Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 8, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!

So here I am with my take on the last day of our Girly Girl Nail Art Challenge. I'm kind of sad that this is going to be the last challenge manicure... Anyway, today's theme is "girl's just wanna have fun", so I don't really want to start with the sad stuff, haha.

I had some trouble coming up with an idea this time. Since I was travelling last week, I didn't get around to prepare some ideas and mani's in advance. Work this week was also more tiring than I anticipated, thus I realised that today's mani had to be rather simple. I settled with trying the acid wash technique which I have seen on several blogs over the past weeks. Inspired by the coloful manis of my fellow challenge bloggers, I decided to use bright colors also.

Here's my first try on the acid wash manicure:

The polishes I used for this mani are essie Navigate Her, depend 295, Manhattan 51K and essence Sundancer. I got the depend polish when I was travelling in Sweden last week and it's really amazing. I wish the bottles were a bit bigger though...

I was also surprised just how easy it is to achieve this manicure. I prepared this over a total of 3 days because of my lack of time. I just painted a new coat of color on top of the previous every night. On the morning of day 4 I simply took a q-tip, dipped it in acetone and started scrubbing lightly. The acetone melts the different coats of polish quite fast. The longer you scrub, the more the layers are going to show up. I think I needed a total of like 15 minutes to do both hands and I'm confident that you can be faster once you get the hang of it.

Obviously, it might be best to use one coaters because you don't have to melt away so much polish if you are doing as many colors as I did or even more. The depend polish worked great. 51K on the other hand needed two coats and when I started scrubbing, it started to discolor the yellow... I don't know, but the consistency of the polish+acetone was a bit weird. I also think that this kind of mani is actually a great way to touch up a manicure.

What do you think? Have you tried this technique before? What are your results like? Got some tips maybe?

So this was my last girly-girl manicure... This past month has been a lot of fun, I got to know a lot of wonderful new blogs and I was also really overwhelmed with the feedback I got during this time. Thank you everybody, who took the time to comment! I was, and still am, really happy to read all of your comments!

I'm pretty sure this won't be the last challenge I'm participating in, but on the other hand, I'm still sure that I can't handle the daily kind of challenge. If anyone knows of a challenge with a similar time frame or wants to create their own, I'd gladly participate!

Please take a look at all the awesome nail art everybody else has been doing to!

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 7, Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

Haha, I'm soooo behind this week! This post was supposed to be up on Tuesday... and now it's Friday already. It's really interesting how a few days off work just confuse my routine completely. I had a good time in Sweden though, and that's what counts most for me. Plus, I got to buy a few polishes from brands I hadn't tried so far!

Anyway, here is my take on the theme for our seventh day. I took my inspiration from the subtitle "That's what little girls are made of!" My mom is currently working as a day nanny for a little kid just 1 year old and of course, there is all this cute stuff floating around when he is at our house. So I took inspiration from a pattern on his stuff. Ok, he is a boy, but it is a girly pattern to me.

Hm I have to admit, that I consider this mani a fail. It didn't turn out the way I wanted it too. This is partly due to my choice of colors... I'll probably try this pattern again with different colors. I really love my base color though. It's by far my favourite yellow and it's one of the few colors I have a backup of! It's called My Yellow Fellow and it was part of the spring limited edition by essence last year. Since I love it so much, here are a few pictures without weird flowers painted on ;-) My fingers sure look wrinkled here... that's what the foil method does to you....

That's it for today. I hope I'll manage to post my last manicure for this challenge sometime tomorrow!
Thanks for looking! Please don't forget to take a look at the other bloggers' manicures... who have mostly finished the challenge already!

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 6, Who Inspires You?

Good morning from Sweden everybody! I'm a bit late with Day 6 of our Girly Girl Challenge, but since I have some time being the first awake, I thought I'll just write my blogpost. =)
Okay, so the theme of Day 6 is your female role model and creating a nail design in their honor. Most of the bloggers doing this challenge chose their mom and I understand why. I'll have to choose her too, if I want to do a manicure in honor of the person who inspires me the most.

But I'm going to honor another person with my manicure. She's not a role model of mine, but I think she does some amazing nail art. She inspired me with a wonderful manicure that I fell totally in love with. Since it also shows this antique-loving side of my mom, I decided to recreate it. I'm talking about this manicure by Robin Moses. I'm following her blog, always amazed by her freehand nail art, but I seldom feel the urge to recreate a design. I just know I can't do it xD But this time! This time I'd challenge the task!

Robin's video explains really well what you have to do and it didn't seem so hard. So I gave it a try after I had all my "ingredients" together. Hah, easy you wish... My hands hated me for this manicure! But take look first.

It was basically all about creating this antique looking background first. I had to mix myself a color. My hands looked like they were dead with just that color on. I'll remember that for Halloween! Then afterwards, you'd transfer the newspaper. This is actually the first time the newspaper transfered! I was so thrilled about that, haha. Then you are supposed to enhance the antique look by adding really watered down acrylic paint at the side of the nails. And this is where my stuff wouldn't work like Robin's. My cuticles were so flooded with dark brown acrylic paint, just horrible.

