Pink Wednesday: Sweet Swirls

Happy Wednesday, lovely people! Hope your week is going well thus far. As you know, On Wednesdays We Wear Pink so today's quick and simple mani has pink with more pink! Let's just get to it =D 

Please excuse my horrible dry cuticles - I really haven't been taking care of my hands this week. I think I'm still hating my short nails so I don't like paying attention to my tips at the moment... I still felt obliged to do a Pink Wednesday post though!  

I started with two coats of China Glaze Something Sweet on my nubbin' nails, and stamped over it with fauxnad plate m64 in OPI Kiss Me On My Tulips. A challenge I didn't anticipate was that my stamping colour was exactly the same shade as my rubber stamp, so once the polish was on the stamper I had absolutely no idea where the design was or where it was going to land! I just had to guess and hope for the best... Fine in some cases, not so great in others...

Sweet and simple today my darlings. Enjoy the rest of your week - only two days til the weekend! Thanks for stopping by =D.

Matte For Me

My darlings, I'm so sorry I've been away for sooooooo long! Two weeks feels like an eternity and I'm feeling so guilty about it, I hope you'll forgive me! Obviously while I was away I couldn't paint my nails, so there was a week with no polish (aarrrgh!!!), and the manual work resulted in me ripping several nails and having to trim them all back to uber stubby little nubbins! On top of all that, it's just been a rubbish time for me personally so inspiration wasn't exactly flying rampant around my head. All of this combined means I hadn't actually painted my nails at all for about two weeks! Blasphemy on a nail blog I know, but hopefully now that everything's settling down a bit more I'll get my life under control and the blog will follow ;-).


Now, on a wee shopping spree (and I do mean wee, 3 tops and 1 nail polish... only 1!!!!) I stumbled upon a Matte Top Coat in the newly erected Rimmel stand in our local Farmers (department store). I saw it, loved it, talked myself out of it, came back to it about 3 times then finally bought it! Sooo glad I gave in and splurged on that $13 for this baby - I've been itching for a matte top coat for ages but they're not common here at all. So naturally, I have a matte mani for you today!

I started with two coats of BYS Black Satin on my index, middle and pinkie fingers, and painted my accent nails in OPI Glitzerland. The gold shimmer takes a bit more to become opaque so this is three generous coats. Stamped over top is Black Satin with my brand spankin' new Bundle Monster Plates, which you have no idea how excited I was to get! They arrived within a few days of placing my order, and I had a major blonde moment while placing my order (clicked the wrong set... duh...) and the wonderful customer service people sorted it all out for me with no fuss at all - massively impressed!! Buy from them, they're lovely! (Can't remember which plate... I might edit in plate number later...)

I added a coat of Seche Vite to all my nails, mostly to have them dry fast but also because the brush for the matte top coat is white and I didn't want to stain it black on the first use!

I just had to go MATTE - so I added a top coat of Rimmel Lycra Pro Matte Finish to my black nails... Yum yum yum yum!!! Then I dotted Glitzerland over the black to tie it all together. I only used one dotting tool, but by not re-dipping in the polish I got the different sized dots. I had to go over the dots twice as that stunning gold shimmer is just so darn sheer!

Well, whaddaya think? Is this mani awesome enough to excuse my absence? I promise to try and keep up, it's just life's a bit of a poo sometimes and painting my nails was the last thing on my mind for a while there. 


Matte polish: yay or nay? Feedback, lovely people, I do love hearing from you! Enjoy your week!

An Update

Wow... There are some truly terrible ads on tv... I've got the tv on in the background and got distracted, sorry. Anywho, I wanted to give you an update of what's been going on in case any of you were wondering where I've gone. I'm still here, I promise! But I'm away from home on a job at the moment which means my nails are nekkid (oh no!!!). I'm keeping them happy and healthy with my Lemon Flutter Cuticle Butter and my recently acquired OPI Nail Envy, but because my nail polish stash wouldn't fit on the plane, I've had to leave all my colours at home. Being away is a chance to clear my head a little with regards to my polish collection too - I recently came across a sale on Revlon polishes in a local department store and bought three new shades, forgetting that I'd ordered some China Glaze polishes online, and of course when my order arrived, I'd bought almost identical shades... Oops... #polishaddictproblems. I still have well under a hundred polishes though, so I think I'm doing (relatively) well! I've heard of polisher bloggers having up to SEVEN HUNDRED nail polishes. This makes me feel better about buying more ;-). 


