Colour Me Crazy: Red

Hello lovelies!

I hope you've all had a lovely weekend :)  I had to pop in to town yesterday for a few bits.  I somehow lost my shopping list en route though so I ended up just buying clothes.  Totally essential of course...  Today I had a MUCH needed lie in and general lazy day.  I'm so exhausted after going to Liverpool last weekend for my hen and home the weekend before for a wedding, I was desperate for a lie in!  Thank goodness I had a weekend off before hen night number two :p

So, I've been a member of British Nail Bloggers for aaaaages (you may have noticed the tab here).  This week they started the Colour Me Crazy! Challenge.  It's a once a week challenge, which I should hopefully be able to keep up with (I'm sure we all remember the 30 Day Challenge fiasco...).

So here is my manicure for the first challenge prompt - Red.

I finished putting all my polishes on swatch stick this week (well, okay...I underestimated my collection so I ran out of sticks) so an ombre seemed like the thing to do now that I have all my polishes in some sort of organised fashion where I can easily compare them :D  Rather unhelpfully, the last three polishes have photographed as almost the same colour though...

From dark to light, I used Max Factor Ruby Fruit, Ciate Dangerous Affair, OPI Chick Flick Cherry, Liz Earle Knockout and Ciate Mistress.  The random pattern - not sure what they're supposed to be but it's one of my go to patterns - was drawn on using my Barry M Nail Art Pen in Black.

Please take a little look at all the other lovely red manicures this week:

An InLinkz Link-up

Holo Gradient

A little while ago I bought my first ever Ciate polishes in one of their many massive sales (I picked up the Nail Lab in a more recent one - will blog about that soon!).  I'd never really been particularly interested in Ciate - I didn't think the polishes particularly looked anything special and I didn't like all the drama they'd created about people using the term caviar manicure.  But dammit I love a bargain.

One of the items I bought was the Mini Paint Palette.  Seemed like a good way to try out their polishes :)

I used a base of Amazing Grace, a pretty soft pink jelly.  I then painted on Looking Glass to create a gradient.  I actually really wasn't expecting Looking Glass to look like that; I thought it was a glitter, but it's actually a stealth holo!  Happy days!

I really like the effect of the holo blending into the non-holo base - I should definitely do more of these!  All-in-all I can't criticise the quality of the Ciate polishes I've tried.  Although, as always, there are about 5 from this set still sitting unused...I should really stop buying polish.