Magpie Beauty Pretty In Pink Gel Collection - Review and Swatches

Hey everyone! It's been a while, if you don't follow me on Instagram, that's where you can mainly find me these days. I've completely fallen in love with gel polish, in part thanks to my new role as Brand Partner for Magpie Beauty, so you can find a lot of gel designs on there now too! I'm going to keep my blog for longer reviews such as this one.

As part of my role with Magpie, I was kindly gifted the brand new Pretty In Pink collection* and I wanted to give you an honest review and some swatches of the collection for you to see! If you have any questions please feel free to message me on Instagram and I'll help as much as I can!

There are five polishes in the collection, and (as the name suggests) they are a collection of pinks, with a mixture of cremes, sheers and shimmers.

I have quite ridged nails on my pointer and middle finger at the moment so I applied a coat of Magpie - Give Me Strength to those fingers in all of these swatches, but otherwise these are totally on my natural nails. 

Shiny Pumpkins

[AD*]    Happy Halloween-eve! Halloween is one of my favourite holidays of the year (second only to Christmas) because I get to dress up, decorate my house, and also because it presents so many opportunities for nail art! 

This year I was asked by Naio Nails to create some Halloween nail art using their Urban Graffiti gel polishes, and I wanted to try and mix of matte and shiny with this pumpkin design. 

I've been wanting to try a matte gel top coat for ages so I made sure that was one of the polishes I chose for this collaboration, and I was like a kid marvelling when I saw that it doesn't go matte until you put it under the light. Science! (Or not science just magic who knows...). Anyway, read on to find out how I created these nails. 

Gelish Forever Fabulous Collection - Review + Swatches Part 1

Christmas really is the busiest time of the year isn't it? I feel like I've barely stopped recently, and I've got to go away with work this week so I've got even less time than usual.

 I've been so busy I haven't had the time to write up this review, even though I tried the products a few weeks ago, so I'm sorry for the delay in getting this out to you! 

The Gelish - Forever Fabulous collection* is a bumper collection of TWELVE new shades for winter.  There are some really great colours in this collection, and I've split it into two halves so you can see them all in more detail. This is Part 1, and Part 2 will be along shortly. 

Gelish - Thrill Of The Chill Review + Swatches

I can't believe it's the end of the weekend already, every week it just flies by. It's not that I don't like my job, it's more that I diet in the week and eat loads of chocolate at the weekends and I really miss eating chocolate as soon as it turns to Monday... first world problems! Anyway, I've got a review of the new Gelish - Thrill Of The Chill Collection* for you. As always it's a gorgeous collection from them, and I think I have a couple of new favourite Gelish shades too. 

Gelish Chilly Christmas Trees

I'm trying to be strict with myself on Christmas this year, especially in terms of food. I've lost weight recently and I don't to gain it back by pigging out on mince pies, but they're so delicious I'm struggling to resist. However, I decided that I didn't need to resist doing Christmas nails, what's the harm right? And apparently Twitter agreed, as I did a poll earlier and these were the popular choice! 

These aren't the first Christmas nails I've done this year I have to admit, I've been playing around with nail wheels to decide on some designs and these are a by-product of that.  As I was swatching the Gelish - Thrill Of The Chill Collection* (review coming soon), I couldn't help feeling Christmassy and I wanted to do some quick Christmas nails to show off the gorgeous shades of the collection, and to play around with one of the designs from my nail wheel. 

Gelish - Little Miss Nutcracker Collection, Review + Swatches

After a busy weekend of doing absolutely nothing except painting nails and eating (what could be better?), it feels right to end it with a blog post. It's a super exciting week for me as I'm off to see Harry Potter and The Cursed Child next weekend, plus we're off to the Warner bros studios, I can't wait! I bought the tickets for the play more than a year ago, so it's been a long time coming. 

Anyway, on to the nails! It's been so long since I last did a Gelish review, in fact it's been pretty much exactly a year, and boy have I missed reviewing their gorgeous gels. So when I got the new Little Miss Nutcracker* collection to review, I wanted to show you them as soon as I could. I'm well and truly in the festive spirit this year already, I know it's super early but I think because I had such a miserable time last Christmas it just feels all the more exciting this time around, and I already can't wait to decorate my house! 

