Choi's nails

For this manicure:

• Apply one coat of your preferred base coat (I used Essie's protein base coat.)
• Apply two coats of Nails Inc's Upper Cheyne row - a muted pink
• Drip the following polishes in water in the order you like:
  Nails Inc's Pont street mews - a cerise pink
  Nails Inc's Bruton street - a dusty pink nude
  Nails Inc's Upper cheyne row
• Wait until the polish dries on the surface on the water, carefull pick it up with tweezers and place on the middle finger nail. Using nail clippers or scissors cut off the excess. Do the same for the ring finger nail.
• Using Novello Street - a silver glitter, apply over the index and pinkie finger nail.
• Seal with a matte top coat and leave to dry. The one I used was China Glaze's matte magic.

Clearly messed up at the tips of my nails but my watermarbles are quite a hit and miss sometimes.

What other watermarble designs would you like to see?

For this manicure you'll need:

• One coat of your preferred base coat (I used Ciate mini's Underwear)
• Apply two coats of a plain white. Here I used Barry M's Matt white.
• A cup of water and with your choice of polishes drip each one in the order you like in the water.
• Here I used China glaze Light as air - light grey, purple and Essie's I Pink I can - light pink.
• With a toothpick draw any design.
• Wait about 10 until the polish has fully dried on the surface of the water. Slowly pick it up with some tweezers, position it on the nail and cut off the excess.
• Apply a shimmery top coat. I used Color Club's Million dollar listing.
• Seal with one coat of your preferred top coat. (I use Misa's UV Bounceback)
  

I'm really liking this dry water marble method. It stops me from making a mess out of everything and keeps things dry. What other colours should I use next time?

For this manicure you'll need:

• One coat of your preferred base coat (I used Ciate mini's Underwear)
• A cup of water and with your choice of polishes drip each one in the order you like in the water.
• Here I used China glaze Icicle - Silver shimmer, First mate - Navy blue, Light as air - light grey purple.
• With a toothpick draw any design - I think it's best to look for some pictorials or video tutorials for this step because it's just not easy to explain in words.
• Wait about 10 until the polish has fully dried on the surface of the water. Slowly pick it up with some tweezers, position it on the nail and cut off the excess.
• Seal with one coat of your preferred top coat. (I use Misa's UV Bounceback)

The problem with this method is if the polish was left out for too long whilst positioning it will get crispy dry and start to crumble making it easy to lose a piece whilst applying it to the nail. That's exactly what happened at the tip of my middle finger so it had to be patched up with any piece of the polish.



Easter is already here but unfortunately I won't be having any easter designs.

Hope you enjoyed this post.

London calling being a little neon wasn't really what I was expecting from it so in the end I wasn't planning to keep it on for very long. If that's the case now's the right time to practice some nail art and here is the hairspray water marble technique. Well, for this one it's more like the perfume water marble technique. I'm not a hairspray user so there wasn't any around the house. I quite like the whole dark and light colour contrast so I purposely picked Models own's Turquoise gloss to be splattered on top.



I'm not very into the ending look so this definitely wasn't missed. Hopefully I'll make a better choice of colours next time.

Have you ever tried water marbling and accidentally get another layer of polish stuck onto your perfectly watermarble design totally messing things up and then you're there thinking sh*t, this ain't perfect no more! I've had it happen other times but this time I went straight in and dipped my nail in a second time to see if it covered the mistakes made on the first layer.


The result? I'd say it's sort of impressive. Well you can see, there is no major change but if you look closely you'll see the different shades of pink and green/turquoise from the lighter polish overlapping the darker ones.




The polishes used in this manicure mainly come from Essie. It's been a very long time since I used any of them. I don't have many and yet I don't use them enough but here's a list of polishes used:

• We can do it pink
• Going incognito
• Turquoise and caicos
• Splash of grenadine

I did my thumb also and wanted to see how things looked with some dots but the pattern seems to look weird her. It reminds me of something with legs. An octopus. Spider. Eurgh. My imagination just brought me to these two living things when I gave it a good stare so nope. Happy with the other finger nails but the thumb can stay hidden.

Have you ever given this a try?

I really don't see how easy she made this. Well, it is but I did have to go through a bit of trial and error before things started to look similar to the water marble effect. Either I've dug my toothpick a bit too hard that it has left a little gap, things are too well mixed that they look like a hot mess or I'll peel the polish off before it's fully dried destroying the whole thing.


So the idea is painting a base colour on some plastic wrap, I chose a clear pocket folder and painted one to two layers of Jessica's Velvet & pearls which is a black creme as the base. With Ciate's Ivory queen, an ivory with gold shimmers and Ciate's Members only which is a sheer nude with gold shimmers I added the polishes randomly onto the black polish whilst it was still wet and started swirling like a mad woman with a toothpick.


