Showing posts with label China Glaze. Show all posts
    Showing posts with label China Glaze. Show all posts

  • Hi everyone!

    This week's prompt is Pink. I definitely like pink but not as much as Michelle aka the Queen of Pink so while chatting last week I asked her what to do. She picked a beautiful manicure by @nailsrnd that wasn't using bubblegum pink or barbie pink but a darker, more mature tone... perfect for a Fall manicure! So I set out to recreate the manicure she chose for me. This is the result:


  •  Hi everyone!


    Sorry for the unexpected absence. I blame my ailing computer and no time to work on that because half of the team I work in is away on vacation. But it's weekend now, the husband performed a small miracle in curing my poor puter and I was finally able to crop and watermark my pictures. So without further ado, here's the manicure I did for last weeks theme, Other Hand:


    And, keeping to the theme, here's my Cinderella hand:


  • Hi everyone!


    The 30th prompt for the 52 week nail art challenge is Saran wrap. I have to admit a saran wrap manicure isn't one of my favourite techniques as it usually turns out too chaotic for my liking. But since this challenge is all about getting out of my comfort zone, of course I couldn't back down. Let me show you the result and after that I'll tell you what I did.



    I started out by coaxing my husband into shaking my terribly separated China Glaze Elephant Walk for at least five minutes until it was returned to its original, evenly colored dusty grayish-green beauty. When it was useable again, I painted two thin coats on all nails and discovered there is very fine silver shimmer hidden it, making the polish look even better than I had thought at first.

    When the base was dry, I tore off a strip of saran wrap, scrunched it together to a small ball, unraveled it and scrunched it up again until I was happy with the amount of little 'corners' showing up. I then painted a small patch of Painted Polish Herb Your Enthusiasm, a lovely sage green polish with fine holo sparkles and some scattered golden flakies (I didn't see any flakies in my patch but I can see them in the bottle). I dabbed my saran ball in the patch, and started dabbing at my nails.

    Unfortunately the polish didn't really show up on Elephant Walk so I decided to grab a polish that was a lot lighter, Sally Hansen Green Tea which is a mint green creme. A new piece of saran wrap, the same procedure: make a ball, paint a patch of polish, dab the ball in the polish, dab the ball with polish on my nails. This started to look a lot better! There was a bit too much mint for what I had in mind by then, so I went in with another ball and Elephant Walk to darken the lightest parts, and Green Tea again where things got too dark, etc.

    When I was finally happy with what I saw, I did a last round of careful dabbing using Kinetics Sparkling, a warm marigold to bronze mixture of small glitters and flakies. It looks quite orange in the bottle but scattered around on my nails the gold shows up better. All that was needed at that point was a generous coat of Seche Vite on all nails and a camera to capture the first saran wrap manicure I actually liked when I finished it 😉


    These are the polishes I used:

    China Glaze Elephant Walk, Painted Polish Herb Your Enthusiasm, Sally Hansen Green Tea, Kinetics Sparkle


    Let me start with the most shocking part (to me anyway): I like this! A lot!!! In fact, I am still wearing this manicure as I type this and I don't want to take it off, that's how much I like it 😊 I guess I can handle the chaotic result of saran wrap a lot better if the colors match instead of clash, so I definitely want to try more of this as a background for stamping. What do you think? Yay or nay?


    Last but not least, I finally managed to cross off another prompt of what has to be the longest-running challenge in the nail art universe, the SBB Nail Challenge. Saran wrap is on number 39, and I've done it!


  • Hi everyone!


    It's time for another round of My polish, your plate. This time I picked the polish (China Glaze DV8) and Michelle picked the leaves-with-wallpaper from plate (MoYou Trend Hunter 12). This is my manicure with the two:


  • Hi everyone!


    It's the third time Michelle and I challenge each other with a polish one of us picks and an image of a stamping plate to use with it is chosen by the other. This time Michelle picked China Glaze Glittering Garland as polish and the plate I selected is Hello Maniology (formerly Bundle Monster) BM-412, the top image with the interlocking dots.

    This is what I created with them:



  • Hi everyone!


    The last Friday of the month, and actually the last Friday of 2019! Wow, this year has been an out-of-control roller coaster with major lows (my kitchen nightmare 😱) and huge highs (my dream kitchen 😍), and with way too little nail art posts, but at least one per month for the Friday Triad. This is the last one of this year and I got to pick the manicure that Michelle, Juanita and myself would use as inspiration for our own nails. I picked a very season inappropriate pumpkin manicure by Melissa aka @melcisme. I did this on purpose because I didn't know when the other ladies would wear their manicures so maybe they didn't want to go for Winter (as it's Summer on the Southern hemisphere) or the holidays at all. This way everyone could do what she liked. Also, it doesn't need a horribly complicated technique which is a huge pro in the busiest month of the year.

    I myself decided to go all-out Christmas, complete with red, white, green and gold:


  • Hi everyone,


    it's the last Friday of the month once again, so it's time for the Triad manicure where Michelle, Juanita and myself take turns in picking a manicure that serves as inspiration for the three of us. This time it was my turn to choose and I selected this manicure by dreamsnails. Yep, you're seeing that right: gel polish and freehand... I don't know what I was thinking! (to be honest, I do know... that geometric design and the color blocks... what's not to love ;) I knew from the start I wouldn't do gel polish and since I can't freehand if my life depended on it, that was another no no. So what did I do? This:

  • Hi everyone,


    I'm so behind with the #52weeknailchallenge it just isn't funny anymore, so what better use of Easter Monday than do some catching up and type up some posts for the manicures I did during the last weeks but haven't been able to show off yet?

    So to start, here's my manicure for prompt 11 - Ocean:


  • Hi everyone!


