nailbox - October Review

Yey, October's nailbox is HERE and the colours are perfect for my 30 Days of Colour Challenge. This month we have an autumn themed box with three gorgeous polish for the season.

First up is Rimmel's 'Caramel Cupcake' what a great name and also a lovely polish. This was opaque in two coats and it's been a while since I bought or used any Rimmel polishes and they've made the brush much thicker. Just one swipe with this bad boy and my little fingers where DONE!

Really liked this polish and used this as my base and to create the gradient on the manicure below. 

Next is another Gel Effect polish from Nails Inc, I think this is the third polish I've received from nailbox from this brand, This is a gorgeous burgundy/purple colour and one of my favourite colours. This again was opaque in two coats and in the gradient came out much brighter than in the bottle.

Last but not least is a effects polish from Essie called ' Summit of Style' a lovely packed glitter polish with gold glitters of two different sizes. No need for fishing with this glitter just one dip and apply to the nail deposits plenty of glitter. In fact it's so packed in the bottle I wasn't sure if it was in a clear base or if there was black glitters in there too.

This month's nail care items were some nail scissors, useful because I'm always hunting for my pair, and some Drying Drops from OPI. I did use these when doing my Thanks Giving manicure, bit hard to tell if it dried the polish any quicker as I ALWAYS use a quick dry topcoat. Also when applying to the nails I wasn't sure how to apply it so it covered all my nail. Something to experiment with, if you have any tips or experience with drying drops let me know.

Here is the manicure I created using all the polishes in this month's nailbox and is also my manicure for the next prompt in the 30 Days of Colour Challenge 'Fall Gradient'. 

30 Days of Colour - Harvest and Thanks Giving

The eighth prompt for the challenge was 'Harvest' and my other half suggested I do something around a Harvest Moon. I lacked the imagination to make that manicure happen so instead chose to do another stamping manicure with leaves.

Again making use of the the new Revlon polishes I've recently bought, I started off with a base of Revlon ColorStay in 'Fall Mood' a rather appropriately named polish for this manicure. It's a gorgeous copper shimmer polish with really fine glitters. 

I then used a variety of polishes to stamp the leaves using MoYou's Mother Nature Stamping Plate 02. Polishes I used included OPI, and other Revlon ColorStay polishes in Red and Orange, the yellow is Revlon Parfumerie in 'Sunlit Grass'. 

It was such a task to take a photo of this manicure, I top coated everything with Leighton Denny 'Gold Save the Queen' which is a fine Rose Gold Glitter to give it extra sparkle. So getting a picture without the light bouncing and reflecting off my nails and obscuring the leaf pattern was tricky. The Extreme Close up above gives you a better idea!

Next was 'Thanks Giving' and being British I didn't really know what to do. After googling it I opted for more leaves in Thanks Giving themed colours, no Turkey!

Not overly happy with this one, it look's very child like and I made a couple of errors whilst creating this design. I decided to use acrylic paint for the leaves and after painting a base colour of white, I remembered to put a top coat on so I could remove mistakes. But what I should have also done, is paint a matt top coat so that the paint would adhere to the nail rather than just pool on the shiny top coat.

I'm happiest with the thumb on this design, this was the first nail I painted. It all went pear shaped from there! Again I topped this design off with the Leighton Denny 'Gold Save the Queen' to tie all the design in and Bob's your Uncle!

30 Days of Colour - Quilted and Pink Glitter

Still chugging on with the 30 Days of Colour Challenge, next prompt was quilted. Wasn't really sure how to tackle this one so spent sometime googling it, to see what others had done. I wanted something a little subtle.

I used striping tape to make the design and after painting the base coat I sponged the glitter polish over the striping tape to create the design. It was difficult to see how well the glitter faded at the top of the design, and you can see it's rather blunt. I would have preferred it to blend out more.

Next prompt was all about the pink again, this time pink glitter! I think pink is actually growing on me now, because what I like most about this manicure is the accent nail. Not sure the glitter worked on the other nails.

