Giant Polka Dots

Hey everyone! Did you have a lovely Valentine's/Galentine's day? I went out for a curry and watched a rom com while eating chocolates, pretty damn great! I'm so glad you all loved my floral nails from my last post, I'll definitely have to recreate them with different colours because I love them as much as you all seemed to! 

Today's nails are super simple, especially compared to the florals, but as I so rarely do simple nails it was nice to do something that only took a few minutes. These were inspired by i_heart_nailart on Instagram, and I just loved the look so much I had to recreate them. 

Aztec Accents

After a nice relaxing Saturday having afternoon tea, I decided it was probably time to start editing the multitude of designs I've had sitting on my computer for months. I annoy myself with my tendency to do loads of designs that I never get around to editing. Finally this design gets to see the light of day, and I'm pretty pleased it does. There's something so striking about aztec designs, and I love how the dark vampy green brings out the black and white. 

Rose Gold Quartz

I've been meaning to do rose quartz nails for a while now, I used to have a rose quartz stone when I was younger and I loved how pretty it was. So when the trend came about in nail form I knew that I had to do them. But, despite watching quite a few tutorials on how to do them, I'm not quite sure I've got them right. It's one of those designs that you can wing a bit, but you have to make sure you wing it the right way. I'll definitely play around a bit more because it's such a great look that I want to make sure I nail it (ba-dum-ch). 

Rose Gold Snowflakes

It's been a busy ol' week this week, which concluded with me smashing my car into a bollard.. so not the best. But as with all bad weeks, I've turned to blogging to take my mind off it. I have to keep telling myself it's Christmas soon to distract myself, and what better to remind myself than with Christmas nails! I have so much inspiration this year but just not enough time to do everything I want to do. I'm hoping to be able to do a couple more designs this weekend before it's too late. I did however manage to squeeze in these nails a couple of weekends ago. 

I was recently sent a wonderful Christmas package from Sally Hansen, and I knew as soon as I saw these polishes inside that I had to do some nail art with them, they just looked like they would work so well together... and they do! 

Gold Leaf Marble

I can't believe it's already Autumn, I know it's so typical as a Brit to talk about the weather, but it really doesn't feel like we had much of a summer. I must admit though that Autumn is one of my favourite seasons, I love any excuse to wear something from my extensive jumper collection, and I love cosying up under a blanket on an evening with some candles lit. 

I do have a tendency to regress back into summer colours in my nail art however, so I tried my hand at doing something a little more autumnal this time around. Can you believe I've never used gold foil before? I've had a little pot of gold flakes that was given to me by my good friend Very Emily years and years ago, and I'd totally forgotten I owned it. However, I've seen so many designs on Instagram recently using gold foil that I just couldn't resist doing some myself, and I remembered that little pot hiding away in my drawer and decided to give it a go. 

Red Accent Tribal

Hey everyone! I don't want to make any excuses for why I haven't posted in a while, but I also don't want to leave you with no explanation. The basic rundown: I went travelling, some crappy thing happened, and then I've been super busy and demotivated. Luckily, I seem to have got my motivation back, and I've done 4 nail designs this week, all of which I'm pretty pleased with. It's nice to have my motivation and my inspiration back, and I want to throw myself back into blogging. I've got a new office which I love working in, so that's definitely helping. The shortened version: I'm sorry it's been a while but I'm back now and feeling inspired! 

Anyway, I tried my hand at some tribal nails because it felt like ages since I did a proper tribal design. They take me forever to do (is it just me?) but I always love how they turned out. However, rather than torture myself I just decided to do it as an accent nail. I don't know if it's just because I'm a little rusty, or because I was distracted by New Girl, but these took me two hours and that was just with two fingers, I couldn't face another 3 hours. 

Detailed Pink Roses

Hey everyone! Do you ever do a design and whilst you're painting it you just know you're gonna love it? That was how I felt about these nails. I pushed myself slightly out of my comfort zone painting the roses and I was so proud of how they turned out. They were inspired by these fabrics I found on Pinterest, and I decided to combine two of the designs to go hand in hand, but I kind of wish I'd just done the roses on all fingers.  I wore these for a week and I couldn't stop staring at my nails the whole time. I was especially pleased with them because I have so little time to paint my nails these days and I sometimes worry that I'm losing the skill, so it was nice to see that I haven't. It's definitely given me the bug to try out some more designs that are slightly out of my usual style once I'm back from travelling so watch this space. 

Crazy Flowers

Sometimes a design looks much better in practice than it does in reality, and this is definitely one of those designs. I was inspired by this design I found on Pinterest but I tried to make it my own and just ended up with a design I wasn't really that pleased with. I decided to post them anyway because they're not the worst nails I've ever done, even if they're not the best either. I think if they were more cohesive they would work a lot better, I should have probably just stuck with the original design, but you live and learn I suppose! 

I used Bourjois - Bleu Mysterieux, and Barry M - Cotton as the base colours, then I used Sally Hansen - Redgy*, Sally Hansen - Pink Cadillacquer*, Orly - Light As A Feather*, and Deborah Lippmann - Walking on Sunshine for the flowers. The studs are from Born Pretty Store. Finished with a coat of Seche Vite. 

