Mermaiden

Once more a few polishes out from the untrieds. Room for some new polishes...

The one I really wanted to use was Catrice Iron Mermaiden (dupe for OPI Not Like The Movies). Sadly it was too sheer on its own - I merely saw a grey-ish veil on my nail with the first coat. It was clear it had to be layered over something dark.

On the left there is one coat of IM on black, on the right a coat on its own. Pretty sheer, but maybe meant for layering.

As the underwear I picked OPI Lincoln Park at Midnight (form my untrieds as well.. this I bought in November..ahem..). I don't have a shot of it on its own, but it was a pretty dark plum shade - and you can see it on the accent nail, although covered with a little something..

For the accent finger I tried layering flakies polishes: On the LPaM there's one coat of Nfu'Oh 51, Nfu'Oh 39 and lastly Nfu'Oh 50.

I loved the flakie madness!! It doesn't compensate my longing for Finger Paints Asylym or Twisted, but it's still multicoloured - at least a bit. Here are all the polishes:

Though, pretty, the manicure was too dark for the emerging summer season. I needed some bright colours on my talons, so this one had to go soon. Prepare for a colourful manicure post soon!

Buffy Bronzed

Rather than a proper manicure this one turned out to be a study on how various bronze glitters look over dark colours.

The base here is Essence Vampire's Love 'Gold Old Buffy', two coats. (And a pre-cleanup pic..sorry!) I was about to whip up some tired jokes here about vampires, their slayers and bronzer, but let's forget that, because bronze was the colour I picked up to decorate this mani - mostly because of these bronze studs I wanted to use.

After adding the studs I decided to try on different glitters/flakies as follows:
Thumb: Essence Circus Circus My Sparkling Acrobat
Pinky: OPI Pros and Bronze
Middle finger: Nfu'Oh 39 (Looove!! <3)
Index finger: Sinful Colors All About You

You could propably guess that the Nfu'Oh is the one I liked most. You can see a crazy colour shift from green to deep red in it - even in this pic! I've never tried it on a dark black-ish colour before, and now I'm more than ready to try it on everything. I'm still sooo much into flakies..

There you have the polishes, and that's all, folks!

Toothpick Tips

It's two days left to throw in your guess at my guessing game / mini giveaway here!
Meanwhile I've got some needle (or, rather, toothpick) marbling to show you.
This manicure idea is in no way my own, although I haven't seen this out in the blogging world lately. This was inspired by an ad I saw in a salon I frequent.

This one ows a lot to the tuto made by Liz at Liquid Jelly. Also this manicure by Jacki from Adventures in Acetone was a great source of inspiration.

First I freehanded a french tip using China Glaze White on White. It needed two coats, and if I hadn't known I'll be adding some nail art I would've made it three.

Next I brushed on two coats of Essie My Way - almost the perfect french polish. The perfect one would have just a tad more pink in it.

After adding a coat of SV and letting the base to dry out thoroughly, I put on one more, very thick thick, layer of My Way and dabbed some Essence Colour&Go Rock It Baby! on the very tips.
Then, using a toothpick, I drew some swirly lines, dragging the wet purple polish over the white french and over to the nude base.

On the next day I decided to add some bling by dabbing NfuOh 50 flakies onto the tips. I liked this mani a lot, both without and with flakies. In a few days I faced the familiar dilemma once again: I wanted to paint my nails, but I didn't want to remove my current mani. Does that ever happen to you?
And, as always, here are the polishes I used:

I remember buying the Essie My Way for certain grand festivities last spring, where I needed to wear something classic and neutral. And I remember using some baaad words when, painting my nails at the hairdresser's that morning, I noticed it's so sheer it needs a hundred coats and I don't have my Seche Vite with me. After that, I've only used it for layering and french manis two or three times, so almost all the polish you can see missing from the bottle went onto my nails on that single occasion... A love-hate relationship...

Green Flakies

This is yet another mani isnpired by my untrieds. This time, I picked up Catrice's sold out forever, which I felt I had to get but could not figure out, why. (Does that ever happen to you?)

So this is three coats of Catrice Sold Out Forever (had some problems with the formula - solved by adding thinner) and a coat of NfuOh 39 - except on the accent finger where you can see SOF on its own.

I wanted to let loose with my dotting tools, so I searched for matching green colours. It was handy as heck with my new swatchsicles!The simple design of dots and flowers was made with China Glaze Re-Fresh-Mint, Color Club Perfect Mol-ten and Essence show your feet In the Jungle.

