Bright Pink Leopard Print With Gradient

Hi everyone!

I'm so in love with today's manicure! I did a light blue-green gradient with bright pink leopard print on top, as you can see.

The colours I used for the gradient are:
Lapiz of Luxury (Essie)
Miss Minty (Gosh)

For the leopard print I used:
Amazing California Love (OPI)
Black on Black (Sinful Colors)

I first created the gradient by using a piece of sponge. I waited until the polish had dried and then I did the leopard print on top. 

The green colour I used looks more baby blue in these pictures, as it does on my nails - the combination with the real blue colour just makes the green one look different, but I quite like this actually. I think these colours fit really nicely together :)

 I'm really liking this design, it's so bright and cheerful :)

Distressed Nail Art (Chalkboard Nails' technique)

Hi everyone!

I loved Chalkboard Nails' distressed punky nail art so much that I just had to try it for myself, and I am sooo liking the result on my nails!

I followed her super easy tutorial to make this design, it's really amazingly simple and it looks so cool!

The colours I used here are:

FM1 - D'Orleac (white)

MATE 01 - D'Orleac (orange)

Black on Black - Sinful Colors

Miss Minty - Gosh

Lapiz of Luxury - Essie

Amazing California Love - OPI

I think these colours look really great together in this design! I didn't always use all of the colours: on my thumb, middle finger and pinky I used the pink, blue and mint green; on my index finger and ring finger I used pink, blue and orange.

What do you think? Has any of you done this design yet? I'm really loving it, this is definitely a design I'll be doing a lot!

Thanks for reading!

Duochrome

I told you a few days ago that I had bought my first duochrome polish - it's Spectral Green by Nocibé.
I was really curious to try it out. I had never used a duochrome polish before, so I actually can't really say anything constructive about this one because I can't compare it with any other duochrome polish.

That being said, I do love this one!
The colour shifts from bright green via mermaidish ocean blue to dark blue - my favourite colour of all these is the mermaid one :) (you can see it on the picture below, with a bit of the green colour as well - I sort of managed to capture the colour shift in pictures)

When you look straight at the polish on my nails, it just seems green. But if you tilt my hand a bit (or move your head, whatever works for you) the colour changes. I think I spent at least ten minutes in the bathroom looking at how pretty the colour shifted while brushing my teeth, haha.

It's really hard to get decent pictures of these polishes where the colour shift is visible. I have hundreds (and yes, I really do mean hundreds, it's not an exageration) of failed pictures of this on my computer. It's very frustrating when the colour shift is so obvious when you just look at your nails, but it's just not visible in pictures... However, I think I sort of managed to capture the colour shift in the pictures I'm showing you here (right?)

Do you have any duochrome polishes? Do you love them as much as I do? :)

*EDIT: I've made a gif to show the colour shifts even better!*

 Thanks for reading!

Dry Marble with Essie's Lapiz of Luxury

I went on a little shopping trip a few days ago and bought three new nail polishes (hurrah!)
I got Essie's Lapiz of Luxury, which is a soft blue polish, Essie's topcoat Let it Shine, and Spectral Green by Nocibé, which is a sort of duochrome green polish. I'm excited to try that one out!

But first I tried out the Essie polishes. I thought the soft blue would make a perfect match with my mintgreen shade Miss Minty from Gosh, so I wanted to do a design with these two.

I actually wanted to do a watermarble design because I need some practice in that and I thought it would look great with these two colours, but Essie's Lapiz of Luxury is NOT a watermarble-proof polish AT ALL. When I put a drop of it in the water, it completely spread out, but not in the way it's supposed to: it just sort of dissolved in the water, it was very strange. 
I thought maybe I did something wrong or the water was not the right temperature, so I tried it again, but I got the same result. I hadn't tried watermarbling with Essie polishes before, so I don't know if it's something that is the same for all of them, but I knew that I couldn't watermarble with this one...

