Items Used
piCture pOlish Bonkers
Diamond Glitter from Born Pretty Store (Colour #5)
Glisten & Glow HK Girl Top Coat
Browsing Tag:
Glequins
Last weekend, I was on the hunt for NYC’s new peel off base coat which, amazingly, I found on the first try. While I was there, I spotted the 3 for 2 offer across all cosmetics and inevitably got sucked in to buying two extra bottles of polish! One of them was this new NYC shade I spotted, Velvet Chic. Although we’re a bit trained to think of dark colours as winter nail colours, this caught my eye as a perfect winter shade. It’s like a cool pastel; not too bright but not dull either, just somewhere in the middle as classy to boot.
For the nail art here, I was inspired by this post at Chalkboard Nails although instead of dotting on the colours, I used some little round glequins from Born Pretty Store over NYC Velvet Chic. I think the iridescent effect is interesting paired with the matte top coat.
I topped it off with one coat of Glisten and Glow HK Girl and then one of NYC Matte Me Crazy.
You may remember a mani from last month that contained a few acccent nails with glitter placement resembling the Rainbow Fish. Well, I loved the accent so much that the next day I went to town on the rest and did a full hand of rainbow fish nails! I took some pictures I never posted on the blog which I came across as I was deleting some old files and thought you might like to see. I think all together, this mani probably took close to 2 hours but SO worth it.
Polishes Used
piCture pOlish Swagger
Nicole by OPI Be Awesome
Glisten & Glow HK Girl Top Coat
For July’s Nailvengers challenge, we’ve decided to jump in to glitter placement. We’re all of differing abilities when it comes to this style so you’ll see a really wide range of designs when you visit Brit Nails, Lucy’s Stash, and xAmeliax to see what they came up with for the challenge today. I’ve had these round glitter pieces sitting in my ‘to try’ pile for a while now so I thought today would be the perfect day to debut them.
I started out just placing the dots on randomly with all the colours mixed together but after one nail, I decided I’d rather group them together in combinations of three to four colours so each nail looked different from the next. My favourite is the index finger – a surprisingly compatible combination of blue, purple and coral!
What You’re Looking At
Barry M Coconut
Glisten & Glow HK Girl Top Coat
Rose Gold Zodiac Midi Ring from Astrid & Miyu
Every year, I get sucked in to the July 4th mani mania and end up creating one myself even though I’m not in the US and won’t be celebrating myself!
For the nail art, I used Rimmel Raw as Night, Graffiti Nails Ice White and Sally Hansen Pacific Blue as my base colours.
On my first and middle fingers, I did some glitter placement with Glequins from Born Pretty Store (#3 and #11). There are my stars!
For the stripes, I laid down some striping tape so the white would shine through and then blotted on the red using the textured saran wrap technique. The texture is made from mostly Barry M Burgundy Crush and Rimmel Raw as Night with a tiny bit of Nicole by OPI The Coral of the Story and Graffiti Nails Ice White.
It’s all topped with two coats of Glisten & Glow HK Girl.
The first ever day of The Lacquer Legion is upon us, and what a day it promises to be! Along with my fellow Lacquer Legion admins Chalkboard Nails, Work/Play/Polish and Rebecca Likes Nails, we’ll be announcing a new theme every month and today’s theme is Reinvention.
I must say that like many of you, I was fairly stumped by the prompt at first. After a lot of thinking, I decided to look back to see what I was doing a year ago and see if it was something I could somehow reinvent. It turns out the blog post I published on this day last year was ‘WTF is a Glequin?‘ so I thought today would be the perfect opportunity to dive back in to Glequin nail art and ‘reinvent’ it with a more grown up look.
You can follow all The Lacquer Legion action on Instagram (Statigram link), Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook using the hashtag, #LLReinvention and don’t forget to share your links on The Lacquer Legion’s Facebook Page.
I used Barry M Burgundy Crush as my base colour.
One nail at a time, I used one coat of clear nail polish and stuck on the diamond shaped glequins (colours #2 and #5) using a toothpick dipped in clear polish to make it sticky at the end. I actually filmed a tutorial for applying Glequins which you can see on my YouTube channel here!
It’s all topped off with two coats of Glisten and Glow HK Girl to smooth everything over.
So here we are! The 31st and final day of the challenge. I definitely enjoyed it more this time around than I did in previous years. I know that because not once did I consider giving up part way through! It’s always so satisfying when you get to the end of a big task like this that you commit yourself to and see through to the very end. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m very proud of myself right now!
For the last prompt of the challenge, we have to honour nails we love. There’s one manicure that I’ve loved since the moment I saw it and it’s by Deniz, a now-retired nail blogger, at Emerald Sparkled. This particular manicure is titled Look Rich, Be Cheap and since I first saw it back on that day in February 2012, it’s been burned in to my memory. I have a long standing love of glequins and I think I can pinpoint Deniz’s mani as the one that sparked it! Black and gold is a favourite of mine and I think Deniz’s design is so timeless. It’s jazzy but very elegant at the same time.
I used W7 Black as my base colour and used round glequins from Born Pretty Store to frame my nails. (Video tutorial here)
The Chanel decal is also from Born Pretty but they don’t seem to be selling them any more.
I topped it all off with two coats of No7 Stay Perfect Top Coat.
In other news, I’m headed to London tomorrow for the Cosmopolitan Blog Awards where I’m nominated in the Best Established Beauty Blog category. I’ll be teaming up with Allie, Lucie and Alice; all my fellow nail blogger nominees and I’m so excited to get there and meet everyone but very nervous at the same time. I’m still at a loss for something to wear on my nails and I only have the rest of the evening to decide! Can you say #nailbloggerproblems?
Day 31: 2011
Catch up with the 31 Day Challenge on Pinterest!
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