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. 

Christmas Holly Berries

Hey everyone! Happy Christmas Eve Eve, I thought it was about time I posted some Christmas nails. These mistletoe with red berries were inspired by a plate from Matalan (see below). I actually did these in early November but I felt embarrassed to post Christmas nails so early... so I took it to the other extreme and now I'm posting two days before Christmas, oops! 

I used OPI - My Vampire Is Buff as the base, and then a mix of greens to create the leaves. I used OPI - Big Apple Red, and then acrylic paint for the white and black detailing. Finished with Barry M - Matte topcoat. 

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

Alice

Mice and Cheese

Happy Tuesday everyone! I've got something slightly different from the usual florals and patterns today with this mice and cheese design. I saw a few similar ideas floating around on Pinterest, and I stumbled across this design, and I loved the idea so much that I had to recreate it. I tried these first on false nails to see how they looked, and I must admit my first attempt was slightly better than these, but I hope you still like them! 

Porridge Nails

Yeah you read that title right, these nails are inspired by something you would probably consider very uninspiring: porridge. Inspiration really can be found in the strangest of places!

 I have porridge every day for breakfast at work, and I've stared at the Moma* packets sitting on my desk for weeks without realising that my next inspiriation lay right in front of me... turns out it can strike when you least expect! So when Moma asked me to team up with them, I knew that it would work because not only are their packets are so bright and colourful, but it's also a product I enjoy and wouldn't mind sharing with you all. 

Marvel: Thor Ragnarok Nails

Hey everyone! I've got something a bit different for you today. Marvel asked me to create some Thor: Ragnarok inspired nails for my Instagram but I couldn't resist posting them here too. My blog is after all supposed to be an archive of all the designs I've done, so it feels wrong to have posted them elsewhere and not on here! 

My middle three fingers were inspired by Pop Vinyl figures of Thor: Ragnarok, and then I added a hammer and lightening to my other nails to encapsulate the true Thor-ness of these nails. This is a different type of design to what I usually do, but I really enjoyed challenging myself and I am 98% happy with how they came out... I just wish my hammer looked more like a hammer! 

Barry M - Black Cats

Happy Halloween! Whilst I said yesterday it felt like Halloween was over, I got back into the spirit today. We bought soooo many sweets for trick or treaters because we live right near a school, and we didn't get a single one! I'm guessing the creepy ghouls we've got stuck to our windows were too much, who knows? Anyway, my final Halloween design is hopefully a bit less spooky, but still on theme: black cats! 

To the horror of my boyfriend (he definitely prefers dogs), cats are my favourite animal and would be my pet of choice, so it seemed fitting to paint them on my nails this halloween. This isn't the first time I've done black cat nails (see here), but it is the first time I've done them this way, and I love the combination of pastel and black. This was my last design in collaboration with Barry M, I hope you've enjoyed them! 

I used Barry M - Rose Hip* as my base, and then I used Barry M - Black Forest* and Barry M - Cotton*, finished with Barry M - Matte Topcoat*. 

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

Alice

Barry M - Pastel Halloween Bats

It's almost the weekend, and that means one thing... halloween party! I'm so excited. This is the first proper party we've hosted in the new house so I'm really looking forward to it, and I can't wait to put halloween decorations up tomorrow. As I mentioned in my last post, I've got quite a few halloween designs to post, so here's the second one I created for Barry M: pastel bats. 

These were a combination of different ideas I'd seen on Pinterest. I loved the idea of an ombre effect on the nails, and I'd seen a few mini bat designs, so I combined the two, and I really love how these turned out. 

Soft Scoop - Meebox April '17 Nail Art + Review

Hey everyone! Here's the second of the two Meebox reviews I promised you. This one is slightly more delayed than the last, especially as this was actually technically April's box, but nevertheless it still had some gorgeous polishes in that I wanted to showcase for you, albeit slightly later than I would have liked. April's Soft Scoop Box* included £42.98 worth of products, which is a bargain when the box is only £20 (or even less if you sign up for a few months). What I love about Meebox is that it pushes me to try out brands I wouldn't usually, or who I've never even heard of. This time it contained:

IZ Beauty - Baby Blue

Trust Fund - Do you Know Who Your Father Is 

Model's Own - Banana Split

Zoya - Matte Top Coat

Whats Up Nails Decals 

Whats Up Nails Confetti

I like to set myself the challenge of trying to use all the products from the box, but unfortunately I couldn't decide on a design that showcased the confetti, but otherwise all the products are included in the nail art. 

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. 

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! 

Pastel Frogs (aka a slight fail)

Hey everyone! Today I'm showing you what turned out to be a bit of a failure, which was frustrating because I put quite a bit of effort into these. These were inspired by a t-shirt my mum's goddaughter was wearing over christmas (picture below), but they didn't turn out as I hoped. You may or may not be able to make out (it's more obvious on my pointer finger) that I actually drew the lilypads in light blue. I stupidly chose to use a grey base rather than white and the colours just blended together once I added topcoat. They were actually quite different before which is why I continued with the design! I was however really happy with the frogs which is why I still wanted to show you the design, especially the one on my ring finger.

Matte Christmas Trees

Can you believe how close to Christmas it is? I've been swapping christmas presents with my friend this evening and I've spent all weekend wrapping, and making my own gift tags (those things are expensive to buy!), so I'm definitely in the Christmas spirit now. Just a few more days of work until 4 days of freedom. Soooo... time for some more Christmas nails. When swatching the Autumn/Winter Barry M Speedy Dry Polishes, I felt that Dead Heat*, this gorgeous red, would be perfect for some Christmas nails. I didn't really know where I was going with these nails, I started with just the white outline and I intended to leave them at that, so I took my pictures and went to remove them. But I just wanted to see what they looked like with a pop of colour, and I ended up loving them more. 

