The winter challenge day 16

Newspaper nails = one very excited polish addict
Reality = fail
That just about sums it up. I was really looking forward to doing newspaper nails because a) it was something I had never done before and b) they look awesome when done properly. Sadly mine failed.
I chose to paint my nails a pale pink. Then I got my wet nail polish and applied the print onto my nails. That step worked out way better than I expected and the words were surprisingly crisp. However I struck trouble when I went to put a top coat on. All my words smeared and smudged together to form a black blob :(
Here are the less than extraordinary photos of this failed attempt. But I shall try again because I still think it is a cool idea.

Excuse the lack of clean-up. The newspaper ink went all over my fingers and because it was obviously a fail I didn't bother cleaning up and just removed it straight away. 

The winter challenge day 15

Hi guys. 

Today I want to show you a swatch of OmShe's 'Forest' polish which is free from dibutyl phthalate, toluene, and formaldehyde. Also, it is made in Australia which is always a plus and is available at Priceline stores for $9.95. I went into Priceline one day (not my local Priceline, one in the city) and asked where their OmShe stand was and they told me they hadn't  heard of the brand but nonetheless I eventually found the OmShe products tucked away in a corner. Basically, moral of the story is that you do have to look for it.... 

I was very excited to use this brand and the fact that it is 3-free and 'green' however their range of polishes is quite small so I had difficulty deciding what colour to get. I decided on Forest and whilst it's not a WOW colour it is very versatile and very pretty. I am definitely happy with the colour. Application was also pretty good, perhaps not as good as some other brands (for instance I find Revlon polishes to apply very easily) but application was still nothing to whine about. The formula is quite thin and requires 2-3 coats. The polish itself is a cross between a nude, pink shimmer and brown. My best description of the colour I guess would have to be the following: A versatile pretty beige with a pink shimmer tone throughout. Hopefully that makes sense to you :) Well anyway, as you will see in the photographs it's a beautiful pinky brown tone with a subtle shimmer to it. I picked it for today's challenge because it is definitely 9-5 friendly but not boring :) 


***currently 20% off at Priceline***

The winter challenge day 14 - Hollywood Glamour

For the Hollywood Glamour theme I decided to add an accent nail to my midnight affair mani I did for day 13. I first covered up my tip wear with some silver polish, Rimmel's 'Your Majesty' which is a  brilliant metallic silver requiring only one coat. I then covered the whole nail with 'Crystal Daze' by BYS which in other words is plain old silver glitter in a clear polish.

I really like how navy and silver look together and I am very happy with how this turned out. It looks very glamorous and is a quick fix for dreaded tip-wear.

The winter challenge day 13 - winter blues

The winter blues. Gloomy, depressed, cold and sometimes emotional days. All you want is for it to be summer again. But there is a cure :) Chocolate and nail polish!!! 


Today I bring to you Revlon's 'Midnight Affair' a deep navy with an elegant, subtle shimmer to it. It is a very rich colour which is why I chose it for today's challenge because to me it looks really sophisticated and is a really easy to wear. It's also a great base for nail art or for a glitter/flakie top coat! It changes in different lights and you can make it more or less blue depending on how thick your coats are. For this particular manicure my coats are quite thick so it is slightly darker than I wanted it to be but I am still happy with it. 


Formula wise it is brilliant and really easy to apply. You only need 2 thin coats or perhaps one thick coat :) In my photos I do have a top coat on and I would recommend a top coat because with darker colours tip wear and chips are easily noticeable. 


Score: 8/10

The winter challenge day 12

Today for the winter challenge the theme was 'comfort eating' something I am guilty of, particularly in winter. One of my favourite things to eat or should I say 'drink' is hot chocolate in the winter time. Therefore my manicure is inspired by hot chocolate and chocolate :)
So I did an accent nail in Rimmel's 'sunset bronze' which is a metallic brown. My thumb was painted in Chi Chi's 'High heeled house wife' and the rest of my nails had two coats of high heeled house wife and then painted my tips using essence's 'Meet me Now!'. These feature nails were suppose to represent hot chocolate with pink marshmallows. Yummy!

The Winter Challenge Day 11 - Weather inspired

 One of the polishes I got yesterday in my haul was part of Essence’s ‘Season of Extremes’ collection called ‘Nude or What?’ and I AM IN LOVE! This is the most gorgeous mauve-grey colour I have ever set my eyes on. I would even consider buying a second bottle of it (actually most definitely would) if the formula wasn’t so thin.


 When I first got a bottle of essence polish I was super pleased with the formula but of late they have been letting me down. Not sure if it’s the ‘type’ of polish. Perhaps their metallic’s are better than their cremes?

Anyway, I still really love this polish for the colour because it’s not as blunt as a grey but not as bold as a purple so you can wear it across many different situations.

 I also chose it for the winter challenge’s day of ‘weather inspired; because it reminds me of the winter days you get where it is kind of overcast and kind of blue skies but at the same time a bit gloomy! Whilst it most definitely is not a blue polish it is a murky colour, which represents from my viewpoint many of the in-between winter days we often get here in Australia. We do get winter, but not the snow, just the overcast skies, random drizzle and wind.

I am really glad I joined essence’s facebook page because they promoted this range (Season of Extremes) and made it clear that it was only available at Priceline stores, not at Target. However it is not all bad if you only have access to Target because my local target at least has the marble range which Priceline does not have. Well that is what I have found anyway. Maybe other locations differ.