Love these Revlon Parfumerie polishes though, this African Tea Rose smells lush. Think the problem here with the glitter was that it didn't contrast with the light pink polish enough. All Revlon polishes here, the light pink is Revlon ColorStay in Natural Pink and the Pink Glitter is Revlon Shining Strength. 

30 Days of Colour - The Progress

We're about half way through the 30 days of colour challenge and I've completed six manicures, so only four behind. Not too bad and I'm going to keep going. The next prompt of the challenge was denim and I wasn't sure what to do, I saw a few manicures online where they had painted stitching and pockets on the design. There were even designs for acid wash denim.

I didn't want to have my nails too obviously looking like a pair of jeans as I had training on Tuesday night, so I just went with a denim like polish. I had several to choose from, a Barry M one aptly called 'Denim'. 

Or an Essence Polish that is called 'Blue Jeaned' and labelled as a Jean Effect polish.

The polish I picked however was from OPI and is from their Suede line which I never knew existed until recently. This is the Suede version of OPI Ink and it dries to a Matt finish.

OPI Ink is such an amazing polish and the Suede version is nice if you don't want to faff around with a matt top coat, however it doesn't have quite the same colour shift that the original has. This is all I have to say on the matter and manicure...

The challenges next prompt was 'Leaves'. I really wanted to do some stamping for this prompt, but am limited to the very few stamping plates I have. Luckily a recent Nailbox subscription box included a MoYou Tropical Stamping Plate which included some foliage and leaves, although not quite the autumn design I was hoping for.

I hope I saved it from looking too tropical with the colour combination. I picked up a couple of No.7 polishes from Boots last week and the base of this Manicure is one, called 'Star Shower'. It's hard to describe, it has very fine gold, blue and silver glitters in it. I think the base is clear and just jammed packed with glitters, so I was able to make it opaque in three coats.

I used one of the 2true Metallica polishes in 'Aphrodite' I picked up from Superdrug a wee while ago to stamp the leaves with, and it stamped really well. I had to give it a bit more glitter as the leaves hide some of the base so topped the design off with China Glaze's 'Golden Enchantment'. LOVELY!

How well do you get on with stamping and do you have any favourite polishes to stamp with?

A all new level of addiction - £1 Polish

A little while ago I discovered that PoundWorld/Land sells top quality branded nail varnish that can retail from anywhere between £5.99 and £6.99 for just a quid!

The brands that I've seen them stock already are:

• Revlon ColorStay
• Revlon Parfumerie (You can still buy these full price in Boots at £6.49)
• Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure (CSM)
• Rimmel
• Bonita Polish
• NYC (Recently PoundWorld were selling these in packs of three for £1) These sell for £1.79 each in places like Boots and Superdrug. 

The main reason from what I understand on why you can buy these in PoundWorld/Land is that brands change formula or discontinuing lines as in the case of the Revlon ColorStay polishes. The majority of the Sally Hanson polishes I've picked up particularly from the CSM line are from old collections so maybe just left over polishes that they haven't been able to sell.

I'm certainly not complaining and everyone loves a bargain, and if you love polish as much as I do and aren't shopping for a particular colour it's a great way to find top quality polishes for a great price to add to your collection.

Now this is where the problem gets worse. The Revlon lines seem to have a definitive amount of polishes in the ColorStay and Parfumerie lines and once I'd bought a few, I wanted to complete my whole collection. PoundWorld/PoundLand etc... don't obviously carry the whole collection and these polishes appear at random, but now I want them all!

Fortunately I travel around a bit at the moment and have the opportunity to visit some Pound shops a bit further a field, and I've been able to pick up most of the line, but there are still some colours that are alluding me!

See how lovely they all look though, and think about how lovely they all will look if I had the WHOLE collection!!! It's become a bit of an obsession and now I trawl the internet trying to find the missing colours for a reasonable price. For some reason I've seen listings on Amazon for the rarer polishes ranging from £15 to £30. I'm not THAT mad.

What polishes do you lust after and what lengths have you gone to bag the polishes you desire?