The collection features 6 gorgeous shades, plus a lovely glitter topper to complete the collection. They're all such wonderful Christmassy shades, but I think my favourite must be Plum-thing Magical*, because it really is (some)thing magical! This was also my first time trying to new Gelish bottles. When I first saw they'd changed I was a little sad, as I really loved the old design, but having seen them in person I really like them, and it's so much easier to see which colour you're picking out! 

Glitter Pumpkins

Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you've all had a fun day dressing up. My work dressed up on Friday instead as Monday is a super busy day and we wouldn't have had time to play any Halloween games, so I didn't actually dress up today. But on Friday I was Wednesday Addams, which makes a chance from my usual cat outfit that I do every year! I of course had to post some nails on Halloween, and whilst they are more autumnal than scary, I hope you still like them!

Gelish Glow In The Dark Polish + Halloween Nail Art

Hey everyone! I'm so glad it's the weekend. I'll soon be on my way to Sheffield to go pretend I'm a student again for the weekend, and I can't wait! I haven't actually been back since my graduation, so it will be great to be there again. Today I'm showing you my first Halloween nail art of 2016. Each year I struggle to come up with new ideas for Halloween and Christmas. Most of the designs have been done 5 billion times so it's hard to come up with something original. So whilst this isn't a particularly new design idea... it is glow in the dark! Glow in the dark nails are one of my favourite things about Halloween, and so when I saw Gelish were bringing out a glow in the dark polish* this year I jumped at the chance to review it. 

I wasn't really sure what to expect from the polish, I didn't know whether it would be a standalone colour or a topcoat-type polish. It turns out it's more of a topcoat type polish. When applied it looks kind of cloudy, but once cured it goes more see-through. I put two coats over the whole design below, and as you can see in the glow in the dark images, it shows up a lot brighter on the white but it is also still visible on the dark blue. I always feel a bit childish in my love for glow in the dark things, I used to have glow in the dark stars on the ceiling in my bedroom and it always reminds me of that. So glow in the dark nails will always be a win for me, especially when they are gels. I was worried when I first applied it (before curing) as it didn't seem to glow, however curing activated the glow and it was bright enough that I could see them glowing even when not properly in the dark. 

Sharpie Watercolour Flowers

Hey everyone! I want to apologise for not being the best blogger at the moment, I have a lot of products building up and I'm definitely feeling the pressure but life has to come first. I've needed to prioritise my life off the internet for the past few weeks, and I still need to, but my blog has always been my escape and I want it to remain that way, so here I am escaping for a little while. I've been finding it hard to find the time to do my nails, let alone blog about them, but I managed to spend the entirety of Saturday doing nails and it feels nice to be able to have some new content to show you. 

Today's nails are kind of a fail, but as I've said before I want to document all my designs, fails or not. I've never tried watercolour nails before, mainly because I didn't think I had the necessary products (what is 'rubbing alcohol' when it's at home?). But then my lovely friend Very Emily informed me that all I need are some Sharpies and some nail cleanser, and I decided to buy a nice huge pack of Sharpies to give it a go (I'll always be a stationary hoarder at heart, so any excuse really). These were so simple to create, I was kind of just playing around and they turned into a design. It was so satisfying to see them turn into little bubbles rather than blobs of colour. And I really loved the design ... until my topcoat smeared it everywhere. I don't know if it's because I used a gel topcoat, or if I should have used nail polish for the centre of the flowers rather than black sharpie? If you've done watercolour nails before let me know where I went wrong. 

Detailed Gelish Florals

Hey everyone! I'm still in denial that my holiday has come to an end and that it's officially Autumn, as much as I love cozy jumpers, and having an excuse to have the heating on (I'm always cold) I really wish we'd had more of a summer in the UK. But, my holiday isn't quite over until I've shown you my holiday nails, plus my 'nails on tour', so for today's post and tomorrow's post my holiday can live on. 

Whenever I go on holiday I use it as an excuse to wear gels. Because I have to (and like to) change my nails so often, whenever I review gels I usually do so with a peel off basecoat so that I can swatch a few at once without the lengthy removal process. So it's always nice to be able to wear a design for a bit longer, without the risk of them chipping or peeling after a few days. I spent ages choosing a design to do because I wanted them to be a design that I'd want to wear for a while but also look good in my 'nails on tour' pictures. In the end I settled on this design I found on Pinterest. I didn't stick with the colour scheme or the design 100% because I wanted to make it my own but I really loved how it turned out, and I still have them on my nails now, 2 weeks later (although I'm hating how much they have grown out I just haven't had time to take them off). 

