Hello!
I wanted to do some nice, bright nails for a trip to London this weekend. I knew I wanted to use my new, super-bright Electric Nights polishes I'd recently bought. These are by China Glaze and they're gorgeous!
I also wanted to try out my new swirly vinyls from She Sells Seashells. I thought I'd combine the two, and came up with this! For all nails I started with a white base - I used Cotton by Barry M. Once this was dry, I topped my ring finger, little finger and thumb with two coats of the neon glitter.
For the swirly nails, I waited a bit longer until the white was completely dry. I then used tweezers to carefully pull up a swirly vinyl, and stick it down onto the nail, two to each nail as my nails are long! I painted over with the pink, then removed the vinyl immediately. There were some imperfections where the pink leaked a little into the white, so I used a white nail-art pen to correct this before topcoating.
I looooveeee theeeemmmm!!!
I haven't bought any new polish for aaaages but I had to cave when I saw the new Electric Nights collection by China Glaze, and seeing manicures people had created using the polishes. I'm not usually bothered about China Glaze as a brand - it seems a bit too pricey for me, and I prefer to stick to polishes that are more easily available on the highstreet for not too much money, such as Barry M and Models Own.
However, I saw that these new China Glaze polishes were available on Nail Polish Direct for half price, and couldn't resist treating myself to some. I agonised between getting the full collection of the mini neon cremes, but to save money I settled on getting my favourite full-size creme and my favourite glitter from the collection. These were Glow With The Flow (pink!) and Point Me To The Party (multi-coloured neon glitter).
They came this week and I was desperate to use them! I had a few ideas, but ended up going for a pink-to-white gradient with the glitter over the top. For the gradient I used Glow With The Flow, along with a paler pink (to help the gradient blend better) and a white polish, both Barry M.
These photos don't do the pink justice - my camera couldn't handle the neon! It's soooo bright in real life, and I definitely want to wear this for like the whole of summer. The glitter is fab too, really colourful and unusual - I will have to think of lots of ways to incorporate it into my nail art.
My nails today are refreshing and summery! I've wanted to use nude with neon for a while and I came up with this design - and I love it! I was initially thinking of adding a leopard print design either over the neons or over the nude, but I liked the 'fresh' look of them without so left them plain.
The base is Lychee by Barry M, and the two neons are Beach Bag (orange) and Sun Hat (pink) from the Models Own Polish For Tans collection. They're stunning colours! I did the chevrons using template vinyls from She Sells Seashells.
Hello!
Okay, this mani turned out way brighter than I expected! I always forget how bright these beautiful Barry M gelly shades appear on the nail - I do love it (and hope my work does too...... :-S )
To
create this look, I used Papaya (orange) and Grapefruit (pink). I also
used some 'Reinforcement Rings' that you can use to strengethen
hole-punched paper! I bought these from Boyes, for just over £1 I think.
You can get them in WHSmiths but they were quite pricey in there, so do
have a look in discount shops that have a stationary section if you're
after some!
I started off with two coats of Papaya (above!) and left this to dry. I actually wore my plain papaya mani to work today as I love the shade, and also didn't have time to add any nail art last night! Therefore when I came to apply the reinforcement rings, I knew my nails were completely dry (which they need to be).
I did each nail one by one, and started by cutting one vinyl ring in half then peeling off one half, and sticking it carefully and as straight/evenly as possible onto the base of each nail. I then painted over in Grapefruit, and immediately peeled off the ring. I just did this with my fingers but it might have been easier to do with some tweezers!
Once dry I added a topcoat to add a shine and to make the join between pink and orange look more seamless. I wish I could add some neon studs or glequins to these, but I will have to save that for another time when I'm off work!
Hello!
Here are the nails I wore over the weekend. I was inspired by banicured_ on Instagram to create this circle gradient - like a regular gradient, except you paint the polish onto the sponge in a circular shape and dab it onto your nails. I used neon colours for a summery look - a cheapy orange from a discount cosmetics shop and a neon yellow from Claires. Here they are, along with the used sponge!
Basically I just kept painting on the orange/yellow onto the sponge in the same pattern and dabbing it onto my nails one by one... I let them dry then repeated a few times until it was bright enough for my liking. I finished with a shiny topcoat.
I know the bottle says "UV" on the orange one but I didn't really take much notice - I'd bought it for the colour not for any special effect, and didn't think it'd work anyway with it only being about a pound, but when I went to bed my nails glowed bright glow-in-the-dark rings - awesome!!
I liked these from a distance, up close they look a bit blotchy and uneven. If I'd had more time I would have added a pattern over these but I didn't finish them until late - boooo.
Here's some more pics of them from over the weekend - very hard to photograph how they looked but here's two attempts - I especially like the one of them against the dark sky!
Also, I broke my little finger nail REALLY low down on Friday :-( I don't even know how I did it, I just noticed it was cracked, and it's really bad. I had a teabag repair over the weekend, which broke on the second day... I was away in London so ended up keeping it together with a plaster...
