Tape Manicure Fail
I forgot about this post. It got lost in my drafts after I was in two minds of whether to include this tape manicure in a post, but then I went to the trouble of doing the hideous thing I might as well! :P
I threw out all my old top coats and bought a new one after this bubbly disaster! I saw a post a little while ago on Lipglossiping about Lumos top coat as a non-gloopy, non-shrinking alternative to Seche Vite. I ordered a mini bottle from eBay to test it out, only £3.50 including postage, bargain! I’ve been using it for a month and I really like it. In fact I’ve used half of the mini bottle already. I will definitely grab a full sized bottle next time and perhaps try their base coat too.
My previous attempt at taped tips (Principality of Sealand Nails) I really liked and it lasted over a week, so I thought I’d go for something similar.
I used Revlon Plum Seduction as a base, taped off the tips and used Models Own Snow White, taped off the tips again and used OPI Charged Up Cherry. I thought these looked ok together, kinda reminded me of candy canes! I like the white stripe separating the colours, but my application was a bit crummy this time. I have a very ridgy index finger nail and my tape refused to lie flat so my line looks rubbish. The rest of the nails weren’t too bad though. After a few hours I thought I’d add a top coat. BAD IDEA! All of my top coats have wronged me lately, either by being gloopy or shrinking my lovely polish! Only Models Own 3 in 1 had not incurred my wrath so I put that on. Moments later lumpy bubble city! I hate you crummy old top coat, to the bin I cast you all! Lumos is my only topcoat from now on :)
Have you tried Lumos top coat and base coat? What did you think? I’ve quite impressed so far with the top coat. I’m going to write a review on it now as I keep forgetting, but as my spoilers in this post suggest, I love it :P
Principality of Sealand Nail Art
I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but I went to see Art Brut this weekend! :P It’s not like I mentioned it several times or anything and was all excitable. It was the album launch gig and it was awesome, the new album sounds great. I like getting new albums, but I find it takes me a few listens to get into it. Maybe it was because it was live, but it sounded great from the first listen. Art Brut then performed a second set of all the classics, it was a great night! I loved the Buffalo Bar too, I wish there were decent bars where I live, it’s just scummy student bars, no indie bars in sight, bah! Also, how cute is the hand stamp?! :)
Now the title of this post says what is on my nails, but it doesn’t make much sense why I would paint the flag for the Principality of Sealand on my nails to go to a gig. I shall explain! One of the new Art Brut songs is about Sealand and apparently the Prince and Princess of Sealand were at the gig on Saturday. Sealand is a former World War II sea fort, 6 miles off the coast of Suffolk and it was claimed as an independent sovereign state, you can read more on the SealandGov website or Wikipedia page.
Principality of Sealand Flag
So there you go and here are my nails! I first painted my nails with 17 Knockout Red, a great one coat red. Then due to my lack of quick drying topcoat I waved my hands around for awhile. I left it about 30 minutes to make sure it was dry. I didn’t want to tape off the ends and then to rip the tape off and take the base polish with it! It was fine luckily :) so I taped off the nails at an angle and painted the tips with Models Own Snow White, which could have done with another coat as the red does show through a little, but because it such a small section I left it. Again, there was more waiting and hand flapping. Finally I taped off a smaller chunk for the black tips for which I used Nails Inc London Nights. More flapping…than before bed I throw on a quick topcoat to make it shiny because the 3 polishes had slightly different finishes and it looked a little bit strange. At last I was done!
I did this all in the evening and I cannot take pictures without daylight due to a cheap and nasty phone camera, so theres no step by step shots unfortunately. When I have a job in the summer the first thing I intend to buy is a nice camera so I can actually take pictures at other times rather than a couple of hours around midday! :) Also, I realised I can’t take picture outside in the sunshine. All my outside pictures of London are all bleached out. A camera is definitely high on the want list!
This is possibly the most time I have ever spent on one manicure! I really like it though, it came out better than I thought it would. I must invest in another quick drying topcoat to speed up the drying time so I can do this kind of thing more often :) I’m getting better at placing the tape so I don’t get any polish bleeding under it, my last attempt at a tape manicure resulted in me having to paint over the join between the colours, so this is a great improvement! :)
I had a lovely time in London, it was just a shame I couldn’t stay for longer. I stayed in a hotel I like in Regents Park so spent the day after the gig floating around the park in the sunshine, it was lovely, I didn’t want to leave! I did get rather toasted though, so my skin is now a normal skin colour compared to the blueish tinge I normal have going on. Should have packed suncream instead of 4 pairs of socks! :P
Hope you are all enjoying this lovely weather, now to catch up on the many blog posts I’ve missed! Have a lovely week! xxxx
Illamasqua Gamma with Nails Inc London Nights Tips
Hello to my new followers! I’ve been very happy this week as I’ve had a few new followers, it makes me happy that someone wants to read my driveling nonsense! :D <3 I was a bit bummed after I posted the first picture of myself a few weeks ago and I lost a follower, how depressing it that? :p Oh well, I’ll try not to scare the rest of you lovely people away!
My last nail post was Illamasqua Gamma and I didn’t want to take it off. It had no chipping or tipwear after 4 days with no topcoat, quite impressive! So, I decided to jazz it up a little with some black tips.
