Birthday Nails 2015

So it's ma birthday!! I'm getting to the point where i can't remember my age anymore... Yip, it seems like I'm getting old. Hehe.

Anyway, Heather mentioned the other day that she found the polish she wants to be buried in. You can find that post here. I can officially say that I have found mine too.

It's called Gemini Rising from Colors by Llarowe.

This is one of those OMG polishes. Just look at it! It's beautiful! It's perfect! I love it!!

For this I painted 2 coats of Gemini Rising on all my fingers except my ring finger, which has 2 coats of SC Charmed. Once Charmed was dry, I used my cyclone vinyls I got from Twinkledt and painted Gemini Rising over that. I removed the vinyl immediately. Top coated and Voila!

Just look at this beaut in direct sunlight! I couldn't keep my eyes off it. WoW

I'll leave this with you and I'm off to enjoy my bday on the couch with some whatever goodies I can find in the cupboard and old seasons of Supernatural!

Aaaand the winner is.....

A huge congratulations to Lorain Ruthilal!! Check your email, hurry.

I also just want to thank everyone who entered. Thank goodness it's all automated and I didn't have to choose the winner myself.

Dirty Pickle's black chevron

I'm not quite sure how to describe Dirty Pickle from Parental Advisory Polish. It's an olive green filled with blue flakies. It is honestly not a very pretty colour, but the flakies. Omgoodness, the flakies. It really adds something else to this polish. This is two coats with no top coat. The formula is very easy to work with, but mind the drying time. I'm so used to my polishes drying super fast, that when I get one that takes slightly longer, I manage to smudge it!

Look at those flakies!!! The longer I wore this, the more I fell in love with it! Of course there's some art to go along.

I honestly didn't know what to do with this one, as it's such an odd colour. So I ended up using my chevron vinyls I got from Llarowe and SC Black on Black.

I'm loving my vinyls! The person that came up with it is a genius! I have a whole sheet full, so keep an eye out for more vinyls. And I have one more Parental Advisory Polish that I wanna show, so keep an eye out for that one as well.
What do you think of Dirty Pickle? Is it dirty enough for you? ;)

#DTOwedding - For Thea

Today is a super special day for Thea from Madness Nails. She is getting married!!!

I want to wish you a blessed day, may it be filled with friends, family, love, laughter and happiness, no tears! Only if they are tears of happiness, that will be acceptable ;) May your lives be filled with joy and I hope you will always be able to find joy with each other. Congratulations!

Michelle roped in a couple of us to celebrate Thea's wedding with some nail art...

I started with two coats of Tip Top Hysteria. I'm hoping it fits in well with the colour scheme of the bride and groom. I also think my camera hates this colour, it's more plum and less red.

I then stamped using Essence stampy polish in black and the image of the girl off BPS BP-25 plate on my middle finger. On my ring finger I stamped her dress using Tip Top Armourplate. I then sponged on a glitter gradient on my thumb, index and pinky using Tip Top Galaxy.

That's it, what do you think?

And again, only the best of wishes to you Thea  
XxXxXx

An InLinkz Link-up

Guest post: Michelle from Ordinary Misfit (Pic Heavy)

I have something super exciting today! I have Michelle from Ordinary Misfit here! Yay!!

Okay, so maybe I need to calm down slightly and hand it over to Michelle!(!!!!!)

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Hi lovelies,

I have been so excited about doing this and being involved with this at all is just so awesome! I am super duper excited to be able to share here today. The fabulously awesome and super sweet Juanita passed on some of her (NEW) stamping plates on to me simply because she had doubles. How awesome is that?

I did 4 different looks using 4 different plates. Let the fun begin :)

Born Pretty Store M64

The criss cross pattern on the left really appealed to me and I really wanted to use it. But oh boy...

I started with two coats of Sinful Colours - Snow me white on all my nails. Once that was completely dry I stamped my pinky, middle and index, using the image on the left and Essence stampy polish in black. On my ring finger I used the bottom right image and Essence stampy polish in black. I then topcoated  everything and breathed a sigh of relief. Getting that criss cross pattern centre across my nail was not as easy as I thought it would be. Goodness me, did I struggle. In the end I went with the result you see here, even though it wasn't exactly perfect.

Born Pretty Store M65

This might be one of my favourites I did. I started with two coats of Sinful Colour - Black on black on my pinky and ring finger. On my middle and index I used two coats of Tip Top - Lime time. This is one of my favourite colours! Once that was completely dry I stamped onto Lime time using the top right image and Essence stampy polish in black. I then topcoated everything and before the top coat could dry I added the two small neon studs on my pinky and ring finger.

