Pastel Retro Squares

Good evening! Sorry I haven't blogged for a while, life got in the way. :( I'm back with a fun nail art design inspired by spring and the sixties: pastel retro squares. I chose pastel colours because I thought it was very nearly spring. Having said that, I did this design on my nails last night and woke up this morning to a blizzard!

I started with a white base before using striping tape to mark off the squares. I used the bottle brushes to carefully paint each coloured square - you definitely need steady hands for this! The colours I used are OPI Done Out in Deco (lilac), OPI Banana Bandanna (yellow), Revlon Minted (green), and a random Color Club pink that doesn't seem to have a name.

I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out, but if you look closely you can see the white bled a bit on my index and little fingers. Boo. Oh well, you can't tell from a distance. :)

The Hungry Asian Twenty Ten & Vote For Purple

I was reorganising my nail photographs on my computer at the weekend (what an exciting life I lead...!) and came across some photos I took a while ago of some polishes I bought from The Hungry Asian on Etsy. Somehow I forgot all about them! You don't want to know how long ago I took these photos. *cough* May *cough* I bought four mini polishes (I love the bottles!), and I'm showing you two of them today.

Twenty Ten has a black jelly base with fine red, blue and copper glitter and larger blue hex glitter (for some reason the colours make me think of Alice in Wonderland - I have no idea why!). I layered one coat over Nails Inc Black Taxi for the photos below. As far as I can remember I had no application issues, and the glitter distributed itself evenly.

Vote For Purple has small purple and silver hex glitter in a shimmery base. It's pretty sheer but the glitter gives good coverage. I layered it over OPI Done Out in Deco.

What do you think? Do you have any polishes by The Hungry Asian?

Lavender Jelly Sandwich

The title sounds a bit like something edible, doesn't it? Mmmm...

I have had the most AMAZING few days. The historic house I intern at has had filming going on for a BBC TV drama starring Michael Gambon (Dumbledore), Michelle Dockery (Mary in Downton Abbey) and Charlotte Rampling (Never Let Me Go). Holy crap, it was so exciting! I was kind of a general dogsbody but it meant I got to watch a few scenes being filmed. Plus I met Dumbledore! YAYYYY.

So today's manicure is my second ever jelly sandwich (you can see my first here). I began with two coats of China Glaze Sweet Hook (swatches here) before adding a coat of Barry M Lavender Hexograms. You'd think this would be lavender hex glitter, right? Wrong. It's actually purple square glitter with silver micro glitter. I love unusual-shaped glitter, so it ticks all the boxes for me. The formula was okay - I had no trouble getting the glitter out, but I did find that it clumped together a bit. I followed it with OPI Care to Danse?, a sheer lilac, then another coat of Lavender Hexograms and finally a second of Care to Danse? Plus top coat, obviously. :)

Purple Gradient

I've had a lot of firsts recently: my first jelly sandwich, my first stamped manicure, and now my first gradient. The colours I used were OPI Done Out in Deco and Nails Inc Little Miss Naughty, using this tutorial.

Weirdly, it actually looked better on my right hand than my left, which normally never happens! I attempted to take a couple of photos of it, but be warned - I'm rubbish at photographing my right hand so the angle is weird and makes my fingers look really short and fat!

And just for laughs, here's a photo of what my nails looked like before I cleaned up and put on a top coat:

What a mess!

Can You Keep a Secret?

I have a confession to make. For the last couple of weeks I have been harboring a deep, dark secret from you...

...I finally took the plunge and tried nail stamping!

It's something I've wanted to have a go at for a while, so I bought a Konad starter kit. The designs on the two plates it came with were pretty boring though, so I got a set of Bundle Monster plates too. I've been playing around with them and slowly getting the hang of stamping - I didn't want to mention it on here until I'd familiarised myself with it because I'm a bit of a perfectionist! Here's Barry M Silver Foil stamped over Essie She's Picture Perfect using one of the BM plates:

You can see there are some missing bits - I'm having a bit of trouble getting the images to transfer onto the nail perfectly - but hopefully this will improve with practice.

Have you tried stamping? Do you have any tips for a newbie like me?