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

Alice

Grumpy Cats

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I did any non-floral nails so I decided to mix things up a bit with these grumpy cat nails. They weren't supposed to look so moody, but once I'd painted a couple of the cats and they started to look sullen I decided to just go with it. After all, cats are pretty moody right? At least mine is anyway! I've always considered myself a cat person but I'm definitely becoming a dog person too now, and I can't wait to get my own place so I can actually get pets! These were pretty straight forward to create, but full details are after the jump.

Tiny Essie Flowers

Hey everyone! Hope you've all had a good week. I'm definitely in "thank god it's Friday mode", not because it's been a bad week but because I'm really looking forward to this weekend. I know I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front again but life is so busy (in a good way) at the moment that I barely have time to open my laptop let alone write a blogpost! I did have time to paint a few designs however to try and catch up so here's one of them, these cute little flowers using the new Essie Gel Couture Ballet Nudes collection. I was inspired by these nails I saw on Pinterest and I knew I wanted to put my own spin on them ever so slightly. I love how these turned out, I hope you do too! 

Autumnal Flowers

Hey everyone! I've had such a busy January, I haven't had an evening to myself all month, yet somehow it seems to be dragging by. Why is it that it always feels like the longest month? Even though it's my birthday month and I've been having a really great time I still can't wait for the month to end... mainly because pay day can't come quick enough!  Anyway, I finally had time to sit down and paint my nails and it felt great to get the brushes out again. It feels like a long time since I've painted anything. I was digging around for some inspiration and I found an old design by The Illustrated Nail and I knew I had to do some nails inspired by it. These aren't a direct copy, the original was a lot more detailed and I only looked at the original before doing the design not during so I didn't realise that they were so dissimilar until after. 

Monthly Favourites: September

Hey everyone! It's the last day of September (although technically it's now the first day of October where I am) and that means that it's time for my monthly favourites once again. Can you believe I've been doing this for 4 months now? It only feels like a couple of weeks ago when I decided to start it at the beginning of summer, which also shows how fast summer went! So for September I have quite a few nail-related products, I know I've had quite a lot of make-up in my favourites for the past couple of months, but it really is whatever is my favourite that month, and I guess this month I'm going back to my roots! The products I've chosen for this month are:

KMS California - Hairstay Maximum Hold Spray* and Add Volume Volumising Spray*

Barry M - Natural Glow Shadow and Blush Palette*

Magis - Home Soak off Kit*

Sally Hansen - Cuticle Rehab*

OPI - DS Extravagance 

Picture Polish - Sizzle*

Guest Post for Very Emily - Tribal Jelly

Hey everyone! Today I have a guest post over on my dear friend Emily's blog, which you can see here. It was about time I repaid her back for the guest posts she's done for me in the past, including this one that you saw a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, I'm not going to say anything about the nails because you can head over to Very Emily to see all the info there.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments. And dont forget to check out the post HERE for more info

Alice

Tutorial: May Day Nails with Click Fragrance

Hey everyone! Today I have a brand new tutorial for you to learn how to create these cute May Day nails. I know May Day was last week but they'll also be great for summer celebrations! I've created this tutorial for Click Fragrance, and you'll have to click here to see the steps for this design. Click Fragrance is a website that sells cheap cosmetics/makeup and fragrances (and of course nail varnish!) and delivery is free on all UK orders, so you should definitely head over there to have a look!

All details on colours etc. can be found here on Click Fragrance 

What do you think? Let me know in the comments! 

And don't forget to check out the steps here

Alice

Nailvengers Assemble: Untried Polishes - Sally Hansen Nail Art Pens Review

Hey everyone! It's the end of the month so that means a brand new Nailvengers Assemble post. Dont forget to check out Allie over at Brit Nails, Sammy at The Nailasaurus, Lucie at Lucy's Stash and Amelia at xameliax to see what designs they came up with! You can also like our Facebook page for updates. This month's theme is 'Untrieds' and as I have quite a stash of polishes to review building up I decided to use some of them. I've been wanting to use the Sally Hansen nail art pens ever since I received them, and the Rita Ora Rimmel London polishes have been catching my eye too so I combined the two for a simple floral design.

Sally Hansen/Rimmel Jelly Sandwich

Hey everyone, today's post is just a quick jelly sandwich. For those of you who don't know what a jelly sandwich is, it's typically a layer of thin, jelly-like polish, a layer of glitter, and then another layer of the jelly-like polish to create a sandwich effect. I've only ever done it once before, here, and I really liked the look, but I couldn't think of which colours to do it with again. So when these gorgeous colours from Rimmel and Sally Hansen dropped through my postbox, I knew instantly that I had to create one using them, and in fact I sat down then and there and did this manicure. It's just taken me ages to post it! I did actually post a quick picture on Instagram as soon as I'd done it, so some of you may have seen this manicure before, but hopefully that wont matter to you too much! 

To create this look I used a base layer of Sally Hansen - Shell We Dance*, with a middle layer of Rimmel - Disco Ball*, and then a finishing layer of Shell We Dance, all topped off with a coat of Seche Vite to smoothen out the design. 

I really like the look this creates, but I never seem to be able to think of colours that I could use to do it more. What do you think? Let me know in the comments

Alice