Quick Swatch: Jessica Ruffled Bottoms

A long long time ago, I can still remember...I was looking for my ideal purple polish.  My auntie suggested I try Jessica Ruffled Bottoms, and I've been in love ever since.  As an expression of my love for this polish, I thought it was time it had it's own blog post.

It matches my phone and kindle and camera and laptop and just generally makes me happy.  I heart purple.

Great formula as well.  This polish can do no wrong.

What's your go to purple creme?

New Technique: Watercolour

Hellooooo!

Last week you voted for me to try out the watercolour technique!  I have to say, I wasn't looking forward to this.  I did, rather sensibly, actually google a tutorial for once though.  I happened across a cheat's version, and I was oh so tempted...  But no, I stuck with doing it properly.  I glanced at a few tutorials to get the general idea, but I don't remember which ones, sorry!

So, the grand unveiling...

I really liked it...although I don't know if I like it in the photo.  I used a base of Barry M Matt White to begin with.  Then, using one colour at a time, I added one or two dots to each nail, then used a nail art brush dipped in acetone to sort of smudge the polish around a bit.  My top tip: use less polish than you think you need; the first colour I did was the purple, and my blobs were too big so it didn't go as faint as I'd like.  Oh, and topcoat over your base colour!  Otherwise you'll end up taking off some of your base when you start with the acetone, and no one wants  to see naked nail!

The other polishes I used are Jessica Ruffled Bottoms, Nails Inc Grosvenor Street, and Max Factor Bright Orange and Cactus Green.

Thank you to everyone who voted, it's lovely getting you all involved!  Don't forget to pop over to my Facebook page to vote for next week's new technique.  Acrylic paint is winning at the moment, so if you'd rather see me attempt needle drag or DIY spotted, get voting!  And if you have any other suggestions for new techniques you'd like to see me try, just leave a comment :)

New Technique: Acid Wash

Before I did my little June disappearing act, I had a vote for which new technique I should try out, and acid wash won.

I can't believe I'm even showing you this.

I think I went in a little too cocky, and definitely too ambitious.  I didn't bother looking up a tutorial or anything, looked straight forward enough.  And I had this wonderful idea of using all the colours of the rainbow!  How amazing right??

Well, not so much.  Here we go... (please don't judge my nail art abilities by this photo lol)

Utterly disastrous...

I used, from bottom to top, Jessica Ruffled Bottoms, China Glaze Man Hunt, Barry M Spring Green, Nails Inc Notting Hill Carnival, Max Factor Bright Orange and OPI Flick Chick Cherry.

Six different polishes was definitely too much.  There was so much polish to get through to show a bit of the purple, that all the other colours just ended up blending together into some sort of brownish mess.  And I had like full on craters in my manicure lol.  You can also see in some bits where I went right through all the layers and revealed some bare nail - lovely!  I've since learnt that I should've top coated between colours.

Oh well, you live and learn!  I'll definitely give it a go again, maybe with white on top and just two colours underneath, so it looks like a gobstopper :D  Any tips for success for next time?

Don't forget to pop over to my Facebook page to vote for which technique I should try next!  And more suggestions are always welcome :)

Day 19: Outline

I do believe these are also referred to as framed nails?  Anyway, this is something I haven't tried before, so I decided to go with this over the other option wings.

The way I've seen this done in the past is to paint your outline colour first, then tape of your tips and paint your second colour, leaving a little bit of a margin around it.  I sort of did it like this, but minus the tape - I just freehanded tips on in my outline colour.  Not as neat as you'd get with tape, but I really hate the stuff lol.

Naturally what little sunlight we had disappeared when I went to take pictures of these!  I used Jessica Ruffled Bottoms and Layla Gold Idol.

My nails are really curved, so you can't really see that there's an outline at the sides as well!  So here's a side shot just to prove they are there lol.

