Summer Challenge, Day 6: Favourite Summer Colour

Well, this challenge is going well for me. I had to miss the last 3 challenge days because I caught a cold and really couldn't be bothered to paint my nails over this past week. Sorry about that! I'll catch up with any themes I miss at the end of the challenge, so they'll be posted eventually. Anyway, on with today's challenge. It's simple enough, just choose your favourite summer colour. I didn't want to pick a favourite, so I just watched a polish I hadn't tried yet. This is Barry M's Magnetic polish in "Burgundy". I've seen this swatched a few times, and thought it was gorgeous. So when one of my friends brought it for me for my birthday I was super excited!

It's a really gorgeous colour that I would happily wear on it's own, but the magnetic effect really makes it stand out. The only problem I have is that I always manage to knock the magnet on the polish, but hopefully I'll get better at not doing that with practise.

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!

Primark Neons swatch

If you hadn't noticed, the weather is amazing in the UK right now! With the summer weather finally arriving, it's time to take out the neon colours. Yesterday, I went into Primark and saw these neon polishes (and a few colour collections) at £2 for a box of 4. Mega bargain!

Unfortunately, my camera struggled to get the colours right. The pink and orange are accurate, but the green and yellow are tons brighter in real life. The yellow is more of a highlighter yellow, with shimmer, and the green is super bright, and kinda yellow-ish.

For the swatches, I painted each of my nails except the ring finger in a solid colour. For the ring finger, I put some of each colour on the nail then swirled them together at the edges. This created a colourful tie-dye effect. The inspiration for this was from Nail Stories.

The swatches are two coats of each colour. This got them to be the same colour as they appear in the bottle. The application was a bit difficult as the brushes didn't flatten out too well for me, but clean up isn't a huge issue. Also, I'm not a huge fan of "fat lids", I prefer the skinny ones as in Barry M polishes. But that's just down to personal preference. The formula was to be expected of cheap polishes. It was streaky in the first coat, and kinda uneven, but with a second coat and a top coat it was fine. Also, the smell was odd... it's as if they used something to cover up the usual chemical smells, but I can't put my finger on what it is.

Overall, I think they're well worth the price and I look forward to trying more of Primark's collections!
On a side note, the yellow looks like it could be a dupe of China Glaze's "Sun Kissed" from their 2012 Summer Neons collection. I have that coming in the post, so as soon as it arrives I'll do a comparison!

Accessorize's "Pink Spice" swatch

Another post already?! This is madness.

Although, I think it's necessary. Yesterday, I went to a Superdrug other than my local one purely because I was walking past and was pleasently surprised to find that there were other brands that my Superdrug doesn't stock. Namely, Accessorize. I think I'd first heard of this brand from Pretty Punk UK's blog post and fell in love with "Pink Spice", so I just had to buy it.

The swatches are 4 coats and a top coat. I think you could get away with 3 coats, but I felt that the nail line was still too visible, so added another.

I love this polish! To describe it, it's a sort-of copper colour with pink/red tones to it. At some angles, it appears orange and at others it's a pink-red-purple like in the pictures. The index finger in the first picture shows most accurately the orange colour. It's just all so pretty! The only issue I have with it is that with the amount of glitter I can tell it's going to be a pain in the arse to take off. Oh well, I think it's worth it.