Then, using more acrylic paint, you do the flower part. My hand is not as steady as Robin's and my placement of the flowers isn't as neat too, but I still really liked how it turned out. I actually liked it so much, that I didn't change it for a whole weak. I got a lot of people asking whether these are my natural nails or fake ones. They looked a bit fake indeed. So many layers of polish and stuff, several coats of a really glossy top coat to seal it really well... yeah, I suppose it looked like fake nails.

The clean up for this manicure really destroyed my hands though. This is one more reason why I didn't take it off until after a week later.

So those are my nails inspired by Robin Moses in honor of my mom, who is still supporting me a lot these days. She isn't fond of my nail polish addiction and is one of those constantly teasing me about it, but I can usually overlook that. She's there for me when I need her the most and I really love her for being who she is with all her crazy ambitions that make people shake their heads.

Okay, I hope I'll have enough time to create my manicure for Day 7 in time. I'll be back from Sweden by then.

Ah, and one more question. Do I need Make Up Store's "Greta"!? It's the silver holo. I'm not sure if I really want to spend 120SEK on a single polish... does anybody among you have it? What's your opinion?

That's it! Have a great day!

Take a look all the other wonderful manicures too, please!

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 5, Gotta Love Chick Flicks!

So today is Tuesday again, which means girly-girl nail art time! I wasn't sure if I would like today's theme, because it's nail art inspired by your favourite chick flick. Hm. This isn't exactly the kind of movie I like to watch, so I actually had to search the internet for a little bit, until I found something inspiring me. But I found something!

Some of the few "chick flicks" I have watched are the Bridget Jones movies. And here I found my inspiration: Bridget's pyjamas! I know they are a bit christmas-y, but I didn't care very much... I like penguins! Even in spring!

This is the picture that insprired me. This time, I didn't exactly try to copy my inspiration. Only partly xD

I recently got a lot of old polishes from my mom. She's mostly a red person, so most were red polishes. Perfect, because I own even more yellows than reds! I chose one of the polishes I got from her: a classic red by the brand Jade (Maybelline). It was a little goopy, but nothing a few drops of thinner couldn't handle. What surprised me, though, was the smell! It smells almost as bad as Model's Own polishes. I don't think the polishes still smell like that...

The red polish dried really slowly. I painted all my nails on both hands, nail art an all and when I applied my top coat almost an hour later, I would still drag the red! Luckily, it doesn't show up very much.

The black and white are acrylic paint as usual. I originally planned to use my striping polishes, but I couldn't get the caps off as much as I tried (with freshly painted nails...). Oh well. The orange and blue for the penguins are polish though.

Well, since my top coat dragged the colors a little bit, the lines aren't as crisp anymore, but I still like how it turned out. It felt weird wearing red polish though. It still is a very unusual color for me, which is weird, because I wear red clothes a lot...

That's all the picture spam for today. I can't wait to see everybody else's nail art! Please take the time and check out their blogs!

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 4, Inspired by the Runway

Today is Thursday, the second in our 4 week challenge. The theme for Day 4 is "Inspired by the Runway"... uuuh, difficult. I don't really follow fashion, yet alone fashion from the runway. If I follow a particular fashion, I would say I'm influenced by Japanese fashion, but nothing in the magazines really inspired me... So I thought, why not literally be inspired by the runway and I ended up browsing galleries with pictures from 2012 haute couture fashion shows. Definitely not really interesting to me...

Anyway, this is what I came up with:

I used Color Club Perfectly Mol-ten as my base color, but layered p2 blue horizon from the Deep Water Love LE on top to make it look more blueish. Blue horizon is really really sheer, so it was perfect to add a little bit of blue to the nice green foil of Perfectly Mol-ten.

Then, I decided to stamp a pattern - something I haven't done in ages. I really lack some stamping skills. Or I have to figure out how to work properly with my revell Email Colors, which I used to stamp. Hm, they are not meant for nail art, but for model making. They are very highly pigmented though. Stamping really works well with them, but they seem to dry a tad slower than your usual nail polish. Even though I waited 15 minutes until I applied top coat, I still smudged my stampings.

The light beige stamped really well. It's opaque! I don't own any beige nail polish that would be that opaque. Anyway, after top coat, I applied my rhinestones in red and aqua. Late at night I seem to have trouble with my geometric senses :D It's pretty bad on my right hand, which I didn't take pictures of... hehe.

I guess I have to show you a picture of my object of inspiration too:

This dress is from the Spring 2012 collection by Alexis Mabille, a French designer. I think his creations are quite wearable. I have to admit though, that I'm not surprised, that I like his designs. He seems to be popular in Japan... and here it comes full circle.

As always, please take a look at the other girls' creations too:

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 3, Delicate and Elegant

Wow, it's already Day 3! Let's take a quick look on the Challenge Chart...

So, today's manicure is supposed to be delicate and elegant. I had a really hard time to decide... Delicate and elegant basically describes the kind of design I'm a lot into lately. There are a lot of pictures I have in my inspiration folder that fit this category, especially from Japanese nail art blogs. But somehow I even ended up starting over several times, because I didn't like it just halfway through. Well, I even ended up using pink after all, even though it was my plan not to. Haha.

