Purple Water Marble - Happy Birthday to Me !!!

Nail Fun

Nail Fun is all about having fun with your nails.  Layering it, splattering it, making pretty patterns with it … it’s the most fun you can have on your own with a child in the house !!  J 

BIRTHDAY PURPLE WATER MARBLE !!!

I have been in awe of the girls who can water marble for yonks!  Blame Colette at My Simple Little Pleasures oh and also blame Christina at Let Them Have Polish too for her recent Bettina excellent marble.

I tried it once, a couple of months ago.  I ended up with a big splodgy mess and only did 1 nail, and it took FOREVER to dry, so in typical Crumpet fashion, I abandoned (I don’t tend to persevere with things I can’t master lol).

For my birthday, I wanted to do something special, and after the great Galaxy fail, (plus the addition of a bank holiday weekend) decided I had enough time to give it another go.

And here it is –

I am DELIGHTED.  It’s not perfect.  You can clearly see through the pics that the nails get better the more I practice ha ha.   I love some more than others (obviously) but oh my god IT’S PURPLE and I love it !!

Things you need to know –

• I used a base coat of OPI Planks A Lot
• I marbled with OPI Planks A Lot, CG Let’s Groove (the dark one, doesn’t it look wowser), Sally Hansen Lacey Lilac and Model’s Own Purple Ash (the slightly browny one)
• I really can’t decide whether Purple Ash was genius or catastrophe.  It’s a warm brown based purple, unlike the other 3 which are cold colours.  This makes it the odd one out and it clearly doesn’t work with the other 3.  However, in a couple of the nails it adds a crazy paisley psychedelic effect which I love.  Hmmmm
• The Beth Factor – my amazing daughter helped.  She was fascinated, and she was an excellent stick twizzler and tape ripper offer
• The Beth Factor – my amazing daughter hindered.  She was NOT a good blob dropper, ripped a few bulls eyes AND capsized the water bowl lol.  But we still had fun J
• Blowing on the water helps – whilst you have your nail immersed, blow on the water til the excess varnish starts to wrinkle – this makes it MUCH easier to candy floss on to your stick

• Bubbles – I ended up with a few bubbles – anyone know why ?
• The patience of patterning.  At first I was quite hesitant with the patterns, which is why the first couple of nails are basically swirls.  The better designs definitely come with more confidence and more decisive strokeplay
• Have plenty of tissues nearby to soak up the worst of the mess

 my favourite nail of all - right thumb

So, not perfect, but super happy anyway.  Even better, I am now excited to do more marbles.  I just need to train the daughter a bit more first!  Lol.

Have fun J and let me know if you have picked up any other great marble hints, tips and tricks.

NAILS I LOVE - Zoya - PULSE Collection

Nails I Love

ZOYA – Pulse Collection

Zoya’s PULSE Collection came out a while ago and I have had it on backorder for 2 WHOLE MONTHS !!  It’s nearly killed me waiting for it to arrive.  It’s full of dark, deep, hypnotic colours with a little bit of metal and shimmer thrown in for good measure.  Sounds like heaven !

These colours are GLORIOUS. They are dark, they ARE hypnotic, they are mysterious, dramatic, perverse, subversive, evil – everything a classic dark polish should be!

Let’s start with the thumb – SLOANE.  Described as “black plum metallic” Sloane is going to be getting a lot of wear this winter.  I think she’s more like blackcurrant skin, and it wasn’t til a sunbeam hit us that I saw the teeny tiny sparks of metal glinting under her surface – she’s like a super spy keeping that secret!  I love this.  A lot.

Index finger = RIHANA, a “raspberry wine metallic”.  This is like burgundy without the brown – a nice dark shimmer, not unlike red wine.  I don’t know that I would call it raspberry – it’s a bit darker than that.  I think she will look a-may-zing with glitter.

On the middle finger, MIKKA, an “icy grape metallic”.  There is a lot of kinship between this one and Sloane.  They are both from the Grape family, but this is a little bit lighter and has a lot more going on as a result.  She sways and shimmers, bends and blinds you – this is pure dark beauty.

