Nail Art: Galaxy

Galaxy nail art is a sure fire way to get people to look at your nails and stare in wonderment at your "skills" when really you're doing a lot of careful splodging lol

I can't remember what colours I used, but all you need is a black, dark blue, purple, pink, yellow, white and a glitter. 

China Glaze - It's A Trap-eze!

Sorry for the blurry photo guys, it was a horrible day in Edinburgh, and I couldn't find my camera so had to make do with my phone :/ 

This is the fabulous It's A Trap-eze from the China Glaze Cirque De Soliel collection, and i have to add that the photo does not do it justice at all. Its a very pale milky blue, with various glitters suspended in it. This is with only 3 coats, which shows how densly packed the glitters are in comparison to standard glitters. 

The first layer of glitter applies fairly well, with the glitter spreading evenly and no specific dabbing is necessary which is one of the reasons why i love it so much. It's like having a mix of confetti and cupcake frosting on your nails and i never ever ever want to take it off!! 

I probably should have tried the PVA trick before applying this, but i couldnt wait as soon as i saw this land on my doorstep :D 

Halloween Nails 2012

I have to admit I'm not the most avid Halloween person. I don't like kids, so trick or treaters and a no go, and I can never be bothered trying to find a non-slutty Halloween costume :p However I do like the effort some people go to, with full on face make up, fake blood etc :)

One thing that I do get up to on Halloween is do my nails :D Granted I've only done them twice now, but I plan on making it a yearly thing :) They surprisingly didn't take too long, maybe half an hour ish, but they are kind of messy if you look closely, but I guess that adds to the effect a bit...I'm hoping? :p

Blood Drips
Frankenstein
Ghost
Web
Bloody Boo

Googly Eyes
Pumpkin
Gravestone
Slime Drips
Jack Skellington

My fave ones are the slime drips and the bloody boo, I quite like the glittery background for the drip and how I managed to make the background bloody-ish for the boo :)

I've been a bit bogged down with uni work atm, so thats why this post is a bit lack lustre, I had a rather confusing lab report to do, and now I'm behind on lecture notes :( I really wanna keep up with re-writing lecture notes, since my modules are year long ones (so I only get exams in May) and apparently you get examined on 3rd and 4th year lectures in your final year D:

Hope you gys have a safe and fun Halloween whether or not your dressed up :D

Galaxies Round 2

Yet another re-hash of an old design for you guys today! Although this time, my galaxies turned out a bit 

meh in comparison to my first time :/ 

Also, I'm sorry my cuticles are in a dire mess, this was my third attempt at a design (one did not turn out as I hoped and the other just smeared all over the place cos I was too impatient D: ) and the acetone wasn't doing much for them...I must get round to buying some cuticle nippers, now that I know that they're not as scary as they seem thanks to good old youtube :)

I normally list the colours to my designs, but the only branded polishes I used were the black and the glitter which were good old Barry M, the others were just those cheapy ebay polish pens!

Galaxy nails have been around for yonks now, so there's probably loooots of explanations/tutorials on how to do these :) They're a lot easier than they look, all you really need is a couple bits of sponge, some galaxy-esque colours and a glitter topcoat :)

I'm not liking these ones as much as I liked my first ones, these are too yellow and I should've taken my time to blend/sponge my colours a bit better...but I guess they look okay from afar, I don't take too kindly to strangers getting too cosy with me XD

Pastel Gradient

Hello special people!

Just a quick phone pic themed post today, I just did a simple gradient which I didn't think qualified for a proper photographing session with my camera.

Gradients are good if you want a simple yet "oooooh lovely!" type design, especially if you go over the top with a glitter topcoat, which also blurs any harsh lines and makes the design a bit more flawless :)

I've been hooked on the pastel trend lately, although my wardrobe doesn't convey my obsession thanks to my other obsession that is lip balms and lipsticks *sighs*. However, hopefully I will remember to NOT buy any lip related products next time I'm in Boots or Superdrug, and remember that they now stock the once America-only brand thats is Essie...Mint Candy Apple, Tart Deco and Fiji are first on my list!

Sayonara! ^_^

Domo Kun!

Okay, I got bored of all the lovey dovey Valentines Day nails, so I thought I'd get round to the design that made me want to do nail art in the first place...Domo Kun! 

Domo is a little...monster?...type thing famous through advertising a Japanese TV channel, and hence famous in Asia and to any Otaku's out there hehe.

This design is relatively simple to do and didn't take me long to do at all :)

Owly Love

I have to admit that even though I'm in a long term relationship, I'm not the hugest fan of Valentines Day. Well, the cliched side of it, y'know, teddy bears, balloons and other various public declarations of love. Although I've never received flowers before, so that'd be nice I suppose :p Actually, I dont even like hearts either, think this may be the first time I've used my heart gems that I got last summer...