So I opted for a dry marble instead, because I really did want to do a design where the two colours sort of mixed, I didn't want to have hard, clear lines which seperated the two colours, I wanted flowy lines because these colours are very soft and I think flowy lines look great with soft colours :)

So as you can see, I did a dry marble on my middle finger and ring finger, and I painted the rest of my nails with Miss Minty. I then added a few rhinestone because I thought the colour of the rhinestones fitted so perfectly with the colours of the polishes :) 

I then added Essie's Let it Shine and well, look at the shine! I'm really happy with this topcoat, because it didn't smudge the design and it's so much shinier that my previous topcoat! Of course I still need to put it to an ultimate test (a black and white design), but for now I'm very pleased with it.

So, what do you think of this design? Has any of you ever tried to watermarble with Essie polishes and if so, what was the result? I'm quite curious to know if it's impossible to watermarble with the other Essie polishes as well :)

Thanks for reading!

The Versatile Blogger Award

Hi everyone!

A few days ago Lucy from The Nail Snail nominated me for The Versatile Blogger Award!

I had read some things about this award before, but I still had to look up information on what it exactly entails. It's basically an award that you give to blogs you follow and like, and you post their link so other people can discover some new blogs through this. I've already discovered some great new nail art blogs in Lucy's list!

Maybe you all have had it with awards like this, but I'm still in the "yeey everything about blogging is new and exciting and OOOH I got a new comment on my post!" phase, so I was really happy with this award. I'm glad people read my posts and like my designs :)

The rules of the Versatile Blogger Award go as follows:

1. Thank the person who nominated you - THANK YOU Lucy! :)
2. Include a link to their blog.
3. Select 15 new blogs/bloggers that you've recently discovered or follow regularly.
4. Nominate those bloggers for a Versatile Blogger Award, leave a link to their page and let them know they've been nominated.
5. Tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

Alright, on to the nominating! I chose soms blogs that I absolutely love, most are nail art related.

These are all about nail art, and they have amazing designs:

1. The Nail Polish Challenge

2. Bedizzle Nails

3. Canadian Nail Fanatic

4. Seize The Nail

5. Squeaky Nails

6. Pretty Little Nails

7. Neglelakkmani

8. Punch Nails
9. The Sequined Nail

With the following blogs, I want to give some more explanation as to why I like them so much:

10. Nails At 2am

Well okay, this one probably doesn't need a lot of explanation, and you probably all know her already - she has amazing nail art!

11. Break rules, not nails 

I just discovered this blogger a few days ago, and she has such amazing designs! She doesn't just paint her nails, but also completes the look with snakeskin or fake blood on her hands for Halloween :)

12. Mucking Fusser

My absolute idol in regards to watermarble!

13. Intrinsically Florrie

This is not a nail art blog, but more a blog about fashion and very cute outfits. I think this is a great blog to get some inspiration for nail art.

14. Coewless Polish

Amazing nail art, I'm a big fan! Her blog is in Danish (says Google - I can't understand a word of it) and of course Google translate isn't that accurate, but she paints the most unbelievable things onto her nails.

15. Paulina's Passions
The most beautiful designs, I often cannot believe my eyes when I see her nail art!

I found this challenge to name 15 blogs quite hard, because I like every blog I follow (otherwise I wouldn't be following them) and if you have to make a small list of great blogs it's very hard to choose. I probably looked over dozens of blogs who are just as awesome as the ones mentioned here, so definitely also take a look at the other blogs I follow! :)

And now, 7 things about myself:

1. I'm a vegetarian. 

2. My favourite sort of animal are rodents. I can't get over how cute guinea pigs and mice are. And while some people might think rats are disgusting, I think they are really cute :)
I actually got to babysit my friend's hamster this weekend, it's the cutest little fuzzball ever!

3. The food that I can always eat, every day, morning and night, whether I'm hungry or not, whether I'm being attacked by a giant sixteen legged spider or not, is spaghetti! With pizza and lasagna on a tied second place.

4. I still use the same cell phone I got when I was 12 - my trustworthy Nokia is now about 9 years old.

5. I love watching old movies - Hitchcock's Psycho is one of my favourites.

6. Some of my favourite tv-shows are Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Sherlock and Arrested Development (I'm probably forgetting dozens of others).

