Birthday Beauties

So it was my birthday last Sunday, 5th May, make a note for next year! In celebration of this I went out for a meal on the Saturday with Uni friends to Bodean's on Poland Street in Soho followed by drinks in Leicester Square. It was really quite a lovely evening. The following day I met some more friends for a day out at London ZOO! Such an awesome day.

Anyway, back to the nails, so my birthday nails were done to match my outfit for Saturday night. My flatmate Beth wanted to do the same so I did her nails to match her outfit too. So mine were Monochrome and Beth's were Leopard print. Have a look;

Mine's the left hand, obviously, and Beth's the right. For my monochrome I used 2 coats of Ion by Sally Hansen and block acrylic paint for the border which I painted on with a little nail art brush. I then topped it off with my Barry M top coat.

I've taken a picture with my Barry M black because I used it to fill in the tips which I accidentally chipped whilst getting ready. :)

These are Beth's gloriously manicured hands and my first attempt at leopard print nails. We used Barry M Mushroom for the base, then a gold crackle for the big splodges (why not, we didn't mind if it crackled a little bit) and then again using Barry M Black and a dotting tool to do the "brackets" as we called them.

And here we are in out glad rags before heading out. :D

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Hexagon of the Silver Screen.

I'm back after a little tiny break and as celebration I thought I'd sit down and actually spend some time prettifying my nails. I'm very pleased with these! I don't normally go for having a different thing on every nail but I've been inspired by some of my fellow bloggers who have done something similar. You are all very talented and awesome and below is my attempt to pretend I even come a little bit close to being as talented as you are.

So I've used one of my favourite polishes as the base, it's Nail Pop Shade 11, Dove. I have this shade and Chino which is the nude version, absolutely love them, they're long lasting, really glossy, quick drying and they give a great full coverage after two coats. Next I used a nail art brush to do the stripes and covered my ring finger in full with Revlon's Silver Screen and finished them off with my Born Pretty hexagonal pieces of glitter. They're still quite subtle but I love the shine of Silver Screen and it looks awesome in all kinds of lighting! More pics to follow;

And below Nail Pop's Dove after two coats. Love it!

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Shiny and Suede

I was originally not going to post this until I had a bit more time but I have been tempted by the awesome posts of some notably talented people. Please click links at the side to see their awesome works of nailart. :)

So, today I went to an outlet shopping mall with my Mum and there was a Next! We popped in for a browse and I spotted nail varnishes! Dangerous. I didn't realise Next sold w7 but they had a huge range and a load of suede effect ones which I'd been meaning to try out (the effect mainly, not necessarily the w7 ones). Well I decided to treat myself - they were £2.50 each and I decided I liked the pink the best so I plumped for that one, but the brown and black looked gorgeous too, and the purple... ok they were all nice.

They're great after one coat but I went for two to start off with, they're great to the touch, matte but with a sort of metallic quality about them, if that's a suitable description. I wanted to do something else to it too, simple yet quite striking, and this is what I ended up with;

Below is with two coats of the w7 Pink Suede, before I used masking tape to create the top triangles. Unfortunately it's not a very forgiving polish as my nails are quite brittle at the ends at the moment and this is visible under this polish where it isn't normally with others.

The black I used for the top is Barry M, I used to two coats to fully cover the pink underneath before removing the masking tape. I'm yet to be 100% happy with any of my masking tape designs I think I may need to invest in some less dodgy tape because I always end up with sticky nails afterwards!

I like this, I love the colour of the Suede and I haven't had bright nails for a while so I'm going to see what the wear is like on this polish, hoping to get a couple of days at least.

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Blue Moons

So today I've got another little idea inspired by my born pretty glequins. I started with two layers of my blue Nails Inc mini from the "Flutter and Paint" gift set I got for £2 from TK Maxx. Bargain! I then used my dotting tool to place the glequins one at a time over my Barry M top coat to stick them down. I then finished off the moon shape with a line using my nail art pen from Topshop.

 

I've had it on a couple of days now and it's lasted well. I also tried out my new Sally Hansen Dry Kwik for this design and it worked a treat. It's not a thick top coat it's consistency is water like but it does the trick.

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Stamps and Shiny Pennies

This was my first attempt at stamping. I bought a little stamper set that came with a random plate, which to my delight was flower based and really quite lovely so here are the results;

First one is a close up with flash because you can really see how lovely the basecoat is with this lighting. It's Sally Hensen's Shiny Penny, two coats and it looks great on it's own;

I then used Barry M black to stamp on the flower design and I was really happy with how it showed up. Covered with a top coat and it looked lovely! 

And then here's without flash so you can see the stamp better.

It's a really fun and super quick way to create designs but there's something to be said for spending a bit more time doing it yourself so I don't know how often I'll be using this but it's a great little gadget to have!

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Pretty with Pink Clingfilm

Inspired by a clingfilm tutorial I read a while back. I used Superdrug's cheap light pink MUA Natural Days and a little Marks and Spencers Bright Pink from a set I got a while back. Then topped off with a new Barry M glitter I got called Pink Sapphire Glitter. It's awesome, I'm really into my glitters that have different sized pieces of glitter in them at the moment. They're gorgeous and I have loads to try out! So here's some pics;

First is before I added the glitter;

Serious love for this, it lasted a fair few days with my Barry M top coat on and the glitter wasn't actually that stubborn to get off! I will definitely be doing this again with different colours.

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I should introduce myself...

Hi!

I have very lovely and talented nail arty friends who have encouraged me to get a blog so here I am! I'm looking forward to having somewhere to show off all of my (successful) nail art adventures.

I may have lots of posts in the beginning because I have quite a large backlog of photos from previous attempts. (I may even get a bit Christmassy, who knows!)

In the meantime I shall introduce myself with a blog post about my most recent arty attempt.

I recently purchased some Hexagon Nail Art Glitter Dust Powder from Born Pretty, link here. After some strong words about rubbish delivery my glitters finally arrived, numbers 5, 9 & 14. I love them;

I used my new nail art brushes (£1.84 from ebay - go buy they're awesome. here.) And my new dotting tools to pick up the glitter, again, super cheap and brill delivery (here).

More pics,

So that was last night and the last pic from the bus stop this morning. After this I met up with my equally addicted to nail art friend Saz. Here is a picture of both of our hands together;

And my belated Christmas present and loads of lovely nail art things for my to play with in the future! Very excited to try these... and a photo-framed picture of us in Maltaaaaa.

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