Indian Gradient

I went to India for the first time back in April to visit my finace for a few weeks and meet his parents. I wanted some simple but not boring nails for my trip so decided on these gradient nails.

The base colour was the Watermelon gelly paint from Barry M. I then sponged on the tips Barry M’s peach melba nail paint.

I built this gradient up over a few layers until I was happy with how it looked before adding a topcoat. I think the final result looks a bit grungy.

Interestingly I found my nail varnish lasted very well in the Indian heat. At home I find near the end of a week the varnish starts to look brittle and cracks on the tips a bit before it starts chipping off. However in the heat it kept it softer as if it was kinda kept melted to the nails lol so I got a whole 2 weeks of wear out of it before any chips.

Simple Glitter Fun

This was just a simple design using 2 different glitter nail polishes. For the base colour I used Barry M’s Raspberry. I really love this colour.

On the thumb and ring finger I used a fine pink silvery glitter. I like this one because I feel it gives a metallic look from a distance.

On the rest of my fingers I used the Pink Sapphire jewel glitter nail paint. This has various shapes and sizes of glitter but it’s a bit hard to layer it up as you have to blob it on a bit to spread the glitter well across the nail.

Spring Flower Nails

I came up with this design to match a dress that I wore for a birthday party recently. I’m glad its starting to get darker much later now so that I can use natural daylight to take my pictures when I get home from work. Makes them come out a lot better.

I painted all my nails in 2 coats of the mint green colour first. All colours used for this design are by Barry M.

Then using a larger dotting tool I made a flower design on each nail using the darker pink colour.

Afterwards I used a smaller sized dotting tool to add a lighter pink flower shape over the top of the darker flowers.

Then I used a nail art brush to add some flicks in a dark green for leaves and added a little gem to the middle of each flower for some extra effect.

I then finished the whole thing off with my topcoat. I’m quite pleased with how this one came out and think the colours look great together.

Beady Stripes

I’ve been playing a bit more with textures on the nail lately as I like the feel. This time I used some of the nail beads I was given for my birthday.

These are the MUA nail constellations, which are just as good as the other nail beads I have tried. However I didn’t like the packaging. The bottle has a thinner end to allow you to aim the beads better, but I found barley anything came out of the end which was too frustrating for me lol. So I ended up pouring some into a tray and dipping my fingers in.

I firstly painted all my nails with 2 coats of the purple. Then I added the blue on the bottom half of each nail only. These colours are from Barry M.

Then I painted a clear stripe across where the 2 colours meet and applied the beads. I used a cuticle stick to neaten up the stripe and pack the beads together better.

I then finished everything off with some top coat. I had to dab the top coat over the beads as it seems to pull the colour off otherwise. I have this problem with other nail beads as well. I need to try some other types of top coat to see if that is the cause. I like to seal everything in place with lots of top coat as I like my design to last a week.

Soap Making – #4

Thought I would share some more of my soap making pictures. All these soaps were apple scented and were made up of 2 colours.

For the above ones I first made 3 round blue soaps. I then cut them up like segments of a cake and split the segments between 6 round moulds. I then filled the gaps with the other colour to get this effect. The only problem was in some places the blue was covered completely so I had to cut away a little bit in places to reveal the blue underneath.

For these ones I filled a small flower, heart and star shaped mould with the blue and let it set. At the same time I filled round moulds almost full with the other colour. When all was set I placed the blue shapes in the top of the round moulds and filled the rest of the space left full in order to hold them in place.

Mosaic Crackle

I bought one of the Avon crackle effects recently even though I have a few crackle polishes, but I was drawn to this because of the shimmer in it and also because I don’t have a green crackle. I got it in colour Gleaming Emerald.

I found the application slightly less forgiving than the Barry M crackles are. Therefore you will need a bit of experimentation to get it right. I decided to try it over a lilac base.

However generally I found that if it was too thin you would end up with a translucent coat with very thin vertical lines forming the cracks. If it was too thick then you wouldn’t get enough cracks to see that it was supposed to be an effect.

