St Patrick's Day Cling Film Nails

Happy St Patrick's Day! Are you doing anything to celebrate? I've been at work today so I think I'm just going to take it easy, but I did paint my nails last night to reflect my Irish ancestry (I'm a quarter Irish). I decided to do a cling film/saran wrap manicure because I haven't done one since the Olympics last year!

I started with two coats of Revlon Minted and, when this had dried, painted on a coat of Essie Mojito Madness. When this was still wet I dabbed it with scrunched up cling film and followed with a coat of China Glaze Golden Enchantment for a bit of sparkle.

You can see last year's St Patrick's Day nails here.

Glitzology Swatches - Part One

Good afternoon! Today and tomorrow I'll be showing you some nail polishes from the indie brand Glitzology. It's quickly become one of my favourite indies, both for the quality and uniqueness of the polishes and for the fantastic customer service. The three you'll see today are glitter bombs in clear bases; the ones tomorrow each have a coloured base.

First up is As You Wish. I'm not ashamed to admit I bought this mostly for the name, as The Princess Bride is one of my favourite films. It has large white and holographic teal hex glitter and smaller fuchsia and lavender glitter in a clear base. I layered it over China Glaze Gothic Lolita; there is a lot of glitter in As You Wish so I had to be quite careful applying it that I didn't overload my brush. It gave great coverage in just one coat.

Next up is My Viking Boyfriend. The creator of Glitzology, Stacy, says this is named for her boyfriend, which I think is really cute. This is blue and silver holographic hex glitter, silver squares, dark blue hexes, and silver holo micro glitter. As with As You Wish it's absolutely packed with glitter, so I found it easier to dab it on rather than apply it normally. This is one coat over Nails Inc Baker Street.

Finally I have Skeleton Key. I believe it's inspired by the movie Beetlejuice, which I haven't seen. I absolutely love this one, I think it's my favourite of the three. It has matte black and white glitter (instant WIN) and two shades of purple glitter, all of various shapes and sizes. It contains bar glitter so if don't like that I'd steer clear; I personally love bar glitter! Again this polish is crammed with glitter so you have to be a little careful applying it. I layered one coat over Rimmel Grey Matter; as you can probably tell, I did a slightly thicker coat on my middle finger.

As a general note about all three polishes, they gobble up top coat so I did two generous coats of Poshe to make everything smooth. I'm happy to report I didn't experience any problems with curling glitters (hurrah!). Thanks for reading and pop back tomorrow for part two! :)

Happy New Year!

I'm a day late, but happy new year! Did you do anything exciting? A couple of friends and I went to the top of a hill and watched about ten different firework displays going off in the town below us. It was really beautiful.

Today I'm showing you the manicure I wore to celebrate. It doesn't really scream 'New Year' but I haven't done leopard print in a while so that's my excuse! I used a base of OPI Don't Pretzel My Buttons, which is now my go-to nude shade, and China Glaze Angel Wings, a dense gold glitter, for the blobs. Finally I outlined it using my trusty black Models Own Wah nail art pen.

This might be one of my favourite leopard print designs yet! :) What did you wear on your nails to ring in the new year?

Black and Gold French Tips

Evening! It was my birthday on Friday - yup, I was born only three days after Christmas. A lot of people seem to think this sucks, but I actually really like it. I don't usually have to work on my birthday, and my friends are usually all around too so it works out pretty well. I turned a quarter of a century old so to mark this feat I went on a night out with my friends. I was pretty restrained in my alcohol intake and only got a little tipsy, yay me. I was wearing five inch wedge boots so my feet were not happy by the end of the night, but apart from that I had a great time. :)

Because I am a weirdo I always like to have a colour theme when I go on a night out, and for my birthday it was black and gold. For my manicure I started with OPI Goldeneye and added a coat of holographic glitter, China Glaze Golden Enchantment, on top. Once it was completely dry I used tape to paint the tips black. Simple but effective.

Do you have a colour theme in mind when you dress up for a night out, or are you less anal than I am? How do you do your own nails for your birthday?

