New Year's Eve - Silver and Black Negative Space Nail Design

Well hello to the last day of the year! I feel this year has happened quite quickly, my nail shape has changed so much as my nails have got longer, and to fit in with this trend I have had to reshape them again this week. Maybe nail strengthener should be the next addition to my nail kit.

For New Year's Eve I always feel black and silver is a great combination and I have fallen in love with the Silver polish from my Ciate calendar "Fit for a Queen", the silver is so pigmented and shiny, it's great.

As always below I have a step by step guide of how I created these.

HPB Presents: Christmas Dot Design

Hope everyone's having a nice holiday period. This design is hard to explain as it's literally just a series of dots. I searched the internet for christmas patterns and just attempted to copy some of the patterns there, using my dotting tool and some appropriate colours.

Winter Walks in the Woods

So yesterday I saw this cute design for @hannah_nails_it  on Instagram (Click the link to see the picture), and thought I could totally recreate something like that. Regrettably mine does not include the cute yeti and robin but nonetheless I think it still captures the winter spirit.

Keep reading to find out how I did it.

Burt's Bees Lemony Cuticle Butter Review

As the holidays approach you may have a friend that loves polish. One gift I could recommend is a good cuticle butter if they haven't already got one, if they have you can't have too much of a good thing!

Since using my first cuticle butter product I have definitely seen an improvement in my nail growth and strength as well as less hang nails.

Last time I reviewed Lush's Lemony Flutter cuticle butter, and this time it's Burt's Bees turn with their Lemony Butter. Lemon seems to be a common scent for cuticle butter/cream.

See how it stacked up.

Penguins and Glitter

Hello all, we're seven days into December which means I have 7 new polishes thanks to my Ciate 2014 Calendar.

For today's tutorial I've used 3 of the colours I've received. Penguin nail art was hugely popular last year thanks to the John Lewis Advert featuring Monty. So I gave it a try this years to help with the winter blues.

I think you can already tell but I didn't have a colour suitably beak coloured so I had improvise with this deep salmon pink.

HPB Presents: Monochrome Hearts

So for those among you that noticed, I'm Back! Last week I didn't get a post out as each design I attempted just didn't work out as I wanted. They annoyed me so much that I just left them and had plain purple nails for the whole week. I also went out a splurged a little bit on a gift for myself (more details to come).

I came back and I thought the the inLinks for the group I a part of would have ended, but luck had it that it is still open, which means I get to share with you a lot of other ladies that have done monochromatic nails in the last two weeks. At the bottom of the page they'll be lots of links to other designs so be sure to check them out if monochrome is your thing!

My nails would have been a nice matte and shiny design, I may show it if I can find a good picture but as I did my second hand the stamp wasn't coming out properly and I could suss out why, so that quest was abandoned very soon after the problem started. This week however, I've come armed with black, white and a simple design.

Slightly Festive Starry Nails

This post is a little later than usual, I try to post on Monday's. This week I just haven't been feeling it and stopped painting my nails after just one coat, until today. I removed the slightly chipped polish I had on from the weekend and repainted and jazzed them up. I also got out one of my lightbox lights, so excuse the yellow colouring on most of my photos I have now learnt that the light needs to be filtered through the white lightbox material to stop that from happening. Alternatively I could buy a new light bulb, but I don't think my student budget allows for such purchases.

My finished design ended up looking quite festive, although I really didn't mean it to. I just wanted to paint something simple on my nails. I think the two colours are what make it festive, the dark purple and silver. Winter, I don't know.

Keep reading for a breakdown and some slightly better and slightly worse photos.

Poppy Fields

This week falls on the anniversary of the end of World War One and here, in England, this is marked with Remembrance Day. On the 11th day of the 11th month, at the 11th hour there is a one minute silence in honour of those who fought in the war and those who continue to fight for their country. This year the ceremony was on Sunday the 8th, just yesterday at my time of writing. In honour of this I used the emblem most associate with this day, the poppy, and recreated a design I have seen from Chalkboard Nails, who used lavender as her flower.

Stamping with two colours

Hello there!

Today's post is a little different as here in Britain the light is fading very quickly and I am yet to set up my light box. Meaning when I went to take pictures of my design as I created it, the photo quality was not great. So instead I woke up early and took some photos of the finished design so I could at least show you what I have done this week and also talk you through was I did and what I used.

