Make A Spectacle With Your Nails

Hi everyone! Hope you guys had a lovely Christmas! I had a wonderful time with friends and family, a bunch of amazing presents and yummy food. Let's see what the new year will bring!

Today I have a darker colour with a bit of added sparkle to show you. It's actually an old mani lost in one of my folders. Miss Sporty 'New Black', a dark grey creme with a rainbow of micro shimmer which unfortunately cannot be captured on camera. Topped with China Glaze 'Make A Spectacle' from the Halloween 2012 Wicked Collection.

Make A Spectacle is an iridescent glitter with large hex pieces as well as smaller pieces swimming around in a shimmery base. I did a few layering experiments on a nail wheel and it looks awesome over over any polish. I was surprised I only needed one coat to achieve this much glitter load on the nail. It really transforms a plain colour and it's my favourite from the collection.

Pastel, Gold and Daisies

I'm trying to hold onto Summer as much as I can. We've had an unusually hot weekend here which was awesome but I know temperatures will start falling very soon and it will be time to embrace Autumn!

I've felt like wearing yellow for the past couple of days and I finally got around to it. I was only planning to wear a pastel yellow on it's own but as it turns out, the formula on this polish was very streaky so I had to cover it up with some stamping.

This is 2 coats of "Yes Love" No243 I usually buy Yes Love polishes in €1 stores when I go on holiday to Portugal. They are extremely cheap and always have a really fantastic range of colours and finishes. The formulas are hit and miss but I suppose you can't expect too much of a €1 polish.

I stamped with Cheeky CH16 and randomly dotted some gold shimmer onto the daisies (Miss Sporty Gold Backstage).

Mish-Mash of Vintage Flowers, Glitter and Rhinestones

Today I wanted to show you guys a design I did for a contest currently taking place on Instagram, hosted by the ever so talented Bedizzle. The rules were simple, just to copy a design that she had done in the past. I opted for a design that I could manage as every other mani she had done was way to complex for me to attempt!

So that it wasn't an exact copy, I changed up the colours a little and the placement of the flowers and glitter as well. So it turned out a bit of a mish-mash of vintage flowers and placed glitters:)

Polishes used - Essie Mint Candy Apple, Collection 2000 Fruit Loop and Ninja, Rimmel London Apricot Punch, Miss Sporty Gold Backstage and OPI Alpine Snow for the dots and stripes.

Remember the Mermaid Tail nails I did a while back, also for an Instagram competition? I won second place. I couldn't believe it, there were so many great entries!

A Little Teal Jelly Gem!

Today I wanted to show you one of my favourite blues (Miss Sporty Pop Fiction) layered with a little unexpected gem I found in a euro store in Portugal.

In my opinion, these euro stores usually have pretty horrid polishes! Most of them have been opened and tried, the formulas are a nightmare etc, but this one was just sitting there all pretty and shimmery.
We don't have the brand "Yes Love" in the UK but from what I've seen, it's widely available in Spain and Portugal. This is one coat of Yes Love #441 (a deep teal jelly full of green, blue and gold micro shimmer) layered over two coats of Miss Sporty Pop Fiction.

I really like this polish and will definitely be layering it over other darker and lighter colours! I think it would look great over a creme mint green!

And here is a picture of Pop Fiction on it's own! It's such a stunning cool toned blue:

Glistening Turquoise Seas

Miss Sporty- Hypnotic Turquoise. A very pretty turquoise shimmer with hints of green and gold.

This polish reminds me of Summer Holidays, hot weather and glistening seas! It looks so exotic and "hypnotic", Lol! And very, very bright!

The formula is excellent to work with and applies brilliantly. This is 2 coats which gives you opacity but you could probably apply another one for more depth. Not much else to say about this polish other than it's a keeper :)

  

Starry Starry Blue Sky Gradient

Check out the nubbins! I've had to file my nails right down after removing the glue-on nails. After a little buffering, they were as good as new!

I decided on a blue and glitter gradient today as I wasn't really inspired to stamp, scotch tape or do whatever kind of nail art. Sometimes a gradient is just as pretty!

Polishes used: Barry M Blueberry Ice Cream, Miss Sporty Blue Berry, China Glaze Blue Iguana, 17 Midnight Sapphire, Essence Blair, La Femme Purple Glitter.

Black & Gold Egyptian Pyramids

Today's mani was inspired by Jane's Pyramid manis. I spent the best part of an hour trying to figure out how she created a 3 tier pyramid without having to use 4 strips of tape simultaneously, but in the end I gave up! All I could come up with was a 2 tier pyramid!

Polishes used were Barry M Black and Miss Sporty Gold Backstage. I really like the contrast between Black & Gold and I love doing tape manis but I need a little bit more practice to get my angles right!

Miss Sporty - New Black & a Little Plaid Woolly Sock

I have another low cost/ drug store brand nail polish to show you. Miss Sporty - New Black. I try my best to avoid buying expensive polishes (which I'm not entirely successful at) and most of the high end brands I own were either on sale or were given to me by my mum, my husband, friends, etc.

