Born This Way - Meebox August '17 Nail Art + Review

Hey everyone! It feels like forever since I last reviewed a Meebox*, in reality it's only a couple of months. This month's box is their 2 year anniversary edition, and they've totally smashed it, as always. The theme is 'Born This Way'* and is of course inspired by Lady Gaga. For just £20 the box contains products worth a whopping £35 (plus what would be £5 postage!): 

Meebox - The Grape Escape Nail Varnish Remover

Color Club - Pure Energy

True Brit - Etiquette

Ard As Nails - I Love You Hunny Bunny

House of Wonderland - Born This Way Decals (exclusive)

When I started these nails I knew I wanted to do something bold to highlight both Meebox and Lady Gaga. But, do you ever have one of those days where every design you try just wont work out? Have you ever tried coupling that with a sprained wrist? Welcome to my weekend. 

I really tried to make this what I wanted it to be, but I just couldn't get the water decals working. Every single time I pulled them out of the water I got them caught up in each other, and after a number of attempts I decided it would just be easier to paint the eyes instead. This is totally my fault and not because of the decals, it was only my second time ever using them after all. 

I'm not 100% on how these turned out, although in person they seem to stand out much more. Let me know what you think.

Gradient Barry M Stripes

Hey everyone! It's an exciting week this week for me, today was my first day at my new job, and tomorrow is my birthday! So a busy couple of days. Anyway, it's freezing cold here at the moment but I wanted to bring a bit of brightness with my nails. This was a new look for me but they didn't really turn out as I had hoped, I used blue pink yellow and green but you can only really see the blue and green.. and mainly green. But nevertheless I do still quite like them, they are matte after all.

Blue Checkers/Gingham

Hey everyone! I decided to redo my orange checkers nails from the other day in my favourite nail polish colour: blue. I really love the look these nails have and I think I prefer them even more in blue. I probably will end up trying this in other colours too, now I've realised how simple they are to create. It's not as hard as it looks, just paint your base, stripe in white, and fill in the centre of the stripes in light blue ... although that sounds really patronising probably if you're only just starting out! A good striping brush goes a long way, I've recently been using these (mainly the smaller one) from Born Pretty Store but I've also used a variety of others over the years. If you want to try out those brushes, you can use my code KHL91 to get 10% off. 

I used Barry M - Sky Blue* for the base, then I used Barry M - Cotton* for the stripes, and a mix of the two colours for the lighter blue. Then I added Seche Vite topcoat to seal it all in. Unfortunately I wrecked these in the middle of taking photos by hitting them on my lightbox (it'll teach me to wait a bit longer!) so I didn't get to take more than one photo unfortunately, but I'm sure there will be more versions in the future.  

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

Alice

Orange Checkers/Gingham

Hey everyone! I couldn't really decide what to call this post as I'm not sure whether these really are gingham or not. With my previous gingham designs (see here and here) the white has always been the base colour. Here, however, the orange is the base colour so I'm not sure if it's just a checkered design or if it can still be classed as gingham, you'll have to let me know! This design came about because I realised that Barry M - Cotton* is incredibly opaque for nail art, so when using it for stripes it doesn't go blotchy, which is an issue I normally have when striping with white. All the lines created with this are solid, and it made it easier to do these.

Striping practice

Hey everyone! So today I have an experimental kind of design for you. The wonderful Algae Veronica recently sent me some polishes (as I showed on my instagram @onenailtorulethemall) and one of them has been something I have lusted over for a very long time - Essie 'navigate her' so of course the second I got it I had to use it, but I also really wanted to practice my brush skills. Up until about 4 months ago I had never (!!!) used a brush for my nail art, every single design was done with dotting tools, so it's been difficult for me to build up the confidence to use a brush. It sounds stupid I know, but I'm always worried that it will flick out or go splodgy and ruin my design, and this sometimes does happen, so I'm often over-cautious with my designs and I dont want to be, so I know I need practice. But this time around I wanted to practice my striping skills, so here you go, everything here except the base colour was done with a medium length striper brush or a black striper.

I used Essie - Navigate Her, Art Deco Stripers in white and black and an unnamed pink from Boots, along with a medium length striper brush

Alice 

P.S sorry for the bad quality photos, the weather was awful and I was in a rush, but I shall soon have my lightbox ready to go (yay!) and pictures should be better from then on

Collection 2000 'Twilight' review and nail art

Hey everyone! So unless you didn't get my hint the other day and you didn't see my tumblr post yesterday then you should know that today I'm reviewing Collection 2000's Hot Looks "Twilight" collection. All pictures are taken in natural light. Hope you like it, pictures after the jump!