Born Pretty Store M76 

This one was another favourite. I really wanted to use the middle image and centre it across my nails, but after the struggle I had trying to get the image on M64 centre, I didn't want to set myself up for failure :P So I decided to go with the very top image and doing them slightly off centre and in random places. I started with two coats of Sinful Colours - Black on black on all my nails. I then used the Essence soft touch matte topcoat. Once it was completely dry I stamped using China Glaze - Harmony. I didn't topcoat because I wanted to keep the matte of the black, but the chrome of Harmony. I really like the combination.

Born Pretty Store M78

The minute I saw the bottom left image I knew I wanted to use it. Because it is a very "lovey" plate I also knew I wanted to use white and red. On my pinky and index I started with two coats of Sinful Colours - Snow me white. On my middle and ring I started with two coats of Tip Top - Cherries in the snow. Once that was completely dry I stamped over the white using the bottom left image and Tip Top - Cherries in the snow. On the red I stamped the butterflies on the very left using Essence stampy polish in white. I then topcoated everything and left it to dry.
That's it! These are the 4 plates and the 4 looks. What do you think? Which is your favourite?

Thank you so much for reading and having me. Thank you so much Juanita, not only for having and involving me, but also for all the treats. You are just amazing!

Xx
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Wow, isn't Michelle just the bestest?? Calling me sweet and all that ;) And I'm sure you can tell which one is my favourite, although they are all amazing and Michelle is super hard on herself, I loooooove the green one! Because greeeeeeeen!

The reason for having her here, besides that she's awesome, is that I have these 4 plates and a Tip Top Lime Time to give away!! Since it's my birthday at the end of the month I decided to share what I can. And who knows, maybe I'll add some extra goodies... I will announce the winner 31 March, on my birthday!

And please don't enter if you not planning on hanging around. I will send the prize anywhere in South Africa, so sorry no international entries.

All you have to do is enter via the Rafflecopter widget.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Inspired Recreation: Rebecca at Lane's Lacquers

As I've mentioned previously Rebecca at Lane's Lacquers is one of the bloggers I follow and she recently did this post. And I had this urge to recreate it.

After some back and forth between myself and Michelle, I finally decided on a colour scheme.

From left to right (from thumb to pinky), In the Navy, Turbulence, Boogy Wonderland, Purple Reign and Purple Panic, all Tip Top polishes. The concern when looking at these in the bottle, is that they might be possible dupes. But on the nail there is a difference, even if it is a subtle one.

I waited for each of these amazing colours to dry, taped off a section and painted it white, using SC Snow me White.

When the white was dry I taped off the colour part and stamped using the straight hounds tooth design off plate BP L-006, using Tip Top Moonshine.

This was another topic of discussion. Stamping with black like Rebecca did or not. I opted for a lighter colour, as my colours was quite dark already and I was happy with doing something subtle. So was Michelle. :)

The other problem I had was for some reason I couldn't pick up a full image using my double ended BPS stamper. I had to use my essence stamper. I'm kinda seeing a trend here though, my BPS stamper picks up subtle lines much easier than big images. It's a theory that I will have to put to test.

As usual let me know what you think, love it, hate it, let me know. What colour scheme would you have used?

Wildlife gone bolty

The other day V at For the Love of Nail Art showed Nubar's Wildlife. And was it not a beautiful colour. I'm normally conflicted when I buy polish, because I need some kind of validation to buy, since I have so much already. But with Wildlife I was lucky to find it and I knew I had to try it.

So this is Nubar Wildlife, 3 super easy coats.

I was amazed at how easy this polish was to work with. Seriously, no brush strokes just easiness. Because this was such an amazing polish I didn't want to cover it up too much, but I really wanted to use my lightning bolt vinyls from Llarowe. The black is SC Black on Black.

Soooory for the smudge on my index finger, you can thank my left hand for that. And my stamping didn't work quite the way I wanted too as I for the love of nail art couldn't get my stamper to pick up the image. But I guess it's a good thing as I didn't want to cover much of Wildlife.

As always let me know what you think. And how gorgeous is this polish!! I couldn't stop staring at the pink and gold and green.

Disappointment

This has been bothering me for a while now. And I've come to the realisation that it's kinda making me depressed. Besides that I'm probably dead tired from working too much.

