Summer Challenge Catchup, Day 5: Fruits

For this challenge, I'd considered finding a really obscure fruit to try and make my nail design more original. But then I thought if I did that, then no one would understand the nails. So, I decided to do a common fruit but in a way that was different to usual. Just for the fun of it. My friend suggested bananas so instead of just painting my nails yellow, I did this:

It's the Bananas in Pyjamas! I used to watch that program all the time when I was little, although the only part I remember is the theme tune. I'm pretty happy with how these came out. I started with a base of Barry M's "White", then used Max Factor's "Candy Blue" and a thin paintbrush to paint the stripes on all of my nails except the ring finger. Then, I did the details of the Banana using Barry M's "Yellow", Max Factor's "Candy Blue", Barry M's "Mushroom", and Barry M's "Black". After that, I went back to all of my other nails and added 2 small bananas just to make them look less boring.

I'm especially happy with how the Banana turned out, I can never usually get outline lines to be that thin with the brush I have. Thankfully, I ordered some new brushes from Ebay this morning so in the future small details should be much easier. Yay!

Summer Challenge, Day 9: Favourite Summer Memory

I think everyone will agree, this was a hard challenge. Everyone has some memories from the summer that really stand out but it's hard to transfer those into some nail art. Then again, with a theme like this then it more than likely guarantees everyone will do something different.

Outside my house when I was growing up, there was a HUGE tree where I would play and hang out with my friends. It was a good meeting place, and so I have a lot of memories attached to that tree. So, that's what I based my nail art on.

I did a gradient as a background to make a sunset, to show those days where we would play outside all day until it got dark and our parents called us in. Then, on my ring finger painted the tree. In hindsight, perhaps I should have done some stick people on the other nails and under the tree. Oh well, I still like how it turned out. The colours I used for the background were Barry M's "Bright Red", Nails Inc "Atomic", Barry M's "Yellow" over a base of Barry M's "Lemon Ice Cream". Then, I used a small paintbrush and Barry M's "Black" to make the trunk and branches of the tree. After that dried, I used the brush again to stipple leaves over the branches using Barbara Daly's "Kiwi".

Summer Challenge, Day 8: Beach

We are halfway through the Summer Challenge! I say we, but I have missed almost half of the themes so far... Oh well, I'll do them at the end, promise! Today's theme was Beach, so the most obvious thing to do was paint a beach on my nails. So that's what I did. Here it is:

Yaaaaaaay, more freehand! And a lot of different polishes. To start, I used a base of Barbara Daly's "Lustre" for the sand. Then, I used a small paintbrush and Barry M's "Denim" to make the sea. I then swirled in some of Barry M's "Matt White" to make it look more like the sea. Then, I sponged Rimmel's "Aqua Cool" to make the sky and used the small paintbrush and white again to make clouds. I added details in with the paintbrush. From pinky to index finger we have; a beachball, a red parasol, the sun in the sky, and a palm tree. For those I used Barry M's "Bright Red", an unnamed Miss Sporty nail polish in brown, Barry M's "Yellow" and Barbara Daly's "Kiwi".

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!

Yellow and Blue gradients

A trend that is sweeping the nail-world right now is gradients. I think a part of this style gaining popularity is through Sammy from The Nailasaurus posting her tutorial which makes creating gradients a hell of a lot easier. You can find that here. This is the technique I used to paint my nails.

The yellow is Barry M's "Lemon Ice Cream" and the blue is Max Factor's "Candy Blue".

I've still not decided whether or not this combination is something I like. The colours are very bright and "in-your-face", but at the same time there's something hypnotising and summer-y about them.

Thoughts?