Essie She's Picture Perfect

Hello all! Just a quick post today to show you Essie She's Picture Perfect. It's a very pretty lilac polish that covered well in three coats. It supposedly has a shimmer but I found this very difficult to spot. It probably didn't help that the sun didn't show the entire time I wore this. :( You can almost see the shimmer in the final photo. Oh, well. It's still a really nice colour.

Purple Polka Dots

What a surprise, another purple manicure from me!

I have said it maaaany times before, and I'll say it again: I love purple. There's something very sophisticated and regal about the colour - but fun too. My favourite coat is a bright purple one that I wear almost every day in the winter. I basically live in it for five months of the year. Purple always looks classy and it goes with almost anything. (Obsessed? Moi?)

So today I have purple polks dots to show you. I started with a base of Topshop Parma Violet, which is a greyish lilac shade. It's very soft and very pretty. It's not quite the colour of actual Parma Violets, though:

I am actually eating some of these right now. I haven't seen them sold anywhere for years, and then I found them at the garden centre the other day when I was buying's Claude's hamster food. Random!

I used Nails Inc Little Miss Naughty, which is one of my favourite purple cremes, and a dotting tool to make the polka dots. I'm actually surprised at how straight and uniform they came out!

My mum is a purple fiend too. She often quotes a poem by Jenny Joseph, which I have included below:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in the slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

-Jenny Joseph, 1961

Are you a fan of purple too? What's your favourite nail polish colour to wear, if you have one?

China Glaze Gothic Lolita & Topshop Razzmatazz

By now you've probably seen a million and one swatches of China Glaze Gothic Lolita, so I thought I'd show you what I layered over it instead. Gothic Lolita is a light/medium purple with a subtle blue shimmer. As for Topshop Razzmatazz - which consists of fine and medium holographic glitter in a sheer lilac base - it's been sitting on my desk for several weeks while I decided what to layer it over. I sat there stroking my (not literal!) beard, pondering what would work...

Image credit

...when it came to me like a lightning bolt from Zeus that Razzmatazz and Gothic Lolita were made for each other.

Obviously the lilac base in Razzmatazz doesn't show up against the purple of Gothic Lolita, but it's still a very nice combination. The formula on Gothic Lolita was great, no problems there. Razzmatazz was a little thick and the medium glitter wasn't as prevalent as I would've liked, but I'm still happy with this combination.

Illamasqua Jo'mina + Max Factor Fantasy Fire = A Match Made in Heaven

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you will know by now how much I love purple polishes. Illamasqua Jo'mina has been on my wishlist for quite some time, and I am happy to say that it is no longer a wish but a reality!

Jo'mina is a vivid light purple. I wouldn't call it lilac because it's too bright. I've heard it's very difficult to photograph the colour accurately, and it's true! I almost wanted to cry with frustration when I was taking photos of it because it just looked too blue. Happily, when I looked at the photos on my laptop they weren't too bad, but just imagine this colour as a thousand times more bright and in-your-face in real life, okay?

Pretty gorgeous, isn't it? I wore it like this for a couple of days before realising that the only thing that could possibly top it on its own...was with Max Factor Fantasy Fire on top. I've shown you Fantasy Fire before here, and unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard of it. It's a sheer purple polish with a red/gold/green multichrome shimmer. I like it with Barry M Indigo as a base - but I love it with Illamasqua Jo'mina. The brightness of Jo'mina still shines through but doesn't overpower the shimmery loveliness. I used two coats (eh, I have four bottles, I don't need to be stingy!) over Jo'mina. Take a look:

And a bonus photo of it blurry so you can see how sparkly it is:

What do you think of this combination? Do you have a favourite polish to layer Fantasy Fire or other dupes over?

My First Water Marble

Yup, you read that right... I decided to try my hand at water marbling the other day. I wouldn't call it an unqualified success, but at least it actually worked (which is more than I was expecting)!

Products:
Blue - Rimmel London Aqua Cool
Lilac - OPI Done Out in Deco
White - OPI Alpine Snow

The pattern isn't very exciting and it bubbled a little, but oh well. Hopefully once I've done it a few more times I'll be able to iron out any kinks. I only did it as an accent on my thumb and ring finger because it was quicker/easier. I used a cutepolish tutorial on YouTube, which I found very helpful.

The water marble actually worked best on the thumb of my right hand:

Now that I've lost my water marbling virginity and it wasn't as much of a faff as I expected, I'm keen to try other patterns/colours. So watch this space...