Late Christmas Mani featuring essie - Angora Cardi

Good morning!

I only did a single real Christmas manicure this year. And a simple one at that. I wasn't in the mood at all and honestly, I'm glad it's over for the next 48 weeks. I'll stay with my wintery manicures. Those are more my cup of tea.

Dieses Jahr habe ich nur eine einzige Weihnachtsmani gepinselt und eine super einfache noch dazu. Ich war echt so gar nicht in Weihnachtsstimmung und bin auch ziemlich froh, dass jetzt erst mal wieder 48 Wochen Ruhe ist. Ich bleibe da lieber meinen winterlichen Manis, das ist mehr meins.

I wanted to create a simple manicure using one of my untrieds, essie Angora Cardi. I remember seeing a manicure similar to this, but I think they used green. Even though it's so simple, I got a couple of nice comments on it.

Ich wollte was ganz einfaches haben und dabei einen meiner vielen unbenutzten Lacke verwenden, den essie Angora Cardi. Ich hatte mal so eine ähnliche Maniküre irgendwo gesehen, die aber grünen Lack verwendet hat, glaube ich. Obwohl das ganze so simpel war, habe ich aber doch ein paar nette Kommentare bekommen. Das erfreut das Herz. :)

Products used:
- essie Angora Cardi (2 coats)
- Revell Email color

Thanks for reading!!

The Lazy Days of Summer 3: Flag Day

Good evening everyone!

Before I'm ending up being too tired again to write a short blog post, I quickly want to show you my design for the third theme of the summer challenge. This one was not as easy for me as for a lot of other ladies. I don't like the colors of the German flag very much, the Japanese one appeared a little bit too easy, but I'm also not very attached to the American flag. Most did this theme around July 4th, so it was not unsurprising to see a lot of American themed manis. So here I was sitting, thinking of some flag to be my inspiration.

In the end, I got my inspiration when I took my dog for a walk. We always come by this office building that has three flags put up in front of the building. One being the European, one the German and the last being the Hassian flag. Hassia is the federal state I'm living in. I'm not doing that flag... it's just as "difficult" as the Japanese one. But I started thinking about using my city's flag for this manicure.

So here is my city's flag. Blue background with a lion in red and white. The golden french is supposed to represent the golden crown that should be in this very spot. Since my nails are too short right now, I didn't have enough room to paint one anymore, haha.

I used Catrice Pool Party at Night as my base color. I still love this polish a lot. I just wished it was a liiiittle bit more purple toned and it would be one of those shades tha I'm still looking for...

Anyway, when that was dry, I got my white acrylic paint and tried painting that lion. That was such a pain in the ass. The proportions are still off, but that's the best I could do. I'm really thinking about getting some high end white acrylic paint. I need it to be opaque immediately for those tiny things. I always end up messing up my details, when I have to layer the acrylics...The red is red acrylic paint. Probably the shade I use the least, hehe.

I finished with a golden french using my revell email color. Yeah, still not healthy to use, but it's just the french... I love how opaque it is though.

What do you think of my cute little lion?

Oh, and did I mention that my nails broke again? Like how can they break when they are this short!? But they did... :((

And here's the list of all the lovely ladies participating in this challenge:

Victoria @ Manicurator

Alyson @ BEADS. NAILS. FOOD.

Mandy @ Mandy's Polish

Hannah @ Polished Prisms

Sue @ Creative Nail Design by Sue

Katee @ A Girl and Her Polish

Charlotte-Louise @ Charlotte's Nails

Karine @ Karinea0a

Jen @ The Polished Zombie

Jessica @ Jessica's Nail Tales

Ashley @ One Nail to Another 

Pryanka @ Nail Sparks*

Anna @ Polished Cousins

Maribeth @ Obsessive Cosmetic Hoarders Unite!

Sharra @ The Blahg

Stephanie @ A Little Polish

Amanda @ Counting Down to Bliss

Jess @ NearlyNaturalNails 

Heidi @ DIY Polish 

Becky @ Glamfiend

Green + Gold + Rhinestones = Glamourous?

Yay, I'm back! Finally! I don't know how many things went wrong in the past 4 weeks, but it sure did prevent me from posting. After my last post, I thought things would get better as our baby bunnies are now eating all by themselves. But right after I started doing my nails properly again, my computer decided to collapse. I guess I really need a new one soon. Oh well.

Anyway, I was very busy doing my nails, taking pictures and such, so I hope I'll manage to post a lot in the next few days. Today's mani is actually my current manicure. I'm going to enter a little contest with this one that actually ends tonight, so I have to post it first. (edit: I would be more than happy if you took the time to vote for me~ http://rundum-schoen.blogspot.de/ In the top right corner you can find the poll!)