Ring finger is BLAIR, an “elderberry plum metallic” and this is the first one I didn’t love as much on the nail as I thought I would.  In the bottle, she’s a shimmering swirl of hot-headed rubiness, but veers towards maroon on the nail.  I don’t know where all the brown suddenly came from.  She’s not ugly, not by a long strange, but I would have liked the red to dominate a little more.

Finally on the pinkie, COLBIE, a “russet metallic” – perfect description.  This is a bit lighter and browner than Blair, giving an intense blackened copper look.  Again, these 2 are very close sisters, and given the choice I would probably keep Colbie as she looks like Autumn leaves.

Missing from the photo is JACY, a “mauve metallic purple” – imagine Demi with a bit of fuschia shimmer on top.  She’s a little bit the “odd one out” in terms of tone”, which is why she didn’t make it to the hand of glory J

So, Sloane, clear winner, then Mikka, possibly the unphotpgraphed Jacy, then Rihanna, Colbie and Blair.  All beautiful girls – bring on the dark skies and these girls will be good to go.

Have fun J

  

Top Tip – if you’re ever unsure what a nail colour looks like, go to Google images, which will give you plenty of contrasts and compares.

Nail Fun - Fiiiiiiiire !

Nail Fun

Nail Fun is all about having fun with your nails.  Layering it, splattering it, making pretty patterns with it … it’s the most fun you can have on your own with a child in the house !!  J 

FIIIIIIIIIIRE !

Hi everyone J  so, I’ve been playing around with similar themes lately and ended up with 2 volcano designs which I really like.  In the last one, Alternative Volcano, I’d left 2 nails blank so that I could run further experiments …. And I liked one so much that she now has a post of her own. 

Behold – Fire!

This is a really simple mani.  4 underlying shades – I used OPI The “It” Color, CG Papaya Punch, OPI Tangerine Scene and CG Life Preserver.  You can use any combination of colours – all I would suggest is that you steer away from using a red, because in a minute it will get lost.

So, photo of suitably messy nails, and this one comes with a sad, saaaaaad story.  Halfway through my stripes, there was an almighty crash.  I turned around, and saw that my box of purple varnishes had crashed to the floor, and already through the lid I could see purple blood.  One of my girls had died L  Luckily, she was a common girl rather than a super special one (I think I would have cried if Deborah Lippmann’s Bad Romance had bled out) but traumatic nevertheless.  Of course I had to start cleaning up before it all dried, hence the lovely beetroot type stain around my index finger.  Siiiiiigh.

So, one thick layer of red shatter (mine was OPI) and you’re ready to go.  I did the shatter of a couple of the nails in a “wave” style, and it definitely looks more like flickering fire. 

I’m really really pleased with how this turned out.  It’s bright, it’s dramatic, it’s so WOW on the nail.   I just can't stop looking at it.

Enjoy!  J

Nail Fun - Alternative Volcano

Nail Fun

Nail Fun is all about having fun with your nails.  Layering it, splattering it, making pretty patterns with it … it’s the most fun you can have on your own with a child in the house !!  J 

ALTERNATIVE VOLCANO

So, I haven’t had much success with Grey Crackle (I use CG’s Cracked Concrete).  Their silver, I love, their black, I love, the purple and the pink, I likey and refuse to give up, but the grey … well it just seems to make everything dull.

I’ve tried it with light colours – just makes them look dull.  I’ve tried it with dark colours – just makes them look dull.  I’ve even tried it over bright colours – guess what?  Made them look DULL.

Then I saw a wonderful post from Let Them Have Polish which I am unfortunately not clever enough to hyperlink.  She had layered Cracked Concrete over 4 horizontal stripes of yellow, orange, pink and violet and it looked AMAZING.   Suddenly it looked cool, shiny and subversive, so I had to try.

Having tried it against purple before and hated it, I opted to keep to the yellow-orange-red theme.  2 layers of each of the 4 stripes.  20 mins to dry.  Thick and fast CG on top.