If any of you know New Zealand geography at all, I'm from Wellington (bottom of the North Island) but am working in Christchurch (halfway down the east coast of the South Island) for the week. There's a good chance you've heard of Christchurch even if you're fuzzy on where NZ even is - it's been hit by a LOT of earthquakes following some massively severe ones over the last year and a bit which has kinda made it world famous (notorious, maybe?). There's evidence of the big quakes all over the place - I saw so many cracks in concrete buildings and missing pieces in roofs and even a few buildings that are just shells now on the ten minute drive from the airport to the hotel. Personally I've always really liked earthquakes because I haven't witnessed any big lethal ones, and I just think there's no sensation like it. I had friends who felt the same before they moved to Christchurch to attend university... They're really over them now. I was in the city for about half a day before I felt the first rumble - 4.5, 11km deep - but it was a nice gentle rolling one and those are just fine by me. I was in bed (it was about 11:30pm) so it was like being rocked to sleep... Well, it would have been if my eyes weren't like saucers... 


So no nails for you for a while! Even if I'd brought my polishes with me, the ground down here is a bit too mobile to let me paint properly. When I get back (I'll be straight back into the next trimester) I'll make it up to you - my BundleMonster 2012 stamping plates arrived literally as I was putting my bags in the car to go to the airport! I'm so impressed with that, as I only ordered them days before they arrived! Definitely going back to the site to hunt down some more bargains ;-).


Right, off to the supermarket and to coffee!!!! I like coffee... Hope you're all doing well, you lovely people, and I am sorry for the lack of nail art... Keep smiling, beautiful babes, I'll catch you later =D.


- Ally xx

Fail Friday: ALL the Colours!!

Hiya guys! Today's Fail Friday post is a well-intended mani that simply didn't turn out as imagined, and actually looked bad enough that I couldn't bring myself to leave the house with it on! I think it was a mixture of the crap-tastic stamping and the wrong tones for the rainbow and my rush to get something done that resulted in just... no. Wanna see?

From left to right: Revlon Red Hot, BYS Tempt Me Tangerine, China Glaze Happy Go Lucky, China Glaze Four Leaf Clover and BYS Drop In The Ocean. I think I had the wrong orange, green and blue for this to be an effective multi-coloured rainbow mani, but they're kinda all I have at the moment... I'm working on it, I promise! 

I painted each nail a different colour - red on my thumb through to blue on my pinky - and hated it, so I tried to mute it by stamping over them all with fauxnad plate m65 in BYS Black Satin. Again, well intended, poorly executed... Smudge smudge smudge all the way home...

See what I mean about the wrong 'tones'? The theory was there, but it just... failed. 

Gah. Thank goodness that's over! What was your last mani-fail? Have you mastered the rainbow mani yet? I'd love your feedback, guys! Oh, and happy weekend!! =D

Pink Wednesday: My Boyfriend's Sweet Tulips

Hiya darlings! All sorts of exciting things have been going on here - I'm in the process of building a shiny new rack for my nail polish collection, and consequently have been devoting more time to the construction of that than to my nails, which is why I've missed a couple of days, oops! But because it's Wednesday, and On Wednesdays We Wear Pink, I thought I'd do something special to make up for missing a couple. I haven't done a water marble in aaaages, and it's the nail art technique that really kicked off the passion for me, so I've done one for you in pink! It took me a few tries to get back into the swing of it (I used to have the method down pat!) but I'm happy with the results =D.

In case you were wondering about the name of today's post, explanation is here! The three polishes I used for my marbling were OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls, Kiss Me On My Tulips and China Glaze Something Sweet. 

To add a bit of shimmer (because who doesn't love a bit of shimmer?) I added a very thin coat of OPI Princesses Rule! over each nail. Princesses Rule! can be quite over powering when it's used over top of other polish and tends to take the focus away from whatever's under it because it's such a dense glitter, so I only used the teeniest tiniest bit. There was barely anything on the brush at all, but it's still clearly visible! Surprising for a 'sheer' glitter... 

I forgot how much I love water-marbling! I think I avoided it for so long because it uses up so much polish. But still, the result is kinda worth it... =P.

Have you tried water-marbling before, or dry 'needle' marbling? What colour combos would you love to see in this style? Enjoy your Wednesday, babes, and thanks for checking in! =D

Quick 'n Cute

Hiya lovelies! A real quickie today! Today's mani is three coats of OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls with stamps from fauxnad plates m76 and m78 in China Glaze Urban-Night. The pearl accents are from the Born Pretty Store. Enjoy!

Ciao, darlings! =)