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?