The Lazy Days of Summer 5: Inspired by your favorite towel

Hi everyone~

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend so far!? I do! I'm really looking forward to the next week, since I'm finally on vacation~ yay! As I'm not going to travel this time, I'm planning on doing some nail art instead. For example... my current challenge.

Today, I have one more design to show you. It's the fifth out of fourteen themes, so I have quite a few to do this coming week, hehe. So I was supposed to be inspired by my favorite towel, but since mine are all plain single-colored towels, I used one of my sister's towels instead. She is not living with us anymore, so I did this from memory. It's nothing special, but I got to use two of my untried polishes.

First of all, I painted the dark blue, Model's Own Betty Blue on one third of my nails. When that was dry, I added the lighter blue, Catrice Blue Cara Ciao to the rest. I let that dry for quite some time and then added a white stripe and white dots that I would cover up with my neon green polish by the Turkish brand Woo.

That green was really bright. It looked almost glow-in-the-dark, but it's a simple neon. It's quite sheer though. The white was definitely necessary.

Later that day, I went for a walk with my dog quite some time after sunset, but it was not dark yet. I noticed that the green was still really really bright and I decided to take a few pictures when we were back home.

Those last two pictures were taken after that walk in the last daylight. I was surprised that my camera captured it so well. It appeared to be way darker in real life. I think I like neons better than I thought. They are quite fun. But I still can't  see myself wearing a full neon mani yet...

That's it for my towel inspired mani. My pool party is coming up next.. hopefully tomorrow!

And here's the list of participants:

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

essence - ready for boarding base coat (review)

Hi everyone~

Today, I want to review a base coat by essence, released a little while ago with their ready for boarding limited edition. But not the base coat itself, but rather how it works with holographic polishes. I got this idea while chatting with Chiro from Nail of this Week maybe 3 weeks back, when she was playing with this base coat. I had already bought it myself back then, but didn't have the chance to try it yet.

Well, for my last manicure, the flip flop one, I decided to give it a shot. The manicure is based on the different base coats I used to compare the ready for boarding base coat with others. So why try it with holographic polishes in the first place? It dries to a slightly milky finish and appears to supply a lot of grip to the polishes you put on top. I think this is necessary, because this base coat is supposed to be a peel-off base coat.

For this review, besides the ready for boarding peel-off base coat, I also used essence studio nails 24/7 nail base, Microcell 2000 and Color Club stuck on you base coat. The latter being a random one from my stash. I don't really use it, but it's one of the clear base coats, different from the rest. I usually use the essence studio nails 24/7 nail base. I dries to a matte finish and dragging seemed to be less of a problem with it. I thought about trying it with a holo, because of that.

So first, what is this ready for boarding peel off base coat? It's a water based base coat that allows you to peel off any lacquer without the use of nail polish remover. It's suggested to be a top travel accessoire. In the picture above, you can see how it dries from white to somewhat milky transparent. It takes a while, maybe 15 minutes and as you can see from the picture, it shrinks. It actually already started shrinking while I was still applying... But well, you couldn't tell anymore, once the actual polish was on top.

I used Make Up Store Greta to test the four base coats for their "aqua base" qualities. This one proved to be a really difficult polish, when I tried it before. I had a lot of bald spots, dragging issues... the usual.

For the first two pictures, I used one coat of Greta on top of one coat of the respective base coat.

Pointer: Microcell 2000. Middle: essence studio nails 24/7 nail base. Ring: essence ready for boarding base coat. Pinky: Color Club stuck on you base coat.

So what can we tell after just one coat?  On my pointer, I have a few slight bald spots. My middle finger shows a little bit of dragging, but it's mostly fine. Greta applied almost flawless on my ring finger and there's major balding on my pinky. Even though Greta applied smoothly on top of the studio nails base coat, there's something very noticeable though: the holo effect seems to be almost gone. I had really high hopes for the studio nails base... boo.

Next is two coats of Greta.

Except for my pinky, coverage is almost the same for all of them. I still find the holographic effect on my middle finger a bit less pronounced, but it doesn't show as much anymore. On my ring finger, the holo looks to be "deeper", but since there was no balding or dragging anyway, this one gave me the least trouble. On my pinky, it required three coats to cover up all the balding from the first coat.