As every so often, my inspiration was a Japanese nail artist. I love her work even though I can't reproduce a lot of it. Today's mani is a variation of a watercolor mani she has done. Instead of the watercolor effect, I chose to sponge myself a gem-like base using green polishes. I really love sponging... it's so easy and the effect is just awesome. Also, it dries quickly... and I could move on with my gold framing right after I finished sponging. Well, my framing doesn't look as delicate as I wanted it too, but it's not too bad. I definitely need a new detail brush. On the gold, I added some gold glitter as well as a variation of green and yellow rhinestones. I actually hoped they would get cloudy once coated with topcoat, but this time they failed me!

Here's what I used:

Pinky & pointer:

• OPI Bubble Bath, 
• revell email color 94 

Ring, middle & thumb:

• Catrice Sold Out Forever,  
• Catrice Virgin Forest, 
• essence Colourbration, 
• China Glaze Zombie Zest,  
• China Glaze Emerald Fitzgerald, 
• Rival de Loop spring melody and 
• Kiko 268.

I'm not happy with my pictures. Usually it's purple's that my camera doesn't want to photograph properly. This time it was green's. The green is much more vibrant in reality. It's close to the green of the large rhinestones, but sadly, it looks a bit washed out in my pictures.

The revell color doesn't last very long, I have to admit. It works great for stamping and it's really opaque, but you can tell that it is not meant for polishing your nails. On the other hand, I'm really happy that my rhinestones are staying where I put them. On my third day of wear I have lost my first and since then, nothing! Yay.

So what do you think? Is my equation appropriate?

Studded sponging experiment

Today's mani is obviously not part of the Spring Challenge. I'm not finished with my nails yet and I'm not sure if I'll manage to post them today.

Today's nails were done a while ago on a whim. I just felt like playing around and trying stuff I wanted to do for a while. I had gotten so much nail art stuff that was still unused. I always feel bad about my buying habits... What makes me want to post about this mani is a small contest held by Dani from Dani's Beauty Blog to celebrate her blogiversary. It ends today and I forgot to post the blogpost I had almost finished preparing, but since I didn't like what I did anymore, I'm rewriting it. :P Well, Dani basically wants her contestants to show her some inspirational nail art and I just thought that my experiment might be inspirational to her, because the experimental part is easily done and I'm pretty sure she has the stuff I used.

So here's what my evening sponging experiment looked like.

There were actually three things I wanted to try that night. First was to see how the silver email color I just bought is behaving. It's not meant to be used on nails, but I had read on several stamping sites that it works great for stamping because it's so highly pigmented. It is indeed and one pot of 14ml cost me less than a bottle of polish! Second was the striping tape that had just arrived in the mail. I experienced something similar to yesterday's mani, but I had completely forgotten about that. My top coat (same as yesterday's) was peeling off and the color was a bit faded the next day, but not as badly.

But what I wanted to try most was sponging using the scratchy side of a cleaning sponge. I don't know where I read about it anymore. It was last year, I'm pretty sure... took me a while to finally try it. Using the scratchy side creates a completely different effect, but I loved how it looked. Basically, it's the same as using a regular (makeup) sponge, but the texture makes the difference. I roughed it up a little bit, because it's a bit too flat on its own. Not enough texture.

So for the sponged nails, I painted my nails white using essie Marshmallow and let that dry completely. This time this was really important, because the scratchy sponge can actually pick up some of the base color if it's not dry enough. Then, I cut a little piece out of my big kitchen sponge, dipped it into black polish and then started sponging lightly. I tried to sponge triangle shapes on two of the nails. On those nails, I added another triangle in black. Afterwards, I cut some striping tape to cover the "edges" of my triangles. My ring finger also got a tiny bit of gold polish sponged upon as well as a few gold studs.

The remaining two nails were painted black first (p2 eternal). Using a tiny brush (I used size 3/0, but I cut away about half of the brush hairs) and my newly bought silver email color (Revell #90), I freehanded the flowers and dots. I had to find out that email color takes longer to try than regular polish, which means that topcoat has to be applied later. I smudged my silver a bit, because I didn't know.

There's only one picture, sadly. When I looked through my usable pictures, I found out that they all looked somewhat alike. Boring. But here's a picture of what I used.

So that's my experiment. I'm not saying it's overall successful. There was something I didn't like about it. Not sure what though.

What do you think? Did you try sponging with the scratchy side?