Autumnal Colours - Nubar Hieroglyphys Purple

Well, it's safe to say that Autumn is well and truly under way here in the UK. It's been raining on and off all this week and apparently we are having the first storm of Autumn today. I've had to bring out the wellies, the umbrella and the rain coats already!

Needless to say, I was in no mood for bright or pastel colours on my nails this week so I dug out this perfect transitional colour which isn't extremely dark but is dark enough to suit this weather.

This is 2 coats of Nubar Hieroglyphys Purple, a bright berry purple colour. It looks slightly brighter in the second picture as I was having trouble with my lighting! These kind of purples are quite elegant in my opinion, I'm loving this polish. What do you think of it?

I'm Still Here...With a Bunch of Swatches!

Hi guys! Yep, so I'm checking in to let you know I'm still around. Sorry I've been MIA lately and haven't been updating my blog often. Sometimes life just happens, I've been extremely busy lately and probably won't be able to post as often as I'd like to.

Although I haven't had a lot of time or patience for nail art, I have been painting my nails regularly (can't stand the sight of my naked nails, lol!) and I've been posting all those pictures on Instagram. My IG name is '@nailstories', if you have an account you can follow me there too :)

Here are some of the polishes I've been wearing for the past few weeks. Apologies about the quality of the pictures, I don't use Photoshop or crop pictures before posting on Instagram.

Butter London - The Black Knight

Jade Holographic - Rosa (sent to me by Bia)

Nails Inc - Baker Street & Essence Prince Charming

OPI - It's My Year

Tip Top Nails - Fairy Dust & Nubar Violet Sparkle

Homemade gold leaf top coat (sent to me by @bedizzle)

The Hungry Asian - Strawberry (sent to me by @nic_tchelly)

Essie - Brooch The Subject

Essie - Splash of Grenadine & OPI Crown Me Already

Color Club - Glitter Wonderland

Thanks for visiting
xxx

Olympia Beauty Show Haul

Today I was lucky enough to be able to go to the Olympia Beauty Exhibition. Well, depends which way you look at it, considering the damage to my credit card! If you are a nail polish hoarder or beauty junkie, this place is like heaven! There were so many pretty polish stands, I didn't know where to turn!

Everything was so clean and neat on the Essie and OPI stands, they were both packed with people browsing and grabbing bottles but the crowds and queues weren't as bad as I thought they would be. OPI had the entire Skyfall collection in stock apart from The Man With The Golden Gun which I wanted to badly but the lady said they sold out about 1 hour after the doors opened!

Here's some of the stuff I bought:

Skyfall Collection:. L-R: On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Live And Let Die, Casino Royale, You Only Live Twice.

Some other OPI's I was lemming. L-R: Hot & Spicy, Pirouette My Whistle, You Callin' Me A Lyre?, Don't Pretzel My Buttons, Every Month Is Oktoberfest.

OPI was selling for £5.80. Some of the American girls on Instagram were shocked at this "discounted" price as that is what they would usually pay normal price. However, OPI is very expensive in the UK and there are hardly any sales ever, so this is an awesome price for us.

Color Club In True Fashion and some of the Winter Affair 2012 Collection. L-R: Gift of Sparkle, Winter Affair, Glitter Wonderland, Berry And Bright, Editorial.

Some random China Glaze lemmings (Lubu Heels, Ruby Pumps, I Herd That and the only 2 that caught my eye from the Wicked Halloween 2012 collection - Cast A Spell and Make A Spectacle.

L-R: Throw Me Something Purple Please, Uptown Glamour, That's My Little Secret, BreakAway, Indescribable.
Misa was selling for £2 so I grabbed these. I really like Misa and it's really difficult to get our hands on this brand in the UK!

L-R: Night Sparkle, Hieroglyphys Purple, Stylish Peacock, Lavender, Beaute, Twlight Kiss. Nubar was 6 polishes for £20.

To be completely honest, Cuccio is a brand I have never heard of but they did have a vast array of colours on their stand. I couldn't help getting some of these nudes and pinks. The formulas look very good, we'll see.

Phew! I'd been saving up for a while when I found out I had a ticket to this event! It is well worth saving up for if you stick to a budget throughout the rest of the year! This obviously means I won't be buying anymore polish for a very long time!