Anyways, I'm trying to avoid doing typical Valentines nails as I also dont like reds or pinks too much so thought I'd try something original (I hope..) and do some owl nails :)

Anyways, sorry for the blur and the messiness of the nail, I done these at midnight and I couldn't find my proper nail art brushes T_T

I can't really remember what polishes I used either (rushed straight to bed), but I'll try and edit this and put the names in somepoint after uni :)

Bah Humbug!

Exams are done! Christmas shopping (and wrapping) has also been done! Which means I now have time to do my nails :D And of course 'tis the season for Christmas nails!

I have to admit, I ain't one for Christmas...being Asian (I was born in the UK but my parentals are from Hong Kong ^_^ ) I'm not one for cold weather...I also hate being in crowded places and sometimes I don't like overly cheery people either, so you can see why I'm not a huge fan of winter and Christmas. Think cos my parents have never been overly traditional or Christmassy, so I've never had it installed into me :p But I'm heading to Mr Vimto's this Christmas with his huge (and traditional) family, so I'll see how I survive that :p

Anyways, back to the point, I did my nails in a Christmas mix and match theme as I figured it'd be about as Christmassy as I'd get :p

Thumb - Rudolph

Pointer - Holly

Middle - Christmas tree
Ring - Santa
Pinky - Snowman 

Thumb - Snowflakes
Pointer - Present
Middle - Christmas pudding
Ring - Lights
Pinky - Wreath

Sorry for the complete lack of any proper cleaning up and lack of moisturised cuticles, I was pretty knackered from present shopping and wrapping and tidying up for Mr Vimto's landlord tomorrow... -__-

Twit Ta-Woo!

Apologies for the lighting...hopefully you can still get the gist of the design :( Mr Vimto's bringing his camera from back home in Edinburgh this weekend so hopefully the pics will get better (not sure what the make of the camera is, but anything's better than my current camera, right? hehe)

So, as thrilling as Forensic Bioscience is (I do it as an extra module, not a degree sadly), writing a lab report for it isn't quite as thrilling, so I decided to do my nails for a bit of a break :3

Now, I am obsessed with owls, dunno why, but I think they're rather awesome and I'm slowly building up a collection of owl themed goodies :D I've been planning to do owl nails for a while, but wasn't sure how to go about it...full owls, heads, on branches or whatnot. I was planning on doing a scenic type thing, with owls sitting on a tree branch and a moon in the background, but it didn't work out quite well due to spacing issues on my short nails :(

I decided to settle on using negative spacing (when you can see bare nail) cos I liked the look of seeing the wee owl ears :3 I used some french manicure stickers to get the curve (relatively straight)

I thought it might look a bit boring just having all owls so thought I'd do polka dots on the ring and thumb in the colours of the owls...they're a tad wonky cos I wasn't quite paying attention hehe.

Although, I did forget to add french manicure base before I started the coloured owls, so my bare nail looks TOO bare :(

Green: Models Own, Jade Green.

Lilac: Models Own, Lilac Dream.

Grey: Collection 2000, Angel Wings.

Orange: Ebay unbranded striper.

Yellow: Ebay unbranded.

Black: Ebay unbranded.

Top coat: Nail life, speed demon.

Can You Feel The Boom Boom Bass? (super-fail)

After the somewhat success of the Sweet Like Chocolate song inspired nails, I attempted to do some nails inspired by Nicki Minaj's Super Bass. And how I failed -__-

My right hand has better designs than the left, so maybe if I did the same designs on the other hand, it'd have looked better :/

Thumb: pink and yellow eyliner

Index: half blonde, half pink hair

Middle: pink hair

Ring: pink lipstick

Pinky: green hair

Thumb: green scaley swimsuit with pink goo

Index: glow in the dark nautical stripes

Middle: polka dots in the colours of the dancers' underwear

Ring: pink feather

Pinky: pink giraffe print

I really didn't like how the nails turned out, I took them off after a day...Oh well, back to the sketchbook...

Halloween 2011

I must admit, I'm not a fan of Haloween, y'know dressing up etc. But I do like how much effort people go to for it. So I decided to do a Halloween design :)

Thumb: eyeball

Index: Bat against sunset

Middle: Blood drip

Ring: Pumpkin

Pinky: Mummy

Thumb: Frankenstein

Index: Dracula

Middle: Zombie drip

Ring: Ghost

Pinky: Fangs

It took longer than I expected to do these...maybe cos I wasn't in the mood to do my nails, but my hatred of having bare nails made me do them :P However, I did forget to use my Fantasy Makers glow in the dark polish I bought specifically for them :'(

Pastel Stripeys

I realised that even though I have like 4 proper striping brushes...I hadn't actually done many stripe involved designs :O

These are a lot simpler to do than I thought...the process is also rather theraputic :)

I used Collection 2000, Angel Wings as a base and used peach, blue and green polish for layering.