Score overall: 7/10. Score for colour 10/10. Score for formula and ease of application 6/10. 

The winter challenge day 10 - Galaxy Nails

I don’t know whether I love Fridays or Thursdays more. Fridays are awesome because you know that you the following 2 days are the weekend, which usually equates to some relaxation and a chance to catch-up with friends as well as a desperate catch-up study session. Although sometimes the properties of weekends ruin the weekend for us, with a busy weekend spent catching up and going places and getting home exhausted. On the other hand, Thursdays are pretty good too because you have the excitement of Friday and you can allow yourself to start daydreaming about the weekend.

Anyway, the theme for today is galaxy nails. This was my first time EVER doing galaxy nails and my electricity was out so no internet and no access to any tutorials. Hence I kind of just made it up as I went. Not sure if that is good or bad. Maybe you can be the judge J

I decided to do two different galaxies because I had a couple of ideas and then pick one and do all of my nails using that idea later.

My first idea was to use the following polishes: Revlon’s Midnight Affair, Essence’s In Style (metallic teal), Essence’s blue addicted and then Ulta3’s confetti. Some photos of this idea also include Face of Australia’s aussie nature I read somewhere that galaxy nails are all about adding dimension to your manicure so that is why I chose two different sizes of glitter.

My second idea was a little more crazy but I think I actually like it more. The polishes I used for my second idea were: Revlon’s Midnight Affair, Essence’s In Style, Avon’s Flutterby, and Ulta3’s confetti.

After taking a few photos of both I was on the fence on a couple of issues:

1) Were nails really galaxy nails?

2)  Did I like idea 1 or idea 2 more?

3) Should I experiment some more?

I decided to experiment some more so I did the following layers: midnight affair, blue addicted, face of australia's aussie nature, blue addicted. This made a really cool effort.

I really like how my these ideas turned out, especially idea 2 with the matte top coat on top and I will definitely be doing a full manicure soon and uploading it. I had a lot of fun trying out galaxy nails :)

Here are photos of idea 2 with a matte topcoat, I think this is my favourite!!!

Comments on my galaxy nails?  Hope you have a great weekend!

The winter challenge day 9 - geometric

Today I wanted to bring you something special, something unique, inspiring and hopefully interesting. I have my fingers crossed. I am a complete novice at nail art stuff but I put a ton of effort into this and despite the mistakes I hope you enjoy the post. Just don't look too closely. Hahaha


Ok so my first attempt was to put bold triangular tips on nude polish but as you can see it was underwhelming.

Then I tried stripes but the colours didn't contrast enough (and they were messy).

Finally I decided to remove everything all my polish and start from scratch. I used ulta3's blue marlin and mermaid green. Both polishes are cremes, dry quickly, reliable and awesome. 

This was my first sticky tape mani and I am quite happy with how it turne out. It's not very elegant and I accidently ruined a bit of it during clean-up but by that point I was over it! If you would like to do this for yourself the only piece of advice and the most important tip I can give you is make sure you stick the tape onto the top of your hand and give it a good rub before putting it onto your nail. This removes some of the glue. Otherwise the tape will pull your polish off  :( 
Been there done that :/ 


So here are the photos:

I have seen far more complicated scotch tape mani's and although I am keen to perfect this technique I think I will stick with the more simple designs and patterns are the moment. One idea I definitely want to try out is the horizontal stripe but with silver either side of it. Maybe on the weekend if I get time :)

Would love to know what you think of this technique and my attempt. 

Cheers, 

:)

 

The winter challenge Day 8

The theme for today is "your favourite nails" so everybody is probably expecting photographs of some gorgeous manicure but whilst I have a select group of polishes that I call my 'favourite' they have either already appeared on my blog recently or are going to be part of a future blog. So I didn't really know what to do but I decided to think back to what started my addiction to nail polish. It was probably Revlon's 'Poppy'. But then I realised that it was actually the fact  that I had stopped biting my nails chronically. You would not believe how dreadful my nails were this time last year! Anyway today I am going to show you my natural, healthy and relatively long nails. They have just been cut, buffed and are currently wearing a base coat in preparation for day nine of the challenge.Photos are not great and I know they do not look that impressive but I did just cut them because if I let them too long they break and then I have to cut them real short :(  Boring, I know, but here are the photos.

The winter challenge day 6 - pink nails

Ever since I can remember I have hated the colour pink with a passion however I think I may just have overcome my hatred of pink due to a couple of pink-toned polishes I have brought lately: Essence's 'Meet me now!' and Essie's 'Lion around' and 'your hut or mine'. They are just gorgeous and as soon as painted my nails I just went oooohhhhh :)

Anyway for day 6 of the challenge I am going to display 'Meet Me Now!' by essence.

This is a dusty deep pink tone that isn't too "Barbie" like for me, an anti-pink person, but is still quite a fun colour to me. Colour-wise I would say the bottle cap in the first picture is pretty accurate.

Formula-wise I would say that it wasn't quite as easy to apply as other essence polishes and probably requires a bit more patience than I had when applying this, perhaps 3 neat coats rather than 2 messy coats done in a hurry!!!
I hope you like this pink as much as I do :) Please feel free to leave a comment and if you are a new reader, you are more than welcome to jump into this challenge :)