Pick N Mix Week 7 - Wild Animals / Yellow

I am a secret lover of yellow nails. Painted yellow, not just stained from too much polish yellow. I think they look super summery as long as you find the right tone of yellow for your skin. If you pick the wrong one you tend just make your hands - and thus by extension, yourself - look a little ill.

I tried this mani first with pastel yellow and had to change it - I liked the colour, but a) I wasn't sure if it liked me, and b) it got totally overpowered by the dark grey.

Pick N Mix Week 6 - Domestic Animals / 3 shades of blue

Late post this week and I do apologise - work has been super hectic and its been all that I could do to keep awake for tea before falling asleep on the couch.

This is what should have been posted last week, which was domestic animals OR 3 shades of blue.

I went with 3 shades of blue.

Pokemon Challenge Gen II, Round 17 - Steel Type

I'm nearly at the end of the Gen II pokemon journey, which makes me both sad and excited. Sad, because I'm almost done, and excited because I totally can't wait to do Gen III in the new year! Stay tuned for more details in the next month on that one, but first - the last type group of the challenge, Steel.

Steel was one of the new types introduced in Gen II, along with Dark, and its another of the types that I don't really use often. Some existing Gen I pokemon were retyped as dual-type to include steel, so I've gone for one of these this week...

ER31DC Week 29 - Inspired by the Supernatural

I did try and do mermaids for this one, but only after I had painstakingly painted my nails with a super sheer polish did I realise that I did not actually own the fish scale stamping image that I thought I did. And then hand drawn scales came out badly.

So I went on to do the obvious... Vampires.

Not the crappy sparkly kind though. I grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with proper vampires in it.

Pokemon Challenge Gen II, Round 5 - Flying

I was so impressed by Rachael's HootHoot nails for round 1 - he's a dual Normal/Flying type that I thought I'd try it myself for the flying round!

ER31DC Week 17 - Glitter

I don't do glitter a lot, mainly because the cleanup is the biggest chore on the planet. I know there are solutions to this - PVA basecoats, fancy basecoats designed to make glitter removal easier, soaking in polish remover to get evrything off at once - but I'm lazy and impatient, haha. So sadly, this look didn't linger long on my nails.

Which is kinda a shame, because I quite liked it.

ER31DC Week 13 - Animal Print

I was going to be different and attempt giraffe or some variety of neon zebra print and then I tried leopard print and I fell in love with it.

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.

Pokemon Challenge Week 13 - Rock

Because I am Queen of the derpy looking pokemon (judging by my previous choices), I totally couldn't resist doing another odd choice for rock week....

Look at those eyes, how could I not paint that vacant little face?

...Omanyte! Handily, Rock/Water type, which allowed me to test out my latest Sinful Colors buy - Savage, a matte blue.

Extra Relaxed 31 day challenge - Week 1

31 day challenge, as run by Rambles of a Polish Addict. Thankfully this is being run as a 31 week challenge, rather than a 31 day one, else my brain would explode - I have no energy after work during the week to come up with nice manis!

I'm so relaxed about this extra relaxed challenge that I missed the first week, so here's my catch up post and week 2 will happen before the end of the weekend.

The first 10 weeks are colour based, and week 1 is red. I love red. I have quite a few red polishes now but I picked up another one a couple of weeks ago and completely forgot about it until I was raking through my stash this morning..

Blue & Gold

I've not gotten any new polishes this week.

Well, strictly that's not true. I've not bought any new polishes this week. I was, however, gifted some by the fabulous Rachel of Racho's Nail Love as she had two bottles of a Sally Hansen Complete Manicure in Thinking of Blue and she'd bought me Rimmel 60 Seconds in Torrid which is a beautiful dark metallic/shimmery red.

Even better than the two gifts to keep was the fact that Rachel came over for the afternoon and brought her entire polish box.

Her collection completely dwarfs mine. I mean, I thought I was bad with my three little plastic drawers full, but that's nothing on Rach and her humongous box of polish and nail art supplies. Topcoats, base coats, polishes, glitters, indie's, US brands like China Glaze and OPI, brushes, studs... the contents of that box were pretty much endless.

In amongst the boatloads of expensive foreign polish, however, was a bottle of Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure The Sky's The Limit. I've got most of the Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure range thanks to the wonder that is Poundland (or Poundworld, I can never remember which) but this sky blue is an absolutely amazing colour. Its very summery, and I could really do with some summer right now!