Thanks to the rubbish British weather, Gold Idol looks like a rather poor scattered holo here.  It's actually an AMAZING really strong linear holo.  Here's a picture with flash that shows it much better!

 Have you tried outline nails?  Or would you have chosen to have a go at wings instead?

Flip Flop #18: Galaxy Nails

I'm being naughty and posting out of order. Clearly just such a rebel...

My day 17 nails are on the process of being completed, but I did my day 18 nails yesterday, so you're seeing those first!

I've done galaxy nails before, which you can see here.  I absolutely adored them, although I didn't think they came across as lovely in the photo as they were.  I wanted to do something slightly different this time, that is after all the fun of doing challenges!  So I tried to do one big galaxy that spans across all my nails, instead of all the little galaxies that I did last time :)

I love them again...

I used Barry M Black, and then went sponge-crazy with Barry M Matt White, OPI On Stranger Tides, Barry M Bright Pink, Jessica Ruffled Bottoms and China Glaze Man Hunt.  I didn't have any silver glitter on me, so I added a few dots with the white polish.

Flip Flop #15: Stamping

Hello ladies :)  I hope you've all had a lovely Sunday!

I'm now settled in my hotel for the next few days.  It has a four poster bed and it's so high I have to jump onto it.  AMAZING.  I'm suddenly far more okay with being kicked out of my flat for a few days.  I just wish I could have my cooked breakfast now though, yum yum yum.

So for day 15 the choices were Stamping or Jelly Sandwich.  I still haven't tried a jelly sandwich, but I went with stamping because I already had an idea that I'd been wanting to try out.

When I received my stamping plate from Born Pretty Store (you can see the review here) I had the idea of doing multicoloured stamping with the apple image, so that's what I attempted today!  Be warned, this is my first attempt at using more than just one colour!

I used (from L-R) OPI Flick Chick Cherry, Barry M Matt White, China Glaze Manhunt and Jessica Ruffled Bottoms, and the yellow is Rimmel Sunshine.

I'm fairly pleased with this.  I was hoping to get more orange and green between the colours, maybe this could be achieved by changing the direction I was scraping in?  I love the blue into the purple though, I think that looks really pretty :)  I had a little trouble with my scaper though - you can see on my middle finger there's a cheeky little red patch that I didn't quite scrape off.  It's a Konad scraper though so I wouldn't expect to have problems!

Right, well I think I'm going to enjoy a complimentary hot chocolate and read a little more of my book.  I'm sure the novelty of the hotel will wear off tomorrow though lol.

Flip Flop #13: Sponging

I fully intended to spend today getting caught up with this challenge, but instead I spent the day looking at hotels in Paris and didn't paint my nails even once.  Whoops!  I have, however, booked somewhere for my boyfriend and I for next month.  I just need to book the trains tomorrow :)  Yay!  Now of course I need to plan my Paris manicure...

But on to Flip Flop related business.  The choices for day 13 were Watercolour or Sponging.  I really felt I should attempt watercolour...but I didn't want to.  I do love myself a good sponging manicure (in fact, I prepared a tutorial for you aaages ago that I haven't got round to posting!).  I thought I should attempt to do something a little different though, so I had the idea of cutting out shapes of sponge and using these to sort of stamp on my nails.  Much like potato printing!

So I thought some bold colours over nude would look good.  Originally I was going to randomly stamp my circles and triangles over the nail, but in the end I decided to make sort of tips instead.  Which I regret!  Not too happy with how this turned out, but I do like the idea of using shaped sponge.

I used OPI Don't Pretzel My Buttons for my base colour, and then Jessica Ruffled Bottoms for the circles and China Glaze Man Hunt for the triangles.

On to day 14!  It's a bit late for Valentine's Day, so I suppose I'll have have to go with French Tips!

Here's a reminder of what's coming up in the challenge:

Flip Flop #11: Splatter

So today I learnt that I can't to splatter manis.  Absolute disaster.  I don't get it...I have no idea what I was doing wrong.  And then I got a bit light headed from all the blowing lol.  So in the end I went for blobbing polish on and blowing it across the nail.  Didn't really work at all because it spread out far to nice and evenly.  But here's what I ended up with anyway!