I preferred to aim mine around a medium thickness as I wanted the green crackle to stand out boldly, but I also like thick cracks going both horizontally and vertically in between. The only thing that I do love about this crackle over other brands that I have tried is simply the fact that it has a lot of glitter in it.

Another thing I noticed about this one was that it took quite a while for the full effect to come out. At first I did not think it was working, because with the other brands I have tried the effect is very quick. However it does need some time to look its best.

Pink Teal

I wasn’t sure if to post these pics as they are a bit plain and was more of an experiment with this particular colour combination.

However I will be away from home for the next few weeks so needed some posts to schedule up in advance to cover the time I’m gone. These have been sitting on my computer since September last year so figured I might as well just use them than delete them.

The colours used are Teal and Pink Silver glitter. Both are by Barry M. The teal has a kind of metallic finish to it and so I was interested to see how it would look teamed up with a glittery nail varnish in a completely different colour.

Therefore I did one look where 1 coat of the glitter was applied over the teal on all nails. The other look is the teal on all fingers and then several coats of the glitter was packed onto the ring finger only.

Starry Night

This design was quite easy to accomplish. It uses some star design nail stickers that I bought from the Avon at the end of last year.

They come in a pack of 2 sheets. 1 is of black stars and the other is in silver. The silver has a kind of foil look to them.

I used Barry M’s denim for the base colour. Once this had dried well I peeled off the stickers I wanted and stuck them to the nail. There’s many different sizes on each sheet.

The only hard bit is that you need to aim it well when you place it as once its there you cant really adjust it without ruining everything. After I sealed them on with a top coat.

Easter Nails

Happy Easter Everyone! Here’s the nails I did for Easter this year as I forgot to do any last year.

It was quite a simple design. I painted each nail in a different pastel shade using Barry M nail paints and made sure the ring fingers were in yellow, as I wanted these to be chicks and the rest to be eggs.

On the ring fingers I then added 2 black dots for eyes and then a beak and feet in orange. I placed 2 silver rhinestones over the eyes.

On the remaining fingers I made an Easter egg design. I used striping tape in a matching darker shade of each nail colour. 2 stripes of this were placed across each nail. Then in the gap between the striping tape I added 3 rhinestones in matching colours.

I finished the whole thing off with a healthy layer of topcoat to hold it all together. Hope you like it!

Furry Nails

I’ve seen images of the velvet nail trend online long ago but never felt in the mood to try it out back then. It always looked like it would be too messy. However my friend gave me a pot of the MUA Fur effect nail fluff for my birthday last month. I have it in colour ‘fluff and cuddles’ which I would describe as a nice dark magenta colour.

It recommends you use a similar colour for a base coat so I painted all my nails with 2 coats of Nails Inc’s Malibu Cosmo, which was the closest colour I have to match. I wanted the ring finger to be different so I did something that would be the opposite to fur by using a glitter nail polish. I decided on Nails Inc’s Special Effects in Bloomsbury Square. This was then finished with a top coat.

The fur comes in a pot with a sifter on top. You can either sift the fluff into the top and apply or remove the sifter and dip your finger in the fluff. I decided to dip mine in. I painted each nail one at a time with a coat of the colour and then dipped it in the pot. I pressed the fluff on gently to the nail with another finger to help it stick.

After leaving it for a while to set, I used a cheap eye shadow brush that I don’t plan on using to brush the excess back into the pot. If there were any missed spots I just dabbed a bit more nail polish on the ‘bald’ area and put more fluff over it to fill it in. It was less messy than I expected and it wasn’t too hard to get most of the mess back into the pot to reuse.

I really loved how it turned out and I really love the texture. I couldn’t stop rubbing my fingernails all week. A friend at work thought it was cool also and described it as feeling like a velvet lined box. I found the durability was better than I expected also despite the lack of a topcoat. Also when I did get chips or areas wore ‘bald’, it was easy to just reapply the fluff as required to the relevant areas only. Doing this in this way was quite seamless and it wasn’t obvious that you had tried to touch areas up. I do recommend giving this a go to people who love uniqueness to their nails.