So after painting this design all I could see was some sort of deconstructed latte art – anyone else or just me?
I’ve still not got my mojo back (or time) for painting nails but I was bored of seeing them blank, this kind of quick nail art was perfect for my mood.
So I have a bit of an ongoing love affair with the cosmetics brand ‘Kiko’, does anyone else use their stuff? They don’t test on animals and their make-up is really great. I only wear, (therefore only buy) eye make up so that’s all I’ve used but it’s highly pigmented, comes in a great range of colours and is actually really affordable for such quality.
Anyway I thought I would try some of their nail products, firstly these nail wraps. As much as I love to paint my nails there’s sometimes just no time to actually do so, so wraps are a great convenience.
The applied really smoothly, they were reasonably sized and I was able to file off the excess easily. Over all I was impressed! If you wanted to they could have been customized quite easily with say gems or studs or even mixed and matched with nail polishes.
So I’ve seen a lot of random/abstract nail art lately on Instagram (e.g among others, ‘Ninanailedit‘ does the style quite often) and thought I’d give it a go. It was simultaneously freeing but a bit stressful , let me explain.
It was great to just do a blob here, a few spots there, add a line and then voilà. It was quick, in my opinion it looks quite cool and it wasn’t messy. There was no pressure to be ‘perfect’. Done.
But! It was knowing when to stop and also not getting too OCD about it. Is that enough spots? Do the lines have to all point in the same direction? Was that the right colour combination? And so on.
I’d definitely do it again as it was quite fun and I’d recommend for everyone to give it a go!
So I’ve been super quiet on the blog front, apologies. I won’t bore you too much with the detail of the excuses but basically I’ve been super busy and unmotivated. When I did manage to get a minute to myself I just wanted to chill out and couldn’t be bothered with my nails.
ANYWAY! I purchased this super cute washi tape over in Japan. It’s very appropriate for today’s climate which has been considerably snowy. I cut the tape to size and stuck it down, it was actually quite a sticky washi so it stuck no bother. I then top coated it with Seche Vite and viola!
So cast your mind back to Wednesday when I published a review about some Holographic Nail Foil. It looked really pretty until Seche Vite melted it, in to something else pretty but not what I’d signed up for really. This was what I turned it in to, a galaxy design just made sense really with the deep, shimmery tones that were now displayed on my nails after the melting.
So for this simple design. I used ‘Ivory Queen’ for the base, two coats, it’s a very gentle peach, with a slight shimmer of gold. I must say I think it’s a colour I could wear on my nails without feeling the need to add any ‘art’, it’s a warm enough nude colour to not make me look ill (as so many other nude colours do) and also interesting enough for me not to get bored. The hearts are painted with ‘Knickerbockerglory’, how about that for a mouth full! A very bright pink which I’m sure would make an amazing base colour.
So I purchased some nail art supplies out of a shop called ‘Wilkos’ for £1 each – a set of nail wraps, french manicure tip guides and ‘nail jewels’ – 4 little tubs of very fine nail foil. I haven’t seen their nail products before so I was keen to try them. I’ve already used the tip guides for my green ombre on ombre, and they worked great, so today I decided to use the foils and wraps.
The wraps are definitely in the ‘thicker’ category, but not in the ‘too thick’ one – meaning they were able to bend round the nail and hug it, but not pliable enough to get rid of two tiny wrinkles. Still acceptable for £1!
The foil, this is where it gets confusing. The following points about it aren’t meant to be complaints, but they kind of sound like that, but I’m not sure if that means I am complaining about it because it wasn’t actually ‘bad’?… The foil is super fine, I sometimes accidentally blew it away with my breathing or arm movements. It also stuck to everything without much coaxing, my tray and my fingers mainly. I used nail foil glue to make it stick to my nails and I did want the pieces of silver to be small and delicate… However with the foil glue being so sticky and the foil being so keen to attach itself to anything I ended up with big clumsy chunks. Nevermind! I still enjoyed working with it, and really like it?… Confused, I am.
So ‘Chinchilla’ is a really nice grey, blue. However, I can’t tell if it makes my hands look older. (If a polish can do such a thing, I have been a little lax on my moisturizing lately so it could be that too…) ‘Twinkle Toes’ is a loose silver glitter, which of course created a terrible mess, and didn’t photograph well. That’s not to say it’s disappointing, as it’s lovely and sparkly in reality just too messy for regular wearing. My striping tape has also arrived so expect plenty more straight line designs!
So I managed to scored off 4 polishes with this design, leaving 19 more bottles from the calendars to try out! The base colour is ‘Loop the Loop’, the sort of duck egg green is called ‘Apple and Custard’, the dark green is called ‘Tweed and Tails’ and the only one left is called ‘Hidden Gem’. I used my new Seche Vite (how do you pronounce that by the way?) and it’s great. At first it made the nails look fuzzy, not smudged but just odd – but then it kinda cleared up and it dried pretty quickly and with a nice gloss. Yet another great bargain from TKMaxx!
So I was on holiday at the weekend and by the time I got back, I really couldn’t be bothered to paint my nails. (I also wasn’t smart enough to schedule a post, duurr.) Hence why I’m posting on Tuesday instead on Monday, sorry. I’ve never tried a ‘blobicure’ but I thought they looked cool, some are really amazing looking if you google it. I think my attempt turned out not too bad but there’s certainly room for improvement – I’d definitely like to give it another go!
It was such a simple technique that I even painted my left hand as it required no control from my right hand!
WonderfulWolf 