Skulls and Bows

From the moment I saw this mani on Kayla Shevonne, I knew I had to recreate it! I squealed because it was just so cute! Then I beat myself up for not having thought of it before! How I have not yet done a mani with skulls, bows and black dots is beyond me, so thank you Kayla for doing this awesome mani! If you haven't yet visited Kayla's blog, do so now! She inspires a lot of my nail designs and her tutorials are really detailed and easy to follow!

I wore this many for 4 days (doesn't happen very often) and I can see myself doing it again, even with a different base colour because it's so quick and easy, yet so cute!

I used an unnamed pink as my base colour! Stamped with Konad Black polish and BM211 and added a coat of Nubar Black Polka Dot! The bow is fimo.

Bad Little Kitty

Before I took Nubar Mod Aqua off this morning, I had a little play around with some nail art pens from Rio Beauty. I have a few of these pens which I bought in bulk on Ebay but the Rio ones are of a higher quality and the bristles on their brushes are much better than the ones I had.

Rio do different types of these nail art pens: neon, pastel, metallic and an original set (which is the one I received). They all include 8 colours, rhinestones, nail glitter, a design chart, application brush, instructions and a step-by-step DVD which is actually very useful. I like their dual applicator bottles, as you can use both the fine brush and the detailing pen depending on which design you want to create. These sets retail for £24.99.

One of the tutorials on their DVD is how to draw little paws and you all know how much I love cats! Plus I've been meaning to do something similar to this mani for a couple of weeks now, ever since I saw it on her blog and couldn't believe how pretty it was. Can you guess whose mani I based this on? Of course you can, it's AmyGrace's Beware of the cat mani, although I replaced the little birds with paw marks as I don't have that plate.

I drew the cat with the black fine brush and the paws with the detailing pen from the set.

And here you can see what is included in each set:

*This item was sent to me for review

Mod Aqua - For the love of pastels...

Although it's not very spring-like and it's raining here today, (so I can't use any of my new holo polishes, boooo), I can still wear a pastel and pretend that it's sunny! Sometimes I like rain (especially if I'm snuggling at home) but today is not one of those days :(

Here's Nubar Mod Aqua from their Polished Chic Collection Fall 2011:

It's a dusty and soft pastel blue, much like CG For Audrey but less bright! Why don't I pay that much attention to Nubar? They have some really special and lovely polishes and the price isn't bad compared to OPI and Essie!
I had a little trouble with the formula on this one, mine was rather thin and needed 3 coats for full opacity. It also applied a bit streaky but nothing too major for a pastel! It's still a gorgeous polish!

As you can see, I'm also experimenting with different hand positions for my pics. I need to find one that compliments my nails and the shape of my fingers! I love the hand positions the girls on THIS Brazilian blog have, so I've been trying some of them out!

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:

Nubar Prevail (Modern Matte Collection)

(This is a scheduled post, I am currently on holiday)
Today I wanted to show you Nubar Prevail from the Nubar Fall 2009 Matte Collection. Yes, another matte, I've been bitten by the matte bug :) Well, truth be told, one of the UK's distributor for Nubar was having a sale so I bought 3 bottles!
Prevail is a vampy deep brown/ purple with a tiny hint of copper which is visible in the bottle under direct light/ sunlight. It's a matte but there is also a wonderful sort of shimmer to it and it dries satin as opposed to chalky matte. The formula is so great, I applied 2 coats and it's so smooth and easy to control.

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

Nubar Earth - Amazing green from the Going Green Collection

Today I wanted to show you an amazing green I recently purchased from the Nubar Going Green collection. The whole collection is a dream to look at. I can't stop staring at my nails. Hhmmm, its so eco-themed !!

I'm sure that if you are a green lover you already own all or part of this collection.

Earth is a blue-green shimmer. In certain light, this one can actually look more blue than green but it has tons of pigmentation - light green micro-simmer all over .

IMO, the formula on this polish is pretty much perfect, I can't flaw it at all. Its totally opaque in 2 coats and has a fast drying time. Its a dream to work with polishes like this. I can't wait to get more greens from this collection.

 *Picture overload coming up !!*