Yeah...

I used Barry M Grey, then 'splattered' with Jessica Ruffled Bottoms and GOSH Holographic Hero.  I've probably managed to take the only photos in existence of this polish where it doesn't look holographic...that's an achievement right?

Flip Flop #8: Colour Blocking

You may have noticed that the URLs for some of these posts say flip flip instead of flip flop, because I type flip flip in the title every flipping time!  Sometimes I notice before I publish, sometimes I don't lol.

Anyhoo, I shall be playing catch up today and tomorrow!  I had a lovely weekend back at my parents, although they fed me far too much and I left 3 pounds heavier than I arrived (that can't be good in a weekend can it?).

So here's day 8 of the Flip FLOP Challenge.  The choices were Colour Blocking or Black & White.  Since I require far more guidance for inspiration than colours, I went for colour blocking.  I'm not sure if colour blocking has to involve tape, I suppose anything involving block of colour counts, but I always think of tape manicures, so that's what I did.

If you're an older follower of this blog, you may know that tape manicures are a bit of a nemesis of mine.  Nowhere near the level of water marbles, but they give me grief none the less.  I just can't get my lines clean!

However, I am very pleased with myself on this occasion.

I couldn't face the faff of painting, drying, taping, painting, drying, taping...etc etc.  So I just painted my nails white, taped off sections with striping tape, and then painted these sections, leaving me with white borders when I removed the tape.

I love them.  Definitely something I'd do again, and they were relatively quick to do.  The only faffy bit is getting the tape to stick to your nail instead of your finger (presumably tweezers are a solution to this...).

I used Barry M Matt White as my base colour, then filled in my sections with Max Factor Cactus Apple, Jessica Ruffled Bottoms and Hello Kitty Play Ya (cutest bottle ever...).

DIY Gold Leaf Topcoat

So we've all seen these gold leaf top coats that are around at the moment, and cost a small fortune.  I was particularly taken with the OPI one, due entirely to the shiny bottle of course.  Sadly, I didn't actually like the look of the polish at all...and I couldn't even justify to myself getting someone else to spend the money on it for me.

However, when I got these gold and silver foils to review from Born Pretty Store, I thought I'd have a go at making my own top coat.

The set contains six each of gold and silver foils, each sheet in a separate little pot.  All the pots come together in a little plastic box.

To make my top coat I used two sheets.  I just scrunched them up and rubbed them on a nail file, then I put all the little pieces into an almost empty bottle of some old gloopy Seche Vite (I thought the gloopiness might make it more like a suspension base?  No idea if this is true...).  I was worried I wouldn't have enough to do a full manicure, although I don't know why since each sheet is about 5x7 cm, so just one would be enough to entirely cover all of my nails.  Must have been all the Christmas drinking affecting my brain.  Needless to say, there's plenty left.

Anyway, I used two coats of my DIY gold leaf topcoat over Jessica Ruffled Bottoms.

I looooove it.  So so so so much.  I am a total gold leaf top coat convert.  I love the big bits so much, and I like how some of it's so small it almost looks like glitter.  So so pretty.  AND I wore this for over a week and it didn't even chip until the day I took it off.  I think it was all the layers of Seche Vite lol.  Nothing was getting through that.

I did also attempt a manicure with the silver foil, but I made such a bad polish colour choice to go with it that I had to take it off immediately (even my boyfriend said it was diabolical...).  The foil's quite tricky to handle since it's so so thin and delicate.  It's fine for tearing off random bits to put on your nails or stuff like that, but I don't think it'd be suitable for cutting shapes out of (unless you're a lot more patient than me perhaps).  It's great stuff though - I just need another empty bottle now to make a silver foil topcoat!