I'm really happy with this polish, maybe because I had low expectations (it only cost £1.99). It's an amazing dark grey creme with the slightest rainbow of micro shimmer, you can see fuschia, blue, purple, yellow and green in there although it was extremely hard to capture it with my dodgy little camera. The formula is also very good. It applies really well and is opaque in two coats.

This polish is part of Miss Sporty's Lasting Colour collection which says it lasts up to 7 days chip free. I didn't put that to the test but it definitely lasted for 4 days chip free.

I also added a little plaid woolly sock pattern to the ring finger which I saw in this tutorial but boy was it hard to draw those diamond shapes and lines! This grey is pretty enough to be left on it's own! :)

Nubar Prevail Gets striped

(This is a scheduled post, I am currently on holiday)
I added other tones of purple to yesterday's Nubar Prevail to create some diagonal stripes and of course added a little fimo butterfly to the ring finger :-)
My husband was saying that these colour together don't pop as much as some of the other stripe manis I have done but I still like how the purples look together. The purple on the top stripe near the cuticle is Blue Berry by Miss Sporty and the stripe on the tip is Perfect Plum by Rimmel London. I also added a top coat, look how good Prevail is with a top coat. It's one of those mattes that you can turn glossy and it still remains a nice colour:

NOTD: China Glaze Wagon Trail Rays of Light Mani

Hey guys! Today I wanted to show you a quick and simple funky french mani with "rays of light"on the accent finger. I used China Glaze Wagon Trail from the Rodeo Diva Collection as the base colour and I have to say that this will now be one of my favourite autumn/ winter colours! I love China Glaze but it's so hard to get hold of here in the UK unless we get it shipped from the US, which I'm avoiding at the moment because of shipping costs and custom problems :-(

I love the colour of this polish. It's a sort of golden green packed with even more olive green and gold micro shimmer. There are also different coloured shimmers thrown in there and in one of the pictures below you will be able to see some red shimmer! I love polishes that are unique, this one is definitely it! I am so happy with the formula as well. The consistency is just perfect (not thin but not thick and goopy either) and it was beautifully opaque in 2 coats.
The ring finger is Miss Sporty Gold Backstage, part of their Clubbing Colours range. I also used it for the French Tips:

 

Glittery Pop Fiction!

I painted my nails with Miss Sporty Pop Fiction yesterday (and ended up doing my toes as well) but this morning before I went out I had to fiddle around with it. Why oh why can't I leave a pretty colour alone!!

I sponged some Zoya Trixie half way up and then some Orly Glitz & Glamour on the tips before stamping with BM01. To be honest I have no idea what I was trying to achieve! Usually when I start a mani I already know what I want to do with it but sometimes when I'm pressed for time, my ideas are all over the place and then this happens:

xxx :-)

Miss Sporty - Pop Fiction

Hope everyone is having a great Saturday :-)

Today I just wanted to show you a great blue creme I got the other day during my trip to Boots - Miss Sporty Pop Fiction! I couldn't wait to try it so I removed yesterday's Mavala red mani!

I really like Miss Sporty because their polishes are generally good quality (I've never really had problems with their formula) and you can get 3 for £5. Other than only being 7ml bottles (booo!!), one thing I like about these polishes is the flat wide brush. It's so manageable and fans out even wider, covering more nail plate, yay! It's a little bit similar to the Sally Hansen Insta-Dri brush but doesn't pick up great big globs of polish!

The formula is highly pigmented (what I would expect of a creme) but I didn't expect it to be this creamy considering it's a low cost end brand.
I was searching on Wikipedia List of colors for a name for this blue because I'm really bad at giving names to colours other than what they actually are (I got this idea from Deniz but don't know how to colour drop as she does!) but the closest thing I could find was Brandeis Blue which means nothing to me...so... it's just a nice bright blue that I really like!! Lol!

xoxo

NOTD: Minty Fresh Sparkly Flowers

Today I felt that I don't devote enough time to my BM plates and to stamping. I'm not great at stamping, I always manage to make a mess of it but a good stamp can sure make a mani pop and look that little bit extra special.
I had this shimmery minty green in my stash of untrieds (not sure why because it's so pretty), the hubby got it for me a couple months ago, it's by Miss Sporty and it's called Green Lemon. I then stamped (BM03) the green flowers with Nubar Earth and OPI Lincoln Park After Dark and added some green and purple rhinestones:

Here is what the Green Lemon base colour looks like on its own:

What I used:

xoxo

NOTD: Stripe it Green

Good afternoon everyone :-)

So, yesterday I showed you the most amazing green from Nubar's Going Green collection - Earth. I've had this on my nails for a couple of days but I love this green so much that I didn't want to take it off !!

Instead, I added some green stripes to it. Nubar has a lot of shimmer micro-glitter in it so I stuck to the shimmer theme and used 2 other shimmery greens - Miss Sporty Green Lemon and the other green (middle colour) is by Vital Make-up. The bottle says number 19 but it has no name !

You can probably see a slight dent in my ring finger... my cat jumped on the table and my arm jogged whilst I was trying to pull off the scotch tape...!!!

I love all these greens together:

Products used:

* Nubar - Earth
* Vital Make-up - No19
* Miss Sporty - Green Lemon from Clubbing Colours range
* CND Base Stickey & Top Speedey Coat


Hope you guys like the green combo as much as I do :-)

xoxo