Blue fan brush mani

Hey guys!

So, I have had a set of nail art brushes for a while now and I realized I had never actually used the fan brush that was in it. I was unsure what to do with it until I saw some tutorials popping up. Turns out that you are able to create very cool looking manicures that are simple to do. Perfect for me!

After some fiddling around with colours this is what I came up with. Pretty cool, huh? Personally, I'm very fond of the effects that the fan brush gives. And like I said, it's extremely simple.

What I did was start out with two coats of a simple black creme, in this case Essence Black is Back. I left it alone until it was completely dry which is when I grabbed my fan brush. I made the hairs of the brush slightly wet and seperated them a bit. Then I dipped the tips in Catrice Blue's Brother. And swiped the brush across my nail.

You can kinda experiment with the brush. You can swipe over your nails just once, for example. But for most of my nails I did two strokes: one starting from the left side, to the middle of my nail, and the other from the right. It created this nice effect that looks different on each nail.

I only used one colour this time, but I can see this being very interesting with two colours! What do you think?

Wet 'n Wild - Back Alley Deals

Today's polish is one of my overall personal favourites. This was actually the first one I ever ordered off the internet - I just HAD to have it after seeing swatches from All You Desire a long time ago.

I mean, just look at it, because it screams 'me'. Purple, pink, AND glitter? That's definitely a Tess-polish. I love it. :')

This is Wet 'n Wild Back Alley Deals. An absolutely gorgeous glitter polish. It has a clear base that is packed with very small purple glitter, and slightly larger round pink glitter.

The glitter is very dense and it could be worn on it's own. But if you have this polish, please don't, because it looks even better if layered over a dark creme. Plus, you use less polish, so you can wear it more often. ;) Here I have one coat layered over Revlon Plum Night, a simple dark purple.

It does dry up rather gritty and dull. Even though that works really well for this polish, I prefer to use two layers of topcoat to make it shiny and sparkly. The formula for this polish is great! Even now it's starting to thicken a bit it was very easy to apply, and because the glitter is so dense you generally get an even amount of purple and pink everywhere.

For reference - this is a picture without topcoat. Still very pretty! Sometimes I wear it like this as well.

Essence Floral Grunge - Madly Purpled

 Hey guys! Today I have a nail polish from the Essence Floral Grunge collection. I bought two polishes from this collection, a matte and a 'textured' one. I'll be writing about the matte today.

This is Madly Purpled. It's decribed as 'the matt'. Matt? I've never seen it spelled like that. Maybe it was an intentional mistake? Stuff like that bothers me! :P Anyway, this polish is quite pretty. It's a pretty dark and gray-ish lavender which makes it, in my opinion, a very classy colour. I really liked the way it looked with my skin tone. It also has a nice subtle silver shimmer.

As you can see however, it can't really be classified as a 'true' matte nail polish. I'd say it dries up to more of a suede finish. If you don't like that, you can slap a topcoat on top of it and you'll have a pretty shiny lavender with noticable shimmer. I actually liked it like this.

The formula was good too. I used two coats and I had no problems applying it!

What do you think of this polish? 

Art De Lautrec 04B

Guys, it has happened again. I fell in love with another nail polish.

Today's polish is one by a brand that seems to be fairly unknown! I had heard of the name Art De Lautrec before and I was pretty curious about their nail polishes. So when I found them for sale at a Christmas Fair I visited back in december I got myself this one.

This beauty is 04B (I wish they had nice names!). It has a blackened base that is absolutely packed with gorgeous and very sparkly holo glitter. How pretty is that? I keep looking at my nails! 

I have painted one coat of it over Essence Black Is Back. It's apparently possible to wear it on it's own, but I haven't done that for reasons listed below.

So, I have one problem with this polish. My bottle has a very weird formula. It feels really gloopy and thick even though it's not that hard to apply. It is, however, impossible to paint thin layers with this one which is why I decided to layer it over a black creme. I do think this is just my bottle, so if you ever want to try it out, no worries! I probably just got unlucky. :)

It dries up a bit dull, but one coat of topcoat was enough to make it super sparkly. And despite the thick coat I had to use, it dried up very fast and looks very smooth and shiny!

I have never seen Zoya Storm with my own eyes, but if I look at the swatches of it, 04B looks like it could be a dupe.

What do you think of this polish? And are you familar with Art De Lautrec?

Lavender Stamping and a new layout!

Hey guys! I am back from my little break. I caught a nasty cold so it took a bit longer than I wanted to. I'm still not completely better but I did feel like fiddling around with nail art stuff, AND my blog layout. What do you think? I mainly wanted to change it so I could actually respond to the comments I get. I was starting to feel bad for not being able to interact with you guys properly. I hope you like the new layout. :)

So, I decided to try my hand  at stamping once again, since it had been a while. :D

Okay, my colour and plate choice was a bit random this time, haha. And as you can see, my stamping skills could really use some improvement. But keep in mind this is only about my fifth time doing a full manicure with stamping and that I have a lot to learn!

The base colour is NYC Lavender Cupcake, one of my favourite cremes. Since I don't have any Konad polishes (they have been on my wish list for a while now...) I rummaged through my stash trying to find a decent polish to stamp with. I ended up with Essence Unexpected Galaxy which is actually one of their colour changing nail polishes. I knew it was an opaque polish, though I wasn't sure what it was going to look like after I applied my top coat, haha Fortunately, it wasn't too bad!

I ended up stamping an image from one of my Born Pretty Store plates. This one is from stamping plate m65 and I thought it looked pretty groovy.

So what do you think? How bad of an attempt is this? Also, feel free to share any tips and tricks you might have for me!

Teeez - Gutsy 04

Today I have swatches of a polish by a brand that I am very unfamiliar with. The brand Teeez is sold by several places around here but the price is a bit higher than I'm comfortable with. A long time ago I decided to buy one of their polishes and it turned out to be quite nice.

This is Gutsy 04. It's pretty hard to describe this colour, but I'll give it a shot. I think of this as a dark base with multicoloured shimmer. It seems to have red, copper, and silver, giving this polish a very metallic and 'rusty' look. It's unique in my collection, that's for sure. I personally like it a lot!

The bottle reminds me a lot of Catrice, apart from the cap, which has a snake print on it. Awesome.

The formula was a bit thick, but I'm guessing that's because I've had this polish for quite a long time now. Apart from that I had no problems applying it and it needed two coats for full coverage.

Are you familiar with this brand?

Essence - Miss Universe

Hey everyone! Geez, it's may already. Time is going so fast. Today I'm showing you another nail polish by Essence and I believe this one has been pretty popular recently. I also got it as a gift from my boyfriend, so I thought today would be a good day to post this, since it's his birthday today!

Miss Universe is gorgeous! It has a dark base, full with blue and green shimmer. The blue is much more noticable, however. In the bottle it looks like a duochrome, but don't let that fool you - it really isn't. That doesn't make it any less pretty though... look at that depth!They picked out a good name for this one, because it's like staring into space and seeing pretty tiny stars everywhere.

And the formula? Well, they could have done better. I was surprised at how sheer this polish was, and I was worried when I painted on my first coat. It needed three coats to be opaque and I wasn't a big fan of the formula in combination with the wide brush Essence uses nowadays. Despite that, I love it very much and I am very glad to have it in my stash.