You can see the gold and silver foils here.  The set of 12 costs $5.53 (about £2.75) and shipping is free, wherever you may be in the world.

Don't forget, if you want to buy these or any of the other products on Born Pretty Store, you can use the discount code LKL91 for 10% off.

What do you think of gold leaf top coats?  Have you bought one, or would you attempt to make your own like I have?

Glittery Leopard

Good morning (er...afternoon) everyone :)  I hope you're all having a lovely weekend!

I used to do leopard print nails all the time - they were very much my go to nails when I couldn't think of anything else to do.  They're so quick and easy to do, but they look like they've taken a lot of effort!  Anyhoo, I realised I haven't done leopard print in a while, so I decided that's what I'd paint on my nails the other night.

I bought a few new glitter polishes the other day, so this had to be glittery of course!

I wanted to use my new Barry M Gold Glitter for the base.  I thought this was going to be a nice dense glitter like Red Glitter, but I layered it over Barry M Gold Foil just in case there were any little gaps.  Good job I did, because Gold Glitter is actually a lot more sparse than I was expecting.  Don't get me wrong, it's quite dense for a glitter, but you really wouldn't be able to build it up to be opaque on it's own.  I used 3 coats here, and I'm happy with it - I think it still achieved the look I was going for, especially in real life.

I then added dots of Jessica Ruffled Bottoms, and outlined the spots using a black nail art pen (that was going a bit mental and coming out so fast!  Hence the thick lines...).

So the next day (yesterday) I was thinking 'I've got challenge manicures I need to do...but I don't want to take off this glittery goodness!'.  But then, as I was buttoning up my coat, this happened.

Well the PVA glue base certainly did its job of making the glitter easier to remove!  Has anyone got any tips for making a manicure with a PVA base last a bit longer than a day or two?  Or will I just have to suck it up and remove it the old-fashioned way if I want to wear glitter for a few days?

Also, I'm hoping to get a few tutorials done this weekend.  Is a leopard print tutorial something people would be interested in, or is that something everyone's pretty happy with doing already?  If you've got any more suggestions of tutorials you'd like to see, just let me know in the comments (or if you're feeling shy you can email me at polishedart@hotmail.co.uk).

Untried: Barry M Gold Glitter

31 Day Challenge - Day 19: Galaxies

So I'm just working on my own schedule now.  I hope we're all down with that...  My boyfriend's going away to work on Monday, so I'll get back on track then as I'll have nothing else to do in the evenings than paint my nails (especially since I still don't have TV or proper internet...sob).  So anyhoo, here are my galaxy nails for day 19 of the challenge.

This was my first attempt at galaxy nails, and I LOVE THEM.  I can't take my eyes off them, and I'm totally baffled as to why not every single person I've encountered since I did them has told me how fabulous they are.  There are some very strange people out there.

Sadly, I don't think the picture does them any justice.  But they are beautiful, trust me lol.

I used Barry M Black Multi Glitter for the background, then went to town on the sponging with Barry M Matt White and Mint Green, a Special FX pink, Jessica Ruffled Bottoms and China Glaze Man Hunt.  I topped it off with a coat of Saffron 07 and Seche Vite (at this point I had to rush to get ready to leave the flat, but I only damaged one nail going to the toilet and putting my shoes on...not too bad...).

Take a look at all the other participants in the challenge (I think they're past day 20 now...I don't really know anymore):

Kimber at Kimber's Lacquer Korner

Kat at Hooked On Polish

Diana at Nails By Diana

Aly at Wonderland Beauty

Meredith at Perfectly Polished

Nicole at The Color Republic

Kate at The Painted Pony Nails

Cee at Absolutely Cee

Nail Narcotics

Nicole at Nicole Gets Nailed

Shelby at Shelby's Swatches

Stephanie Louise at All Things Beautiful 

Mixed Mama

Joanna at Sweet Polish of Mine

Patty Greenberg

Liz and Lisa at Lozlosa 

Mari at Nailista 

Greta at How Was Your Day?