Matte Glitter Triangles for Avon

Hey everyone! I've had such a busy week, my life normally seems to revolve around sleep and work but this week I've managed to catch up with friends and I've just been to see Spectre tonight. I enjoyed it but I must admit I think I prefer Skyfall, although it seems like I'm alone in my opinions. Today's nail design is not a Halloween design, instead I'll be posting Halloween nails for the rest of the week. Unfortunately I haven't finished editing my pictures yet so they'll have to be squeezed in somewhere else. These are just some simple triangle nails combining glitter, matte and regular nail polish to create a multilayer effect. I dont think I've ever really used all three in a design together so I was pretty happy with the outcome

Matte Neon Flowers

Hey everyone! I've had a nice relaxing weekend of doing pretty much nothing. I spent saturday doing a tonne of nail art designs, it felt like so long since I just sat down and spent a day doing nails and it was great. I got quite a few designs done which I'm sure you'll see soon but for tonight I just wanted to show you one of the simpler designs I did. I got a selection of Models Own polishes to review and they've been sitting around waiting for me to do something with, and I decided that it was time to do some nail art with them. I'll probably do some more at some point as there's a great selection but this is what I came up with on a short timescale.

Tutorial Thursday: Matte Autumn Toadstools Nail Art for Barry M

Hey everyone! This was supposed to go live last night but for some reason it didn't work, so even though it's technically friday, here's my tutorial thursday. Today I'm showing you how to do these cute toadstool nails, as I said before in my review of the autumn Barry Ms this whole collection is great for autumn nail art, and straight away the idea of doing toadstools came to mind.

Gingham Man at the Helm Book Inspired Nail Art + Review

Hey everyone! I've been meaning to do gingham nails for ages, they've been at the top of my to-do list for over a year, but I just haven't plucked up the guts to do them. Anything involving line work puts me off, I don't feel confident doing lines, and they often go awfully as a result, and as gingham is just lines, I've always been a bit wary of doing it incase I mess it up. So when Penguin got in contact a couple of weeks ago and asked me to do some gingham nails inspired by the cover of their new release, Man at the Helm* by Nina Stibbe, it was the push I needed to finally do the design. 

I'm a huge fan of books, up until uni (which destroyed my free time) I never really had my head out of a book, now I only tend to read on trains, and ever since I got my car that's become a lot less regular as well. However, this summer I've really rediscovered my love of books. I've always been a staunch hater of e-readers but I got one a few months ago to save me lugging books around betwen uni and home, or on holiday, and I took it on holiday with me and read 4 books in a week, so they're pretty handy in a way, but I'm still a staunch supporter of having a book in hand. Especially when the cover is as lovely as Man at the Helm's. Which of course you wouldn't get to see if you were just reading it on Kindle. I've also done a few designs based from the cover of books before, and I've done a design of Penguin's own book covers, so it was an honour to be contacted by them. 

Tutorial Tuesday: Palm Trees + Barry M Matte Topcoat Review

Hey everyone! For the rest of this week I'm going to be showcasing all the new Barry M releases for summer, starting today with their gorgeous new Matte Topcoat*. As it's tutorial tuesday, I decided to bring out one of the tutorials I created for Barry M and combine it with my review. The Matte Topcoat retails at £2.99 and definitely fills a gap in the market. I recently (before this came out) went in to Boots to find a matte topcoat for a friend and I was shocked at the lack of choice for under £5, there was nothing, especially nothing of quality, so I was very excited to see this released. It's also brilliant, which helps, and for that price you really cant go wrong. There are varying degrees of matte, and this is one of the more matte topcoats out there. It's also much more matte than their recent Summer Matte Collection (review coming tomorrow, I know I promised it would be out today but I have a couple of photos still to edit). 

Tutorial Tuesday: Negative Space Florals

Hey everyone! Today on Divine Caroline I have a brand new tutorial for you, this week for these cute negative space floral nails. I'm super excited to show these to you because I absolutely love how they turned out and I wore these for almost a week because I just didn't want to take them off. Check out the full tutorial here.

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

Alice

Review Week, Day 3: Jacava London Swatches and Nail Art

Hey everyone! I'm ashamed to say I almost forgot to post today. It's 2am here and I was in bed with the lights off when I suddenly remembered I hadn't posted today's review, oops! Anyway, today's review is of a couple of Jacava London polishes: their Matte Topcoat*, and Vanilla Slice.* I was sent a few of their polishes to try out, so I'm sure you'll be seeing more around sooner or later, but these are the two that stood out to me straight away and I knew I had to try them. Once I'd mattified vanilla slice I also wanted to add a design to them, so I recycled my old 'Owl Be Yours' manicure slightly and added some polka dots and hearts. I've been wanting to redo owls for a while now so I'm really glad how these turned out

Nude Checkers Stripes

Hey everyone! I'm afraid I dont have a tutorial ready for you today, I've only been around my lightbox for a couple of hours in the past week and I just havent had the time. I'm working on one whilst I type this (well, I've taken a break to write this but you know what I mean) so I will have one up thursday instead, but for now I thought I'd do a post based on my checkers stripe tutorial from a couple of weeks ago, which you can see here. I'm not sure whether I prefer the pink or the nude, or which works better, but I know that I definitely love this in matte!

The base for these was Barry M - Lychee, then I used MASH - White, and black acrylic paint, topped off with a coat of Butter LONDON Matte Topcoat

What do you think? Let me know in the comments

Alice