Guest Post: Nail Jems

Hello ladies :)  This week's guest post comes from the lovely Jem of Nail Jems.  Jem has a beautiful bright and colourful blog, with equally beautiful nails to match (and some pretty handy reviews too!), so do pop over and check it out.

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Hi all, my name is Jem from the British/Australian nail blog Nail Jems!

I would like to thank Sam for allowing me to be a guest poster, she's a really talented nail artist and it's an honour to be deemed worthy of a spot amongst her own fantastic work! 

The nail design I bring you today is not so much about the design itself, but the technique I used to achieve it.

I'm a bit of a cheap skate and hate to over spend on anything, so I like to get creative with my funds first and foremost, and try and achieve great nail art with whatever I have laying around or can buy at the cheapest price!!! 

So to achieve today's mani, I did home made, hand drawn decals with coloured permanent marker pens, resulting in this funky multi-coloured chess board design!

To make home made decals, I start by painting a layer of clear polish onto a plastic sandwich bag and I let it dry thoroughly for several hours. It must be fully dry as if you try to draw on it, it will smudge, or it wont peel off the bag when you go to apply it to the nail.

Once the layer of clear varnish is dry you then draw your design right onto it.

As nails are so small it is difficult to draw out a precise grid with tiny boxes using just your ruler (believe me, I tried it and it was a mess!), so to do the chess board mani I printed out a grid pattern with small measurements using photoshop. I placed the part of the sandwich bag that had the clear polish over the grid, and then with the aid of a ruler for straight lines, traced the design in 4 different colours for each nail onto the layer of clear polish, and then coloured in alternate boxes. I let the ink dry and colour in the boxes another 2 times to get a nice solid colour.

When its done I peel the layer of topcoat from the bag using tweezers and cut it into nail sized pieces, I paint my base coat colour, or 'undies' if you prefer! (in this photo Sinful Colours 'Snow Me White') then I attach the decals to the nail with a layer of top coat left to dry for a couple of minutes so that it's tacky. I smooth the decals onto the nail with a cotton bud, trim the edges with cuticle scissors, and seal everything with another layer of topcoat.

I really love this technique and the coloured pens are so versatile, I've traced a beautiful fish scale mermaid pattern in one colour HERE (where you can also see what kind of pens I use), drawn free hand a multi- coloured henna pattern HERE, and even drawn directly onto the nail without making decals at all, like in my mani HERE.

I know a lot of girls that don't have great luck with nail stamping (it's certainly always been very hit and miss for me!) so this method can also be a great alternative as you can trace any pattern you want onto a decal to layer over your polish, and you can easily collect a nice selection of markers from thick to fine tips, in gold and silver and even colours like mine. Purchasing these pens has certainly been much cheaper than buying 20 different polishes hoping that they might be opaque enough for stamping only to discover that they aren't!

So I hope you like my marker pen technique and that it will inspire many experiments and great looking mani's, and thank you all for taking the time to read my post! If you would like to see more of my work be sure to visit my blog www.nailjems.blogspot.com.au where I definitely wouldn't say no to a couple of new followers ;)

One last thanks to the lovely Sam for this great opportunity... and I'm out! XXX

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What a great post!  I've used this decal technique for a couple of manicures (check out the leprechaun manicure I did for Sincerely Stephanie here), and can totally vouch for the tracing!  I normally use polish though, but using felt tips is a little bit genius!  So much easier to control and such a selection of colours!  And I can't quite get over how clean Jem's lines are and how uniform she's got the colours...I definitely need to give this a go!

Thank you again Jem for a fab guest post :)

Femme Fatale: Lime Thief and Bottle of Infinite Stars

Hello lovelies :)  My fiance went back to work today, so I should be posting a bit more regularly for a little while!  I've got so many photos ready, I just haven't had a chance to write many posts.  Too many weekends away and evenings out :)

I was recently send some polishes to review from Femme Fatale.  In addition to stocking loads of lusted-after indies, Femme Fatale also produce their own range of nail polishes, and that's what I'm showing you today!

First up I'm going to show you Lime Thief and Bottle of Infinite Stars.  Pop back later in the week to see what other polishes I was sent!

Lime Thief is my favourite of the polishes I was sent.  It has a green base (perhaps what you'd call a crelly??) and then is full of all different glitters, ranging from large matte green hexes to teeny tiny red glitters with a holo flash.  There's also teal in there and some matte red glitters too.  I really like the mix of shiny and matte glitters - makes it more interesting than other multicoloured glitters - and I LOVE the pop of the red glitters against the green.

For these swatches I layered two coats of Lime Thief over Max Factor Cactus Green.  The glitter required a little bit of careful placement to ensure an even coverage, but nothing too tricky.  I used two coats of Seche Vite to make sure it was lovely and smooth with those large glitters.

Next up, Bottle of Infinite Stars.  Even just the name is awesome.  This polish contains stars in a blue jelly base, and is jam-packed with various sizes of blue and slightly greenish hexes.  I squealed a bit when I unwrapped this - I do love me a shaped glitter.

Here I used two coats over Barry M Blueberry Ice Cream.  I should say, China Glaze Man Hunt is like the perfect base for this, I just did it over a lighter base so you could see the glitters a little more clearly.  There is no fishing required here, I got tons of stars on the brush!  Almost too many!  And as you can see there's plenty of glitter in the base too.  My only complaint would be that stars from the first coat get almost totally obscured on the second coat.  I think I'd stick with just using one coat over Man Hunt in future :)

 You can check out the full range of Femme Fatale polishes here.  They cost $10 (Australian dollars!), which is a little under £6.  Please note, the bottles I've shown here are just samples, the bottle you buy are 12ml!