Miss L at Beauty by Miss L 

Gini at Sassy Paints 

Chameleon Stampede 

Pam at Nail-E-Glance 

Me, Myself and Polish

31 Day Challenge - Day 9: Rainbow Nails

Hello again :)

Here, as promised, are my super geeky rainbow nails!

A nice little bit of dispersion for you!

For the base colour I used Barry M Grey.  The white was done using a nail art pen, and for the prism I used 2true No. 49.  Then for the spectrum, from red to violet, I used Barry M Bright Red, Max Factor Bright Orange, Rimmel Sunshine, Barry M Spring Green, China Glaze Manhunt and Jessica Ruffled Bottoms.

Next up the challenge is gradient nails *ponders whether or not to do something involving graphs...*

Check out all the other rainbow nails :)  There are some really great manicures today!

Kimber at Kimber's Lacquer Korner

Kat at Hooked On Polish

Diana at Nails By Diana

Aly at Wonderland Beauty

Meredith at Perfectly Polished

Nicole at The Color Republic

Kate at The Painted Pony Nails

Cee at Absolutely Cee

Nail Narcotics

Nicole at Nicole Gets Nailed

Shelby at Shelby's Swatches

Stephanie Louise at All Things Beautiful 

Mixed Mama

Joanna at Sweet Polish of Mine

Patty Greenberg

Liz and Lisa at Lozlosa 

Mari at Nailista 

Greta at How Was Your Day?

Miss L at Beauty by Miss L 

Gini at Sassy Paints 

Chameleon Stampede 

Pam at Nail-E-Glance 

Me, Myself and Polish

My Favourite Things: Final Post!

Good evening ladies (and gentlemen?).  Today is the final day in the My Favourite Things challenge, hosted by Kelly over at Ooh La La Polish!  The theme for today was to recreate our favourite mani from the challenge.

I decided to recreate Becca from Horcrux Nails' Favourite Animal mani, because of it's awesomeness.  I do feel this should come with a little disclaimer.  My attempt really does not do Becca's nails any justice - so please check out the original!  Mine looks like a child did it (I'm blaming the lighting...).

Yeah...bit of a mess.  But I love the idea nonetheless!  The green is Barry M Spring Green, and then we've got Barry M Bright Red, Jessica Ruffled Bottoms, a combination of Max Factor Bright Orange and Rimmel Sunshine, and China Glaze Man Hunt.  The black and white are both nail art pens.

And with that, the challenge is over!  Don't forget that if you want to take another look at all the manicures I produced for this challenge, you can click on the Challenges tab at the top of this page :)

31 Day Challenge - Day 6: Violet

Here's post number 2 of 3! It's day 6 in the 31 day challenge and the theme is violet! For this mani I attempted to use tape again. It was more successful than previous attempts, although still not perfect.

I used some craft scissors to cut tape with a squiggly edge, and then I added the dots using a dotting tool.  The polishes are Jessica Ruffled Bottoms and Stargazer 232.

And here's what coming up  (if you don't know it by heart by now).

Have a ganders at all the other violet nails today:

Kimber at Kimber's Lacquer Korner

Kat at Hooked On Polish

Diana at Nails By Diana

Aly at Wonderland Beauty

Meredith at Perfectly Polished

Nicole at The Color Republic

Kate at The Painted Pony Nails

Cee at Absolutely Cee

Nail Narcotics

Nicole at Nicole Gets Nailed

Shelby at Shelby's Swatches

Stephanie Louise at All Things Beautiful 

Mixed Mama

Joanna at Sweet Polish of Mine

Patty Greenberg

Liz and Lisa at Lozlosa 

Mari at Nailista 

Greta at How Was Your Day?

Miss L at Beauty by Miss L 

Gini at Sassy Paints 

Chameleon Stampede 

Pam at Nail-E-Glance 

Me, Myself and Polish