Now I'm home I've done another repair but don't think it'll last more than a few days! Arghhh why do nails break :-(
Hello!
I've just come back from a really fab weekend (and have to go to work soon, boo!). My lovely friend Bob (Naileymabob) won two tickets to see a catwalk show at London Fashion Week, and invited me to go along! We were both intrigued to see what it was like, and although we didn't know the designer we were seeing, it was a fab experience in general!
We arrived and were taken to a V.I.P lounge (set up by Vodaphone, who ran the competition Bob won) and were given champagne and nibbles. Here's our nails for the occasion, we both used our neon studs from Born Pretty, but in different ways! We both received a goodie bag, and I joked it better have nail varnish inside. AND IT DID! We both got a special edition Nails Inc polish called Vodaphone Red. Myself and Bob will be showing it off on our blogs during the coming week so keep a look-out for that.
Then there was the show, quite short, but there was some really nice dresses. They were very monochrome, which will inspire some future nails! All the models had either black, white or blue nails. Here's a snap from the catwalk, quite a few of my pics blurred but this one didn't. They all had awesome hair too!
Walking round Somerset House (the venue) was great, everyone was dressed really awesomely, and we saw some sights! After the show we headed over to Westfield Stratford for some shopping & food. We excitedly visited the Models Own bottleshop - here's a piccie:
And we treated ourselves using the 6 for £20 offer, getting three each. We spent ages choosing, but in the end we both picked two of the Velvet Goth collection (the blue and green each) and some others. You can see Ibiza Mix in the pic below but in the end I went and swapped it (the lady was very nice and understanding!!) for another Velvet Goth like Bob.
Lastly, here's the nails I had for LFW. I freehanded the leopard print, and the studs (pointy and neon, from Born Pretty) were each applied by hand. None fell off with a good few coats of topcoat (apart from one spike on the train home). Sorry for the pic quality, all of these in this post were taken on my phone!
Hello!
Tonight I've created a gradient using 4 bright neons. :D I wanted to do a neon design as I'm not at work tomorrow so it's my chance to have some bright nails! I decided on a gradient because I couldn't decide which colour to use. Here are the polishes that feature (the orange was newly bought today)
I'm not going to go through the names of them, because only the first one has a proper name!
I started this mani with two coats of white. Once this had fully dried I painted all 4 colours onto a sponge, in order. I then dabbed/rolled the sponge onto each nail. I kept repeating this to build up the colour, which you need to do as it starts off really faint. I'm still not completely happy with the brightness (I wanted them to appear more neon, like in the bottles) but I couldn't build it up any more! I think they'll look more bold and bright when not sponged on, which I'll definitely try another day as I have a few more design ideas using the neons. Anyway, I finished off with a topcoat as usual to smooth it all out.
Also, these nails definitely look better from a distance, I'm not happy with how they look in these pics :-( but they look okay IRL!
Hello!
Here are my nails tonight. I love doodling with the Barry M pens!
I treated myself again today... I've been lusting over Models Own for months now, but have never bought a bottle due to the cost. I had another browse of the stand today, and as it was three-for-two (I like my offers!) I decided it was about time I added some to my collection. I then spent an agonising amount of time choosing what I wanted. In the end I went for a complete mix. A neon polish - I picked the green (Toxic Apple) because I felt it was the most unusual. A new 'flaked' polish - there is a proper name for these but I can't remember it. I saw swatches on another blog earlier this week and loved the way the shimmered! I was really stuck between the blue and the purple, but I picked the purple in the end because there was a bigger contrast between the colour of the polish and the colour of the flaky-bits. And finally I wanted a glitter - I was going to pick Ibiza Mix, a multi-coloured glitter, but I eventually settled on the gold glitter as I thought I'd end up using it more, and I loved the different sized/coloured glitter pieces. So there we go - I hope I've justified my purchases!!
So tonight I painted my nails with the neon green. I started with a base-coat of white to help the green stand out. But after three coats of Toxic Apple, the polish was still a bit un-even and streaky. I'd be interested to try it on a bare nail to see how opaque it is. Anyway - this didn't really matter as I was planning to get busy with my nail art pen (Barry M). I doodled a tribal design over all of my nails, using various ideas from items of clothing and other tribal nail art I'd seen and liked, including some of these fab patterns from Nail Wish. I topped it all off with a coat of Insta-Dri - my bottle is running low again! :-(
I love these nails, but unfortunately I can only keep them on for tomorrow - I'm going to a wedding on Friday and these so won't go with my dress, lol. I've got some pretty (but simple, as I'll have to do it in the hotel beforehand) nail-art planned that'll be more wedding-appropriate. Then after that I can try out my 2 other new Model's Own polishes - yey!
More pics of my neon tribal design.... here is my right (good) hand again:
And my left (non-dominant!) hand:
And another two pics with the flash - it reaaaally brings out the neon!!!
Edited to add that I saw this in Boots earlier! I knew their stands were empty for some reason, but didn't know this was why! :-( Wonder what's up...