 

For this mani I used essence Fall for me as my base color. It's a classic blue pastel that I bought right before it was discontinued and hadn't used until today. The rest of this manicure was painted using acrylic paint. I have to practice placing my dots. My right hand looks way better (but cuticles are even worse...). I thought I would try some one stroke flowers again, but sadly my acrylics hated me and refused to do what I intended. :D I still think it turned out okay though... It looks cute at least.

I'm not exactly looking forward to the next challenge... This one will actually be a challenge. I'm just not really into runway fashion... o.O"

Please take a look at the other girls' blogs. They have been coming up with a lot of awesome designs for this challenge!

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish
Kelly of DevilishPolish
Jodi of Captivating Claws
Danielle of Lacquer Lover
Elly of Polishable
Olivia of Unprofessional Nails
Kate of This Charming Kate
Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails
Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady
Eugenia of Talon-ted
Lindsey of Neues vom Kellerkind
Amanda of Nox Nails
Ashley of Smashley Sparkles
Sarah of See Sarah Swatch
Emily of The Lacquerologist
Jess of LuvMyLacquer
Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 2, Gimme That Bling

Yay~ finally done! I had sooo many ideas for today's mani and a  really hard time to decide on what I wanted to do in the end... Well, here it is:

This is actually the first time I worked with loose glitter. What a mess! It's a really nice pink holo glitter and I wanted to use this for a while. I just painted my nails with a clear polish and applied the glitter while it was still wet by pouring it out of its little tube. It's a very hungry glitter that needed 3 coats of topcoat to be smooth. But it's so sparkly! The pictures do this sparkling no justice, honestly!

On the other nails I did a check pattern using essence Purple Cherry, essence Wanna Kiss?, Manhattan 51K and some white acrylic paint. And some more glitter of course.

I took all of my pictures under simple lamplight. They are not really color accurate... a little bit too pink. I hope the sun will be out tomorrow. I'd love to try catching the sparkliness on a few more pictures. I really can't wait for summer to come. The pictures turn out soooo much better.

And lastly for Jenny... some penguins :D I did this before taking off my previous manicure!

Ah, almost forgot out growing list of participants! Make sure to check out the other girl's blogs. They did some really nice blingy manicures! <3

Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish

Kelly of DevilishPolish

Jodi of Captivating Claws

Danielle of Lacquer Lover

Elly of Polishable

Olivia of Unprofessional Nails

Kate of This Charming Kate

Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails

Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady

Eugenia of Talon-ted

Amanda of Nox Nails

Ashley of Smashley Sparkles

Sarah of See Sarah Swatch

Emily of The Lacquerologist

Jess of LuvMyLacquer

Tressa of O' Natur Nail

ChiChi of I'm just me...ChiChi 

CR of Color Me Silly

Amanda of Berry Polished 

Robin, Erin, and Anna of Polished Cousins

Bonny of Over Stuffed 

Taylor of REJOICE! 

Jess of Nearly Natural Nails 

Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge: Day 1, Think Pink

Just as a bunch of other girls, I have decided to participate in the Girly-Girl Nail Art Challenge that was created by Lindsey from Neverland Nail Blog. It's going to be a four week challenge with a total of eight manicures. I think this is do-able for me, even when I'm lacking time now and then. Same as the others, I'll try to post my manicures on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

So, today is Tuesday and thus, the first day of our challenge. "Think Pink" requires us to wear a pink polish and some nail art. I'm going to try to incorporate this challenge into my plan on only using polishes I haven't worn yet. For todays mani, I chose a polish I own for approximately 9 months and still hadn't used: OPI Play The Peonies. It's a really light, delicate pink, but it's the kind of color I really loved in my teens. I only own a mini version of this color, so I layered a pearl white underneath... yeah, stingy. :D

Then, I created a ruffian with an charcoal grey glitter polish I mixed for this purpose using essence Glitterastic and a grey polish from Japan.

I topped it with two coats of essence BTGN Top Sealer and placed some black rhinestones before it was completely dry.

I'm still wearing this mani, but lost all of the rhinestones but one. :D Looks weird without them. I really like Play The Peonies, but I think I can't wear this one on its own as it doesn't go well with my skintone.

Also, my hands hate me this week. I wore gloves and loads of moisturizer the night before I took these pictures and they still look this dry...

Please check out everyone else who is participating:

Lindsey of Neverland Nail Blog

Ashley of Follow The Yellow Polish Road

Stephanie of A Little Polish

Kelly of PolishEnthusiast

Jodi of Captivating Claws

Danielle of Lacquer Lover

Elly of Polishable

Olivia of Unprofessional Nails

Kate of This Charming Kate

Bethany of  A Plethora of Nails

Lizzy of The Do It Yourself Lady

Eugenia of Talon-ted

Ashley of Smashley Sparkles

Amanda of Nox Nails

Sarah of See Sarah Swatch

Emily of The Lacquerologist

Jess of LuvMyLacquer

Tressa of O' Natur Nail