Christmas Penguins

Evening! I have my final Christmas design for you today. I wore this to my work's Christmas lunch last week because it matched my jumper, which is this cute one from ASOS (that is obviously not me wearing it. I only wish I was that slim):

Before painting the design on my nails I did some Googling to see how other people had done penguin manicures. To be honest I wasn't overly impressed with most of them, so in the end I blagged it and just tried to loosely copy my jumper. And here's the result:

The black and white are Barry M polishes, the beak and feet are Topshop Louder, the gold bow tie is China Glaze Angel Wings, and the red bow tie plus red nails are China Glaze Ruby Pumps.

Aren't the penguins super cute?! I absolutely love how this turned out, and I received so many compliments from co-workers at our lunch. Yay for penguins!

This will probably be my last post before Christmas. I'm having a quiet one at home with my family and hamster Claude, what about you? So yeah... Merry Christmas!

Christmas Snowflakes

Happy end of the world! I celebrated the fact I'm still alive by going shopping and buying myself lots of clothes I don't need. It's my birthday in a week and my friends and I are going on a night out, so obviously I had to get some new shoes. I bought the most ridiculous/amazing black studded wedge boots from Primark...I might break my ankle but at least I'll look awesome doing it. How have you spent the non-apocalypse?

Anyway. Today I have a Christmas snowflake designed inspired by one I saw on AbbieNail last week (you can find it here). Abbie is really talented at freehand nail art and I am so envious of how long her nails are - how does she not break them all the time?!

I didn't have the same polishes as her so I had to improvise. The purple base is OPI Ink and the silver glitter is China Glaze Fairy Dust. I used a Models Own nail art pen for the snowflakes, which took forever to draw. I tried to make them all look a bit different, as everyone knows no two snowflakes are alike. Finally, I stuck a rhinestone in the middle of the larger ones and disco glitter around the edges of the smaller ones.

I also drew them on my right hand and they didn't turn out completely terrible! Hurrah! I actually loved wearing this design - unfortunately it chipped quite badly on the third day, otherwise I'd probably still be wearing it!

Christmas Trees

I have my first Christmas nail art to show you today, and as should be obvious from the title, it features a Christmas tree!

Christmas trees are one of my favourite things about this time of year. Every year my parents and I go to our local tree farm to pick one - my mum and I are really particular about what tree we get so we often spend over an hour choosing. I remember one year my dad had to work at the weekend so my mum and I went together, found a tree, and had a hell of a time squeezing it into her VW Polo to take it home!

I wanted to try this design by Nailside but was short on time, so I simply used a striper and China Glaze Holly-day to make a green triangle on my thumb and ring finger. I filled it in with China Glaze Golden Enchantment and then added some loose disco glitter to represent baubles. Finally I topped the tree with a gold rhinestone and covered with top coat. On my other nails I did two coats of OPI Don't Pretzel My Buttons and one of China Glaze Golden Enchantment.

Polished Nail Bar

Last weekend we had a Christmas Fair at work, and I was lucky enough to be one of the stallholders. My colleague in charge of the Fair asked the staff if any of us had anything we wanted to sell and so I suggested a nail bar. To my surprise she loved the idea - the Polished Nail Bar was born!

I had so much fun painting nails. I was there both days and although the weather was rubbish we still had a fantastic turnout (the final figure for the weekend was over 3000 people!). On Saturday I only had six customers, but I was much more popular on Sunday and had a steady stream of people who wanted their nails painted. As it's only a hobby I don't have any professional equipment, but I think I managed to make my stall look pretty good anyway.

The base coat I used on everyone was Nubar Foundation Base Coat, and the top coat was Poshe Super-Fast Drying Top Coat because it dries really quickly and isn't toxic like Seche Vite. Interestingly, although the Christmas-inspired nail wheel I created for the occasion was much admired, everyone went for standard nail painting rather than art or rhinestones. Two of the most popular colours were a-england Avalon and Perceval, which I showed in my previous post.

