Pink Wednesday for Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is Breast Cancer awareness month, and what better way to combine a cause with a colour I love but to do Pink Wednesdays with my partner in nail-based crime, Rachael of Racho's Nail Love.

The base for this mani is Nails Inc Elizabeth Street, with the stripes on my ring finger being Nails Inc Walton Place for the middle colour and Catrice Raspberryfields Forever.

The glequins are from Born Pretty Store, from this set of 12 colours. They're great for adding a little extra sparkle to a mani, especially with so many colours in one kit! They are a little hard to manipulate if you don't have (or can't find, curse my poor organisational skills!) a wax pencil, which are totally fab for picking up glequins like this, rhinestones and studs.

An InLinkz Link-up

ER31DC Week 26 - Inspired by a Pattern

Stripes. I love stripes.

Fun With Glitter

As I was playing nice and trying to figure out what base colour & glitter combo to use for my 31 day challenge nails on saturday, I stumbled upon two polishes that I've never really used.

OPI's Thanks A Windmillion is a new purchase from the joy that is Fragrance Direct (OPIs for £3.99? How could I resist!) and is a beautiful pale sage green, wonderfully classy looking and pretty.
Orly's Halo is a super sparkly and super packed gold and silver glitter in a clear base that can easily be used as a full coverage polish - see this post for swatches of it and the other two polishes I got in the trio a few months back.
With one of these polishes being new and the other being a glitter, neither had really been used for anything yet, so I decided to stick 'em together and see what happened - classy, muted green with super bling gold-and-silver.

Long and the short of it - I think its amazing.

Tri-Polish Challenge May - Stripes & Tips

Tri-polish challenge nails #2 - Stripes and Tips.

This was actually the first set of nails I did for the challenge, and I really have to admit that I had completely no direction when doing these nails. I just did stuff, and then these nails happened.

ER31DC Week 12 - Stripes

I love stripes. I'm actually really surprised that I haven't done more stripey manis on here, but then again I only have one roll of striping tape. I'm preserving it haha.

The base colour for this mani was given to me by my Chief Enabler, Rachael of Racho's Nail Love and is Orly Lola. I have a bit of an odd love for all things "offensively pink" as I like to term it, which is quite amusing as I'm not big on the whole girly thing.

ER31DC Week 8 - Metallic

This week, I've gone for a colour combo I've not seen used much - brown and gold.

With it being metallic week I figured I'd have to include either silver or gold in my mani, but after that I was a little stumped. Silver is usually my go-to colour for anything metallic, so I went for gold to try and push myself out of my usual comfort zone of colours... then I sat and stared at my stash for ages. I have reds, pinks, greens... but none of them grabbed my attention. I'd used them all before or they didn't quite look good sat next to gold, until I opened my purple/brown drawer and pulled out one of my as-yet-untried Sally Hansen polishes - Coco-a-go-go from the Insta Dri range.

I'm quite a fan of brown as colour, and as soon as I sat it next to my chosen gold (Ciate's Sand Dune, one of my Marie Claire Freebies) all I could think about was chocolate. I was sold.

ER31DC Week 7 - Black and White

This is a terribly conveniently timed week. I am over the moon.

I live in Newcastle Upon Tyne, where the local religion is football (or soccer to any Americans). Twice yearly we must vanquish the savages from the next city, and the next fixture is sunday.

Newcastle United play in black and white stripes, so my nails this week are dedicated to my football loving other half and his religion.

Pokemon Challenge Week 9

9 weeks in already!

This week is Poison type week, but I realised that I already did my favourite poison type pokemon for Bug week - Venonat. I clearly did not think ahead. So off I toddle to the Bulbapedia to peruse the poison type listing, and I spot the only pokemon I would I want to do on the list....

Arbok.

Then I also realised that I cut my nails short last week and I've not actually got much space to paint an full Arbok on my nails now. So I went abstract.

Work Week Nails - Navy and Nude

Every sunday I do my nails for the week at work. I would say that its usually a more restrained mani, but not always - one week I went to work with 10 different colours on my nails. Everyone in my office knows I'm a little odd.

I've been hankering for a good navy mani for a while and when I looked at Sally Hansen's Thinking of Blue and BarryM Lychee sat next to each other on my desk when sorting out my new Helmer, I decided that a nude and navy set of stripes was exactly what I had been pondering for an absolute age.

I have to admit that the nails themselves aren't looking the best in these photos - Thinking of Blue resists cleanup like there is no tomorrow.

I think my favourite nails are the thumb/accent and pinky, I'm not too fond of the arrow/sunburst shape on the pointer and the horizontal stripes just make my nail look all short and chubby.

ER31DC - Week 2

Ah ha! Caught up.

Week 2 is Orange, a colour I was always convinced I didn't suit until I stopped being afraid of wearing anything that wasn't black. I love orange on nails, and I'm pondering doing a super 70's orange/white/brown mani at some point because that is one of my favourite colour combos ever.

I decided to do an orange skittle as I really couldn't decide what I wanted to do or which orange I wanted to do it with. I found I had quite a few different oranges today, ranging from quite pastel to pretty damn in-your-face.

New BarryM Gellys

The new BarryM Gelly Hi-Shine colours came out Feb 13th in Superdrug - Lychee, Greenberry, Papaya and Dragonfruit. Being not the biggest fan of pinks I opted out of buying Dragonfruit, a bubblegum-pink shocker, and picked myself up the other three. I was massively excited to use them in a mani... and then never really got around to it.

I've used Lychee plenty in my Pokemon Challenge nails, its a beautiful beige-cream colour and perfect for quite a few pokemon, but I've finally gotten around to using my favourite of the lot - Greenberry.

Greenberry is a beautiful light green-y turquoise - not as blue as it appears in the pic above - that dries to a super high shine like the rest of the Gelly range. It goes on quite streaky at first but soon evens out, and would be perfect on the second coat if laid on slightly thickly.

I was originally going to substitute Lychee for Papaya, which is the coral orange/pink, but as much as I love the colour I couldn't bring myself to not use Lychee. Might try some sort of gradient with them tomorrow for work?

Perfect summery solution to the completely unexpected three inches of snow that fell today. I really should watch the weather forecast more...

Done with BarryM Gelly Greenberry, Lychee on my ring finger and LA Colours Art Deco in Black for the stripe.