Green without Envy

This is a mani featured in Liquid Jelly's Friday Food and Nails by Liz. You can check out all the entries here. She's asked everyone to send their pics of, well logically, food and nails. What a great idea, combining two of my passions, food and beauty! I decided to send a pic of a green butterfly mani I made, with some home grown green beans from our backyard.

The base is Essence I'm a Berliner, on which I konaded a flowery pattern from BM224 and the butterflies from m20 with white and various green Konad special polishes. Why on earth do I own three of them? I'm not even a big fan of green on me and don't own a singe green garment!

Finally, I added some green micropearls. If someone's found a good way to apply them, let me know! I just picked them up with the soft of my fingertip and gently pushed them onto the nail. It went quite well, just not for the occasional, partial fingerprint in my topcoat...

Neon Crash

I was going to spend a few days in the middle of the forest with a few horses and my friends and needed something fancy on my nails. (Don't see the logic? Well I do, and that's all I need, LOL)
There are two coats of China Glaze White on White as the base, and on the top of it three coats of Sinful Colors 24/7. Application was awful with both of the polishes. Nice, that you get them both in this design... Note to self: get a decent white polish.

I stamped on some broken glass patterns from BM202 and matified all the nails with BeYu Mat Topcoat (Mat? As in "doormat"? Not matt or matte? I wonder... Mind you, that it says "topcoat" in plain English in the very same label). This pattern provoked more discussion and comments than the brightest neon colour I've ever had on my nails, which is a small miracle. What do you think it is? Some odd insects? Paint stains? Something broken? I'd vote for a window pane broken in a meteor crash. I've never seen one, though, so I can't say for sure.

Due to the gazillion layers the line near the cuticle is so far from neat that it hurts. After the rambling in the forest there's also notable tipwear. And the colour accuracy of this pic... if you've ever tried to capture a neon with your camera, you know what I'm talking about. Aaaaaugh! Why did I ever publish this? (Easy answer: Because I think it kinda ruled on my nails)

Pink Bling

I've been in want of bling lately, and here's what came out of it. On the base there is three coats of Wild and Crazy Cyber, which on it's own is far from opaque. The nice duochrome flash of blue and purple is clearly visible on the nail, though.

 I was about to make a mosaic mani with scotch tape, but had run out of tape so I resorted to stamping. I used BM plate 225 with Sinful Colors Cream Pink and Rimmel Fruities Strawberry Fizz randomly dotted around the plate before sweeping. Finally I added some rhinestones (from eBay) and off I went.

I've loved this pattern from when I first saw it, but I've had my doubts about it really working, because the stamping colour pools are so large. All those silvery lines you see on the nail are base colour, everything else is stamped. When I initially tried out some polishes for this stamping I was overwhelmed by the stamping potential of the Cream Pink and other Sinful Colors neon polishes. They are a treasure at that price, and worked with this image a lot better than Konad Princess stamping polishes in purple.

On the thumbnails I did a diagonal stamping with the bit of the tape I still had left, and lined it with baby pink micropearls. Of course I poked both of the thumbs somewhere before the topcoat was dry and had to reorganize the pearls. The result of that and added topcoat is sooo visible in the pic. Yuk.

Here are the polishes I used. You won't believe when I tell you the Cream Pink really is a dark pink NEON, not just your regular innocent pink polish she pretends to be in the pic. You sneaky thing!

Sorry about the lousy quality of this pic (I only had my phone with me), but I simply had to include it. Don't you think the champagne bottle duvet cover is the perfect accessory for these nails? Let alone the contents...

Pink Polka

This is again a mani made by my wonderful nail artist J, when I had my gel infills done.

The polish is Alessandro Candy Floss Pink from the He Loves Me -collection. It was almost opaque with one layer, but we decided to paint two justi in case. This is one of the first collections, I believe, where Alessandro polishes have names. Me likes! The formula and the brush were great as always, as well as the colour - a real candy floss creme pink, neither pastel nor too bright.  J dotted the polka dot design with a dotting tool and Konad Pearl White special polish and stamped the bows from m59.

 This is my favourite design, the right pinky. It was also the nail done first. :) This is also my favourite cardboard lunchbox, a retro design I use as my handbag from time to time - but only on dry weather.

I'm not completely happy with the performance of the Konad Pearl White polish in stamping. As you can see, the dots are much more opaque than the bow design. OK, the dots have a much thicker coat, I think, but still I'm longing for a more pigmented white stamping polish. I've seen at various e-tailers loads of stamping polishes other than Konad. I'd be glad to hear if you have any experiences with them!

One Lovely Blog Award

I was overjoyed to have received my very first award. I was tagged by the lovely Iisa from Unglue your Lips. Please click the link to see her fresh and crisp blog!

The rules are:
1. To thank the person who tagged you - thank you again, Iisa!
2. To pass this award to 10 bloggers and notify them.

I'm aware of this award having been around for a while, so I decided to pick only 5 bloggers to pass this to. So here we go:

Grace from Oooooh Pretty
September Lena from The Students Guide to Nail polish
Emily from Emily's Nail Files
Amy from Gotham Polish
Hayley from Here Comes the Sun

Go girls! Keep up the good work!

Sunburst

This mani was made to match my husband's favourite electric guitar, the Fender Bonnie Raitt Signature Strat in Sunburst. This was actually his idea - how sweet is that!

I prepped all nails (except the accent nail of course) first by painting them with Sinful Colors Cloud 9. Then I sponged two darker orange polishes (Sinful Colors Courtney Orange & Serena and Cloe) near the cuticle by the help of a sponge mapke up applicator. The most challenging part was to get the black sponged neatly as near the cuticles as possible. I can tell you there was some cleanup required in my right hand. The black I used is Essence Colour&go Fabuless, which has a slight silvery shimmer and even some multicoloured microglitter in the bottle. I've never used it on the whole nail, so I can't tell if the glitter really shows. I sponged the oranges and the black alternately a few times to get the gradient as smooth as possible.

 To brighten all this up I sponged some Make Up Store Vera onto the tips and alongside the line of the base colour and the darker oranges. Having had enough of sponging, lastly, I painted a black line nearest the cuticle to even out the sponged black edge and give a neat look. I feel it really helped (and some acetone, too). For the line I used Essence I Love Berlin Berlin Story, which is a black liner.

Then to the accent nail, I painted a milky white base with one coat of Carlo di Roma 05 (God I hate polishes without names!) and then added a few coats of Essence glitter topcoat (See previous comment!). The accent nail is supposed to imitate the white shell pickguard on the actual guitar.

The symbol in it stands for F as in Fender, even though it doesn't look very much like it. I painted the black base with the Essence liner, topcoated it, and then using a thin brush filled the center with Essence Nail Art Twins Romeo. Before painting the virgin white surface with my black liner, I made a few test drawings with a water soluble marker, which i could easily wipe away. I left the last sketch on the nail when I painted - super easy!

Phew! Two coats of Orly Glosser and one of LCN Quick Dry Oil and I was done. I spent almost the whole  day with this mani, but of course I got to do things in between, like shopping for groceries, preparing the dinner, having a dance class, reading etc. But still, I feel a bit wasted. Does that ever happen to you?

Finally, here are all the polishes I used.
 From the upper row-ish, l-r: Essence I Love Berlin Berlin Story, Essence Nail Art Twins Romeo, Essence Glitter topcoat, Carlo di Roma 05, Essence Colour&go Fabuless;
 and the lower row-ish: Sinful Colors Courtney Orange, Cloud 9, Make Up Store Vera, Sinful Colors  Serena and Cloe.