You know how it is when you do all the work and other people gets the credit? That's how I feel at the moment.

I did something and other people have done the same, the only difference is that they got credit for their work and I got none. It's not that I expect anything or that I want to gain anything from it, I just want my work to be acknowledged as well.

I feel terrible for the way it's affecting me, it's making me feel like my work is not good enough and I hate it.

Maybe you know how I feel, maybe you don't, maybe you just think I'm ungrateful and need to be happy with what I have... Maybe I should be. Maybe I'm just tired to the point where I can't tell the difference between my exhaustion and my depression. Which is kinda depressing, don't you think?

Chalkboard nails

Okay, so I had this idea in the back of my mind and I haven't been able to do it, as I didn't have a decent matte top coat.  But that all changed when I got my OPI one.

I bought a stamping plate from BPS with equations on it, so I wanted to do chalkboard nails. You know, almost a back to school type thing.

I first started with 2 coats of TT Black Forest.

Once that was dry, I went crazy with the stamping using almost all of the images on plate QA95.  

I used TT Hap-pea, Surfer Girl, Essence Love is in the Air and SC Snow me White. I first coated my pinky with the matte top coat and it smeared! So I just top coated everything with Seche and then the matte top coat and voila!

What do you think? Did I nail the back to school part?

Naked Nails

Those of you that's been following me for a while might remember that I had a rough patch, where my nails were breaking one by one and I ended up with stompies for a while. I did a post here where I thanked some people for being amazing and being there for me and complained about my nails a bit.

Anyway, Sam suggested that I get a product called Ultimate Growth 2 from Glamore Cosmetics, saying it might work for me. I'm honestly very sceptical about things like this, just because it worked for you, doesn't always mean it will work for me.

Since I have very nosey nail friends and I've been asked to share my progress, this is for them.

My before picture was taken 26/12/14. As you can see there's some crazy peeling going on and it was right on that lines that my nails broke.

I then took a follow up pictures 19/01/15. There is still some peeling, but not as much as there was when I started.

Follow up pictures 07/02/15. Like wow, you can barely see the peeling. The condition of my nails did improve a lot.

And now, this picture was taken 28/02/15. My nails look healthy, I love the length and the shape. I did lose the corner off my index finger on my right hand after I took the picture, but it's not noticeable and I don't have to change my length at all.

In my first week of treatment, I wore only the Ultimate Growth adding a coat every day. After the first week I used it as a base coat for all my art and if I didn't have any polish on I added a coat of treatment every day. During this I still used my Tip Top cuticle oil and used a sugar scrub to exfoliate once a week. When I did any kind of cleaning involving water I had gloves on. Water truly is your nails worst enemy.

So, be the judge for yourself and try Ultimate Growth 2, which you can buy from Glamore Cosmetics for R150.

Hean nail polish #225 - Summer collection

A while ago I ordered some things for my mom from Glamore Cosmetics. Since the order was under R250 (free delivery if it's over), I asked Gael to choose some nail polish for me to go with the order. The reason why I asked her to choose, is because I can never make up my mind about what I want.

One of the polishes she chose for me was #225 from the summer collection. Since Michelle was doing swatches of the summer collection, I asked if she was going to do this one, as I didn't want to post this and then she does a post and we compare the two, because we all know Michelle is amazing and hers will be waaaaay better than mine. So luckily she said she didn't have it yet and I can go ahead...

This is beautiful! Look at that shine!! I don't think any of my polishes shines like that without a top coat. This is 3 coats for opacity, it's very sheer to begin with, but builds nicely. #225 is a dusty yellow toned green, this is a unique colour to my collection and I'm very sure I'll use it again.

As usual there is some art to go along with it. This really made me think of a summer garden and is a garden not a collection of greens and flowers?

For the stamping I used an image on the BP L-001 plate. On my thumb and middle finger I double stamped the same image using Tip Top Liquid Envy and Lazy Lizard. Lazy Lizard is very subtle and man does it not look cool in person, it creates depth to the stamp. And how pretty does Liquid Envy not look on my index and pinky? For my ring finger I made a decal using an image from the same plate. Black stampy polish, Lazy Lizard for the "bush" and Tip Top Raspberry Cream for the roses.

I hope this carries the Michelle stamp of approval :)

And if you do want to order #225 just click on Glamore Cosmetics at the top and it will take you to their website.

And if you want to see any of the other swatches just click on Michelle (LoL) and you'll pop over to her site.