piCture pOlish Friday #1 - 'Siren Song'

Hey lovelies!
Every Friday for the next 4 weeks I will be sharing a new piCture pOlish shade with you! They have sent me four for review and I'm sooo excited! :D

PS. Most of the photos in this post are taken in my new light box setup! Let me know what you think. :) I still can't resist taking a few shots outside like I usually do.

This is Siren Song, which is a collaboration shade made with Rebecca from Rebecca Likes Nails. Rebecca was one of the first bloggers I ever followed so it's really cool to own a polish she helped design! The inspiration behind it actually has something to do with Blink 182 which I think my fiance would find pretty cool haha.

Siren Song is a beautiful mint green with lots of silver micro glitters throughout.
The polish is a little thin and sheer, and to be honest, quite streaky on the first coat, so you will need 3 coats for opacity. The glitters dried slightly gritty but one coat of top coat sorted that out.

In the pictures, it looks like this polish gave me total lobster hands but in person it really doesn't so I don't know what's up with that!
The shimmers were so shy in my photos. :( But in person it is really sparkly and the shimmers are very visible.

piCture pOlish

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*Product(s) in this post were provided to me by the company or PR for my 100% honest review. For more info please read my Disclosure Policy*

Getting Back Into Stamping.

I've been wanting to get back into doing more nail art recently, but I'm not very good at coming up with ideas; hence why I'm always doing 'inspired' manicures.
Well, today's nail art is inspired by something - but it's not somebody else's nail art.

I started by creating a gradient with Essie A Crewed Interest, Revlon Buttercup and Essie Mint Candy Apple. My gradient was inspired by this picture from Pinterest. :)

{ I have a gradient tutorial video here if you are interested in seeing how I did this. }

I have been wanting to work on my stamping skills also, and I felt the gradient was too plain.
I stamped over the gradient using the flip flop images from Bundle Monster plate BM-309. I used this black polish from Born Pretty to stamp with. I kind of wish I hadn't stamped over the gradient - it looked prettier on its own. Oh well. *sigh*

Thanks for visiting! ♥

Birthday Cupcake Manicure ♥

Hi guys! Happy weekend. :) Hope you have a great one.

Yesterday it was my awesome friend, Danni's, birthday! :) We had a surprise party for her and I did some nail art especially for it.

This manicure was totally copied from just1nail from Instagram. {I know that a lot of lovely ladies all did similar manicures like this to celebrate a birthday, but I first saw it on just1nail.} If you don't follow her already, by the way, her nails are so cute and she does amazing designs!!

The polishes I used in this manicure are:

OPI Pink Friday

OPI You're Such a Budapest

OPI Kiss Me On My Tulips

OPI Princesses Rule

Essie Mint Candy Apple

Essie Bikini So Teeny

Sinful Colors Snow Me White

Essence Make It Golden

I have a tutorial {here} for the chevron/zig zag design if you are interested in how to do that. But that's not actually the technique I used this time, as I hadn't prepared any decals beforehand. This time, I did this:

1) painted my base colours & let them dry totally.

2) cut up some little strips of sticky tape with my pinking shear scissors into the zig zag shapes {the same way I did in the tutorial}.

3) applied the tape to my nail and made sure I stuck it down really, really well.

4) painted over the tape with white polish.

5) quickly peeled up the tape to reveal my zig zag design! :)

Hopefully that little faux-torial was easy to follow. Haha. If you'd like to see a quick video tutorial I would be happy to do that for you some time soon!

Thanks for visiting! ♥

Mint Manis for Talia Joy

Hi guys.
You may have heard earlier this week (or before) about a girl named Talia Joy. She was a 13 year old girl who loved makeup & beauty. She was really talented and she was even on the Ellen DeGeneres show earlier this year. Talia was diagnosed with cancer when she was only 7 years old and this week she sadly passed away. Talia was inspiring to a lot of girls and she will be missed by many all around the world.

Talia's last Instagram photo was of her mint nails, so to remember her a bunch of nail & beauty lovers around the world will be sporting mint polish on their nails today (19th July).
Join in and post your mani on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/your blog and use the hashtag #mintmanisfortaliajoy.