It's a really nice and simple look, and colourful without being too in your face :)

Angry Birds!

In all honesty, I hate iPhones. And iPads... But I love the games like Plants vs Zombies and...Angry Birds! :D

There's nothing like destroying a green pigs fort ;) So this is my attempt at angry birds nails...a few folk on youtube have done the full nails with their faces, but I thought it'd be better to see the whole shape of the head so I did them...erm...not sure of a short way of saying I only partially painted my nails hehe.

The hardest bird out of them was the big white one, was hard trying to get the angle on his sorrowful eyes :p
I was planning on doing Plants vs Zombies nails on my other hand, but they turned out SO stupid and ridiculous, so I just did co-ordinating colurs with some GOSH flakey glittery polish over the top :)

Pick 'n' Mix

I often get in moods where I can't choose what design to do, my mind just seems to randomly get filled with all these crazy ideas, but I feel like I don't have enough time (or nail polish remover) to do them all (which reminds me, I need to get a little notebook to jot down my ideas and not use my uni notebook...)

So, I decided to do each and every finger a different design. Why not? there's no rules as to say that you have to do both hands\each finger the same...some rules are meant to be broken ;)

Right Hand

Thumb: cloudy sky with birdies

Forefinger: hexagonal glitter (kiiiiind of tried to make it look like fish scaled. But failed :p Also, the purple ink ran off as soon as I put top coat on D: )

Middle finger: pastel strawberry

Ring finger: iconic smiley face

Pinky: cow print

Left Hand

Thumb: lilac with purple crackle

Forefinger: polka dots with fruit fimos (the nail polish is called Fruit Salad!)

Middle: midnight blue with blue glitter

Ring finger: rhinestone mentalness! :D

Pinky: Minnie Mouse inspired with rhinestone bow

I had quite a bit of fun with this "manicure" (i dont feel right calling it a proper manicure, as I've yet to get into the habit of doing my cuticles and such hehe). It was a bit hectic as I hadn't planned beforehand what to do, so i was to-ing and fro-ing from my bed to my nail polish box.

But I did get a lot of ooohs and aaahs from my friends :3

In a galaxy far, far away...

I'd been dying to try galaxy nails for a while, and finally got round to it :) 

It's a lot more easier than it looks, and the effect is fantastic once you've done it!

It's more or less just sponging techniques, so ll you need is some sponge (I used some old make up sponge, but eye applicator sponges, washing up sponge, any sponge would do), black, white, pink, yellow and glitter nail polishes. The glitter is optional but I think glitter polishes are good for blending out sponge marks.

Purple Swirl

This was my 2nd attempt at non-water marbling, but this time I used a fan brush I got with my nail brush set. I never really understood what it was for, so I thought I'd put it to good use :P

I used the same mehod as before, used a base, and blobbed on the colours, and then swirled them together with a brush. The final effect was a bit more defined than when I did it with a dotting tool. 

I thought I'd define some of the swirls with some rhinestones, but I don't think it looked quite right in the end.

My proudest creation!

Words cannot explain how proud I was to not only create my own design with no help from youtube, but for it to be as awesome as something like Pokemon!

I remember the Snorlax being the hardest because the green was one of the cheap ebay striper polishes and they take FOREVER to dry, and I also couldnt get his face right.

I must admit I had to google the pokeballs, I haven't watched past the original first season, so I was only aware of the original red and white pokeball.

I decided to do the pokeballs on my left hand as they're the easier design and because I'm left handed hehe.

Safe to say my boyfriend and his geeky friends enjoyed this also!

What's black, white and red all over?

Minnie Mouse nails! I didn't do these on myself, I did them for a friend's birthday party :)

And as always one nail has to be different, so the thumb has clear rhinestones for the dots and a black fimo bow.

These are really cute yet simple, I also did them for a friend to wear to T In The Park!

Can't remember the name of this design :(

If anyone knows, please let me know, it's been bugging me since I done it so long ago!

Looking back on it, this is pretty messy. Lines are inconsistent and not straight, some of the colours have ran over the black :/ but this took me a while to do as you can guess :P

This is also when i started doing one nail different from the others, like the thumb has glitter on it instead of plain nail varnish.

Cos OCD never hurts.

It was around the start of summer time when I did these watermelon nails. but I didn't quite like how they turned out...

So, OCD struck and I redid them. This time with a proper nail striper brush (the ones previously were sriped with the brushes that came with the nail stripers from ebay, but they're horrid: bristles fall out in one swipe, brush thickness varies with each bottle) and a dotting tool.

I watch many cooking shows, and they always say odd numbers are more aesthetically pleasing than even, so I stuck with 3 seeds per nail, and they turned out a lot better than the original :)