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?

Catrice - Steel My Heart

Hello again, followers! If you have been following me for a while you might know I have shown you one of the Catrice Brushed Metal Effects before: Steel My Soul, the lighter shade. Today I will be showing swatches of the darker shade, which turned out to be my favourite.

I'll admit it. I'm not a fan of matte or satin polishes, and while it can look very pretty, it's just not for me. I was hesitan about buying these, but they looked pretty in the bottle and I figured they'd look nice with a top coat. Well, when I put Steel My Heart on my nails I was instantly in love. It's unlike anything else I have in my stash.

It's a very dark brown/purple taupe colour with a lot of tiny, multicoloured sparkles that make it a very unique polish to me.

A close up shot. The blue sparkles are so pretty!

As for the formula, it was a bit thick but it was very easy to apply and I had no issues with it. It needed two coats to be opaque, and since I enjoyed the matte/satin finish a lot I did not add a topcoat.

Catrice - Dirty Berry

What do I do when I'm not in the mood to wear something bright and flashy but still want to wear an amazing colour? Well, I usually pull out the polish I'm showing you all today, which is awesomeness in a bottle.

I'm talking about Dirty Berry, by Catrice. I think I bought this one for a 2 for the price of 1 type of deal, because I wanted a different one I saw. I randomly picked Dirty Berry to make good use of the deal and I'm glad I did, because little did I know this is one of Catrice's most famous polishes. And with good reason!

The polish is a muted purple colour... and while the pictures don't show it, it's a holo! It has scattered and subtle holo. The weather has been gloomy and dark here, so I could not take better pictures, but the holo is very noticable in sunlight and it looks amazing. It looks great in shade too, though, because you can still see silvery shimmer.

As for the formula, I'm afraid I can't say much about that. I've had my bottle for a long time, and it's thickened just a bit. I can still apply it just fine though. I needed two coats for coverage.

Oh, and did you notice the different nail shape? I grew my nails out pretty long, and I wanted to try something new. I was curious how they would look with a more oval shape. My nails are short nubs again as I'm typing this but I still haven't figured if I like it more than my regular shape, so I don't know if I'll be shaping them like this again. What do you think? Let me know!

Reddit Challenge - Week 4: Gradient

I suck. I missed last week's challenge. I was busy with a bunch of other things and just never got to it. :( Seeing as I'm way too late to catch up with it I decided to just continue with the next challenge, even though it's quite late in the week already. :P

So this week's challenge was Gradient or Ombre. I still haven't gotten the hang of making gradients and I don't own enough similar colours to make an ombre manicure with. So I decided to do a glitter gradient with one of my newest glitter polishes.

And this is the result! The base colour is Catrice Welcome To Roosywood, which is a very elegant sort of dusty deep pink colour. I'm not very good at describing colours, and this one is pretty hard to describe! It is very pretty though. I was wearing this one on my nails for a day already which is why there is some visible tipwear.

So then I went through my stash to find a combination when I picked up Essie As Gold As It Gets and figured it might look very good with Welcome To Roosywood. Seeing as I was about to remove that from my nails anyway I decided to try it out. And it actually did look very nice! :) I ended up using it for the challenge and wearing it on my nails, haha.

I really love As Gold As It Gets. It consists of very tiny gold flakes and it's very pretty. It does seem to dry a bit slow for me, but that was nothing a fast drying topcoat couldn't fix.

Wish me luck for next week's challenge because the theme will be orange - my least favourite colour!

Pink Wednesday: Sweets for My Sweets

Hello! Today is wednesday, that means I'm posting another pink manicure in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Today I have for you a super cute baby pink colour, Sweets for my Sweets by Catrice. I love the colour, but do I love the polish itself?

Answer: No, I don't. :( It's very disappointing. The colour is a perfect bubblegum pink and I love it, but the application was downright terrible. Maybe that is because my bottle is about a year old, but I've barely touched it. 

It needed three coats to be opaque, which in itself is not a problem, but the formula is. The polish was thick and gloopy and it was almost impossible to apply decently. Even with a quick drying top coat, it simply refused to dry, and I ended up taking it off soon after.

So while I love this colour, I probably won't be wearing this anymore. I'll be on a search for a similar colour with a formula that is much nicer, though. If you have any suggestions for me, please do tell me!

Reddit Challenge - Week 2: Blue

It's a bit late into the week, but oh well! Here's this week's post for the Reddit challenge I am doing. I did this one on monday, and the theme was 'Blue'.

This theme was nice and easy, and I wanted to keep it simple but I didn't want to simply wear a blue colour, so I painted them a pretty blue colour and took out my striping tape once again.

And this is the result! Simple, easy, but very nice looking,if I do say so myself. :) The blue is Catrice Blue's Brother which is very shimmery and flashes to green in real life, but I couldn't capture it on camera.

Then after it was dry I used my silver striping tape to apply some diagonal lines across the nail, and I think it looks really cute. Application of the striping tape went much better this time, because I got very tiny scissors to help me with cutting the strips.

Here is the colour all by itself. Like I said, shimmery! I don't have a lot of blues but I do love this colour, even if I don't wear it very often.

Next week's challenge will be a bit more challenging for a nail art noobie, wish me luck!

Catrice - Genius In The Bottle

I love duochromes. In fact, I have a weakness for anything that can shift from one colour to another, especially with nail polish and jewelry. So today I'm going to show you one of my duochromes, Genius In The Bottle from Catrice.

