My first glitter sandwich

Hello loves! It's finally Friday! I've been crazy busy this week and now I'm very very tired. I'm looking forward to some relaxing days this week end (although I should study again). Today I want to show you a little experiment I did last week. I was very curious to see how this would look so I did a quick swatch of this mani on one hand. So here it is, my very first glitter sandwich!

A glitter sandwich is a manicure that uses jelly polish and glitter. It had a base of the jelly, then glitter and then another coat of the jelly, so that the glitter looks suspended in the jelly. This gives the mani a lot of dimension. For this I've used S-he Stylezone 399, OPI Gone Gonzo! and a top coat, of course. 

I usually don't like jelly polishes because they are too sheer for my taste. I do however have two blue jellies, just because I buy every blue I see and I ended up with those. This particular one is very sheer, but also has a horrible formula, making application a pain in the behind. It's thick and goopy and it bubbles if you put it on too thick. I used 2 coats as a base and then did a third coat after I put the glitter on. It didn't come out that great, as you can see that there are some spots where the glitter is still uncovered. Also the nail line is still visible in some shots. This also dries very dull, so top coat was very necessary. 

I am still on the fence about this mani. I didn't wear it properly to see what I really think about it. It was just a swatch that I removed after photographing. So I ask you to tell me what you think. I'm very open to suggestions because I do want to try this again in the future and I want to know what I did right and what I did wrong. Please comment! 

Camo manicure and one month of blogging

Hi everyone and I hope you are having a great Sunday! Today my little blog is one month old. Exactly one month ago, on the 9th of September, I posted my very first post. I want to thank you all for reading my blog, for the comments, for all the kind words. To my dear followers a big THANK YOU! I also want to thank my Twitter and Facebook followers. You have all been part of my life and know that I couldn't have done this without you!

So that being said, I want to show you the camouflage nail art I have done this week. It's actually very simple to do. I only used the polishes' original brushes and made random shapes with them. Here's what came out.

I used my old manicure of H&M Hunt me down as a base color. The random shapes were done with ELF Desert Haze (greige), S-he Stylezone 500 (taupe) and Hello Kitty Blackstage (dark grey). After they all dried, I slapped on a coat of Color Club Matte-ified and there it was.

I really enjoyed this mani and got a lot of compliments on it.

I hope you like it and thanks for stopping by!

S-he Stylezone 310

S-he Stylezone 310 is part of the summer collection they released this year. I don’t know if it’s limited edition or not, but it was still in the store over here about a week ago so you can probably get it if you hurry. I bought this polish on a day when I was completely bored of all my colors and didn’t know what to wear. This totally did the job and brought a fresh look to my nails.

Color:

This polish is a very light green with hidden shimmer in it. It’s more like a jade green and it doesn’t pop as much as lime greens, which makes it a more ellegant shade. Unfortunately the shimmer is more evident in the bottle than on the nail. I couldn’t capture it on camera no mather how much I tried.

Application:

Well this part is a bit tricky. The S-he polishes I have from the old collection with the old packaging are all pretty thick and goopy. So the company probably thought that thinning the formula is necessary. The only problem is that they thinned it too much, so now the polishes are pretty runny and sheer. This almost needed 3 coats, but I managed to get around with only 2 thicker ones. The  brush also has some unevenness to it.

Durability:

I wore this for around 4-5 days with no chipping. I think it has good wear time, as all S-he polishes do.

Verdict:

If you get over the fact that it’s pretty runny and not so opaque, this is a fairly good polish and the color is great. All in all, I’m glad I bought it and will probably use it more in the spring-summer.

First attempt at an ombre manicure

Hi guys! Can't believe it's October already! It still doesn't feel like fall over here yet, so it's really hard for me to put on those murky, muted fall colors. Tomorrow I'm starting a new semester in med school, but I hope I will keep posting as often as before. This still means I will have to shorten my nails and wear less crazy manicures (no glitter and of course no ombre). But enough with the ranting, let's get to the nails.

The ombre or gradient manicure is one that features a different color on every finger, from the thumb to the pinky. These colors are however in the same color family and go gradually lighter from the first finger to the last. It's a more muted version of the skittles mani, where every finger is a completely different color. There's two ways to do this. You either take a color and mix it with white and black to form it's lighter and darker versions, or you just take 5 colors in your collection that seem close in tone but each is lighter than the other. I did the second thing and here's what I came up with:

the index finger color is supposed to be lighter, but it came out darker in the pictures

For this manicure I have used:

• Thumb: OPI Siberian Nights
• Index: S-he Stylezone 464 (lighter than in the pictures)
• Middle finger: China Glaze Grape Pop
• Ring finger: Maybelline Mellow Mauve (borrowed)
• Pinky: Sephora Let's dance

 Next time I'm gonna be trying the other technique with mixing the gradient colors instead of just picking up similar ones. I think this turned out pretty ok anyway. What do you think about this look?

 

Paws on my paws

So as I was telling you the other day, I felt that my ELF Desert Haze manicure was too neutral and plain looking, so I decided to spice things up with a little nail art. I painted the paws with stencil stickers from the local DM (Drogerie Markt) store and S-he Stylezone 500, a taupe color, also found at DM.

 

I think this manicure turned out pretty cute and I've gotten a lot of compliments on it. Sorry for the bad quality pictures, but I think they were done at night.

My first post and my first holo

Hi everybody! This is my first post on this blog. I plan to talk about nail polish and show you my nail designs. Hopefully some of you will find my posts useful or at least fun to read. My pictures are not the best, but I plan to improve so until then please bear with me. Today I will show you a polish from the Austrian brand S-he stylezone. You can find it at DM (Drogerie Markt) shops located in Germany, Austria and eastern Europe. S-he Stylezone 155 is my first holographic nail polish. Some of you may know it as 427. I think they changed the numbering on the new packaging, but I can’t be sure as I don’t own the old one. My guess is that these S-he people are only trying to confuse us.

Color:

The color is pink, the finish is, well, a holo. It is not a very spectacular one, but still looks pretty holo to me. My affair with pink polish is nonexistent. We don’t like each other and so I don’t wear it. But for the reason of holo, this is also the first pink polish I ever got. There’s not much holographic polish around here to buy so we have to settle for what we have.

Application:

I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the easiest polish I have ever worked with. It applied like a dream, and while being packed with holo glitter it wasn’t sheer at all and was opaque in 2 coats. I literally made no mistakes when applying it. It dried quickly to a shiny, perfect finish. No top coat was used.

Durability:

I found this one to be very good quality. I wore it for about a week to 10 days and only minor chips and tip wearing were present when I removed it. Considering it had no top coat, I think that is just great. The S-he polishes are not expensive at all (about 3 euros/4 $) so I think you get your money’s worth. I have many polishes from this brand and so far only one of them was disappointing. But that’s a story for a different post.

Verdict:

This is a great one. I just couldn’t stop looking at my nails for one week. Everything is so great about it and I don’t even mind the fact that it’s pink. 5 stars!