Swatched! Barry M Textured Polishes

Hey guys! I have a swatch post today of the much tualked about textured polishes from Barry M. The photos are a bit off because I got an iphone recently and I've still to get used to how it focuses etc. But you can kind of still see how the texture is like concrete :) I also have instagram too if you fancy a look (gunthercentralperk).

Being a Barry M fan I obviously had to get my hands on these, although it is slightly disappointing that here is only pastel colours as I have a billion of them. But it is suitable for the upcoming spring :) All are 3 coats and no topcoat.

Atlantic Road (Blue) and Ridley Road (Green)

Kingsland Road (pink) and Station Road (yellow)

All but the yellow are pure creme colours, whereas I'm sure the yellow has some kind of shimmer to it, although it doens't show well in contrast with the texture. These wore pretty well, very little chipping despite me being at the computer a lot during the 2 days I wore these. Although I did notice they picked up dirt pretty easily due to the texture, I'm a bit of a face toucher when I'm bored in lectures, and I did notice a slight foundation-type tinge to them...ew lol.

These are a nice step forward into the textured polish trend and a lot less hassle than the caviar or fuzzy nail trend as there you're not physically making th epolihs 3D yourself, so they're good if you're lazy but want to dup your feet into the nail art trend :) They're fairly easy to remover, easier than an actual glitter polish, but a smidge mroe effort than a standard polish due to the gritty bits.

Bright Pastel Watercolour Attempt

Hello one and all, how are we today?

This design is a bit of a meh design that I may re-do, either with the same colours or maybe black and white...

Ive gotten a bit sick of pastels lately (I may have over pastelled myself haha) and the use of just black and white in my last post has made me love the simplicity of monochrome on my nails!

This was my attempt at watercolour nails, using a sandwich bag to smoosh together blobs of wet polish to make a kind of watercolour-ish design. I personally don't think my attempt went too well, the colours are kind of still separated and it just doesn't seem too pretty together, maybe i used too many or something...although I do like the middle nail :)

Think black and white might make a good combo, given they might mix to make grey too...

Anyhows, I shall do another post soon if I redo this (i'll give it a day or so...) no doubt :)

The shop is going well in terms of views, but no one's bought anything yet :( Ah well, time will tell :)

Double Post: Hime Gyaru & Ying Yang Drips

Hello m'loves, how are we surviving the freakishly wet summer of 2012? T_T

Anyhows, I have a double post for you today, since I didn't have much to say about of the designs as there wasn't much to it. Also, more apologies for my cuticles, I got fed up and went a bit snip happy with nail clippers...now I know why you're not supposed clip them -_-

The first design is a gentle step into the ever so slightly OTT world of Hime Gyaru nails from Japan.

In all honesty I kind of had another mind blank on what nail design to do, and all I decided was that I was going to use the ever so lovely Buttercup from the Revlon Colourstay range as a base. I then just blindly went into my nail decorations box and grabbed anything yellow based and ended up with this kind of thing. Normally I do my ring finger and my thumb as accent nails, however due to the unpractical use of gems and pearls and whatnot, I decided to keep my accent nail to just the ring finger. They did however last a fair amount of time before I decided to take them off (around 3 days) 

YELLOW: Revlon Colourstay - Buttercup
Gems & Pearls: Ebay

The next design I have is a Ying Yang/Drip effect design that I actually really like. If anyone watches the amazeballs Voussontbeauetbelle (i.e Becca) on youtube, you'll know that she often sports some wowza looking ying yang nails more often than not, and I just had to get involved! Me being one for accent nails and all that tosh, I decided to sport the ying yang sign on my accent nails and a drip effect on my other nails (God, I do like a good old drippy effect)

WHITE: Models Own - Snow White
BLACK: Barry M - Black

Given that my usual white is in Glasgow at the moment and I am in Edinburgh (making sure Mr Lacquerised doesn't die from starvation while his family are away in the sunny climates of Chamonix), I persuaded Mr L to purchase me a white from his place of work (Boots, however he only works in the opticians not the normal part of the store where I can easily peruse the contents for almost an hour!) and he picked up the Models Own French Mani white which I'd never actually used before. Personally, I find it a bit blah to work with...opaque-ish in 2 coats but can be a bit patchy and it has a weird consistency...maybe I'm just too used to my Ultra Pro one lol.

It was surprisingly hard/confusing for me to do the ying yang signs...I couldn't get them consistently the same shape...maybe I was overthinking it too much hehe.

Anyhows, if you don't know yet, Ive finally got round to opening my Etsy Shop, so have a quick peruse if you wish, and maybe even buy a set if you want hehe ;)

Till next time! :)

Grapefruit Fizzies

Bonjour Lacquerised lovelies,

How are we surviving the summer? Are you somewhere warm and lovely, and are you somewhere a teeny bit temperamental like the UK? :p Right now it's rather humid, but switching between sunshine and rain...and wind...very odd.

Today's design isn't too intricate, it's a dotty ombre-ish kinda of deal, with a peach and yellow contrast which is a rather nice, summery pastely concoction methinks :)

Barry M is renowned for their polishes and peach melba is one of the good ones (I've been fooled by many a sheer/jelly polish!). It's a pink-ish peachy colour, opaque in 2 coats. Buttercup was a essential for me to grab asap, Allison of Amarixe on youtube raved about this on her blog (post here) as being an opaque pastel yellow in just 2 coats, which I've found to be extremely hard to find (Revlon Sunshine is a 5 coater culprit!) It's a such a lovely pastel yellow, almost like vanilla ice cream!