Okay, I could say the swirling was the easy part. The peeling, placing and clean up was a pain in the backside! I've seen people use a cuticle trimmer to poke things into place and trim the extra bits down before cleaning up. Even after doing so I still had a lot of work to clean off and with the choice of colour it really didn't make things easier. 

Oops! My thumb is not done.

This is the end result and I'm happy with the way it came out. (You should have seen the other attempts!)

What do you think? What other techniques would you like to see me try?

I must say, these neons were some hard work when it came to water marbling. All the polishes used were from the Models Own's Polish for tans collection apart from Beach bag which was sold out before I could purchase it online at the time.


They are, in colour order from the index finger to the pinkie:

• Bikini
• Flip flop
• Shades
• Sun hat

In person they looked extremely bright like all the neons out there. Bright to the point that it's totally affected my lighting and my skin tone.

Anyway, thanks for reading. WHO'S READY FOR THE FALL/WINTER AND CHRISTMAS? ^^

Woo. It's time to blog about a water marble design again. This was done two months ago in April but they weren't kept on for long. It was my birthday soon after so I redid them quickly just for the day. nothing special was added to it though since I didn't have much time. In the end it was just a plain manicure and I didn't even manage to snap a photo.

For the nail shape on my index finger, my nails ALWAYS chip at the corners and this is what you're left with when you can't be bothered to file them all down to the same size and shape. 







I've had this water marble design at the back of my head for quite a while now. It's easy and sort of reminds me of the strawberry Cornetto ice cream. I couldn't get the right amount of each colour on the nail because I think I added too many layers and the red took more space than the pink.

As usual the base is Essie's Blanc, the pink is China Glaze's Something sweet and the red is Misa's So HOT in sunglasses which I've used as a manicure on it's own HERE before.
Both polishes really suit the water marble method because they spread nice and fast but I kept realising something sweet having holes once it's in the water. Lucky it didn't really show up on the nails.

There's one thing that never fails to make things harder for me later and that's my laziness! I really couldn't bother to line my cuticles with sellotape so here's how my nails looked before the cleanup. It took me a good while to make things look neat after that but my fingers felt good once all the unwanted stuff was gone.

Bottle shot L-R: Something sweet, So HOT in sunglasses.

I think I want to do another water marble nail design but it's always hard trying to choose which colours I should pair with which, there's so many options in my stash! What colour combo water marble should I do next? Any suggestions?

Products I used:

• Two coats of Essie's Blanc as base
• Index: Essie's Lilacism, Turquoise & Caicos and Misa's Blushing rose
• Middle: Misa's Skinny dipping, Double Dutch and Essie's Lilacism
• Ring: Double Dutch, Turquoise & Caicos and Lilacism
• Pinkie: Same as the middle finger

At first the overall look seemed like a fail to me because the flower pattern didn't quite show and I was having problems with water drops on my nails. They kind of exploded when I tried to remove/wipe them and  it left some dents in the polish. Check the middle finger.

I kept switching between different colours as well hence the index and ring finger but on the camera and computer screen it doesn't look that bad so I would say this is just a not-so-good attempt, not quite a fail yet.

Oopsie poopsie! I said to myself I should try and post at least once every two days if I can't do everyday but seems like I just missed the time again. Lucky there's still two hours before Sunday ends so I can still say Happy St. Patrick's day. I don't celebrate this event but it reminds me of a friend who currently studies in Ireland so I thought it'd be a good chance to do my first PADDY-cure :D 

• Thumb: China Glaze's Glittering garland  

• Index: Misa's Good to be green as base
  Saran wrapped with glittering garland
  Essie's Going incognito, Blanc and Barry M's Satsuma for the flag 

• Middle: Going incognito as base
  Clover image on plate BM03 stamped with Konad white and then traced with Essie's Blanc
  Layered with Zoya's Opal flakie after 

• Ring: Blanc as base
  Water marbled with Going incognito and Good to be green 

• Pinkie: Glittering garland sponged with Zoya's flare and China Glaze's Solar flare on tips

Not really happy with every part of this manicure but some did come out how I expected like the accent nail and pinkie. The stamping on the middle finger did turn out to be a fail though.

I had to crop and resize all the photos to remove all the weird bits and make my hand look normal. Panicked a bit since I felt my hand position looked weird which would be horrible since all the photos waiting for me to edit has the same hand pose.

This is a short post because I'm dying to go out and start nom-ing on a muffin with a cup of tea!

Did you do a St. Paddy's day manicure? What do you think of mine?

Both photos taken indoors. Natural lighting

Both photos taken outdoors. Slightly blurry because I was shivering. It was COLD!