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Sonntag, 15. Juli 2012

The Lazy Days of Summer 2: Summer Ombre

Hi everyone~

I hope you're having a great weekend! Mine is almost over and it was sooooo short. But there's only three weeks left until my one-week vacation, yay.

Anyway, today I'm going to show you my Summer Ombre, second theme of the Summer challenge I'm participating in. I didn't do anything fancy this time. This is actually the first real ombre mani I did... hard to believe. I hadn't worn any orange in a while, so the color was decided. I didn't have much trouble finding some maching colors in my stash of untrieds. This is basically why I didn't do anything fancy... I wanted to use this mani to "swatch" a few of my untrieds. So glad I did...

For this mani, I picked only one polish that I had used before. It's the one on my middlefinger. It looks kind of pastel compared to the others, but be assured, it's absolutely not.

Pinky: unnamed beauty uk polish
Ring: OPI The "IT" Color
Middle: p2 notice me
Pointer: depend 124
Thumb: MNY 343

I wish there were more names, not only numbers. It's so hard to picture a polish just by some number.

The two yellow polishes were kind of sheer, but the beauty UK build nicely... not the OPI though. I think I did 5 coats to achieve the kind of opacity I was looking for. It turned out way more orange than it looks in the bottle too. I knew though, because I swatched them on a piece of paper beforehand. The OPI was very slow drying and of course, I smudged it.

The two yellow's glow very nicely in direct sunlight though, don't you think?

The two orange shades were what I expected. Three coats for the p2, two for the depend. I don't own many depend polishes, but the few I have are really opaque. I just wish the bottles were a bit bigger...

The orange on my thumb was a bit of a surprise too. Just like the OPI, it turned out way darker than it looks in the bottle. It's bordering to a light red in my opinion. I do like the shade though. It's a shame that MNY is no longer available in Germany. Can you still buy it somewhere else in Europe? That would be interesting.

That's it for my Summer Ombre. It was fun to do and I can see why people like ombre manis. For me, it is probably a little too undemanding. My colleagues even commented that this was a very unusual mani for me, haha. I like gradients better, so I'll stick with those when I don't feel like painting or sticking loads of pearls and rhinestones to my nails. ;)

Sonntag, 1. April 2012

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