    First things first: best wishes for 2018 and I hope it'll be a year full of love and laughter and hopefully some beautiful manicures ;)

    And talking about manicures... in a weak moment I was persuaded to try and do the 52 Week Nail Art Challenge. @polish_portfolio created 52 challenges, one for each week of the year and you can see all results by looking for the tag #52weeknailchallenge on social media. The first challenge is Pink + Purple and that's what I did, a (pale) pink and purple manicure:



  • Hi everyone!


    As promised here's the second post of today with a very special manicure, featuring my nieces nails:


  • Hi everyone!


    It's that time of the month again when Michelle, Juanita and I show you what our imagination does with (or to ;) a manicure one of us picked out. This month we're doing my choice, a beautiful manicure by @Vernimage. Of course Michelle and Juanita are way more organized than I am so they finished their manicure weeks ahead of the deadline but I didn't do so bad either as I managed to complete my nails last weekend. I even took pictures which was a good thing as I woke up the next morning with a snapped off tip of my middle finger on my pillow and a nasty scratch on my cheek from the remaining pointy edge <insert some choice words that my mom would not approve of>

    Anyway... this is my result, a coral-and-peach version:


  • Hi everyone!


    It's the last Friday of the month so it's time for Friday Triad with Michelle and Juanita :) This time I got to pick the manicure we were going to create and I picked this beauty by Camille of Pshiiit.com...

    And boy, did I regret that pick! I think I've done at least four versions of this manicure and I kept messing up the vinyls. Sure, I could have stamped a design but I bought vinyls and I really wanted to use them. So I fiddled and removed the tragic result, tried again and removed the pitiful result again, did it once more, made pictures of the base before trying to master those *censured* vinyls and... ended up removing the result again as I really didn't like it. At that point my supply of vinyls was running low, my cuticles looked like I'd been doing a month's worth of dishes without gloves, I was ready to start throwing stuff around and I was contemplating just posting the pictures of the base and be done with it. But that didn't feel right either (although I will post the base for my third attempt at the end of this post as I really like it ;) so I sat down, picked a happy color scheme, took a deep breath and this is what I ended up with:

    indoors, no flash
  • Hi everyone!


    What do you do when you've got the flu, have no energy whatsoever and feel like crawling back into bed and stay hidden there for at least two months but you don't really want to do that either? I decided to snuggle up on the couch with a large pot of tea (courtesy of the significant other in my life), some cookies (courtesy of the same person), a fluffy blanket and a stack of movies waiting to be watched... and a few bottles of polish and an assortment of nail care related utensils :)

    I had to remove my manicure as I managed to get a crack in the nail on my right index finger and I wanted to try and repair it. It sort of kind of worked but I'm still not good at the teabag method so I'll probably file all my nails down to shorties when I get too annoyed by the patch job. Anyway, one movie and some relaxed fiddling later this is what my nails looked like:

    indoors, no flash

  • Hi everyone!


    As I was browsing the web for no other reason than being too tired to even watch tv, I happened to see a pretty blue manicure hidden among several other images that showed up during a Google image search that I can't even remember the keywords for. This is the link to the original post for that manicure. I fell in love with the design immediately and I wanted to recreate it but using different colors with this result:


  • Hi everyone!


    On my nails today (and yesterday and the days before that, as I did this manicure last Monday but didn't have the time to write a post about it until now...) is my vision of an elegant, emerald manicure, and below you can read how I ended up with it on my nails (or you can just check the bottle shot to see what polishes were used :)

    indoors, no flash

  • Hi everyone!


    Short post today as a certain male person keeps telling me to stop fiddling with my puter and get my feverish self back into bed (and from the feel of my head he might be right). If you haven't guessed already, I'm one of the many victims of the flu that is doing its rounds at the moment (why does it always have to be me? Why?!) and I'm feeling lousy! But since these pictures have been waiting on my camera for a week now and St. Patrick's Day is almost a week in the past already I REALLY wanted to get this done so I won't have to think about it while studying the ceiling and trying to remember if that crack was there yesterday...

    So without further ado, the nails I planned to wear for St. Patrick's Day (and actually did, but no one saw them as I was a pale, coughing bundle of sadness hidden away under thick layers of covers):

    indoors, no flash

  • Hi everyone!


    I'm so sorry to have disappeared for more than two weeks :( To make it worse there wasn't a specific reason for it, just real life that decided to shift gears and I had to run along with it.

    I did wear (and took pictures of) some manicures that I wanted to show you so these photographs have been patiently waiting for me to find some time and write a post, which is now :)
    (just click the pictures to see a larger version)
  • Hi everyone!


    Quick NotD today as I hardly have time to breathe, let alone write an elaborate post. But I did manage to squeeze in a manicure as the blue one I was wearing (see previous post) started to show tip wear and it kept annoying me more and more to see my nails like that... So pink nails this time.

    indoors, no flash

  • Hi everyone!


    The last challenge in the PPSA Nail Challenge is Needle and as I didn't do the sugar spun one, I was determined to do a needle manicure. I mean, how hard can it be? All the girls on YouTube make it look SO easy...

    After trying it for the first time I decided to do a skittlette so I would only have to do two nails with this technique. After messing up the same nail for the third time I promised myself I would stop if it looked remotely decent. This is the result of the ninth attempt at needle art when I decided enough was enough and from a distance, with squinted eyes and in low light this didn't look too bad...

    indoors, no flash

  • Hi everyone!


    It's the last day of the week which means just a few more hours before the weekend starts and... casual Friday, so in my case: colorful nails :)

    I received a couple of new polishes last week and while they were sitting on my desk, waiting to be put away, a gorgeous burgundy red was standing next to a glittery gold and the combination was so beautiful I decided to use them on my nails.

    indoors, no flash
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