30 Days of Colour Challenge - Catching Oop

So it's fair to say that I'm already behind with the 31 day challenge for this month EVEN though it's a new mani every three days or so. I'm in between jobs at the moment and looking for a job and figuring out what I want to do next is like two full time jobs at once! 

Anyway, enough of my belly aching I'm keen to show you the wonderful creations I've done for the next two prompts! First Up PINK, yes I know, not my favourite colour, however I incorporated a nice Hot Purple/Pink into my Mani below. It's more a gradient than a Pink Ombre, but I can't rock an all pink nail. The inspiration for this manicure was a Thank You card I gave to my other half for supporting me during my time out of work. The card had a lovely purple to pink to orange gradient that I wanted to recreate. Colour is a little off what it truly was in picture below as I've fiddled about with it. The Pink though is a must have from Sally Hansen's Complete Salon Manicure line called 'Aria Ready'.

Day three's prompt was 'Floral' and if you excuse the pun, I nailed it. Not very Autumnal but I don't give a stuff and really didn't want to take it off!

As per usual I looked for ideas online for design and found this design on mycosmeticsbag along with a super easy idea on how to create the flowers. Super easy and really affective.

For my vintage blue I used OPI 'Can't find my Czechbook' one of the first OPI polishes I ever bought. A lovely shade of blue with a drop of green. For the white stripes I used a striping polish I picked up from eBay ages ago, super impressed I managed to get the lines so straight.

Then I used a variety of red and white polishes to create the flowers as per tutorial on mycosmeticsbag and the leaves using a lighter and darker green polish. Simples!

Making a Nail Polish Rack

I currently store all my polish in a Helmer that I bought from Ikea for £25. It's the perfect storage for Nail varnish and can hold up to 500 polishes. However... they are hidden away and I can't see them and often spend time rooting through the draws trying to find a polish that I'm after.

What a lot of people do, especially Nail Polish Bloggers is display their lovelies in a Nail Polish Rack which makes a great background for videos. I've been eyeing racks up (Whay Hey) on the internet and you can pay anywhere between £25-£75 for them depending on how big what the colour is etc... I've also watched a few You Tube videos on how to make your own as you can do this rather inexpensively using Poster Board and wood, which is what I opted for as I wanted something that was going to be sturdy. I settled on using this video as a guide.

The problem I encountered was finding a finished wood in the size that they used in this video for a decent price. B&Q here in the UK had some packs of wood you could buy but this worked out £9-£10 a plank and I'd need three, so I opted for this Softwood CLS which was offer for £2.50 a piece but these were 38mm thick and 63 mm in width.

I also didn't have a fancy saw like they had in the above video so just used a regular saw to cut my pieces.

 As the wood was much thicker I used long screws to fix it together. Drilling through the side panels so I only had to screw into the shelves. Actually I got my other half to screw these in as it was still quite difficult.

Once assembled, I sprayed with two coats of primer and then three coats of spray wood paint in a cream colour. I ran out of spray after the last coat and I think it could have used another to hide the wood knots. I got all my paint and primer from B&Q too, however I did find cheaper at Wilkos after I'd make the rack!

I bought two Poster or Mounting Boards from HobbyCraft for the back and nailed these on to the rack once cut to size with some small nail tacks which I bought from a local hardware store for 99p.

And here is the finished rack with me polishes on it!

Very happy with the result, I'll need to build a few more however to hold ALL my polish, so quite a few bottles are still hiding in my Helmer. I enjoyed the process in making the rack so I'd recommend trying this if you like DIY or building things, here's a full breakdown of all the materials (with links where possible) I used and prices.

3 x Softwood Planed CLS Timber (T)38mm (W)63mm (L)2400mm = £7.50

Ivory Satin Spray Paint 400ml = £6.74

Wood Primer in white = £4.99

2 x Mount Board in cream from HobbyCraft = £6

Pack of 75mm Screws from B&Q = £5

Bag of 100 Tacks/Small Nails = 99p

So it worked out to be £31.22 to build the rack and I do have screws, tacks and Mount Board left over if I wanted to make another. I've been able to store 108 polishes in this rack including the ones I've stored on the top as I made my shelves a little longer so I could storer 14 polishes per shelf.