HPB Presents: Vampire Fangs Nail Art

So I'm kind of torn when I look at these nails between calling them a nail fail or not. I like them when I view the image altogether, but individually they look a bit abstract and random. They are also not exactly as I envisioned as my art prowess is not as good as my imagination, evidently.

All in all they definitely look like a halloween manicure, because of the colours used but as to whether they actually look like vampire fangs is up to you.

I have included details of each step I took when creating this design, just carry on reading.

Alien Stamping and Gradient

So this is the other half of the review from yesterday, the half where I actually tell you how I did the design instead of just focusing on the nail barrier product.

As you can tell from the title I used a mixture of stamping and gradient to create this design, my thumb nail also has the gradient design on.

Born Pretty Anti-Overflow Glue Review

So I have a set of posts for you today and tomorrow that I really couldn't decide what order to post them in. Should I post the design first? Or the review of the weird new product I tried to ease queries over what's on my hands? In the end I went with the review first as the product I tried was pretty cool and I wanted to share that with you first.

The product is from Born pretty store. com and was $3.99 so in British Pounds I paid £2.60. The shipping itself took over two weeks which made me nervous as it felt like it had got lost in the post but I was very glad when it did get here.

The product was shipped over covered in bubblewrap and a very protective padded envelope. One thing I would have to say is it didn't come with any instructions that may have made new users more aware of how to use the product. The picture online shows you how to use it in four steps but I feel like having instructions come with the bottle may be better especially for those that may give it as a gift to someone else.

Nail Design for Fun With Flags Link Up

So today's post is a little different, as today is my first link up post! So not only will you see the design I do but also there'll be a little linkup at the bottom with a load of other manicure designs on the same topic which for this one is "Fun with Flags" inspired by the mini series Sheldon Cooper presents in The Big Bang Theory.

This theme was the brain child of Dina for Secretary's Nail Art. So go and check out her post too! The theme is to basically try and uncover some of the symbols used in flags and not just use them for patriotic reasons. So with this brief, I decided to create my own flag using a few bits and pieces I found on the internet which I'll share with you.

Here's my end product:

Baa Sheep Tutorial

Following on with my animal theme [Don't worry I will do something else in my next post], I have recreated @purrfect_nails Sheep nails from a few weeks ago. To see the original simply click onto her name tag. I loved how cute these were as was excited by the fact I actually owned some of the polishes she used in her nail art. 

The nails consist of two nails with cute sheep pictures, the pinkie with a balloon and the middle finger with the word Baa! For mine I kept my thumb nail blank with the same blue polish I used for all of the backgrounds. 

Keep reading to see a step by step breakdown of how I achieved this look using only dotting tools. 

Giraffe Print Nails

Here's a simple little pattern that just uses two colours and a dotting tool. As it is October the design can be combined with a costume [a giraffe costume though] in order to have a full patterned outfit.

The design is fairly organic and pretty similar to the cow pattern I did in an earlier blog post. You simply load the second colour onto your dotting tool and create bigger splodges, instead of the simple dots.

Work It - Train Mean Plate from Bundle Monster

I took advantage of Bundle Monster's buy one get one free offer two weeks ago and ordered a couple of plates for myself, one from their new collection and one from another set. True to form, as soon as I ordered these they came out with new plates that I wanted to order, but had to resist not to. I don't think my student account would be able to cope with that.

I have one thing to confess from this post today though, the photo quality isn't as great as it should be. I have recently moved into my new flat for second year and painted these when there wasn't much light. Then the next day when there was lighting the topcoat had become victim to the duvet and had little dents in it all over the place. So the couple of pictures I do have were the best of what I had. next time I promise they will be better though.

So as in the title I used the Work It! Train Mean plate [BMXL173 to be exact] for this design. I opted for a couple of blue colours as the image I chose had little water droplets on and I thought that would be better than a bright yellow.

Glam Nails 9: Inspired By @nbnailart

So it is now the end of September and as a result it's Freshers time, so when I was scrolling through nbnailart's feed and found this design [click to see the design]. A design for each fruity cocktail, and although I don't drink much I do sometimes have the non-alcoholic version, and it's pretty great for a Fresher's manicure.
I completed mine with salt, but I would definitely advice sugar as it's much finer and will look better on your nails.

