"The Little Mermaid" Nail Art

Hi everyone! How have your weekends been so far? I finally finished all of my exams on Tuesday, so I should (in theory) have more time to do my nails and of course post them. However, I am Queen of Procrastination so I won't make any promises.

When I did some freehand for my birthday nails, a lot of you said I should do some more. So, here it is. The Little Mermaid was (and is) one of my favourite Disney films and I watched it all the time when I was little. So, I decided to try and do some Little Mermaid freehand. Here it is...

I'm REALLY happy with how these turned out. I was expecting blobs of unrecognisable colours!

The blue I used was Barry M's "Blue Moon", sponged with Barry M's "Mint Green" (which you can't see in pictures, but it's there!) and Rimmel's Nail Tip Whitener. The details are painted on with a tiny paintbrush bought from an arts and crafts shop and acrylic paint.

What do you think? And, which is your favourite Disney movie?

Have a good rest of the weekend! :P

China Glaze's "I'm with the Lifeguard" swatch

Today I have a swatch of the second China Glaze polish that I bought. "I'm with the Lifeguard" is a bright neon green with shimmer. I really like this colour, it's so bright and perfect for the summer. That is, if England ever gets some nice weather...

Of course, being a neon it's impossibly difficult to capture the colour on camera. The second picture is more colour accurate than the first, but it's still brighter in real life. These swatches show 2 coats and a topcoat.

Sorry for the short post today, but I don't have much else to say... :P

What's your favourite colour for the summer? I would definitely wear this one again. :)

Birthday Nails!

Yesterday was my birthday! I turned 16, and of course nail art was necessary. I also have lots of swatching of new nail polishes I should get done soon, so two birds one stone. :)

I chose to use Ciaté's "Bonbon" as my base colour. I got this polish as a free gift from this month's issue of Marie Claire. It's a grey/beige (I think the word's greige?) with what looks like to me some purple/lilac tones to it. The application was okay, although I found it to be a little streaky on the first coat. These swatches show 2 coats.

I really like this colour, it's unlike anything I already own and that's always a good thing. But since it was my birthday I couldn't just leave them plain. I figured I would try some free handing, even though I'm not amazing at it. Free hand nail art is what I started doing (before this blog started), but I haven't done very much of it recently. I think this is mostly because I get stuck for ideas easily, and have to take inspiration from others. The inspiration for these nails came from various images when I did a image search on Google for "birthday nails".

I should have let the cake nail dry a little longer. It smudged with the top coat. Oops. :') Oh well, I still think it looks pretty cute. I like how the pink looks against Bonbon.

I used a lot of colours for this nail art, so here's a list. I like lists.

Barbara Daly's "Kiwi"

Barry M's "Pink Flamingo"

Barry M's "Yellow"

Barry M's "Bright Red"

Max Factor's "Candy Blue" 

Nails Inc's "Atomic"

Rimmel Nail Tip Whitener

What do you think? Should I try and freehand more often, or stick to other forms of nail art?

China Glaze's "Sunkissed" dupe

I promised this post a couple of weeks ago, and finally it's here! When I showed you the Primark neons, I said that the yellow looks similar to swatches of China Glaze's "Sunkissed" that I had seen. Since I had the polish on order, I wanted to swatch it and compare. This would have been posted last week, but something jubilee related was needed, of course.

In the bottles, both polishes look pretty similar, other than China Glaze having a little more shimmer and being slightly greener.

However, the consistencies of the polishes are loads different to each other when applied to the nails. Primark's yellow is much, much sheerer than Sunkissed and could have had another coat to be more opaque. Also, the difference in shimmer is more obvious. When dry, Sunkissed dries with a semi-matte finish but Primark's yellow dries quite shiny. I added a topcoat to make both polishes shiny.

These pictures are more colour accurate than the original Primark neons swatches because I used a different camera. What do you think, have you noticed a difference in the picture quality or is it the same?

Overall, I don't think that the Primark yellow is a perfect dupe for China Glaze's "Sunkissed", however it could make a nice alternative if you can't China Glaze's polishes. They're just as bright as each other, although I think China Glaze has a better finish. But for the price of Primark's polishes (although the bottles are smaller) you can't go wrong!

Diamond Jubilee Nails!

As you may (or may not) be aware, it's the Queen's diamond jubilee today! The celebrations are going on all through this weekend and not ending until Tuesday, to mark Queen Elizabeth II's 60 years on the throne. So, I thought it would be a great time to wear some truly British nail art. Of course, this had to be the Union Jack.

Being the diamond jubilee, glitter was a must, which inspired me to create the flag using glitter. Sammy at The Nailasaurus has been using glitter a lot in her posts lately, so I've been dying to give it a try.

The blue that I used was Barry M's "Navy".

 

 The glitter that I used was some that I brought from Staples. It came from a pack of 6 different colours (blue, red, silver, purple/pink, green, gold). For all of this glitter, it cost £2.75, which I think is pretty good for the amount that you get in each pot! Each glitter flake is less than 1mm in diameter, so they're really really little (and get everywhere!).

 To do this manicure, I first painted the accent nail with Barry M's "Navy". I found that if I painted all of the nails at the start, glitter would stick to those as well. Because of this, I focused on the accent and then after cleaning the glitter up, finished the rest of my nails. After letting Navy dry, I added a layer of clear polish and sprinkled blue glitter over the whole nail. Excess glitter was knocked into a plastic container and then poured back into the pot. After this, I added another layer of clear polish to keep the glitter in place. Then, I used a toothpick with a small amount of clear polish on it to pick up silver and do the white lines of the flag. I placed the silver glitter on whilst the layer of clear over the blue was wet/tacky. To make sure the glitter stuck, I added more clear where appropriate. I then repeated this for the red glitter.

I think that this worked pretty well, but more silver (or less red) could have been used. What do you think?

Have a fun Jubilee weekend (whether you're celebrating or not) and enjoy the long weekend!