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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Uberchic Plate 2-02: gingham check nails

It was really hard to decide which image to take from my new ÜberChic stamping plates. This simple, but cool pattern comes from plate 2-02 from the Collection 2. The image and the etching are flawless, it's my stamping skills which aren't spectacular. ;) It seems, I just cannot stamp straight lines. But I like this mani anyway! Somehow this candy color combination is just cute and reminds me of the  girly dresses from the fifties. :)

Base colors: I'm not 100% sure about which polishes I used, but it has to be Mesauda #91 and matte pink Inglot  #702, which I covered with Seche Vite afterwards.
Stamping: ÜberChic plate 2-02 stamped with MdU polish Holland Blue from the Frozen set.
Studs: pastel colored mini studs from Born Pretty Store


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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......

Advanced stamping with UberChic stamping plate 1-02

After ruining my nails with water sports during my holiday and suffering for at least 3 weeks afterwords, I'm finally happy to be able to do my nails again. Yeey!

The nail art community was going crazy over the ÜberChic stamping plates in the last months, so of course, I had to have them too ;) The flower image comes from the plate 1-02 from the Collection 1.

I've tried the stamping decal technique before, but never managed to get it right - either I would mess up the placing of the image or the decal would melt on the cuticle line during clean up.

This time I tried a new advanced stamping method - colouring the image and transferring it to the nail directly, without covering it with a top coat first. I still managed to smudge it a bit, but I'm totally amazed how easy it was.
There are tons of tutorials on advanced stamping, one of the first I've seen was this one by Lucy's Stash. Another one of my favourites is by San-tie Nails:

Base color: Flormar Matte White Board and two coats of Pierre René #236
Stamping decal: flower image from ÜberChic plate 1-02 stamped with MdU polish Blue Navy from the Frozen set , filled with Essie Bikini So Teeny. Read More......

Aqua dotticure

Hello ladies, my next mani an aqua colored dotticure:

Couple of months ago I've seen a beautiful mermaid scales mani at one of my favorite blogs -  The Nail Polish Challenge. I thought the idea was awesome and wanted to recreate this mani for ages. I should have looked at the pictures again before dotting away- I forgot to order the dots in the scale pattern. I still like the result, but it's not even close to Kelli's pure awesomness.

I used different shades of teal/mint green and my biggest dotting tool. It did take some time to create this mani, but it was exceptionally easy :) China Glaze Kinetic Candy (lightest aqua shade) Kiko #344 (medium aqua shade) Kiko #387 ("dirty" aqua ) Kiko #527 (aqua shimmer) Kiko #530 (dark glitter) Next time I'm definitely going for more glitter and more darker dots, like in my inspiration :)

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Topatopa stamping plate TP05 review

Hey ladies, I was growing out my acrylic nails, so these are finally my natural nails! Yee-haw!

The 2010 Miu Miu Spring collection showed the famous swallows print, which has been copied by every low priced fashion brand ever since:

Source: miu miu

I used a fabulous topatopa stamping plate TP05 to recreate this pattern. Topatopa is a French brand which somehow didn't show up much in popular US/Canadian nail art blogs. What a shame! Isn't it totally cool?

Source: Topatopa.fr

This plate is absolutely fabulous - even the fine lines of the rose pattern in the middle are perfectly etched (great for decals btw!). The shop delivers internationally, shipping to Europe was very reasonable (€3,55 for 4 plates).
How do you like it?

Base color: Inglot O2 #674
Stamping: topatopa TP05 stamped with MdU Black.  They ship worldwide.
Matte top coat: Wax Me by Cult Nails Read More......