Showing posts with label mint. Show all posts
    Showing posts with label mint. Show all posts
  • Hi everyone!


    I had some time to myself, my nails were showing some signs of tip wear, and I had just received a small package with a few plates and a little jar of pigment powder... and this is what my nails looked like when I stopped playing:


  • 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!


    Another episode of My polish, your plate where Michelle and I challenge each other to do a manicure with the polish one of us chose and the stamping plate picked by the other. This time Michelle went for OPI Was It All Just a Dream? from the Grease collection of 2018 and I chose the daisy-like image from the fifth row, second column of Lina Feeling Shapely! 05. Let me show you what my version of the combination looks like:


  • Hi everyone!


    The 14th episode of the 52 week nail art challenge... we're at 25% already! This week the theme is Scrollwork and this is my version that sort of happened accidentally when I was playing with my newest pretties:


  • Hi everyone!


    This week's theme is Half Moon. Apparently this type of manicure became popular in the 1920s. It's almost 100 years later but it still hasn't become popular with me, so I wasn't looking forward to this prompt. That is until I saw a gorgeous manicure by @helenepiuk and within an hour, this was the result of that blast of inspiration:


  • Hi everyone!


    Another month has passed so it's Triad day again, the last Friday of the month where Juanita, Michelle and me take turns picking a manicure that is the inspiration for all three of us. This month was Michelle's turn and oh, boy, did she cheat!!! She chose this beautiful manicure by Emiline from Nail Polish Society... and the original was done using nail wraps! How can a girl do something similar? I actually checked and the exact same wraps are still for sale, but that would be cheating, right? Oh... wait...

    But no, I decided to take the inspired-by route and used just nail polish and tools, and this is the result:

  • Hi everyone,


    nope, it's not the end of the month. It's a surprise manicure, coming from the finally decreasing chaos that has been our home for the last four months. But no complaining about kitchen renovations this time, I want to show you a manicure I did after a bottle of polish was returned to me (I didn't even remember lending it out, so here's to friends who remember stuff like that for me ;)



  • Hi everyone,


    July is almost over so that means it's time for the Triad manicure of the month. If you've been here before you probably know what Triad means: Michelle, Juanita and I take turns in picking an inspiration from our to-do-list and we all create a manicure inspired by it. Just recreate it is an option but go a completely different route is possible as well :)

    This month was my turn and as I knew I was facing some very busy weeks I decided to pick a beautiful but not too complicated manicure, this one by Yvonne from @eivi_nails. I love tone on tone and different finishes so it was on my list for quite some time, waiting for me to notice it. And this is what my version looks like:


  • Hi everyone!


    Usually I try to avoid looking at other manicures until I've done my manicure for the 52 Week Nail Art Challenge. This time however I saw both Michelle's and Juanita's version pop up in my feed and I loved both of them so I set out to do a combination of the two. As you can see, that totally worked out... NOT!

    I couldn't find the right sheer polish as base, I didn't like the floral images on the plates I selected, basically I wasn't happy with anything. So finally I decided to go with another idea that had been in the back of my mind the entire time but that I thought too simple to be called nail art... and I loved the way my nails looked! Here they are:


  • Hi everyone!


    The title says it all. The sun is out (and OMG, how I missed those warm, lazy hours sitting in the backyard, doing nothing but read a book...) and of course that means all holos can come out to play! As we had a birthday party/family reunion to go to, I grabbed two holographic beauties, a white creme and a dotting tool. A short while later I was admiring these nails while enjoying a lovely bike ride in the sunshine (of course safely covered with sunscreen as my winter-pale skin doesn't need much to turn lobster-red):



  • Hi everyone!


    I guess 2017 wasn't quite happy with the speed it was zooming towards the end, so it decided to step on the pedal and went into overdrive. Oh, alright, so December is always extremely busy for my family as there are no less than 5 birthdays that can't be skipped, a children's holiday that loving aunts and uncles are supposed to attend as well, and of course Christmas with all its preparations and last but not least New Year (although technically that's in January but of course everything for the party has to be done in December). Throw in a computer that decides it can't keep up with the pace so it simply shuts down and some last minutes rush jobs at work and you can picture my life for the last three weeks. But I'm not complaining though, because I love this time of year, craziness included :) Anyway, at the moment four birthdays (including my own ;) are in the past, all the shopping and planning etc. for Christmas is done, my computer is completely reinstalled and running faster than ever and I even managed to catch up on reading blogs so I decided to show you what has been on my nails these last weeks (and I hope to do a second post with a really special manicure after this one, no promises though!)


  • Hi everyone!


    I sure hope your week so far isn't as lousy as mine! Apart from my broken and now nubbinized (yep, I've decided that's a word) nails I managed to get not one but two flat tires on my bike in one day and have been called names by a fellow shopper who didn't appreciate me taking the last bottle of detergent from the shelf (I guess he wanted the bottle himself but hey, I have to do dishes too!) and some more of those "minor annoyances". So you would expect me to be quite grumpy and I have to admit my disposition has been sunnier, but I still smile when I look at my nails so things could be worse ;) Want to see what I see when I look at said nails? This:


    And what did I do to create my manicure? Just read on :)
  • Hi everyone!


    The sun is out so that means... holo! And I have two gorgeous specimens incorporated in my manicure today: a-england Proserpine and UNT Forever a Promise (a new to me brand). Want to see what I did with them? Just keep reading...


  • Hi everyone!


    How are you all doing? I hope you're all nice and warm and bundled up if it's winter where you are or chilling by the pool if it's summer. Either way, I sure hope you're feeling better than I do as I'm still fighting a valiant battle against hordes of flu bugs that are still very much present. It's starting to look like I will be victorious but it sure is energy consuming... and of course a brave warrior has to look stylish so during the time I wasn't in a horizontal position, I did this:

    indoors, no flash

  • Hi everyone,


    I have to do my exam this week so this weekend, between studying and growing more nervous by the hour, I thought it was a good idea to try water marbling for the letter M. Yeah, right... shaking hands, no patience and a new challenging technique, really great combo ;)

    So after a few failed attempts at flooding my desk with polish and water I decided to go for something easier:

    indoors, no flash

  • Hi everyone,

    quickie post today as there is a lot going on and I don't have much time to spend on the puter.

    This is my entry for the PPSA Nail Challenge - week 4 - Go Wild With Dots.
    indoors, no flash
  • Hi everyone,


    this is a day that I should have spent in bed, hiding under the covers and isolated from the rest of the world! Instead I was surrounded by cables, guys who were pulling and pushing said cables, floors that were taken apart to get said cables into the space under the floors and all the other mess that comes with putting in a completely new wired network in our apartment so we can stream high quality movies in any room and watch tv everywhere... don't ask, it's my husbands project! Oh, and guess what? Tomorrow they are going to continue!!

    Oh well, at least I managed to free a corner of the table to polish my nails and I was looking forward to working with Zoya Tiana, the pistachio green polish of the Delight spring collection.

    indoors, no flash
  • Hi everyone!


    I had to pick up some cotton pads from the local drugstore this morning and I couldn't help myself, I had to take a peek at the Catrice display. Imagine my surprise when I saw a brand new limited edition display, VISIONary. Of course the four polishes ended up in my basket :)


  • Hi everyone!


    This manicure ended up completely different from what I had in mind, but as stamping resulted in a mess and I didn't have the time to fiddle with it anymore (my husband was growing more and more impatient, telling me we REALLY had to go... ten minutes ago!) I grabbed my dotting tools and went for a quick dotticure instead :)

    Mint, teal and gold - indoors, no flash
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