Golden Rose #70 and water decals from Ali Express

Couple of weeks ago I've ordered a huge set of water decals from Ali Express. I don't even know why it took me so long to do a mani with one of the designs. It so fantastically easy and fun to wear!

I wasn't impressed with the wearability of these decals - after a day on my quite soft nails I had a serious tip wear and some white spots where the color had rubbed off. Maybe my top coat layer was just too thin? Let's hope other decals from the set would hold longer...

What I prefer to do with water decals, is to do the accent nails first and then select the complementary color using my huge swatch collection. No magic or great creativity involved ;)

This time I went for my new Golden Rose polish. This brand is new to me - I haven't seen Golden Rose polishes in Germany and decided to buy some during my trip to Istanbul. Since GR polishes are quite low priced compared to Essie and OPI I didn't have high expectations in regards of quality, but I was positively surprised!
Rich Color collection has a wide brush, which I loved. The formula of this pastel-ish green color (elegantly named #70 ;) ) was great: full coverage in two easy coats, no bland spots or chalky streaks.


Base color for the decals: Essence matte white
Color: Golden Rose Rich Color #70 Read More......

Floral mani with Priti NYC Baby Blue Eyes

Priti NYC is a 5-Free indie nail polish brand from the US. Baby Blue Eyes is such a cute color, I instantly fell in love with it. It reminded me of the Forget-me-nots, which were the inspiration for my floral mani:

My index finger and the pinkie are Baby Blue Eyes, the flowers are acrylic paint. I was really surprised how durable this polish was. My nails are quite soft, but this mani looked good for five full days, which almost never happens to me.

Base color: Mesauda white and two coats of Priti NYC Blue Eyes, bought on Amazon Germany
Flowers: acrylic paint

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Summer floral mani

With the sunny days and flowers everywhere, I was in the mood for a light floral mani :)

This mani was super easy - the flowers are basically overlapping dots. I used three pink and two green polishes. I got the idea from this fantastic tutorial by Fallinnailove.

Base color: white Mesauda 03
Flowers: Dance Legend #883, Revlon Bubble Gum, Essie Skirting the Issue
Leaves: random green polishes :) Read More......

31DC2014, Day 07: Black & White Nails

I'm going through the topics of last September's 31 Day Challenge - why not use them as the inspiration for your next mani? :) Here are my black and white nails:

For this mani I followed "Dabbed Floral Nail Art" tutorial made by Lindsay of Wondrously Polished. She is one of most talented and creative nail art bloggers out there and I'm a huge fan :).  I used acrylic paint for the dabbed flowers/drops.

Since I still cannot control my brush perfectly, my mani not perfect, but I still like it. I expected the painting to take ages, but it was quite ok. The most important thing was to find the right brush - I went for medium sized nail art brush, not the thinnest I have.

Base color: one coat of Cult Nails Fetish
Dabbed Pattern: white acrylic paint

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31CD2014, Day 03: Mint Polish Tart

Last week I only managed to do one mani for the  31 Day Challenge - Yellow Nails:

I wanted to do a floral mani for ages, so it took my favorite yellow - the cute Tart by Mint Polish (reviewed here) - and set to work.

I used my small nail art brush and acrylic paint. I mixed white and black paints and layered different shades of grey over each other - darker grey first, then light grey, then some medium grey on top.
I love how cute this mani looks!

I'm always surprised, that it doesn't take ages to do such a mani. Maybe because it looks like you'd need hours to paint all these small flowers. But believe me, it's much faster - the flowers don't have to be perfect, just small. A tiny, cut down brush does the trick for me. Check out this tutorial  on how to cut your brushes.

Base Color: Tart by Mint Polish, bought through their website with delivery to Germany. Hypnotic Polish is also an option if you are located in Europe. Read More......

31DC2014, Day 02: advanced stamping

Topic #2 for the  31 Day Challenge is Orange Nails. Orange is so not my color, so I didn't even have an idea what to do until I saw this vintage wallpaper pattern on Pinterest:

I've searched through my stamping plates and came up with this:

This time I tried the advanced stamping technique - coloring the design on the stamper and then stamp over a slightly tacky top coat as shown in this tutorial.
Although the technique on itself worked great for me, I'm less than thrilled with my nails. Somehow the final design doesn't work for me... :-/ But good to know this technique is pretty easy, so I can do better next time ;)

Base color: Essence Flashy Pumpkin
Stamping: pattern from MoYou Pro XL 06 plate, stamped with Mundo de Uñas Chocolate. Flowers colored with OPI My Vampire Is Buff

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Roses with Dance Legend 186

I was seeing these beautiful floral manis all over the internet - roses, sunflowers, violets, daisies... I decided it's time I learn how to paint flowers. So here is my fist attempt on roses:

I didn't know how to create this shading on petals, so I watched countless tutorials on youtube. Just search for roses... and spend the evening glued to the screen ;)

I used nail polishes and a very, very thin brush which I cut down as shown in this post (scroll down, there is a link to a tutorial how to cut your brushes).

It was a bit easier than I thought and surprisingly didn't take ages. The main thing is actually to have a thin brush and try to paint with very light strokes. I tried not to press the brush too mush, just barely touch the nail. Frankly, at first it looked really bad, but my top coat blended the colors together and it looks kind of cute now, right? 

The Dance Legend polish #186, which I used as my canvas is "solar active"  - it changes color to pink, when exposed to the sun. In my case the effect wasn't as as strong as shown on their shop page, but it was still very pretty - maybe I just move my hands to much when I talk :D. And the shadow/indoors color is just pure elegance for me. As for the formula, it's a dream - not streaky, self-levelling and fast drying. I'm wearing two coats.

Base color: sun active Dance Legend Magic Sun polish #186, bought online in their shop. If you are in Germany or North Europe, Hypnotic Polish  shop would be a better option.
Roses: pink Inglot 674 (from my NY trip), white highlights with Barry M Coconut (got it in here, Germany only )
Leaves: Formula X Fearless (the same NY haul) and darker Leighton Denny Femme Fatale (TK Maxx outlet) Read More......