After this test, when I did my flip flop manicure, I did another test. I wanted to know how top coating this combo affects the peel off effect. And I was quite surprised just how much it changed the outcome! The pictures you saw above are from my left hand. I topcoated this one. On my right hand, I applied the whole manicure using the ready for boarding base coat and did not apply any top coat.

This is the mani after two days of wear, shortly before I removed it. So major tip wear was to be expected, but what surprised me are those holes and scratches in the middle of the nail. Apparently, the peel off effect means that if there's friction on top of the nail, it's starting to peel off, leaving you with those holes. This did not happen on my left hand where I had used a top coat. On the other hand, by topcoating it, the peel off effect gets lost. It was a lot harder to take it off, compared to less than 5 minutes for the right hand.

My verdict... I think I'll be using the reading for boarding base coat for my holos from now on. At least, for short time wear. Everything was surprisingly easy to take off on my right hand and left my nails without residue.

Have you tried this base coat? What is your opinion?

The Lazy Days of Summer 4: Flip Flops

Hello~

I guess, I'm the slowest out of all the participants of this challenge, but I hope I can pick up my slow pace when I'm on vacation 10 days from now.

So here's my manicure for the fourth theme, flip flops. I did this one a few times, never really satisfied, because I lacked ideas and that shows, I think. I liked my last one best and this is the one I'm posting about today.

My camera doesn't like holos very much...

I started with one coat of essence ready for boarding base coat, followed by two coats of Make Up Store Greta, my only linear silver holo... and by far the most expensive polish in my stash. When I bought that one, I really crossed a line I hadn't dared to cross before, hehe. Well, I thought, why not use a holo while we're having sunny summer weather here in Germany~

Then, I picked a black liner polish and painted a flip flop shape on my nails. Outside of this line, I applied Kleancolor Metallic Aqua using a striper brush. Using the same material, I also painted the v-shape. I topcoated that and applied the pink rhinestones. Done.

Totally nail polish unrelated... I really love how we're finally having summery weather here. After all, I get to go to the pool for the first time this year! But you know, I hate how the suddenly rather warm weather turns everyone into these aggressive moody people, being one of them myself. Getting yelled at for something ridiculous just because it is hot..? Seriously!? I'd rather have a cool summer, if that is what it takes for people to behave better.

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

Another try on the water marble

Hi everyone!

I hope everybody is having a nice sunday doing something fun and relaxing! We finally got a day of sun here, so I really enjoyed taking a long walk with my dog earlier today. Now, I'm looking forward to the coming week supposedly being a sunny one!

The manicure I want to post about today is an old one. I did this sometime in June, I think. Not sure. It was the weekend after I got myself a set of Color Club neons from my local TK Maxx, that's for sure. I still haven't identified the set as the set and the polishes inside weren't labeled. But they were so bright and fun looking that I decided to try my luck with watermarbling again.

First of all, I painted my nails white to make the neons pop. Some say it's not necessary, I prefered to do so. For the marble, I used some bottled water that had no gas inside anymore (bleh...). Conviniently, it was room temperature too.

From the set, I picked a yellow, orange, pink and violet to marble with. The colors spread out okay, but I really have to get faster at drawing my patterns. I used a sewing pin to do so and it worked well, as long as I was fast enough. Also, I remembered taping my fingers this time which proved to be helpful.

The violet seems to be really sheer when used as a marble color, because I barely shows up. The orange and yellow blended a little bit too much, but I liked the look nevertheless. I'm not so happy with those huge air bubbles that formed though. Is there any trick to prevent those?

In the end, I took off all of the marbles except the ring finger one, the prettiest in my opinion, and re-painted them using a violet similar to that washed out one from the marble. I didn't take any pictures though. Even though only one nail was neon colored, the whole thing was still very bright for me. I think the whole marble would have been too bright for work anyway.

What do you think? Any tips to share? Does anyone know what Color Club neon set these might be from?

Have a great sunday! Until next time~