NOTW: Playful polkadots

Hello lovelies! How goes?

Today I have yet another polkadot mani for you... but this time, I tried something a little more fun! Sadly, due to my injured wrist, my photos of this mani were a bit naff, because I was quite shakey (weird nerve damage issues), but I wanted to show you my work anyway, so here goes :-)

Yes, that's my splint - ouchie :-(

As you can see, the lighting and picture quality is really quite poor compared to normal, but at least you can see my artwork. This mani totally makes me think of Minnie Mouse, although I'm not sure why. I really like the design, even in spite of the fact that it wasn't the most original one ever; it was fun to get my nail art pen out again :-)

Last but not least, here's the base colour used for this mani - Rimmel Show Off:

You've seen this colour before in this post here, but my swatch was quite poor. Now you have a decent one :-) As you can see, it's a raspberry pink creme which looks quite dusky in some lights, but rich in others (as above). The formula was perfect and so was the brush - this is definitely one of Rimmel's winners! I actually really like the polish, but I don't often wear it, since pink isn't my favourite nail colour; it was perfect for my polkadots though!


What else would you like to see me try with my new nail art pens? Let me know in the comments!

'Til next time :-)

- Skye x

NOTW: Classy polkadots

Hello lovelies! How are you doing today? 

Today I have something a bit new for you - a full polkadot mani, achieved using my brand new Barry M Nail Art Pens (totally jumped on the bandwagon here)!!! First off, lemme show you the goods:

Spotty champagne...

... or polka-rose gold?

I love intricate nail art but have always failed at it because I don't have very steady hands. In fact, I own two Models Own nail art pens, but I've always found them very hard to use and they've ended up languishing in my polish drawer. Now, armed with my new Barry M wares, I can take over the freehand universe *evil cackle*! 

I was absolutely chuffed to bits that I did the polkadots all by myself, and basically spent the week staring at my hands in awe and amazement haha. They are fun but they also look super classy, and I could totally see me wearing this mani again at a black-tie event (should such an event ever occur in my life!) :-) :-) 

Just for fun I also have a photo of my right hand :P Check it:

Blurry leftiness :D

This hand rarely makes it onto my blog, mainly because I struggle taking photos with my left hand, but I thought that it would amuse you to see how un-dottish my RH dots look - check out my thumb and pointer in particular :D

Finally, as always, let me show you the base colour that I used for this mani - one of my favourite polishes, and one you may have already seen in this post here. Behold Kiko 221 (Light Satin Beige):

Not as golden as I thought...

Back in December I described this polish as "a sheer champagne glass fleck/shimmer polish" which took four coats to reach opacity. However, my impression of it has changed significantly now that I've seen it in the summer sunshine. More than champagne, this polish is rose gold, with a warm rosey shimmer running through it in the right (sun)light. These are also two-coater swatches, mainly because I felt lazy about doing four... but there's virtually no VNL, so I'm not sure what went wrong in December. Finally, I'm not even sure of the finish anymore! Is it glass fleck? Foil? I think it's foil, now... All I know is that it most definitely is NOT shimmer! So apparently my descriptive skills suck when it comes to polish :D but at least you've got multiple swatches of the polish to look at now :-)

One more thing before I go: in the last post featuring this polish, I said that it had a really subtle silver/purple/green shimmer that I couldn't capture on film on the nail. Turns out all I needed was some summer sunshine :-)

Microglitters flashing... click here for a larger photo!

Pretty, huh? :-)


Sooooooo what do you think of my super-classy polkadots?! I adore dots and just loved this mani. Definitely earmarked for recreation at some stage!

I hope you enjoyed this post and look forward to seeing you back here soon!

'Til next time, curlettes :-)

- Skye x

NOTW: Nerdy nails - H20

Hi lovelies! How are we this week? :-)

Today I have my nerdiest ever mani to show you! It's a bit different to the sorta thing I normally do, but I ended up obsessing about doing it, so it had to happen! I bring you, my H20 mani!!! Lookie lookie:

Science can be magical!!!