For my mint manicure, I used my absolute favourite mint polish, China Glaze Re-fresh Mint.

Thanks Nail Polish Wars for organising this. I think it's a lovely way to remember Talia.

Stop The Press + Mint Candy Apple

Hello ladies. I have a quick-ish post about my NOTD (nails of the day) that I wore on Tuesday to share today. I usually take ages to post my NOTDs on here because I let them pile up but I didn't have anything ready to post today so...
I don't always share my NOTDs here on my blog because sometimes they're really plain/boring or colours I've already shown on my blog, or sometimes I just don't have time to photograph them before the sun goes down haha, but I almost always post a NOTD photo on my Instagram when it's not going to be on the blog so follow me there if you'd like to see more "behind the scenes" stuff haha.
Anyway, onto this NOTD... :)

For my base colour I've used Essie Mint Candy Apple, a super pretty minty green creme. It's more blue toned than China Glaze Re-fresh Mint which is one of my fave mints.
I've heard that this colour has a bad formula, but I found it to be quite nice! I only needed 2 coats and honestly there was minimal streaky-ness. I used 2 coats of this polish.

I topped Mint Candy Apple with Ulta3 Stop the Press, which is a new polish from their newly released "Glitterati" collection, made up of all sparkly and glitter shades.
Stop the Press is a clear base with black & white glitters. It's my new favourite black & white topper! :D Amazing, especially for only $2! If I see another bottle of it soon I will definitely be grabbing a back up or two! Haha. They also released a clear base with the black glitters only which I haven't tried yet but I'm sure I will soon. I've only seen this collection in one shop near me so they'll probably take a while to spread out to all of the shops that stock Ulta3. The glitters that were released around Christmas time only just started popping up everywhere near me!

Do you have a favourite black & white glitter topper? :)

Mint with Chevrons

Hi guys! I was inspired by It's All About The Polish aka Theresa a while back when she posted this pretty mint mani! And I decided I wanted to do something similar! :)

Although I'm not the type of girl who strictly wears dark colours in winter and bright colours in summer, I do usually gravitate toward the darker colours in winter (though in all honesty I'm not the biggest dark polish fan anyway). So yes even though it's now officially winter and already freezing cold, I don't mind rocking the pastel nails. :D

I used my favourite mint green creme, China Glaze Re-fresh Mint with Femme Fatale Shimmering Snowcap on the middle finger.

I used Sinful Colors Snow Me White for the chevron stripes, and some zig zag scissors (aka pinking shears haha). I wasn't super happy with how my how my chevron stripes turned out. I don't think I spaced them out right. It would've looked much better on long nails like Theresa's haha. I had to use 2 coats of top coat on that nail to smooth out the stripes but it still felt pretty bumpy lol. Not really sure how to fix that next time. :(

Hope you like this mani... because I LOVE the chevrons (even though they turned out bumpy) and want to do more! And if you have any idea how I can make my chevron accent nail smooth without having to do 293749237 layers of top coat. :/

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China Glaze Keep Calm Paint On

Hey guys! I have a quick post for you today. I wore this polish a couple weeks ago haha. My nails were really short so I wanted to wear something I knew I would like.

Before I show you - have you checked out my Blog Sale yet?! :) There's still lots of polish available and I keep adding to it, too. So if you looked a few days ago, have a look again because I've added some more stuff! :D I've also reduced the prices, but the prices aren't really set. If you think that I've asked too much for a polish and you want it, just email me and we can discuss it. :)

All orders of $20+ will get some free goodies too. ♥

So, anyway onto the polish!

This is China Glaze Keep Calm, Paint On from the Spring 2013 collection. It's a mint green with a silver shimmer! I don't think the shimmer is visible in my photos.

I wasn't sure if I'd love this colour at first because of the shimmer but I did really love it. I always love mint greens, though. :)

Do you love mint greens like me?! :) I can't get enough.

Oh - and come back in about 15 hours for something really exciting. ;)

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