I taped off the ends at random angles and painted on some Nails Inc London Nights. It’s a shiny black one coater, perfect for taping. I accidentally put the black on a little thick on some nails so when I pulled the tape off it looked a little scruffy. It looked really obvious next to the bright orange so in order to fix my now scruffy looking manicure I finally got the nerve to give the paint brush a go! I have a load of paint brushes I bought from The Works years ago when I used to paint a lot. I think they were £1 for 5 different thin brushes, bargain! I used a thin angled brush and Models Own Sterling Silver and dabbed a line of silver along the join to disguise my untidiness. I do have a very thin stripe type brush, I think I’ll try that one next time. I was dabbing more than brushing so it’s not perfect. For a first attempt it isn’t that bad though. In person it looks okay because no one looks that closely at my nails, so I’m happy with it :P
Here is a picture as proof that I did that on both hands! It took quite awhile and I think I was getting the hang of it while doing my right hand. I think if I do this again I’ll section off larger bits, it’ll look better :)
What do you think? Do you use paint brushes to do any nail art? I’ve seen the Models Own nail pens, has anyone tried them and how are they? :)
Hope you are all having a lovely week so far! Sorry for my absence lately. I have a lot more free time now that it’s the Easter break, so hopefully I’ll be posting more often! xxxx
Eyeko Vampira and Mac Bad Fairy Tips
I’ve had one of those weekends when you feel really crumby and just sleep and melt into a non-existance. I’m feeling better now…in time for Monday morning ofc :P
I’ve been watching lots of dvd’s this weekend and I’ve got back into watching excessive amounts of X-files after Channel One was axed by Sky last week. Where will I get my Star Trek fix now?! Bah! I was really enjoying watching the old early 90′s episodes, they were super cheesy. I’ve also been listening to David Ford constantly, my LastFm account makes me look a bit obsessive. :s I cannot wait till his gig at the end of the month.
I also developed a fascination with subtitles. I dry my hair in front of the TV in the living room. If I dry my hair upstairs the room gets to hot and I keel over. My hair is getting long and taking ages to dry so I’ve been putting the news on with subtitles while I dry my hair. Everyday without fail there are always mistakes in the subtitles. Some are just silly and don’t make sense, but sometimes you get a word that is wrong that changes the whole meaning of the segment and totally throw me. This one occurred this morning:
“The floods are already effecting poems in Australia.”
After my double take I saw that ‘poems’ should have been ‘homes’, but my brain had already decided that all these Australian poets were writing lots about the floods. It made perfect sense. The floods are absolutely horrible and I assume poets will write about them, but I doubt that would make international news…
Anyway back to random rambling that makes slightly more sense! :)
This is another random taping of nails manicure. I really enjoy doing these and they are a great idea when you have premature tip wear on the polish you have on, but are too lazy to remove it just yet. :)
Here is Eyeko Vampira as the base. I had some minor tip wear on my index finger, but I had to be quick to go ot to a birthday party. So doing the tips was a great answer to my problem!
I taped off the tips are random angles used Mac Bad Fairy. Over black Bad Fairy looks good with only one coat, which is quite important when using tape. I normally just tape it off, slop some polish on and take the tape off straight away. If you let the polish dry a little, the polish will probably come off with the tape, not so good when working with a polish that needs multiple coats.
I really liked the combo and I got quite a few compliments on them. Bad Fairy really shines under those harsh bar lights!
I would definitely do this combo again, but maybe do the tips all the same or another pattern, the colours really looked nice together! :)
Now for lots of pictures! I hope you all had a lovely weekend! :)
Patchwork nails
After seeing patchwork nails post on Karen’s blog (Frazzle and Aniploish) I thought it was fantastic! I would never of thought to put tape on my nails to section the colours, I just assumed it would ruin the polish, silly me! I followed the same tutorial as Karen from Chloe’s Nails and gave it a go! It worked out pretty well, better than I expected! I just used ordinary cellotape, I had some thin tape lying around which is about a centimetre wide, which made the sectioning quite easy. I think I would have struggled a little bit with thicker width tape. Anyhoo, this is what I ended up with!
I went for a frosty Christmas patchwork manicure. :) I used Models Own Feeling Blue as a base (2 coats) and put on a coat of Essie Good to Go. When that was dry I cut a short piece of tape, about 5 cm and stuck the tape to my palm 3 times to make it less sticky. I then placed the tape at an angle near the bottom of my nail and carefully painted a thin coat of Models Own Blue Moon and then peeled the tape off while it was still wet. I repeated this on all my nails and by the time I had done them all the first ones were dry and I could section off the tip at an angle. I did the same as before, but used Models Own Sterling Silver. I thought it worked out pretty well and I really enjoyed doing it. :)
I even managed to do both hands to a similar standard! I was imagining a disaster on the right hand, but because of the tape, no matter hope sloppily I applied it, it worked out ok! :) The only thing I found to be careful of was when you position the tape you have to make sure it is really flat to the nail. One of my thumbs and a couple of fingers were a bit…not crinkled, but not completely flat when I curved it round at an angle on my nail. When it wasn’t completely flat it was difficult to get the polish right to the edge and not have it run underneath the tape a little. All in all, a successful attempt, I will definitely use tape for sectioning again. I think of all those poor french manicures that could have took less time and looked better with a bit of tape I had in a draw! :P What do you think? Do you use tape in your manicures? Or do you think you will give it a go? I’d love to see! :D
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