 Don't forget to enter my guessing game, where you can win some fun neon polishes by guessing the number of polishes on my swatchsicles!

And here are the polishes:

Go on and guess, how many are there altogether!

Day 30: Inspired by a Tutorial

This post contains a whole lot of my family's Christmas nails, so be prepared for a pic-heavy post!

These nails were not strictly speaking inspired by a tutorial, but a great nail blog I found just recently: Rin's nail files. She had the theme "25 days of Christmas", with a daily mani idea, each with perfect how to's so you could almost consider them tutorials.

After that sneak peek to my own Christmas nails, let's take a look at reindeer nails I made for N:
For the first time in this blog you see a photoshopped pic. Poor N's cuticles looked so frightening in a close-up, I had to edit them with one eye closed... But the reindeer really melts anyones heart! You can take a look at Rin's reindeers here!

And then to the colours I used:
All fingers except the accent nail had two to three coats of China Glaze Ruby Pumps. The base of the reindeer fingers was two coats of Revlon Frankly Scarlet, The reindeer itself was painted with OPI A-Taupe the Space Needle, antlers and details with A-taupe mixed with white. Black and white polishes were both from Mavala. And the reindeer's nose is a big shiny blob of Ruby Pumps - what else!

For T I made nails with a snowy landscape:
These were really simple to make with a nail art pen. In small details like this I really prefer pens to brushes of any kind. Rin's landscape can be found in this link.

I love the look of Russian Navy Suede with a topcoat. It really is a unique shimmer: very wintery!

And then the polishes:
Base: OPI Russian Navy Suede, glitter near the cuticle OPI Last Friday Night, some additional larger glitter from Milani Jewel FX Silver. Details with Essence Nail Art Pen in Silver White

My own Christmas nails were made and pictured in a slight hurry, but I actually liked them a lot. I let T and N choose the theme, and they demanded Christmas tree nails, so here we go:

The base was a combination of various polishes, which made it lively and sparkly. And the glitters I used for the garland striping behaved surprisingly well. This mani is not directly inspired by any specific design, but I wanted to include in this post all of our Christmas nails.

The polishes used were:
two coats of China Glaze Cha Cha Cha
a coat of Sinful Colors Treasure Island
a coat of NfuOh 39
stripes with Sally Hansen Gem Crush Lady Luck and Essence Colour&go Make It Golden

I hope you are not yet too sick of Christmas - there is still one Christmas mani coming up. That'll be the last one, and that's a promise!

Day 6: Violets are White

Today's design is shamelessly copied from the ever-awesome Emily's Nail Files. See Emily's perfect design here!! And if you like her blog, go vote her in the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards - link in Emily's blog.
Now onto my take on the subject..

Planning my violet nails started with finding out what does "violet" actually mean. It seems that it's generally meant to be a blue-toned purple, withwavelength of 380-450nm and frequency of 800-715THz. See more here. Thus there are a lot of different violets out there, but a true violet is not just any purple and it's cousin, noo-o.

I chose my violet to be OPI Planks a Lot from the Pirates of the Caribbean collection. And I had to add an accent nail of OPI Mermaid's Tears from the same collection and my recent haul.

Planks a Lot took three layers to be opaque, and there still was some lighter patches. I wonder, was it because I only have the mini and the brush is not so perfect in them? Mermaid's Tears was almost opaque with one coat. I loved everything about it, the formula, brush, colour, everything. I'll have to wear it as a whole mani some day..

I dabbed some NfuOh 50 to the tips. For the stamping I used Konad Special polish in pearl white and m57. I tidied some of the flowers up with Essence Nail art pen in silver white. For the vines&leaves I tried to use the same OPI polishes as for the base colours, but Planks a Lot was too thin for it. So I picked up a purple Konad Princess special polish.

When I compared my version with Emily's, I felt that my own needed some more glitter. (I also felt like a complete freehand noob with two left hands.) So I slabbed on some Essence Nail art twins Edward, which is a clear base with holo microglitter, medium blue and green round glitter and large green glitter rectangles.

 And finally, here are all the polishes I used. I absolutely love the Nfu'Oh bottle with the corset cap!

By the way, I changed my template and added a Wishlist&swaps tab. Any thoughts? Please vote in the poll in the sidebar!