Have you bought or made your own Nail Polish Rack and how much did you pay and how many polishes does it hold?

30 Days of Colour Challenge - Day 1 and bargain polishes!

This month I saw Knitty Nails on Instagram post the following challenge, and as I missed out on last's month challenge I thought I'd take part. Here's the prompts...

I liked the themes and also that it's every couple of days and not every day. I'm catch up with the first prompt already and did it today. Here's my gold manicure.

I saw this on Pinterest and loved the combination of the mint green with the gold, it was either that or purple and gold, that's a classic combination.

I used Revlon's 'Minted' which is a gorgeous colour, but it did take three coats for full opacity. The formula is good and it goes on smooth after the first coat, but as it's a light colour it was a bit patchy. I sponged on the glitter as I didn't want a massive amount of clear base building up on my nails, using Sally Hansen's Complete Salon Manicure in 'Crown Jewels'. Picked this one up in Poundland last week, what an absolute BARGAIN!

This polish is from Sally Hansen's 2013 Sequin OverCoat Collection, I picked up a couple more CSM glitters too, these appear to be from New York Fashion Week Designer collection from 2014. Definitely worth keeping your eyes peeled in your local Poundland, they're also selling pack's of three New York Color (NYC) for £1.

Speaking of affordable polishes, I also picked up these beauties this week as they came free with Elle (Orly) and Bazaar (Leighton Denny) magazine.

There are four to collect of the Orly and six I think for the Leighton Denny, I do like Elle magazine, however I do remember buying Bazaar magazine before for a Leighton Denny polish, it's a little bit up market for me! Also spotted Glamour magazine are including free Nails Inc polishes too this month, so more polishes to keep your eyes peeled for.

Where do you get your bargain polishes from and have you bought any magazines for free beauty products? Let me know in the comments section below.

   

nailbox - September review

September's nailbox was Halloween themed and I couldn't wait to see what creepy colours they had included. I gotta admit that I really look forward to receiving nail polish from nailbox every month as you never know what you're gonna get and it's always a surprise to see what polishes and colours they have included, especially as they may not be the choices you'd necessarily make yourself. Here's this month's goods!

Here we have from left to right, a base coat from Elegant Touch, not one I've tried before as I always use OPI Nail Envy as my base. I'll report back, but let me know if you've tried it and how you rate it.

Next up is this gorgeous bright green from Nails Inc called 'Queen Victoria Street'. This went on like a dream, almost opaque in one coat, but I did two here, formula was spot on!

Next up is a purple metallic polish from Sinful Pro Shine, not to be confused with Sinful Colors and it took me a while to seek them out. These retail at £7.95 each a bottle.

I love the way all of the polish bottles in this months box have the silver cap. Makes me think they're a bit fancy!

This one is a gorgeous colour called  'Show Off' however I found the formula on this a little thick, again I used two coats to get opaque.

This month nailbox included some nail art brushes, which will always go to good use, there is no branding on these so not sure what company they are from.

Last up is a black polish from a brand called True Brit London, this is another brand I've never tried or even heard of. Great formula, have no complains about this one, went on like a dream, may even be a one coater. I layered this over the above polishes as you'll see in my manicure below, so it will need putting to the test. The polish is called 'Taxi Cab' and retails for £12.50, so already you can see that £15 a month for this subscription service is a great deal.

My challenge next was to create a creepy manicure with my new polishes, so had a scout around on the inter-tubes and found this halloween inspired manicure on Lucy's Stash. I created this look using all the polishes above and a white crackle from China Glaze! Here's what mine looks like.

I'm not sure if the green wasn't dry or if it's just highly pigmented as it made the white crackle go yellow, I like it though, more creepy!

Here's some close ups...

Overall another great selection from nailbox, I wonder if we'll be getting something Christmas related in the next box?