7. For my boyfriend's birthday I painted Sherlock themed shoes for him.

Okay, that's it! I hope you all enjoyed getting to know some random stuff about me!

Thanks for reading everyone :)

Blue Shimmer Nails

I'm really in love with these nails, they look so nice and subtly sparkly, but at the same time they also look a bit though :)

For this manicure I used the saran wrap technique with Opi's Raw Granite DS Lapis (gorgeous blue!).

I thought that this manicure would look more like other saran wraps I've seen (if you google it you'll know what I mean by that): a lot of blue polish on top the black. 

As you can see, I didn't actually get a lot of blue polish. Instead, I got this gorgeous blue shimmer, and I'm suuuper pleased with it! 

I think that the saran wrap just didn't really pick up any of the blue polish and only got the glittery stuff, which resulted in this. I love the subtlety of this manicure - I've chosen pictures here that show off the blue very good, but in some lighting you can't really see the blue and get more of a silvery shine.

*EDIT: maybe I should specify how exactly I did the saran wrap, because I think it makes a difference in the effect you get. Some people put the second colour of polish onto their nails and then dab onto it with saran wrap, making the polish go off from the nail a bit. I, however, followed another method: I put some polish onto a piece of paper, dabbed the saran wrap in it and then dabbed the wrap onto my nails, creating this shimmer. So instead of making the polish come off like in the first technique, you just make the polish go onto your nails :) *

Now, as you might know, Opi's DS Lapis is a matte polish with glitters in it, and the bits of polish I actually did get on my nail were also matte. I didn't like this effect at all, since the black polish underneath it was shiny. So I put on a shiny topcoat, added a row of silver studs from BornPrettyStore, and this manicure was done!

I love how this manicure is very simple to make, but looks a bit different, sparkly and fun at the same time.
What do you think? :)

p.s.: I got nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award by The Nail Snail (hurrah!), so I'm going to make a post about that very soon! 

Moustaches Here, Moustaches There, OMG There's Moustaches Everywhere!

Okay, since this months is all about Movember, I decided to participate as well! No, I didn't grow a moustache, but I drew little staches on my nails!

I started by painting the little triangles on my nails using striping tape. Then I painted my nails in a base colour, and on the four nails with triangles I painted the contrasting colour on very carefully. 
After that, I decided to emphasize the triangles with white - it's freehanded, which you can see, but I have to learn to make good stripes without striping tape so all I can do is practice practice practice!

After this, the base design was ready. I then painted on little black moustaches, using a dotting tool and a fine brush. You can find a lot of tutorials on how to paint moustaches onto your nails, but I followed this one by Cutepolish. 

It wasn't actually all that hard to paint the moustaches, I was surprised at how good they look. I was even more surprised at how good they look on my non-dominant hand - I actually like this design on my non-dominant hand better, because I like the colour placement more, but also because some of the moustaches actually came out like a dream!

Then to finish this post: whenever I think about moustaches, I automatically think about all the fuss about Watson's moustache in the Sherlock S3 trailer - any of you watch that? :)

Thanks for reading!

Pink and Blue Watermarble

Watermarble!

This is in no way a contender for “best watermarble in the universe” and I envy people who can make crazy awesome watermarble designs, but I have improved tremendously with this technique so I’m actually quite proud of this design! 

I'm glad I finally found some polishes I can marble with, the others I've tried just didn't spread out in circles like they're supposed to. But these worked perfectly!

Now that I've done an okay watermarble design and seen so many other pretty watermarbles, I think I'm going to be practicing this technique a lot in the coming months. I can only get better, right? :)

Unfortunately, my top coat smudged everything a bit, so the pink isn't as clean as it was before. Lesson learned: buy new top coat.

Thanks for reading!

Bloody Fingerprints

A late blogpost about my Halloween nails!

For Halloween, I was dressed as a pool of blood, so I thought these bloody fingerprint nails were quite appropriate :)

I made them by first painting my nails white, and then I put some red nail polish onto my finger. I wiped off the excess polish and pressed my finger onto my nail, creating these fingerprints. Really easy, and it looked very disturbing. In other words, great for Halloween :)