Step by step break down after the jump.

Glam Nails 8: Fashion

So it is nearly the end of September and Autumn is soon going to set in. For the prompt today it was fashion and I have always wanted to do a peter pan collar style nail design and so thought that would be the perfect design for the prompt.

I paired an autumnal brown with a plain black colour, a plain jane kind of blouse. No crazy patterns, just a plain block colour, simple shirt. 

Step by step pictures to follow after the jump. 

Glam Nails 7: Pink and Black Bows

For todays Glam Nail Challenge Prompt it was bows. So I looked over all my stamping plates in an effort to find the perfect bow that would come out the same on every single nail.

However, I have no such stamping plate and as such set about drawing the bows on, inevitable they all went a little wrong and so I added some patterning to take away from the mess that are the bows on my nails.

I don't think it looked to bad in the end:

Glam Nails 6: Inspired by Obsessedwithnails

Today I recreated on of @obessedwithnails designs from her instagram page. The design is one that I've seen a lot of recreations of and thought would look very unique on your nails.

The design is a white negative space design with dots, daisies and a border. Lots of things going on.

Glam Nails 5: Honeycomb

Buzzy Bees. Pretty much my first thought for the theme of honeycomb but I recently did a Bee design for the OMD3 challenge. So I wanted to push the boat out a be a little more adventurous. Happily I found some glequins I won as part of the OMD3 Challenge which are hexagon in shape and would make the perfect honeycomb design.

Having not used glequins before I followed a design and tutorial by the Nailasaurus [If you click on her name it will take you to her Youtube Tutorial].

I chose to do contrasting colours to make this design stand out a little and be crazily different to most of my other designs, that don't use contrasting colours. I opted for Blue and Yellow.

Glam Nails 4: Vintage

For the vintage theme I was planning on creating a design inspired by the Great Gatsby with some cool art deco features with gold and black colouring. But for some reason when it actually came to creating this design I really wanted to use some triangle shaped gems I had lying around unused for too long.

So I changed approach and thought of vintage England and one thing from this period that seems to be coming back into fashion is the use of bunting all over the place from The Great British Bake Off to the streets of Bath. It's every where making these places a little bit cuter.

I also used up one of my oldest polishes on this design, I think it was so old it could have been considered vintage.

Read on for more detail in order to recreate the design...

Glam Nails 3: Inspired by @naturenail

The third prompt for the Glam Nails Challenge is to create design inspired by naturenail [click on her name to see the original]. I scrolled down her feed and found this cute semi mix and match design that has stripes, leopard print and a plain nail. Although mine is not a perfect replica I am still happy with how it came out.

Sorry about the yellow quality [late night photo]

Glam Nails 2: Barbie

This design I've had on my list of thing to recreate for a while and so when the prompt barbie came up I knew it was perfect as the ballet barbie was my favourite. So the original was posted by Ma Nails on gorgeously long nails, nails that I do not have due to them breaking whenever they get to a good length, but I recreated them anyways and am pretty happy with how they came out. I even blinged them up a little with a gem instead of a little bow for the drawstrings.

Glam Nails: Argyle

September's here and so summer ends. I'll be back to uni near the end of this month and to keep me motivated before then I chose to take part in the Glam Nail September Challenge. The challenge is hosted by nbnailart, obsessedwithnailss and naturenail over on Instagram and consists of 9 prompts. I'm going to try and push myself to create a tutorial for each design that I do in order to keep my blog busy and updated, as I know when I did the OMD challenge I was a bit lazy and only really posted my designs on instagram.

So here is design no.1:

Half and Half Flower

Using three polishes that I won from the OMD3 challenges I set about creating a manicure like many that I had seen, but with an extra detail. I wanted to create a flower over the top of two different colours, thus reversing the colours of the flower. I thought this would work quite nicely and give an extra detail to the design.