Confessional of a Nail Polish Addict - Part 2

I've done it again, I only popped in to SuperDrug to buy, well I don't know what and out I walked five minutes later with three brand new polishes in my bag. The next day I purposely went to a different SuperDrug to see if I could pick up the rest of the set... 

So here is my reasoning, SuperDrug have been selling these 2true polishes for a while and I've read from other Bloggers that these are great for stamping. I can confirm they are... I created this mani last night will little trouble from the polish, plate or stamper!

Usually these retail for £3.99 each and it seems that SuperDrug may be discontinuing this line as all 2true cosmetics were on sale for £1. I managed to pick up the red, blue and purple on my first visit and bagged the green and the teal on my second. These as the names suggests are metallic polishes and swatched really well with only two coats to make opaque.

Along with the Metallic polishes I also picked up three others from their Salon Shine line. I already had the purple from this collection which I bought over a year ago so I picked up the other three. I think there are only four colours.

Again formula was great on these polishes and two coats were used on the following swatches, in particular I really like the shade of red and orange. 

These are an absolute steal at £1 each and because I had clocked up some SuperDrug Points it cost me a total of £6 for all 8 polishes, what a BARGAIN! So get yourself down to your local SuperDrug if you fancy picking up these lovelies, before they're all GONE!

Seeing Spots - Off Centre Dotticure

So as I'm on this supposed 'No Buy' and probably remain on it till the end of the year, it's time to return to my untried polish stash and see what designs I can conjure up.

 These two polishes are my favourite type, dark and vampy with a slight metallic finish to them, and I thought they'd make a pretty good pairing allowing me to tick TWO more polishes off the untried list.

These gorgeous beauties are:

No7 - Temptress (The burgundy one)

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri - Grape Escape

Lovely colours and formulas, only two coats of Grape Escape but three coats for Temptress. I kept this manicure for a day and then decided I needed to jazz it up a little. So searched Pinterest and saw a design where the dotting was only on one side of the nail. So this is what I did. I kept the colours to gold, silver and copper, and then decided to add a few dots of the alternate base colour to finish off.

I'm now eagerly awaiting the arrival of Septembers NailBox this is the only polish I'm allowing myself, yeah right). Think this one is gonna be Halloween themed so spooky manicures coming your way soon...

Bokeh Nails

Many Nail Art Bloggers and Vloggers are doing the 31 Day Challenge this month and I'm missing out as I thought it was next month as there are 31 days in October but not September. The challenge is to do a different manicure every day for 31 days based around the following themes.

I've completed this challenge twice once in January this year and for the first time in September last year (why I thought it was October, I have no idea).

Whilst following others progress I came across a nail art technique called Bokeh so thought I'd have a go. Bokeh is a photography effect where you blur a background on a photo so that it appears as little circles of light, much like the affect on the 31 Day Challenge image above.

I first found inspiration from ohmygoshpolish who created Bokeh nails for her Day 1 Red Nails manicure, here's what she did and how she did it:

I followed her tutorial to create my look but used blue varnish along with white and a light metallic blue as my base.

 

Very happy with how this manicure turned out, I think next time I'll do more layering of the dots to give the design more depth, I only did three layers, so maybe so four next time.

THEN I saw this tutorial for Bokeh Nails when rummaging through YouTube created by Cute Polish, so I thought I'd give this a go too. Super easy to do, actually both of the nail art effects are and they really look amazing.

I omitted the gold accents, and used purple, blue, pink and teal colours, but you can use what ever colour combination you want.

 

Really love the way these look, I'm wondering what these might look using black acrylic paint to create the Bokeh-lites!

Which one do you like best, or have you tried Bokeh nails, and how did you create the effect?

Confessions of a Nail Polish Addict

When I realised that I had a nail polish addiction it was already too late and I had amassed over 200 bottles of the stuff! I'm not sure what exactly, and still don't fully understand why this cosmetic has captured my imagination.

I was never into make-up as a teenage and only recently towards my late thirties have I taken all that must interest in the confusing and overwhelming world of beauty products out there and how to apply them to your mush!

