From the Vault: H+M - Norwegian Sky (inspired by Maria)

Hi everyone,

as I didn't get around to work on the pictures of my purple TNCC manicures for the current month, here's another manicure from the vault.

The base for this manicure is H&M Norwegian Sky, a light blue with pink to blue duochrome shimmer. It looks a little minty on me though. The shimmer is quite obvious in the bottle, but it gets rather lost on the nail. The shimmer is probably at fault for the weird consistency of this polish. You have to be quite careful while applying this one. It's a pretty blue still.

Since the shimmer is taking a back seat here, I decided that the manicure needed something else and I decided on adding a couple of flowers inspired by Maria. While Maria's flowers look so flawless, mine look a bit forced, don't they? Haha. Well, gotta practice!

I totally forgot about the week with my glued broken tip, haha...

Materials used:
- H&M Norwegian Sky
- white, blue and green acrylic paint

Hm, I feel like wearing this again, but I feel the stares of aaaaall my untrieds...

As always, thanks for reading!

Misslyn - Dark Seduction (Swatch)

Hello everyone,

today I want to show you a quick swatch of one of my newer polishes. I never intended to buy it from just the promo pictures, but seeing it in store, this and one more polish ended up coming with me to the cashier. Today's polish is by Misslyn and has both the number 211 and the name Dark Seduction. It belongs to their current trend edition "hot glam".

Dark Seduction was not my first pick from the collection, but I think I like it the best out of the three I bought altogether. It's a dark red jelly base filled with tiny black and golden glitter. Due to the jelly qualities, the golden glitter turns to different shades of pink depending on how deep it is 'buried' in the layers of polish. I like that. Well, I like jellies... + glitter in them = love.

I'm wearing two coats without topcoat here and looking at my pictures, it could definitely use a third to make it more opaque.. In real life, it didn't look patchy around the cuticle at all and due to all the glitter there was no visible nail line either. Drying time was average, removal rather easy for a glitter. At least on me.

I'll definitely wear this again. It's a red and I like it which is rarely the case!

Thank you for reading!

TNCC - Technique Month #1 - Galaxy Nails

Hi guys,

today, I want to show you the first manicure I intended to post for the The Nail Challenge Collaborative's September theme "techniques". I decided to try techniques that I never did before and the first thing I knew I had to try were galaxy nails. I never tried them. I know that they're not very hard to do, but you know, there are so many awesome galaxy manicures floating around the internet... and I seriously love looking at them. I didn't want to try and end up not liking mine... So I kept hesitating. But when this theme was decided, so were my first galaxy nails.

I wanted to start with an easy one, so I did not attempt to recreate real nebulae. (But those are awesome!) I'm happy with my first try and it will certainly not be the last.

It's intersting how different they look just depending on the light. They looked a little bit more awesome in real life, but my camera just couldn't capture the shimmer and the scattered holo bits.

I'm a little sad that I didn't manage to take pictures before going to work... pleae excuse the tip wear. And ignore my sad cuticles too, please. I had tears in my eyes while going through my pictures... o.o"

Materials used:
- p2 eternal
- p2 gigantic
- p2 trouble
- p2 flamboyant
- p2 attraction
- p2 elegant
- Manhattan 124
- Illamasqua Load
- KosmetikKosmo Polarlicht

Yeah, a lot of p2. I had just bought a huge batch of used ones for very little money...

Thanks for reading!

From the Vault: Nicole by OPI - Dream Catcher stamped

Hi everyone,

here's another oldie, that I had totally forgotten. I remember that I originally wanted to do a comparison between Nicole by OPI Dreamcatcher and a BeYu polish I had just bought. Looking at the pictures I haven't worked on so far, it appears that the BeYu polish never made it onto my nails. Which means... it's still in my growing box of untrieds... (I don't want to count...)

