31 Day Challenge - Inspired by a colour and a song

It was always going to be purple, I have a thing for purple and why complicate things when the colour says it all. I never really thought of purple as a girls colour, that is pink, but turns out it is. I don't care, it's a great colour and the below is pretty much the perfect shade of purple.

This is Illamasqua 'Faux Pas' and stupidly enough a polish I have never worn since purchasing it. This pic has no top coat as it dries matt, and I kinda like it.

Day 22 was inspired by a song and one of my favourite songs is 'Seasons' by Chris Cornell. The manicure doesn't reflect the songs lyrics, but the title and I tried to theme each nail around the four seasons.

So blue and white if for the Winter, red and orange is for the Autumn, yellow and orange is for the Summer and shades of green is for the Spring. 

I ended up using glitter top coats for extra effect, as my nail art painting of snow flakes and leaves didn't go according to plan. It kinda works except for the Autumn I think.

Going away to Berlin this weekend to run the marathon so the challenge will have to continue when I'm back!

Alien Nail Fest

This Bank holiday weekend I went to visit some friends down South and took along with me some polishes to create this matt finish manicure I saw on Pinterest. 

My friend agreed to help me with the task, and we practised with variations of top coat under the glitter or over the glitter, in the end we did two coats of Illamasqua's 'Faux Pas' topped with OPI's Matt Top coat and sponged OPI Silver Shatter and Orly's 'Fowl Play' on to the tips of the nails.

It didn't quite work out as the image on Pinterest but I really like how the Shatter looked when sponged on the nail and not painted. I'm going to try this effect on it's own with the different coloured shatters I've not used yet. So anyway you can see here that you can tell where the glitter has been applied as the tips are shiny but putting the matt top coat over the glitter really didn't work either, not sure how to make this work.

So I also did my friends nails and she wanted a gradient, so we used a pale mint green polish, Illasmasqua's 'Muse' and a Revlon, I think, polish in a dark blue to create the gradient below.

This was a practise to see if the colours would blend before doing the whole manicure, worked out pretty well I'd say. Then we topped off with a shimmery top coat to seal the design in and give an extra sparkle.

Whilst down South we ventured into London and taken to a Whole Food's Market in Kensington. This place is amazing, so many different brands and foods that you don't see in everyday supermarkets. Every kind of cheese, spice, pulse and grain you can think of, a real foodies paradise... They also sold Nail Varnish...

I restricted myself to one. They stocked Zoya, Butter London, Spa Ritual and one other brand I can't remember the name of. I wish I'd bought the Spa Ritual one I had my eye on too, but I'll settle for this polish called 'Gem' from Zoya.

Look at the colours in the bottle! It looks like a nebular of something equally spectacular in space somewhere. However it does NOT translate onto the nail. As always the formula on Zoya polishes is perfect and the colour is gorgeous, you just don't get the gold swirly cloudiness on the nail.