However I have always had a creative side and perhaps that's why I love it so... the multitude of colours (I have about 50 purple polishes and I swear no two are the same) the effects and things that you can do with them is endless and only limited by your own imagination. Nail polish manufacturers, mostly indie, are forging the way with new effect polishes whether the trend be crackle, thermal, textured, flakies or holo's and the designs that nail bloggers and vloggers are coming out with every week delights and surprises me.

Now I own over 500 polishes and even this doesn't seem to be enough, just this last week when self proclaiming my own 'No Buy' did I buy 6 more bottles!

First up is a polish I've been hankering after for a while. It's a green scattered holographic polish from Orly called 'Sparkling Garbage'. I picked this up in a set of two polishes from TK Maxx for £9.99. So not a bad price for Orly polishes as one bottle from the brand can set you back as much.

I'm not sure if you can layer this polish up to full opacity, so I used it as a topper to a polish I bought from Next called 'Anaconda'. Next have a relatively small selection of polishes in their stores but the colours and glitters they have are apparently irresistible! Their bottles are a unusual rectangular shape and every time I've visited the shop they are 3 for 2, so I now own 9!

I've also been lusting after OPI DS's polishes. Mostly the first set they brought out which is like gold dust and has the most amazing linear holographic polishes. I spotted this next one again in TK Maxx for £3.99 and had to bag it. Again you can pay up to £15 for these silver capped bottles.

This polish is bright red and has a gold shimmer running through it, seen more in the bottle than on the nail unfortunately. It's also quite sheer, probably the reason it was in TK Maxx, and took three coats for some sort of opacity. I topped this one off with another polish from Next called 'Miami Heat' a gorgeous red and gold sort of flakie glitter. They're not flakies in the conventional sense, but the glitter in this polish isn't of any discernible shape.

So I've failed miserably on not buying polish, the only way I can see myself stopping is by not going into any shops that sell it! I still plan to resist, how long for I don't yet know...

nailbox - July Review

This week I received my second box of goodies from nailbox and was very impressed with what I found inside. Apparently nailbox usually post about the content of their monthly subscription service but this month was a mystery with the teaser of a Tropical Theme.

Here's what was inside!

OPI - Kiss Me I'm Brazilian

Barry M - Need for Speed 

China Glaze - White on White

Elegant Touch - Cuticle Eliminator

AND a MoYou Tropical Stamping Plate and Squishy Stamper

Here's the plate with images in full:

These images are slightly smaller that some of the ones I've seen on other MoYou plates, but plenty big enough for my little nails. I did a couple of stamping manicures with this and the squidgy stamper you also get in this box works a treat.

Here was my first go, I painted a black base and then used two MoYou stamping polishes I already had in pink and blue to stamp with and create this gradient stamping. I fancied a matt look so popped a matt top coat over the whole caboodle to finish the look.

Rather pleased with the overall effect. Then I decided to use the polishes in the box to create a new manicure with palm trees.

First I painted my nails with two coats of China Glaze 'White on White' let those dry and then sponged the Barry M and OPI polishes over the top to create the gradient. The Barry M was picking up the previous gradient layer, not sure if this was due to it being a quick dry polish or if my white base wasn't completely dry. So I sponged the gradient three times to get the colours bright. I also used a liquid latex to cover my cuticles before sponging the gradient. Much less clean up.

I topped coated with HK Girl and as it was late, left the stamping bit for the next morning.

I used all three palm tree designs from the Plate and I also wanted some birds in the design too, but didn't have any stamping plates suitable, so just painted these on free hand. Then when dry just finished off with a regular top coat as I didn't want to smudge the design.

As for the polishes the OPI and China Glaze as always were spot on. The China Glaze was a little runny so make sure you do thin coats as it will pool in your cuticle if you load the brush up with polish. Also my step daughter painted her nails with the Barry M polish and it dried super quick.

Well done nailbox I love what you sent me this month, and what I'm also super impressed with is that as I have A LOT of polish, so far not received anything I have already!

Can't wait till August's box. Have you subscribed to nailbox, and what do you think of the service and what designs have you created with this months Tropical Treat?