Aqua cue

The colour scheme that inspired me was once again from Abby of Lovely in Lacquer. See the post and her great blog here! I think it's one great idea to use colour cues from interior design, art or whatever as the source for manicure ideas. Abby even picks the suitable polishes for us and encourages to share ideas how to use them. I didn't use any of the polishes she thought of, mainly because I didn't have so many of them :) I think I was able to add up to her polish list the missing dark teal (Rimmel Sky High) and dark gold (OPI bling dynasty). I just wish I'd been able to create the wonderful brushed effect the colours in the cue pic had, but I just ran out of ideas. Could have freehanded something with a brush I guess..

This is two coats of Rimmel 60 Seconds Sky High with 2-3 coats of NfuOh 39. I almost chose Cnia Glaze For Audrey as the base, but the slight grey hue in it made me choose Sky High. I wanted the brightest base possible for this Nfu baby. See how it shines!

Stamping is made with Konad white special polish and fauxnad m66. You can see in the close-ups how my Konad white is screaming for thinner. The dots are China Glaze Ahoy!, OPI Bling Dynasty and We'll Always Have Paris Suede. All topped off with NfuOh Ultra Shine topcoat, which is a joy to use with stamping. It's not as shiny, though, as I like my topcoats. Maybe I'll try some other topcoat on the top of it next time.

Gargantuan Haul

I just "happened" to travel to Estonia (the trip was planned for two months ago) and "happened" to pop in a salon where they sell NfuOh polishes (had to drive a quarter of an hour with a map to get there). This trip was a good excuse to get my hands to some other polishes too..

 

 These are Essies, which were on sale at 5 euros each. I just grabbed them and stopped to look at their names at home. But what the heck?! Some bottles didn't have a label at all, just a big, ugly barcode tag in the bottom. Could these be from a set which was then separated in the shop? Are they allowed to do that? At least it was reeelly annoying trying to look up the possible names and collections for these polishes.

I think what I've got here is some polishes from the summer 2008 collection. At least the one on the left could be Movers & Shakers, and I'm pretty sure that third one from the left is Escapades. If I look at this particular collection, the second one from the left could just be Secret Stash.

On some bottles I was able to either find the original label underneath the barcode or read the name of the polish on the reverse side of the barcode tag. So the grey-blue shimmer far right is Fair Game from the 2011 Resort Collection. The second from the right is Burma Ruby which as far as I can tell is not a part of any specific collection (earlier dupe of Wrapped in Rubies?) and the third on from the right is Café Forgot from the 2005 Summer in the City collection.

I felt I bought the whole Opal range from NfuOh, but this doesn't look so bad. I left the red ones on the shelf, because I didn't really see the depth of other polishes in them, or the yumminess of Ruby Pumps. I also feel that a vivid pink or fuchsia flakie is missingfrom the line.

 I just had to take some close-ups. These are numbers 38 and 39, from left to right. (Names! Why don't they have names?)

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 And here are the 49, 44, 50 and 51.

These are Wild and Crazy Twinkle Beat, Super Star and Sand Turtle. Somehow they seem quite alike  in this pic, but you should see them in action!

I had to pay the regular price for these babies, but they are worth it: OPI Teenage Dream, DS Classic and DS Coronation

 Some cheapo Sinful Colors from a sale (left to right): Treasure Island, All About You, Red Diamond, Serena and Chloe, Courtney Orange, Cloud 9, 24/7, Cream Pink, Summer Peach,

I don't really get why I wanted to take a pic of these neons by themselves. Maybe I just want to get another chance to assure you how striking neons they really are, even if it doesn't show in the photo.

Depend crackles were on sale at 1,50 euros each, but I decided only to get the pastels this time. These don't have any names on the bottles, but I remember seeing some on the display - very obvious ones like "Light Pink" or "Dark Pink".

The Konad stall was having it's own sale, though the reduced range was very limited. At least I got to buy the legendary m59 and two green stamping polishes.

I had thought to catch only the Stranger Tides from OPI's Pirates collection, but couldn't resist this minis collection with the price that's near one full-sized bottle. If I fall in love with Stranger Tides after trying it out I can still buy it and have tested four colours (almost) for the price of two.

These I classified as "care products", so they're really not nail polishes, so I don't have to count them in my grand total, right? Right. This is NfuOh Ultra Shine topcoat which is my very first topper I can use with stamping without any care or caution. It simply didn't smear the black Konad special polish, not even when I played with fire (not literally) and really brushed the top coat on. The Manhattan Cuticle remover has proved to be nothing special in a one-time test.

I'll never have time to swatch them all, so if there's something that interests you, just leave a comment and I'll be your loyal servant.