I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time to see a collection from a mainstream nail polish brand that doesn’t feature a red polish. So imagine my sigh of relief when the China Glaze Happily Never After collection dropped through my door… like a breath of fresh, autumn air.
Stamping
It’s nearly time to wave goodbye to 2016 and I know a lot of us will be happy to see it go. On the whole, it really does seem like 2016 was a pretty terrible year but perhaps that’s because I live in the same pop culture as everyone else on Twitter and I just got sucked into it all. Whatever your thoughts on the last 12 months, I hope everyone is rounding off the year with fun festivities and killer nails!
If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen a very coy sneak peek of these nails yesterday and since it’s my absolute favourite mani for a while I had to honour them with a blog post. I also wanted somewhere to put the video tutorial so you guys could see how I got the gradient effect in the stamp. So, hey if you’re back here from Instagram!
I can never make a trip to Primark without taking a gander at the beauty section. It’s always full of stuff I want but never really need. On trips past, I’ve come away with 3 sets of tweezers (the patterns were pretty), mini beauty blenders (because omg how cute but they’re sooo hard to use because they’re literally titch) and a false eyelash applicator (which I knew would be more of a hindrance than a help, but why not because lol).
I’m not sure which came first on this one… was the rose quartz hue inspired by the marble tutorial, or did I decide I needed some rose quartz nails and hop to that marble technique? I guess if I don’t know now, we never will! It’s quite a subtle effect. Like, REALLY subtle! I think next time, I’ll mix a bit of fuschia in with the ‘lines’ to give it a bit of a ‘pop’.
Did you hear? Minimalism and marble are totally in right now and, let me tell you… I’ve been comfortably seated on that bandwagon for a while!
I spent a while last year trying to figure out a way to create the marble effect on nails that was simple, didn’t require too many tools and wasn’t freehanding. Of course, marble is one of mother nature’s creations so I had in mind something that didn’t look too thought out; a little messy and unpredictable but with that certain understated elegance. Eventually I found this solution using nothing but a nail stamper, a smooth surface, and a toothpick.