PEACH: Barry M - Peach Melba
YELLOW: Revlon Colourstay - Buttercup

If Nothing Ever Changed There'd Be No Butterflies....

As you can tell from the new post, I am free from all things examinable and uni related! (at least until resits start...which I hopefully don't have to do...argh...) WARNING: This post becomes rather rambly after the photo, so you can stop reading afterwards if you wish XD

Moving on, I realised it'd been around 2 months since I'd done a design...was quite disheartening...darn exams! I'm not sure why I decided to do butterfly wings, I thought they looked lovely on a tumblr photo I'd seen, (the person used metalic polishes though, so they looked more...sheeny?...Is that even a word?...Obviously vocabulary is my strong point ¬_¬ ), so I thought I'd give it a wee bash. I don't have many metallic polishes since I'm not a huge fan of pearly/metallicy finishes, so I just used creme finishes instead.

To create the base, I used Rimmel Lasting Finish 280 Sunshine but it was so streaky and patchy even with 3 coats, that I ended up sponging over it with a yellow polish anyways. The red/orange gradient was done by sponging too, generally coming in from the corner of the nail rather than just the bottom as I was attempting to make the wings almost diagonal looking? However, my lack of practising drawing the black outlines led to  the majority of the nails looking...well, shit XD

But I managed to get the hang of the method for a few of the nails (middle and pinky) so I definitely know what to do for next time. I then just added a few white dots on the tip of the nail, smeared on a fast dry topcoat (it's become rather gloopy!) and ta-daaaaaaah...monarch butterfly wings!...ish... ¬_¬

All colours from ebay!

So, a few posts ago I said something about selling some false nail sets online (either folksy or etsy) to make a bit of money over summer and to give me something to do. I'm still planning to do that, so hopefully should start things rolling around next month once I get supplies in like false nails, glue, etc. Not sure of which designs to do though, as the seller I found on ebay for false nail sets only does them in batches of 5, and I dont want to buy too many in case this just epicly falls flat on it's arse and I'm left with tonnes of nails just hanging about not bought by anyone... Although after calculating how much everything would be, it shouldn't cost too much for eveything so it wouldn't be too much of a loss if this fails :)

Sounds quite scary that I'm opening a kind-of-but-not-really shop :/ It's been more or less a year since I started messing about with polish designs (the polish obsession has been ingrained for a good few years obviously) and now I''m considering selling some designs...I wasn't even expecting to create a blog, and when I did, I didn't expect to even gain one follower never mind 12...12 followers is nothing compared to the more "famous" polish bloggers, but it's a lot to me and I appreciate that people have spent time reading my mindless rambles haha!

Anyways, I shall keep you posted once my "shop" starts if you'd like to purchase my questionable designs or you can buy them as a gift for someone :)

Farewell and have a nice day! Till next time!

Bits and Bobs

Sorry for not many updates recently, been a bit bogged down with uni deadlines and general life decisions... Been pondering if I actually enjoy being at uni and only decided to go back because I felt I had to and not because I wanted to...meh.

Anyhoos, this is a bit of a spammy post, just some photos of some designs that I did offhand, testing out some methods/new polishes that I felt didn't warrant a whole post on their own...

China Glaze: Electric Pineapple, Papaya Punch
Mattified with GOSH matt effect.

Swirly accent nail

China Glaze: First Mate
Barry M: Gold Foil

On another note, I've (semi) decided to start selling false nail sets with premade designs to raise a bit of cash and to sort of have a job :p It's gonna take a while because I need the time and money to start it up, but going to start with just 20 at first in case it doesn't kick off as well as I'm hoping :p It's a bit scary venturing off on my own business venture, like, in case I get in trouble with the law or something hehe. But hopefully things go okay and I dont get put in jail or something XD

Sloppy Clouds

Just a quick post today, got an exam on Thursday -_-

After my atrocity of peach and black yesterday, I began doing this cloudy sky/sun design. Barry M's Blue Moon is a gorgeous pale blue, however, with the word pale comes sheer, and with sheer comes a pain in the behind to use :p This is actually 2 coats of white and then 3 (or 4) coats of Blue Moon, so 5 or 6 coats of polish! :o I decided to leave this overnight to dry as it was late and I would've stabbed myself in the eye if I messed it up with the clouds.

Blue: Barry M, Blue Moon
White: Ultra Pro, White
Yellow: Revlon, Sunshine Sparkle

Sunshine Sparkle is also sheer but this only required 2 coats of yellow over 2 white, so not as bad to handle. I was going to do one finger grey clouds with rain (since the weather in the UK pretty much IS rain), however, that effed up also. However, I did a thick layer of topcoat on top of the blue before the clouds, so none of the blue came off when I took off the grey clouds :)

Anyways, that most likely makes no sense, I'm a bit brain fried right now -_-

Hopefully my next post is better, sorry guys!

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

TITP

You can pretty much guess why I done these nails. They're horrifically messy, but I wasn't too fussed about whether they would've been neat or not since they would've got ruined when I was there :P

TITP was pretty awesome though, saw Beyonce (where I nearly died thanks to over eager fans) and a few other awesome folk I wouldn't have seen otherwise :P