Isn't it groovy?! I think I wanted to do this because I've been getting to know a new friend lately who is a chemist. He sorta gets my geek going, and when I realised that the crummy weather wasn't gonna let me enjoy this holo in all its glory, I knew I had to do something to it. For some reason, water molecules popped into my head (although my chemist friend named them, I just saw the dots - ahem, atoms - in my head)! Here's what they look like for the non-scientists like myself:

Water molecules! An unconventional mani inspiration? :-)

I'd say the mani is a pretty accurate depiction :-) Although I wouldn't normally put these colours together, I may actually be in love; I can't stop staring at my nails! I especially love how the red contrasts with the gorgeous blue holo beauty that is A England Tristam (so sparkly!), and I love the nerdy nod <3 It's just a funky coincidence that water is blue and so is the base :-)

Here's what I used for this mani:

• A England Tristam (holo blue base)
• Barry M Silver Foil (stamping)
• Kiko 238 (red 'atoms')
• GALS 34 (stamp)

Finally, as usual, I wanna show you the base colour for this mani, the beautiful A England Tristam and my FIRST EVER HOLO (squeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!): 

ZOMG HOLO! I've been living under a rock!
This pic was taken with flash cos there's no sun :-(

This polish will always be special to me because it was sent to me as a surprise gift by the lovely Anne Catherine Vold Archer (thank you soooo much, Anne). I've learned this year, especially through the polish forums, that people are just insanely kind. I love that I have a material representation of this in my polishes - like a little daily reminder :-) I actually wore this polish expecting the sun to come out and blow me away with rainbow holo goodness, but sadly it was not meant to be :-( I will have to dig it out again in the summer (remember that season?) so I can enjoy it properly. Needless to say, it is GORGEOUS and I'm now totally getting the entire holo hype!

I'm actually considering doing a science mani series now, because there are a few stamping images that I have which make me think of science... but I maybe need neons for some of my ideas. Watch this space! 

Would you be interested in me doing a science series (as a linguist? ha!)? Lemme know in the comments!

'Til next time, peeps :D

- Skye x

NOTW: Funky frog tape mani

Hello guys and girls! I have to say, I'm amazed by the number of followers I picked up lately! Welcome and thank you :-) I hope you enjoy my meagre bloggy offerings :-)

As some of you may know, I'm recovering from what has been a really painful break up, and like everyone who goes through this, I have good days and bad days. This week I had quite a few bad days... and I therefore resorted to some retail therapy to boost my spirits. Fortunately, I'm easily pleased(!) and so when I walked into Superdrug I immediately knew what I was looking for: GOSH Galaxy. Let's have a look at a swatch (this is two coats without a top coat):

Glossy ^^

My photo truly doesn't do this polish justice, and I'm really sorry I couldn't get anything good enough. Blame the awful weather we're having, blame my phone camera, blame my less-than-perfect swatch pose, but I just couldn't capture the amazingness! Take a look at these pictures instead (brace yourselves!): http://nail-loopy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/gosh-galaxy.html and http://www.britnails.co.uk/2012/08/gosh-galaxy-swatches-and-review.html. 

I'll just let you take those in... YES, that's right! This is a MULTICHROME!!! Perhaps I played up those pics too much (it's hard to photograph), but it is most certainly there! This polish has a brown/brass/black base and is filled with tiny particles that shift through gold, brass, black, green, blue (the force is strong with this one) and pink. I've seen all of these colours on my nails albeit for a fraction of a second. The polish is quite sheer and there's still a slight VNL here, but I'd say two coats is enough. Three would definitely be plenty. If you like the look of this polish, I would urge you to go hunting NOW - it is limited edition and was released in the Winter collection, so I was lucky to still find it!

As I haven't shown you anything interesting for some time, I decided to try some tape art on top (sorry for the photo quality - GOSH Galaxy is so sparkly with a topcoat that it didn't photograph very well):

Pretty *.* So proud of my ring finger!

Check out the perfection that is my thumb!
Also: turn your head and there are frogs' eyes on my nails!

As you can see, this was almost a very successful attempt! I recently got some craft scissors from Hobbycraft (Michaels in the US?) which are based on animals. I have crocodile zigzags, snakey waves and froggy eyes. For this art I used the last one. The scissors don't cut perfectly, so if you look close enough you'll see each curve is different, but overall I'm very pleased. The best fingers are my ring finger, thumb and pinkie - I rushed on the others and so didn't get the tape dead centre. To do the dots, I used an old orange wood cuticle stick that I use for clean up :-) The black I used was Collection 2000 Ebony #87.

What do you think? I almost didn't add the black dots but I think they really pull the art together :-)

EDIT: Omigosh! You won't believe this. Look at this blog post here from Tina. This is my blog twin! We independently came up with stripe manis this week that look almost identical - I did a double take when she posted her mani in the FB group Crumpet's Nail Tarts! I think the creepiest part is that I did the mani on a whim - I had no idea that the group were doing tape manis that day. Tina and I started blogging around the same time and we'll now be watching each other to see if we manage this weird nail telepathy again anytime soon! :-P

Now I have the tools for it I've decided to try experimenting more with tape, because it's something I can do in relatively little time. I also have a few stamped designs in my head that I'd like to try make happen! We'll see how that goes :-P

'Til next time, curlettes (wonder if that will stick...) :-D

- Skye x

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