullion from ebay stuck to wet polish for the crown.

Well that's all for now! I'm gonna go rock these at a few celebratory barbecues over the weekend :)

Hip Hop Hippity Hop.

Here I have another polish from Dollish Polish. This one was originally an Easter Limited edition shade but it sold out so quickly and was popular that now its a permanent shade! Sadly however, there have been a few problems with the most recent batch so she's currently playing with the formula to make it perfect!

Anyway, HHHH as we shall refer to it, is a pale pink jelly with green, blue and pink pastel glitter hexs in it.  I have to say, although mine was from the original batch and so shouldn't have had any formula issues, I found it VERY hard to use. The glitter pieces I did manage to scrape out the bottle (even after considerable rolling/shaking/leaving upside down!) seemed to sit weirdly on my nail - they weren't really flat. Just beady-like and 3D. Either way, I thought the colour combo was fantastic and it looked very cute and eastery. So I gave up on the glitter and painted my nails with just the pink base colour!

To pay homage to the beautiful glitter combination I stuck pink, white and blue pastel half pearls down the side of each nail.  Each picture is three coats HHHH and one coat Seche top coat.

Natural light.

Artificial light.

Ha. I must apologise for my super short nubbin of a nail on my middle finger! I was so sad when I broke it and I didn't want to sacrifice all the others just to make them all even again :D

Anyway, in the second picture you can see a bit more of the bottle with the glitter in it, Nail polish anonymous NZ has a good swatch of what this polish usually looks like :)

I'm really happy with this polish, regardless of the glitter issues.  Everything I've bought from Dollish polish so far has had a lovely smooth formula and has generally been easy to work with.
My favourite has to be Zombie Flesh which is AMAZING and very unique, but I was so busy enjoying it I forgot to take photos. So that's something to look forward to haha!

Atlantis: The Lost Empire!

As soon as I saw pictures of this polish I knew I had to have it! I have a thing for mythology and ancient ruins so a polish called Atlantis? Instant lemming!
As an added bonus, it reminds me of the film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which I have to admit is a great favourite of mine. When I was growing up I always wanted to be an explorer!

Anyway, this is Atlantis by China Glaze and is one of their 'specialty glitters' released a few years ago.  It consists of a frankly beautiful teal jelly base stuffed full with silver holographic hex glitter!

Indoors, natural light.

Indoors, sunlight.

Indoors, flash.

And a blur shot to show off the holographic-ness!

Oh. My... Wow. I freakin' love this polish so much! I mean look at it! It's such a beautiful colour and makes me think about being under the sea and looking up at the sun through the water. Atlantis is a perfect name for it!

This is two coats of polish and I found that it layered really well. There's no need to dig about in the bottle to fish the glitter chunks out as it is stuffed with them, and there was no dragging!

As you can imagine, removal was a pain. But hey, I'm willing to put up with that for something this beautiful!

Hope you enjoy as much as I do!

Fat guy in a little coat!

Hi gang!
Today I have a franken polish from the lovely Dolly behind Dollish Polish.  All of her polishes are made by her and sold via her Etsy page.

This is one of four polishes that I bought last week and I will gradually be reviewing them as I wear them.
First up is 'Fat guy in a little coat', all of the polishes are named after or inspired by films, sadly I can't remember what this one is based on at the moment!  It's a sheer gold foil base with large blue and green hex glitter and lots of smaller blue and green glitter as well.  In the photos below I am wearing three coats and it's pretty much opaque.

I think next time it may be better to layer it over a gold polish such as GOSH - gold as each layer dims the glitter from the previous layer and it's sometimes hard to get enough to sit on top.

Very quickly, this is two coats of GOSH gold and one coat Fat guy in a little coat.  As you can see the glitter is a bit more vibrant, I definitely prefer it layered!

As well as this, I found that it leaves a VERY gritty finish, even with two layers of top coat (as pictured)!!
Still, I think it's a very pretty polish, at first I wasn't so keen but the more I look at it, the more I like it! It's so unique!

Hope you're looking forward to the next installment!

Crocodile shoes!

The nail polishes I'm showing you in this post remind me of the song Crocodile Shoes by Jimmy Nail!  I pretty much grew up with song as my dad used to play it in the car when he drove me and my brother around :)

Currently I'm wearing Starboard by China Glaze with Barry M's Croc effect top coat in black; hence the title of this post :D

Indoors with sunlight.

Indoors, flash.

Starboard is a lovely grassy green colour from China Glaze's Anchors Away collection from Spring 2011.  The formula on this was a bit thin and runny and I did make a bit of a mess at first until I got used to it!  However, you only need two thin coats for full opacity, so I'm not overly fussed by this fact. The first picture is the most colour accurate but this is one of my two favourite greens. It just seems so perfect, it's not to yellow and has this lovely dusky, muted finish that makes it look so good!

Feeling a bit bored I decided to test out my new Barry M Croc effect polish on top...

Indoors, sunlight.

Indoors, flash.

I definitely prefer this croc effect pattern to the shatter polishes that have became so popular and common since last summer!  It really does look like the skin of a crocodile, especially when layered over green!  If you look carefully, you can see the different patterns you get when you use thick coats or thin coats.  My index, ring and little fingers all have one thick coat and although the cracking pattern is fine and small at the edges of the nail, the centres of the nail generally have big cracks.  My middle finger has one thin coat which has resulted in smaller pieces of crackle, uniformly over the nail.  I'm not sure which version I prefer better!

In contrast to shatter polishes that are applied to dry nail polish, this crackle has to be applied to touch-dry nails in-order for the pattern to appear over 3-5 minutes.  Obviously this takes a lot longer than shatters which only take a minute or two to crack and means that the crackle cannot easily be used to spruce up a worn out manicure after a few days without reapplying a top coat before the crackle.  However, I think the awesomeness of the crackle considerably out-weigh the disadvantages!

I'm very happy that I bought this and it means I don't have to use my ugly shatter polishes anymore since this is so much prettier!

What do you think?

New Years.

I didn’t manage to snap a very good picture of my nails on new years as I literally painted them as I was getting ready to go out! The one photo I have I took the day after so there are a few minor chips and tip wear from the party I went to at my friends house :)

 

This is one coat of an old dark grey polish I found in my room that had no name on it with one coat of Max Factors max effect polish in ‘Silver’ which is a really lovely, burnished silver glitter in a tinted base. I think there might even be a bit of blue and gold micro glitter in there as well as silver!
I then stuck two silver and one black star-shaped rhinestones on my accent nail for a little bit of bling and finally added one coat of seche vite to all nails.

Next up is a burnt orange polish by OPI called Chop-sticking to my story from the Hong Kong collection in 2010. It reminds me of pumpkins and gingerbread men!

Two coats of chop-sticking to my story and one coat seche top coat.
Please excuse the mess that is my cuticles here, they are so dry and horrible from all this wintery weather and neglect over the christmas holidays :(
Got some nail mail on its way at the moment including my first Zoya’s! Definitely something to look forward to :)