Here are the three colours I chose to use, all Barry M Jelly Polishes:

Monkeys and 'Bananas'

For todays manicure I decided to try something new, stamping over a textured polish. I thought this would give the stamping a different look but may also affect straight lines in a way I didn't want. To minimise the risk of the stamp being morphed in a way I didn't want I opted for a cheeky little monkey, where the textured polish could only add to his furry look. Along with this on the same cheeky [Wild at Heart] plate I found some straight lines, I think these were initially designed to be grass but I felt if I did it in yellow it may give the appearance of bananas.

These are the polishes I used:

Born Pretty Store Review [Water Decals and Stamping Plates]

My order came in about a week ago and I've been waiting for an opportunity to share it with you. These are the items I ordered:

1 x Lucky Bag for 2pcs Nail Art Stamp Template Image Plates ( 2 Random Types)
1 x Lucky Bag for 2pcs Nail Art Water Decals Transfer Stickers ( 2 Random Patterns)
Total: GBP 1.29

Both of these items were discounted and as there was no shipping I didn't feel bad for spending as little as I did. From the description of the products, you may have guessed that I had no clue what was coming. There was a selection of plates and decals the random selection could come from but from that I had no say into which ones would come, pretty risky strategy but I couldn't choose between all the other plates on the site. Here is what came in the end:

Simple Pokeball Design

I've had this design on my nails a couple of days now and have created a picture tutorial to show you guys a little more detail of how it was created. Following on from my last post, this design also only needs 3 polish colours, a dotting tool, and then a cocktail stick or striping brush.

The design is based on the nintendo series pokemon and is a pokeball that you keep most of your pokemon in. Although there are other types of pokeball I went with the most basic as this is the most common and recognisable.

I think this design could also look great as an accent nail or like I have a full set.

I realise I am not the first to have done this design, and am not taking credit for being the original creator, but read on to find out how I created it.

Nail Art Starter Pack Designs

So I decided to put together some designs that you can create for your nails with the bare minimum of kit. For my starter kit I have put together my most used products which should cost less than £10.
My kit suggestion consists of:

• Dotting Tool
• Black Polish
• White Polish
• Another Polish of your Choice (I chose a sparkly pink)
• Top Coat
• Nail Varnish Remover
• Cotton Wool Pads
• Cotton Wool Buds

Lush Lemony Flutter Review (Warning: Contains cuticle pictures!)

I bought this product a couple of months back and have been using it regularly ever since. I had seen many other bloggers using it and although not all reviews were great ones I decided I would make my own mind up.

Read on to the end for more information about this nail art design.

UV Gel Manicure Chevron Attempt

After completing the 31 day challenge hosted by Eeeek! Nail Polish!, Crafty Nails, Nail that accent and Brijits Digits, I decided to go with something a little more permanent on my nails, instead of the polish each day they were experiencing.

So I grabbed by UV Gel and lamp and tried to recreate a design I have seen all over Pinterest for the summer.

Perfume Inspired

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So I guess you realised I didn't do a post yesterday, I had the dentist so was a little busy and ran out of time to create a post for you. Yesterday's design was a simple pink with triangles painted on with a nail art pen, to look like my bag.

Today's post is a little more exciting though. I used my Harajuku Lover perfume by Gwen. Here are what they look like:

Smoothie on my Nails

So there isn't actually smoothie spilt all over my nails but there is a representation of my smoothie on my nails. Today's cue was mynailsandmydrink and with it being summer (the British weather doesn't think so) I like to have smoothies either as breakfast or a snack to quell my hunger.

Lego Princess Leia

The theme for today's design was Princess and so I wanted to create something a little different that wasn't just your average tiara and puffy dress disney princess. So instead I recreated princess Leia on my nails.

My middle finger has the head and the two adjacent fingers have her signature hairbuns on each side, my pinky finger then has a starry night and two lightsabres crossing.

Brightly Coloured Bumble Bees

I realised today I had been neglecting my blog in favour of the nail art challenge, where as I could be posting on both letting everyone reading this about my recent manicure.

So today, 4 days before the end I wanted to start telling you about my designs. Today's theme was WINGS and my first thought was to create a butterfly wing or add fimo butterflies to my nails to create a fun summery manicure.

20 Designs in 20 Days (and still 11 days left)!

Today's post consists of a collection of solo and group shots from the OMD Contest.
I hope you like the designs and see many of them are very achievable, also anything you want a tutorial don't hesitate to ask.

