Children In Need Mani

Hello lovelies! Welcome back to the vets and greetings to my new followers - I hope you like what you see here :)

WARNING: this is a picture-heavy post.

As I have doubled my followers seemingly overnight (to a modest sixteen!), I just thought I'd lay it out for you again. This blog is mostly for me, but as I take pics of my manis and post them to FB anyway, I thought I'd give my photos a permanent home. I'm also hoping that this will inspire and motivate me to try things I've not tried before, especially with regard to nail art. I'm still learning, so things won't be perfect, but I'm well up for letting y'all chuckle at my mistakes ;) I'm actually a freelance translator/interpreter and my business is very young, so I may sometimes disappear - I'm certainly not able to 100% commit to a post a week or a specific day just yet - but I'll try to show you what I do each week because I normally change my manis over the weekend when business slows down.

Before I begin today's post proper, can I just take a moment to say how cool the audience stats are from Blogger?

United Kingdom	145
United States	58
Portugal	14
Trinidad and Tobago	5
Belgium	4
Denmark	4
Australia	2
Germany	2
Italy	2
Netherlands	2

These are a few days old now, but that's THREE different continents already! Isn't the interweb incredible, connecting us all like this?

...ANYWAY...

Today, I have a wonderful dotty mani to show you. You don't know me well yet, but I LOVE dots. LOVE them (really a lot). Here's what I came up with:

The colours are inspired by a BBC charity event that happens once a year in Britain called Children in Need (more info in the link). This year's motto was 'Show your spots!', so my mani is fitting indeed :)

If I had mad nail art skillz I would have tried to draw Pudsey, the Children in Need mascot on an accent nail:

Fortunately for you guys, I know my limits - and also I thought that dots would be more fun because Children in Need only happens on one day (Friday 16th November, this year), and I didn't want to have a yellow bear on my nails for an entire week :P

Finally, I'd like to show you the undies on this one. This was an untried of mine which is really quite beautiful in an ephemeral sorta way. The colour is called Cloud Nine (#20) by Collection 2000 (a fav brand of mine), and this is three coats over Rimmel French Ivory (which was a totally pointless layer that I thought might help me avoid visible tips LOL).

In artificial light

In direct sunlight

Although it's quite sheer, which makes it a PITA to apply neatly (pardon my bubbles, pillow marks and weird thumb dent!), I really like this polish because it kind of glows from within. When it starts snowing I'll definitely have to do some snowy manis with it. I have no idea why I didn't try it sooner!

Hope you like this week's offering and I'll see y'all next time on the interweb :)

- Skye x

Autumnal sponging

Hello to my nine new followers and whomever else got sucked in to read this post!


Today I have a lovely autumnal sponge mani to show you. The colours I chose evoke autumn leaves, bonfires and cosy nights in, and this is the reason I chose this combo... at least it would have been, except that the real reason is that I chickened out of doing a tribal mani. I just bought some nail art pens and was excited to try them out, but I soon realised I needed a lot more practice for a good one. Here is just one half-attempted nail to illustrate my point:

Hmmm... yes. Having realised that I was way out of my comfort zone, I caved and sponged instead (I've been meaning to do a sponge mani for ages anyway). Watch this space for a real tribal mani one day!

So, onto today's nails! The nice thing about sponge manis is that you don't require any nail art skills at all :-)

For the sponging I used Kiko 238 (red creme), Rimmel Lasting Finish 'Pop' (orange creme) and Rimmel Lasting Finish 'Sunshine' (yellow creme), as well as a pretty Accessorize duochrome 'Bronze' which has a red/pink/bronze/copper/gold shimmer. Here's a pic that has better angles (claw of doom) for you to see the Accessorize polish. It's actually well worth enlarging these pics because my photos don't really do the mani justice:

The undies was one of my FAVOURITE polishes EVER: Kiko 374. I don't have a good swatch of this but you can see one using the link below which really captures the beautiful copper shimmer in this coffee-coloured lacquer:

http://lacktastisch.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/dsc03658rc.jpg?w=640&h=468

All in all, I was a bit disappointed that the colours (the yellow) didn't *pop* but it's still a really pretty mani and one I'd definitely do again. I'd like to mix it up with different colours in the future, too. Hope you like it :-)

- Skye x

A new blog on the block

Hey there!

This is my FIRST EVER blog post, brought to you from rainy England. I'm hoping to use my blog to record my journey through the world of polish :)

Perhaps I'll start with a bit of history: I've always been a biter, a picker and whatever-elser when it comes to my nails and I remember wistfully looking at quite literally EVERYONE else's nails when I was younger wishing mine would look as nice. My ma and my aunt always had especially nice nails, and my aunt used to try to motivate me to stop messing with mine by promising to do my nails really nicely. Although I never got a mani off of her, this motivated me to have nicer nails and wear polish, and I've actually been a true fan of polish ever since I discovered that I wouldn't bite my nails if they looked nice.

Since then, I managed to acquire a modest stash, but didn't really get into polish seriously until my final two years of university. The first of these years was spent abroad, and I had the great fortune of living with a Russian girl in Austria who was very particular about her nails and cuticles. This was my first ever nail epiphany - I bought some Sally Hansen cuticle remover and realised my nails had never looked better! My final year of uni was a really hard year for me on all levels and I ended up working on improving my person to get through it. As I'd become bored with my manis, I started looking at ways of improving the condition of my nails even more (enter: lemony flutter, life-changer!) and I started researching nail art. Suddenly, I felt like I'd stumbled on an entire world of people who loved polish as much as me and just fell in love with the infinite possibilities out there for manis.

Since then, my stash has doubled in size and I've not been bored of my nails even once. Instead, I bore the members of various polish addict groups on FB with pics - and this blog is just a natural extension of that! I'm still learning all the time and am looking forward to seeing my progress recorded on this blog as time goes by. This is primarily a blog for me, and I'm running a new business right now, so my posts may be fairly sporadic, but I'm looking forward to using my new blog to share my manis with all of you. I also mostly only buy drugstore brands, so I'm not your gal if you're hoping for post after post about indies!

To finish off this post, here's a pic that I posted on FB following the No H8 movement, which I think really demonstrates the progress I've made so far (EDIT: blow the pic up big to be truly horrified!). Here's to onwards and upwards :-)

I hope that you'll enjoy my manis and please be assured that my posts won't be so long in future :-P I know I have a tendency to go on (and on, and on...) ;-)

- Skye x