London baby!

This weekend I move to London to start my new job so I have been packing like crazy and trying to do some extra nail art to schedule for next week because I will be too busy to blog. A while ago I got the Moyou London plate which has stamping patterns linked to London on it and thought this was the perfect time to try it out.

The base polish here is a fantastic Nails Inc that I have had in my collection for months and never tried. There is just the perfect amount of glitter, you can see it through the cream base and it is opaque in two coats. I give you Nails Inc Grove Cottages:

The patterns included are the tube map, the skyline and a beefeater.

Yesterday I also discovered the app Citymapper which is just incredible- if you are visiting London you need this app, it offers you multiple different ways of transport between points and tells you how long it will take and how much it will cost as well as many other cool features-genius!

I had fun making this little tribute to my new home city (slightly over excited!) if you have any great suggestions for things to do/eat in London please let me know.

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Blue heart nail art

I recently made a list of polishes I want to swatch and one of them was Emily de Molly Turbulence, a gorgeous deep blue jelly polish filled with holographic glitters in different shapes. I paired it with a negative space heart design.

Using negative space is a great way to use a glitter polish which requires a few coats to form the base of a shape. The photo below shows what Turbulence looks like at three coats alone with top coat. When it was released it was fairly unusual for a polish to have those diamond shaped glitters in although they are a little bit more common now.

The polish I used to outline the heart shape is Nails Inc Abbey Road, a very dense holographic glitter. The below photo is blurred to show a little of the colours that reflect off this polish in the sun.

My ring finger has three coats of Colour Club Total Mystery to provide a contrast to the glitter polish. This is a beautiful blue jelly with pink shimmer.

If you are thinking about valentines day manicures this would be an awesome choice- it would work in so many colours and is super super easy if you have any type of nail art brush (or a small paint brush/toothpick etc.).

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31DC Metallic Nails

I was a little stuck for things to do for metallic nails so I pulled out one of my untried glitters. This is Pocket Money Polishes Heart of Glass which has shards of pink and silver glitter in it. I decided to pair this with another one of my untrieds- Crows Toes Minion and some heart nail art. I am absolutely in love with this nail art.

I started with a base of Crows Toes Minion, which is epic by the way! It's a purple to deep teal shifting duochrome with flakies in it. This is two coats:

I then used the polish brush of A England Rose Bower to create two intersecting curves on the nail then did the same slightly further up with Nails Inc Motcomb Street before sponging on Pocket Money Polishes Heart of Glass.

I love that the red frames the top of the heart, Rose Bower is the perfect colour, opaque in a single coat and with a slight holographic flash. Heart of Glass is amazing, the shards are flat on the nail and big enough for it to be obvious that the glitter pieces are irregular. Let me know if you like this as much as I do :). For a bit of whimsy here's a tower I made with all of my Pocket Money Polishes

Tomorrow is Rainbow themed  :)

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31DC Orange

Orange, orange well I could paint on oranges but that's boring lets do something more exciting like waves of orange. I freehanded the waves with the polish brushes in Nails Inc Porchester Place, Essie Sunday Funday and H&M Orange. OK so the Essie is coral but who's checking ;)

I have to show you Porchester place alone, it's a gorgeous peachy orange shade. It was a little streaky on the first coat but perfect on the second.

So this nail art is fairly simple but we still have 29 days to go, I don't want to peak too soon. I also like designs where you use the brushes in the polish- less clean up required.

This mani makes orange wearable for me, I really like it.

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Nail Inc Swatches

I have three gorgeous Nails Inc polishes to share with you today:
Nails Inc Blenheim Terrace
This is a beautiful blush coloured polish with a shimmer running throughout. Opaque in two medium coats, application was a bit tricky but didn't take over long to correct.

I am undecided over whether this suits my skin tone or not.

Nails Inc Horse Guards Parade
This is a rose gold wonder, it has a pinky gold reflective metallic finish. It looks very classy on and I can imagine it working with all skintones. The first photo is in full sunlight to show just how shiny this is.

Because this a shimmer not a glitter it comes off very easily. I have previously used this in some nail art here. but it was quite hidden in that design so here it is in all its glory.  The next photo is in shade to show off the rosy glow of the polish.

Nails Inc Lowndes Court
This polish is fantastic! This is one coat which applied really smoothly and was incredibly opaque.

This polish is the definition of a blurple, walking the line between blue and purple.

I apologise for the varying nail lengths in this post, these swatches were done over a couple of months.

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Holographic Brush Stroke Mani

I have been seeing brush stroke manis everywhere recently and after trying one out on my friend Heather (which you'll see tomorrow) I decided to do one on myself with a pink, blue and grey colour scheme. I also included two holographic polishes which gave this mani an extra dimension in the sun.

The above photo shows how this mani looks in the shade and the below shows how it transforms in the sunlight:

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Nails Inc Tribal Nails

I put down two coats of one of my new Nails Inc polishes which is a gorgeous grey with orange shimmer. I think it's called Covent Garden Ballet but most of my polishes are currently boxed up for moving out of university and I can't be sure. I got it as part of a set of 10 polishes for £20. I was just going to leave it but then I started doodling with my Barry M Black Nail Art Pen on top of it. I like the finished result:

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Mosaic nails

I saw these nails by One nail to rule them all and decided to do a version of them using Nails Inc Horse Guards Parade as the base and the Barry M Summer Gelly collection for the colours.

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Glittery Fishtail

I wanted glitter and my favourite mega glitter is Nails Inc Maida Vale and I decided to fishtail it with Barry M Black. My camera was not happy with this manicure in any way, it sort of threw a hissy fit and made the photos blurry. You can still see the awesomeness of this manicure though.

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Second May Tricolour Challenge

For my second mani with red, blue and grey I went for a fish braid. The first time I tried this style I didn't like it very much (pastel fish braid) however, I think I have been won over by this colour combination, it's very intriguing and I can't stop staring at my nails. I have used the same polishes as last time (NYC Water street blue, Nails Inc Hampstead Heath and Mavala Berlin) plus a clear based glitter NYC's Gramercy Glitz because I felt like having glittery nails. I have done this as an accent nail mani for simplicity but if I were going to do it across my whole hand I would have started with different colours on each nail so the plaits would look different on each nail.

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My first tricolour challenge!

I recently joined the Crumpet's Nail Tarts and have decided to participate in the tricolour challenge. The idea of the tricolour challenge is that you pick three polishes in three specified colours and then do four manis using these polishes and you can also use black, white, silver, gold and clear based glitter. 

The colours for May are grey, blue and red. This is a great colour combination- I wouldn't normally wear red and blue together but grey acts as a sort of buffer. The polishes I chose are Mavala Berlin (grey), NYC Water Street Blue and Nails Inc Hampstead Heath (red). I decided to start with a multi coloured leopard print:

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Checked nails

I was inspired by a page in Elle Collections magazine for these nails: It's a wall in the Marc Jacobs exhibition at the Louvre but I really liked that the red squares didn't touch in the corners so I decided to replicate it on my nails- easy enough with striping tape.

Here's the inspiration

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