Finally, here were my own nails for the occasion. On Saturday I wore China Glaze Poinsettia with OPI The Man With the Golden Gun (not my favourite gold leaf combo, it turns out) but I forgot to photograph it, and on Sunday I wore Nails Inc Baker Street with China Glaze Glistening Snow as a French manicure, plus a line of rhinestones.

People keep asking me since if I would do the Christmas Fair again if given the chance, and the answer is: in a heartbeat. I wouldn't want to make a career of it, but if I could spend a couple of days a year painting nails and discussing nail polish...how could I resist?!

China Glaze Immortal & Glitter Goblin

Oops, I didn't mean to not post for five days but I've been so busy this week that all the days have sort of blurred together. I had a training day yesterday on how to manage pests (insects/rodents) in historic houses, which probably sounds really dull but is actually fascinating. It turns out I knew most of it already so I didn't really learn much, but oh well.

Today I'm showing you the two polishes I bought from China Glaze's Wicked collection for Halloween, Immortal and Glitter Goblin. I actually passed on the blurple colour, can you believe that? It just didn't seem that unique. Immortal, however, is pretty interesting - a medium grey with turquoise and fuchsia shimmer. I'm going through a grey phase at the moment, so I had to have it. Glitter Goblin isn't as cool as I'd thought it would be from promo shots: orange and silver glitter in a clear base. I was expecting awesomeness; I got blah. Anyway, I decided to wear both polishes together, with Glitter Goblin as the accent nail.

You can see that now the weather is dark and rainy and rubbish I am in desperate need of a lightbox. I had to take these photos in the bathroom under the light there, because it's the brightest in the house! Does anyone have any tips for making a DIY lightbox?

Lastly, I decided a while ago that when I got to 30 followers I was going to do a giveaway - I'm only one away now! Come on, let's get me to 30! :)

China Glaze Rainstorm French Tips

Hi guys! Yesterday I showed you China Glaze Rainstorm, and I liked it so much that even when it got tipwear I didn't want to take it off. I wore this a couple of weeks ago when I was helping with the filming at work, and I was getting back so late at night that I didn't have time to do anything fancy. Enter...the French tip.

I like the French tip because it's quick and easy to do, but effective. I started with a line of Nails Inc Black Taxi on the tips and followed it with a swipe of a silver striper from Claire's Accessories. Hasta la vista, tipwear!

The lines are a bit wobbly because I was in such a hurry, but oh well. Macro is pretty unforgiving; from a distance it looked fine.

China Glaze Rainstorm

So you've probably realised by now what a sucker I am for blue nail polish. When I saw the discontinued China Glaze Rainstorm on Chalkboard Nails last month I knew that it had to be mine. Rainstorm is a sheer periwinkle blue shimmer with flecks of blue glitter. I wasn't going to attempt to get it opaque on its own, so I used China Glaze Electric Beat as underwear and followed it with two coats of Rainstorm.

I'm really glad I bought this! Thank you, eBay. :) Tomorrow I'll showed you how I jazzed it up after a couple of days' wear.

On a completely random note, this time in two weeks I'll be holidaying in Spain, and I AM SO EXCITED!!

Work Hard. Play Hard.

Happy Monday! Did you all have a good weekend? I went to an ice hockey game. I don't think I've ever voluntarily been to a sporting event before...in fact, I've actively avoided them in the past! But it had a great atmosphere and our team won, which made it even better. Also, it was all kinds of excellent watching the players try to beat the *bleep* out of each other! XD

Recently I went on a night out in London and I wanted some fun nails that would stand out against the black dress I was wearing. I settled on an old favourite, China Glaze Flip Flop Fantasy - you can see my swatch here - but I blinged it up a bit with China Glaze Golden Enchantment, a holographic gold micro glitter top coat (what a mouthful!). Then, as if that wasn't enough, I used some square studs that I got recently from the Born Pretty Store.

Okay, so the end result is kind of tacky and possibly something that would grace the nails of the girls in The Only Way is Essex, but I like it anyway. Oh, and the best/weirdest thing about my night out? I bumped into one of my cousins! Neither of us live or work in London but we both happened to be out with friends from work on the same night. Of all the pubs in all the towns in all the world...