If you want to join in or take a look at all the other designs from the others participating, here is the link to Eeeek! Nail Polish's page with the inlinks and raffle and everything you need to know about the contest :)

Two Simple Nail Designs

After a short stay at a friends house I skipped one of the days of the Oh Mon Dieu contest and so today ended up doing two designs. One for Fast Food and the other Shoes.

I decided to use the plain polish I already had on my nails, instead of removing all the polish twice.

Circus Style French Tips

Hi there! Today is a really simple way to create a striking detail on your plain french tips. The design itself I created for the OMD3 challenge Day 9, which theme was pattern.

Here is the manicure:

Nail Fail

Day Nine of the OMD3 Nail art Challenge theme is Pattern. So for this I decided an identical pattern on each nail would look great and so went with stamping just one colour over another.

I did this the night before around 6 o'clock to ensure it dried before I went to sleep. However, one of the pitfalls of all this polish and designing is that you never know when disaster will strike, for me that was today as I woke up.

OMD3: Day 3 - Princess Peach

So Thursday's theme for the OMD raffle contest was Peach and with that in mind I created a simple homage to princess peach.

I used two polishes and a gem to create the patterning of her dress.

Continue reading to find out how to create this design.

July Plans

So today I was stumbling around other UK based nail blogs and came across this amazing competition: OMD3

Peacock Inspired Stamping

Quick post here showing off my current manicure. No tutorial. Just pictures and a post.

Elanor's nail did a post about this bird stamping plate and I really liked the second look that was inspired by peacocks. So I set about finding something that I could do to create the same vibe. I used two blue colours and added in a gold gem to try and bring in this feel.

Here are the pictures:

Also check out elanor's post that gave me the inspiration to create this. 

Matte Topcoat Review

Something different today as I got curious about matte topcoats and how they worked. While I was out I picked up 3 different types in order to see which one was the best. The first one was £1 from PRIMARK and their P.S. collection of beauty products. The bottle contains 7ml of polish, making it the cheapest of the three I bought at 14.3p per ml, great for us students! The next to were both bought from superdrug, the BARRY M matte topcoat and the COLLECTION 2000 equivalent. The BARRY M polish contains the most polish, with the bottle containing 10ml, but costing £2.99 is about 30p per ml. The COLLECTION 2000 also set me back £2.99 and contains only 8ml, making it the most expensive at 37.3p per ml.

So cost wise the PRIMARK polish is the cheapest, but the bargain price may not account for the quality of how well it works.

First Attempt At Glitter Gradient

Earlier this week I got my gel back out and did a set of plum purple gels. But as the week as gone on I've wanted to change them up a bit and add a bit of a design.

That being said I saw the amount of glitter I had and that I should probably use some so tried to do a cute gradient using one of the silver glitters. This tutorial isn't a fail safe, I should know I have some nice nails and others that just look a mess, but it's just one way to complete this look and will probably get better with more practice.

Cat Tipped Nails

So this is the first tutorial since I have finished my first year at uni and one thing that definitely makes a difference is being back at home with my pets. For my house that is two cats. One that continuously growls at you and another that only comes out at night. But however anti-social they may be they still shape the house and keep me up all night with their continuous running around the house (They make more noise than student housing!)

New Nail Space

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. I've been moving back to my home town as it's the end of my first year at uni. Although it has been about 10 days since my last post it does now mean that I have more polishes and tools to use for my tutorials and blogs.

This post will just be a little tour around the space that I've sorted out.

Starting with the basics,the space itself used to be a computer desk and a bathroom cabinet that I picked up from the tip and changed the hinges so it could open further than the previous ninety degrees. The slide out draw that used to house the computer keyboard is now where I store my painting surfaces so I don't damage the wood.

Cheeky Wild at Heart Stamping

So my manicure this week skips out on hand painted design and instead uses the art of nail stamping. I find that this is a pretty quick way of creating effective nail art.

Pink to Red Ombre

Everytime I do my nails I look back and the photos and fear that there will not be one in focus. Today that first step has had to make a use a slightly blurry picture, sorry guys. This week is my last week of first year at uni and so I wanted something summery and almost festival like. So I found some bright colours and opted to create a tie die effect. For this nail art it will get messy so I advise cotton wool bud and nails polish remover, for cleaning up after.