Candy Shop Glitter and Skulls

Last week I had the chance to try out another Born Pretty stamping plate. I believe it's one of the newest additions to their plate collection, it's the QA8 and it sells for $2.99.
This plate consists of five full nail images and three smaller plant/ flower images. The reason I picked this plate was because it has three animal prints (I love animal prints), a checkered pattern which I have wanted for a long time and a skull image which I thought was so cute.

The manicure I put together involves the skull image and I tried to keep it part rock chic and part cute girly. What do you think?

Here you can see all the images the plate has:

Polishes used:
Thumb, middle and pinky - Justy Cosmetics No. 293 and Claire's Candy Shop
Pointer - Barry M Black
Ring - OPI Alpine Snow, stamped with Konad Black Polish

About the plate - If I am comparing to my BM and Cheeky plates, the image size on the QA8 is quite good (apart from that middle cow sort of pattern). They are rounded off as apposed to a full rectangle but I guess that doesn't really matter. 
I've seen some Born Pretty Store plates on other blogs that the image was too small to fit the nails, even on girls who had very short nails, but that isn't the case with this one. They are also etched really well and my stamper picks up all the polish nicely. I have no complaints about this plate thus far (I haven't yet tried the other images).

Get 10% off your Born Pretty Store purchases by using discount code VA7J61.

*Some of the products in this post were sent to me for my honest review.

Candy Shop

When I first saw that there was a dupe to Deborah Lippmann's Candy Shop floating about, I knew I had to get my hands on it! Tyne from Lovebean Girl was such a sweetie and offered to send me a bottle!

I don't own DL's Candy Shop so cannot compare them but I have read from other bloggers that Claire's is a slightly darker pink and has bigger glitter. I am very happy with this polish, it's so fun and girly! I would have tied my hair into pigtails if I could!

As you may know, I've had some problems with glitter popping off my nails recently but I am happy to report that Candy Shop has some real staying power! I wore it for 4 days and there were no chips! The 2 thick coats of SV probably helped! I'm even too lazy to use the foil method to remove glitter but this time I had no choice, it just wouldn't budge :)

Orly Purple Pleather + Colour Club Covered in Diamonds!!!

Hello fellow nail polish lovers J . Yesterday I showed you how amazingly pretty Orly Purple Pleather is! Ohh, I'm in love (again!)
Well this morning before I left the house for my weekend trip, I was scheduling my posts and I just couldn't resit adding something to this mani. I didn't have a lot of time so I just topped it with ColorClub Covered in Diamonds! I wanted to see what a satin-matte finish would look like with some glossy bling!!

Covered in Diamonds would look much better in direct sunlight but unfortunately, I didn't have any!

And then guess what??!! I wanted to see what Covered in Diamonds looked like matte, so I added a couple of coats of Claire's Matt Top Coat. IMO it doesn't look as pretty as the original satin finish of Orly Purple Pleather.

xoxo

NOTD: Mystical Sun - Gradient nails

Hi Everyone. Today I wanted to show you a mani a did earlier.
I was playing around with my BM plates as I haven't used most of the designs on them and when I saw the mystical sun on the very first BM plate, I thought ...hmmmm..."sunset"!! That also meant I would get to use orange polish which I rarely do. I used sponging to create the sunset colours (red, yellow and orange) and then randomly stamped suns with Konad Black Pearl stamping polish:

What I used:

* Claire's (sorry no colour name or number but as you can see its a dark burnt orange)
* Barry M Nail Paint - Lemon Ice Cream
* Risque - Carmin (This is a Brazilian brand polish which I got on holidays in Portugal)
* Konad Stamping Polish - Black Pearl
* Konad Top Coat (and it still smudged a little)

xoxo

Shiny vs. Matte Striped Nails

Hi guys,

Hope everyone is having a chillaxed Sunday...Umm, I love lazy Sundays :-)

Today I wanted to show you a sort of stripe mani which was inspired by Jane at nailside. Her mummy nails look really pretty and this was my first time doing one so it was also a bit of an experiment :-)

I started off with a dark purple and a pale lilac on the ring finger:

I used OPI - You don't know Jaques over the scotch tape to create the stripes. In retrospect , probably not the best choice of contrasting colour. My stripe widths are also not very uniform, next time I'll do better :-)

Also, on the pinky finger, I tried to mix You Don't Know Jacques with Lucky Lucky Lavender and look what happened...lol !!



I have also recently bought a matte top coat and thought I'd try it on this mani:

I had to apply 2 coats of regular top coat before the matte because it smudges like there's no tomorrow !! It still smudged a little and left some streaks.



Products used:
* Miss Sporty - sorry, bottle has no colour name
* OPI - Lucky Lucky Lavender
* OPI - You Don't Know Jacques!
* Claire's - Matt Top Coat

I like stripey manis a lot and will be giving these another go - with different colours obviously =D

xoxo