I had some trouble taking pictures of this one. It's a lovely duochrome that flashes from a gold/bronze colour to a green that sometimes looks blueish. It's very pretty and it could be considered a dupe for Chanel's Peridot, which is nice because Chanel's price tag is way out of my league.

Application was also troublesome. I found that this polish was thick, runny, and overall a pain to apply, which is very disappointing because I do love the colour. I have had it for a while, though, and have barely worn it because of that reason. It's a shame. I'm hoping it's just my bottle.

Catrice - Poison Me, Poison You + Stamping

Something really stupid happened two days ago.

I was craving chocolate milk so I opened up the fridge and grabbed the carton from the door. Then, I dropped it. And in an attempt to save the carton from falling on the floor I broke my middelfinger nail. Oops.

The difference in length looked too silly to me so I shortened all my nails to sad little nubs and gave myself a simple manicure, since it also ruined my previous one.

This is Catrice - Poison Me, Poison You, a gorgeous shimmery dark purple with warm undertones. Purple is pretty much my favourite colour for nail polish and this one is one of my favourites.

It's opaque in two coats and it dries pretty fast. I had no trouble applying it, the formula is great and ofcourse Catrice has a wonderful brush which made it very easy to apply.

I wore it by itself for one day but today I felt like it needed something extra. I did my first real attempt at stamping. Sure, I have used my stamp for creating my earrings, but I never had a succesful attempt on my nails yet. I recently bought a new silver, NYC Platinum Card and it was surprisingly good to stamp with!

I used one of the Essence stamping plates that I own and I think it turned out pretty cute. As you can see, the stamp didn't transfer that great everywhere, but I think that mostly is to blame on the plate itself.

However, I recently ordered a set of stamping plates from Born Pretty Store so hopefully those are of a better quality and you'll see more manicures with stamping soon! It's such a simple way to spice up a manicure and make it look awesome, so I'm looking forward to fiddling around with my new plates. :)

To end this post, have a gerbil.

Little Ben here tried to eat my camera!

Pink French Tape Manicure

 A few days ago the rolls of striping tape I ordered finally got here! I already tried it out for my Dalek nail art but since I watched the season premiere yesterday I decided to do a full manicure with my striping tape.

... speaking of Doctor Who, if you have seen it, wasn't it amazing? I'm not going to spoil anything for those who still need to see it, but I loved it! :D

Anyway, the manicure I did was not an original idea of mine. I pretty much copied a manicure I found on Google, and I wanted to give proper credit to the person who did it but I forgot to save the link to their blog and I can't find it on Google anymore. So if the idea seems familiar, that's why.

This is my result. While striping tape is very helpful for making shapes and sharp lines I really love to add them to the nail as an accent. So for this manicure, I first used some regular scotch tape to create the diagonal french tips. After that had completely dried, I carefully added the silver striping tape. I really need to practice with putting the tape on properly because some bits of tape at the edges are letting loose as I'm typing this. Oops.

After I had added the tape I added some glitter to my tips. I'm still not sure if I like the glitter or not, though.

The polishes I used were Catrice - Hot Or Not? for the pink tips and Essence - Party Princess for the glitter. The striping tape I purchased from eBay. I have 10 different colours that I got for about 4 dollar from this seller. I'm pretty happy with it and ofcourse I'm already thinking of other manis to create with it. :)

Catrice - Steel My Soul

A few days ago I was in town for a short while and I was able to pick up some of the new Essence and Catrice polishes. Today I'm going to show you Steel My Soul from Catrice, one of the two new brushed metal effect polishes!

I'll admit I was a bit hesitant to get these because matte polishes are usually not my thing. However, after seeing some swatches with topcoats, I decided I needed them.

Steel My Soul is a light taupe colour with a bit of a lilac tone to it, and a very pretty yellowish golden shimmer. The above picture is what it looks like when dried, kind of a suéde, textured finish. It looks pretty nice, and I did like it more than the average matte but it's still not my cup of tea.

...much better! It's super pretty with a top coat. The sparkles are very noticable and really pop. 

A closeup to show the shimmer. It looks like tiny glass flecks. Very nice.

Pastel and Silver Dotticure

Polka dots are awesome. I'm sure a lot will agree with me. It's also one of my favourite simple nail art methods, because it's extremely easy to do, and it always comes out so cute!

I especially love them combined with pastel colours and that's exactly why I did this dotticure.

Even my camera bag has polka dots!

The pink is Catrice - Sweets For My Sweets, two coats. A very cute pink with a subtle shimmer, it looks brighter in the pictures than it is in real life. The green is Catrice - Sold Out Forever, two coats. It's the original colour that was discontinued earlier this year, and it also has a subtle shimmer. For the dots I used Essence Rock N Roll which is a simple glittery silver.

I really liked the outcome of this manicure, and the idea of the silver dots. It really adds something and makes the overall manicure just a tad more interesting.

My first post.

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Hello!

My name is Tess and I'm a 20 year old girl from The Netherlands. My biggest hobby and obsession is nail polish and anything that has to do with it. This hobby started two years ago, and I have mostly done simple manicures. However, I'd love to start trying out new things.

I like sharing pictures of my manicures on Twitter and Instagram but I have decided to start a blog. I don't expect to get many followers at all, but it's something I enjoy that keeps me busy. So, if you do decide to follow me, I hope you will enjoy my posts!

To start off my blog, I want to share some of the nail polish earrings that I've made. :)

This is probably the favourite pair I have done. I used Golden Rose Scale Effect 11 on top of NYC City Blackout. They look like little gems!

More after the break!