Nicole by OPI Dreamcatcher is a beautiful light shade of pink with golden shimmer. But an incredibly sheer one. These are at least four coats and it was not entirely opaque with those. So I sponged on some gold polish - I forgot which - and then stamped with white Konad polish and PUEEN 47.

I liked this manicure. It was unusually delicate for me back then, so it was kind of refreshing to wear something so sweet/girly. Also, I liked this polish better on me than OPI Pedal Faster Suzi, which is close, but has silver shimmer.

Thanks for reading! :)

TNCC - Around the World #3 - China

Hello,

I hope everyone is having a great weekend so far! It's a short one for me, but I hope I'll get around to do some more nail art later!

As I wrote in my second-to-last post, I did most of the manicures for the Nail Challenge Collaborative. I'm going to post these from time to time with the according theme mentioned. So today, I want to show you the last manicure for the theme of August: Around the World. I didn't want to do a "Japan" manicure... I'm doing too many of those. So I decided on China. Close, but something else. Aside from asian food, architecture and silk, I associate pandas with China. A panda manicure it is!

Materials used:
- essence Black is back
- Kiko 626 Lawn Green
- black and white acrylic paint
- Stamping Plate

From the Vault: A Blue French

Hi again,

I still have so many manicures ready to post that I did ages ago. Today, I'm going to release one of those from the "ready" folder...

I was inspired by some manicure I saw on Pinterest, but I can't find it anymore. I pretty much recreated it, but I just couldn't paint thin lines that day. Haha... it looks a little silly. ^^; My nails are too short for this sort of manicure.

Materials used:
- OPI Bubble Bath
- OPI Last Friday Night
- white, pink and blue acrylic paint
- loose pink glitter

I practiced simple one stroke leaves here... again. I really want to master this technique, but it's so hard o.O""

Thanks for reading!

TNCC - Favorite Color - #1

Hi everyone,

it has been ages... again. Partly, this was planned, partly... not. In September, I was on vacation and travelled a lot, so I was pretty sure beforehand that it would be a quiet month. But I had planned to still do all four manicures for that TNCC month afterwards.

Well, I had a great time in Japan and, maybe, I'll even write a post about it. But all of that has got a really bad aftertaste now, because I had to find out the night I returned, that three days after I left for Japan... my cat had disappeared and nobody told me. While I understand why my family decided to keep quiet about it, it made things difficult for me - emotionally. My pets are very important to me and when something happens to them, I get extremely emotional. And lagging two weeks behind everyone in that aspect was terrible. They had long accepted the fact that Mio had disappeared and were not really understanding/supporting in any way. They all appeared rather indifferent to me back then and I still can't understand how they could give up searching actively after a mere two weeks and bake elaborate cakes instead of putting up new posters.

I don't know if it would have been better if I had known while being in Japan. Maybe. What I know for sure is that it threw me out of my loop completely. I didn't really do my nails for a couple of weeks, didn't read any blogs, just worked and kept looking for my cat. He's still gone and there's little hope that he will return considering his character. He loved being with the family, so he wouldn't just disappear without any reason. It's too quiet in the house with him missing and even though it has been 10 weeks by now, I'm still not used to him not being here...

But I started doing my nails again. I feel really uncreative since then, but I can't stay in this slump forever. So starting this post, I'll try to not only do my nails, but post the pictures to my blog as well. The posts might be shorter on text for the time being though.

So to get back on track, I'm going to ignore the fact that I have been missing about 9 TNCC manicures until now and just start with the first one for the month of November. The theme is easy: favorite color. I decided on purple, because there were a couple of purple untrieds on my desk. So here you go, a Japanese nail art inspired manicure in purple!

I tried to paint one stroke flowers, but failed. I liked the one on my thumb though...

Materials used:
- p2 sensual purple from the Mirror Mirror on the Wall LE
- Biocura Fliederzauber
- essence Steel-ing the scene from the metal glam LE
- white and purple acrylic paint

That's it for now! Thanks for reading!