My nails over the past few weeks

So these past few weeks, I've been noticing an onslaught in nail art on blogs. Now I myself have a very shaky hand so I can't draw straight lines nor perfectly rounded dots. Ask my various art teachers, the only thing I'm really good at is abstract! 

Anyway, one thing I've ALWAYS wanted to try is nail marbling. I've watched loads of tutorials on youtube and I even tried it once, but the results were disastrous. About two weeks ago, I tried again and I suppose it was halfway successful. I used my Barry M pastel colours and whilst it is very tedious, I found it sort of relaxing, strange enough as it sounds. 

There were a few gloopy areas but it's a massive improvement from the last time. Hopefully next time, they'll end up better!

Next up, following one of Gem Fatale's Tuesday tips with dotting with a kerby grip, I managed to get another halfway decent look. 

So there were a few dodgy dots, but mostly they seemed to go well. These lasted for ages as well, I'd say about a week with minimal chipping.

Here are the products I used, the no7 Topcoat that my sister left behind hehe and the Barry M Boots LE nail varnish and then Barry M Blueberry Ice Cream.

MNY Maybelline "I'm An Iced Angel" Collection Part One

Just a little note, I'm posting this in two parts, as it'll be a little too image heavy otherwise and I don't like image heaviness!



Please excuse the massive fail that is me putting the package on the wrong way up...
Right, so for Kleeschen (AKA St.Nicholas in Belgium and Holland..basically their christmas), I got this makeup collection from MNY from my parents (ok, I was the one one who picked it out). It retails for €19.99 and funnily enough, I don't think the colours are the same as in the promo pic.

So the nail varnishes are completely different and I think the blue eyeshadow might be the same, but as for the rest, they don't look like the stuff in the collection!
Anyway, as you can tell by the oh so creative name of the collection, it's blatantly a winter collection


Here are the two nail varnishes in shades 653 (the silver glitter) and 655 (beautiful metallic dark blue).


So this nail varnish is just sparkly silver glitter and quite sheer, so it's basically a top coat to spruce up other varnishes.

Oh boy, do I love this nail varnish! The colour is just GORGEOUS and it was just love at first sight. I'm glad that the varnish isn't too dark as I'm not too keen on black and this is light even to be obviously blue.

Bottom is shade 175 and above it is shade 295. usually, I steer clear of the juicy tube lipglosses, because they remind me way too much of the cheap makeup you'd get as a kid that was unbelievably sticky and just awful. So, quite unfairly of me, I thought the worst of these and expected them to be awful, but they are actually really smooth and not sticky at all! I didn't really notice any scent but they're quite pretty, subtle with a little bit of glitter, in fact I think I'm slowly getting over my anti-glitter-lips thing.


So they're quite pigmented, but not too much so, and the clear one has more glitter particles than the pink one, which is the one I prefer because it'll give me a nice subtle colour.

Right, part II is coming right up and should be posted later on this evening :)

Dupe Alert! Urban Decay Aquarius vs Miss Sporty Lasting Colour in Hypnotic Turquoise

Ladies, I have foudn my first dupe! And boy am I proud haha!

So today I was debating what colour I was going to paint my nails when my eyes fell upon Urban Decay's Aquarius from their Summer Of Love collection. And then I noticed the Miss Sporty Lasting Colour in Hypnotic Turquoise, which looked pretty similar.


See, there is a certain similarity, so I decided to test it out to see if I had stumbled upon a dupe.

left Urban Decay, right Miss Sporty

Ok, so at one coat Miss Sporty is slightly greener than Urban Decay but after a few coats...

Every alternative nail is Urban Decay, starting from the thumb and as you can see, after two-three coats, they're practically identical.

But what do you save in terms of price?

Well, if you wanted to be really iffy, you could divide the Urban Decay Summer of Love set at £17.50 by 7 and get £2.50 out of it. Miss Sporty retails at £1.99, so you'd save 51p. BUT as you can't buy the nail varnishes individually, you'd save around 15 quid, if you just wanted this shade. But of course, if you want all of them, then by all means, get the set (despite it well...being autumn.)

xx

Making my own nail varnish!

Yeah, I'm not a pro in a lab, I just did as many other beauty bloggers did and mixed some pigment with clear nail varnish, as you can do by following this nifty tutorial although this's a pretty good post as well!

So basically I did it using Barry M's Pink Gold (3) and a random french manicure clear nail varnish and this....was the result.



The colour is definitely gorgeous, but I think I used too much pigment and not enough nail varnish so the consistency isn't fantastic and it's chipping already, so note to all you people ready to try this: Don't use too much pigment!


So next time I try this, I'll try and do it a little better (and neater!) and I'm looking forward to it as Barry M has some lovely colours with hints of different ones, so I'm anxious to try out some other colours.