Nails on Holiday: Majorca

Hey everyone! As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I have another nails on holiday post for you all today. For those of you who haven't seen my previous posts on this and don't know what I'm talking about, I basically take pictures of my nails in front of things on holiday, you can see all my previous nails on holiday posts here. I really love doing these as they are great for me to look back on as a kind of holiday diary, but they are also great as a way for you all to nosy into my holiday! I do sometimes get funny looks when I'm taking these pictures but it's worth it for the post at the end. If you want to know more about my nails see here for my post yesterday. This is quite a lengthy post so I won't blame you if you don't read it all, but for the nosy readers out there hopefully you'll enjoy it!

This year me and my boyfriend decided to go to Majorca. We decided quite late on that we were going to go on holiday because we thought originally that we couldn't\shouldn't afford it because we've just moved into our first house. However we decided to go anyway because we were both craving for some time away and we spent ages poring over holidays before we finally settled on a hotel in C'an Picafort, Majorca for September. By the 9th we were excited and prepared to fly that weekend, when we received a call that our hotel had overbooked and we would not longer be able to stay there (it turns out that all that time poring over hotels was pretty fruitless). However, they had decided to upgrade us to a hotel in Alcudia instead. We were upgraded from a 4* to a 5*, so we were pretty excited as 5* hotels are very much out of our budget. 

We weren't told much about our room or what to expect from the hotel so we went with pretty average expectations. However, when we arrived we were completely blown away. We were staying in the Viva Zafiro Alcudia and it was absolutely gorgeous. The hotel has recently been revamped so everything is bright, clean and sleek. It was 1am by the time we got to the hotel so we were both pretty tired, but we decided to just have a peek on our balcony to see the view. When we got out onto the balcony I was confused to see some steps leading up toward the roof so I decided to explore, only to find that we had our own rooftop balcony with a jacuzzi! I'm sure for some of you my excitement over that seems silly but I was so happy and to be honest we barely moved from our rooftop sunbeds the whole holiday. We went down to the beach a couple of times and lay by the main pool once or twice but we mainly stayed up there and chilled out which was amazing. This does mean that there isn't a great variety in pictures I'm afraid but hopefully you still enjoy reading. Unfortunately the hotel is a (thousand pounds) out of our price range so we probably won't be able to stay there again as much as we would like to, but if you have the money I would 100% recommend it!

Gelish Green Daisies

Hey everyone! I'm super excited today because I've just got the new iPhone 7. I've never had the up-to-date model, I've always been at least one model behind and I decided to treat myself this time around. I'm definitely an iPhone lover, no one could ever persuade me to change to another brand, and all my other products are Apple too, even if that does make me a sheep! And on the subject of nature (see that smooth movement of topics) today I have some floral nails using Gelish for you. I seem to create a lot of nail art with gels at the moment, but it's because it makes it so much easier to go wrong as you can just wipe off any mistakes! These were super simple to create and were more a result of me messing around that anything else. 

Gelish Street Beat Collection [Partial] Review + Swatches

Hey everyone! Hope you've all had a lovely week, I've been on the countdown to my holiday all week and it's finally here! I fly tonight and I can't wait to be sitting by the pool tomorrow not having to think about anything else. I feel like I haven't switched off in a while so I'm hoping I'll be able to unwind. I have of course prepared some posts for you whilst I'm away, I couldn't just leave you all hanging could I? You'll probably get more posts than usual actually because I've actually scheduled them. I feel like I should do this more often because often in the evenings I'm too tired after work to prepare a post and then I get really behind. Does anyone else schedule their posts a week ahead? Does it work?

Today I've got a review of the stunning Gelish - Street Beat Collection* for you. There are actually six polishes in the collection, and I have 3 of them to show you today. In addition to the three I have, there's also a yellow (Street Credible), a neon pink (B-Girl Style) and a fuchsia (Tag, You're It). It's such a fun and bright collection, and it was a perfect release as their summer collection. I couldn't resist choosing one of them for my toes for my holiday (read after the jump to see what colour I chose), as I absolutely love these shades. I was interested to try the yellow too, as it's quite an unusual shade for Gelish, but having read reviews of how sheer it is I think I got a good selection with these three. Full review is after the jump.