Depending on where you are in the world, Femme Fatale polishes can also be purchased from:

Harlow & Co.

Color4Nails

Beauty So Fly

Norway Nails

International shipping is available direct from Femme Fatale for any British ladies (or anywhere else not served by these other suppliers!).  It is pricey though, as you'd expect, so it's worth considering group buys :)

Let me know if you'd like to see any of these polishes over other undies or commando, or if you have any questions!

Guest Post: Beautylicious

Hello lovelies :)  Today's guest post comes from Roxy of Beautylicious.  Roxy has a whole array of beautiful, delicate nail art (and her header looks super tasty!) so do pop over and take a look!

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Hello ladies!

Roxy here, the girl behind the nails on Beautylicious. I have to be honest - I'm excited but also nervous to write here, on this lovely blog; this is my first international guest post and I'd like to thank Sam for the opportunity. Hope you enjoy my manicure and maybe browse through my newbie blog ^^

This design is actually a remake of an older one, I wanted to see how much I've evolved since I've started my blog (over six months ago). I've used the same nail polish Avon - Sea breeze, but I did the flowers on the accent nail with the one-stroke technique. You can check out my old design >here< and tell me what you think :)

Products used

So this is it! If you want to keep following my work, you can do so through the following ways:

Pinterest, Tumblr, Beautylish, Weheartit

Or you can follow me through Facebook or GFC

Thank you for reading!

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I don't know about you, but I'm definitely thinking I should try out the one stroke technique!  Totally stunning manicure :)  Thank you again Roxy for guest posting for me!

BeautyUK: Queen of Hearts and Gold Digger

Morning all :)  I hope you're all having a lovely Sunday so far!  I'm about to begin my Sunday with a yummy cooked breakfast!

On Wednesday I showed you two glitter polishes from the BeautyUK Posh Polish range.  Today I'm showing you the other two polishes I was sent to review :)  These are Queen of Hearts and Gold Digger.

First up is Queen of Hearts.  I thought from the bottle that this was going to be quite dark and not the sort of polish I'd like, but actually it's really pretty on the nail.  It's made up of medium matte black and shiny pink hexes, with black microglitter.  It's actually quite a delicate-looking polish.

I used two coats of Queen of Hearts over OPI Skull & Glossbones.  Great coverage and great formula.  I think this would also be really pretty over a light pink.

Next up is Gold Digger.  This is primarily gold hexes, with a sprinkling of larger silver holo hexes.  The coverage of this was much better than I expected - I used two coats here.  You could probably get this to full coverage with a few more coats (or fake it with a shiny gold basecoat).

Here I'm showing it over Jessica Ruffled Bottoms.  I think this would benefit from a few more of the larger hexes, I ended up with only 1 or 2 on each nail and they weren't very noticeable.  Interestingly though, I bought this polish a year or so ago and my version is different - the glitter is a darker gold, and it has silver square glitters instead of the large hexes.  Don't know why they changed it, but I think the squares were a bit more interesting, but then the formula and coverage with this one are much better.  I could do a comparison if people would be interested in seeing that?

You can find these polishes here for £3.49 each, or they're also available in Superdrug :)

Nailtopia Stickers

Hello lovelies :)

I'm currently sitting on the in-laws-to-be's sofa up in Liverpool (a little break between stuffing our faces for breakfast and stuffing our faces for tea) and thought I'd write a quick post!

I was recently send some products from Nailtopia to review, so that's what I'm showing you today :)  I have three sheets of very cute stickers to show you!

Each pack consists of one sheet of stickers.  The stickers are really thin, but they're almost a rubbery sort of material, so I didn't have any problems with them tearing or anything like that, and they happily laid flat on my nails.

First up, the tropical parrots!  These are so bright and lovely, that they just NEEDED a bright gradient to go with them.  I've run out of acetone though, so apologies for poor clean up!  This sheet has a lovely mixture of sizes, colours and parrots facing different ways.  You could do some cute nails with parrots sitting on branches and things :)

For the gradient, I sponged Max Factor Bright Orange over Rimmel Sunshine.

Next up, safari animals!  I do love an excuse to do animal print nails...  These stickers are all white (also available in black), and there are lions, giraffes, elephants, rhinos, kangaroos and some of those like deer-type things that you're not actually interested in seeing when you go to the zoo.  It didn't occur to me until I started sticking the stickers on though that white stickers don't show up on white polish...d'oh.

If you want to see the polishes I used, or tutorials for any of the nails, check out this post.

Lastly, silver glittery stars!  These are similar to the pink ones I reviewed from Born Pretty Store a few weeks ago, but thinner with that rubbery feel.  I did waste a few of these though as I was trying to peel them off the sheet, because they're so thin some of them creased up.  Otherwise they were easy to use though.

I used China Glaze Man Hunt and Barry M Blue Glitter for my super-sparkly base, with plenty of Seche Vite on top to make it all shiny.

All in all, I found these really easy to use. They were sticky enough that they didn't move once you'd put them on, but you could still peel them off without tearing them if you needed to reposition.  They're also thin and flexible enough that they don't stick up from your nail.  

You can take a look at these stickers on the following links: Tropical Parrots, Safari Animals and Shining Stars.  Each pack costs £2.99 and delivery was super quick!