Voila – and I likey A LOT.  Even so, it’s not as beautiful as it’s inspiration, and I can’t help but think it will look just as good with black, so I’m still undecided on whether to keep the grey.

My fave 3 fingers, because the cracks were so wiiiiiiiiide.  

Let me know if you’ve done a fab mani with the grey J

 PS - trying to hyperlink here >>>   http://www.letthemhavepolish.com/2011/02/china-glaze-crackle-spam.html

Nails I Love - Purple OTT Mania

Nails I Love

10 Purple Polishes Sitting On My Nails J

I confess, I was bored.  And as I was mooching through my favourite nail polish box (the purples) I found I had 10 I hadn’t tried…. I actually love wearing different colours at the same time so yay, here we go !!  (But be warned, I will be saving the best for last).

The Right Hand

Thumb – LA Girl Rockstar

Index - Color Club Electronica

Middle – Color Club Wild At Heart

Ring – OPI Catherine The Grape

Pinkie – Color Club Tru Passion

In the bottle, I had a MASSIVE crush on Rockstar.  Dark, delicious and possibly poisonous, this is a very dark glass-flecked purple.  On the nail ?  Waaaaaa!  Where’d’all the purple go ?  Everything that made this edgy and cool in the bottle, disappears, and whilst you’re still left with an arresting nail, virtual black with teeny tiny flecks does NOT match my expectations.  It’s still very cool, but not as glam-cool as I’d hoped.

Color Club is fast becoming one of my favourite brands.  Solid, dynamic colour, excellent bottles and application, these tick so many boxes.  My purple splurge included some amazing CC colours.  Electronica (bottom) is just so perfectly named, it’s absurd.  Dark, cold, maelstrom purple, this shines with a thousand volts, fluorescing glossy electricity at every moment.

Wild At Heart (top) shouldn’t be able to compete, but does.  Less blue, and more royal, this is semi-holographic, catching moonbeams in its midnight glow.  There’s a beautiful dusty depth to the holo here – deliciously infinite.

Tru Passion is the odd one out – lighter, a medium glittery purple, this sparkles and shines like it belongs on a Christmas tree.  Whilst it looks beautiful on, it didn’t really look right against its darker cousins, so I layered it with China Glaze purple crackle.  The glitter broke through like a crazy cracked paving slab – love!

And then there was Catherine The Grape .. the odd one out, and doesn’t the name just make you break into a big grin ?  This is a shiny, shimmery brown purple with oodles of class and glamour.  Super glossy, super divine, this is a purple that defies description – the nearest I can get is that it reminds me of what mahogany would look like if it was purple!  Seriously lovely.

Left Hand – The China Glazes

Thumb – Mummy May I

Index – Grape Juice

Middle – Let’s Groove

Ring – C-C-Courage

Pinkie – Spontaneous

So, bottom’s up.  Spontaneous is a lovely lively dark lavender / medium purple.  A shade or 2 darker than OPI’s Planks A Lot, this is just a FUN colour, and I bought it so I would have a good mid range colour for blending.

Grape Juice and C-C-Courage, whilst lovely and sparkly, are not quite as wow on the hand as they are in the bottle, mainly because they come out a couple of shades lighter.  GJ is the lightest, and almost looks anaemic – icy but with nice flecks of colour.  CCC is soooo cool in the bottle – a dark yet bright grey purple that glistens with light – but on the nail it blanded out a little, although I’m sure a little KleanColor magic will brighten it back up.  This is very indigo, and a little too matte for my liking.

Let’s Groove is coolness personified, a 70s swirlfest of shimmering violet tones.  In the bottle, it looks like blackened purple roses, and on the nail, it loses some of that olde elegance, but not much.  It is supremely rich, flashing magenta, brown, royal purple and dark polished wood.  This is almost like the unblued cousin of CC’s Electronica, and should come with its own pair of flares.

And finally … ladies, ladies, ladies … Mummy May I?  Mamma Mia this is ah-may-zing!  Purple has never looked so fine, so sexy, so poisonous and so goddammed witchy.   In the bottle, it is super pretty, devilish and full of voodoo.  A purplish black base, flecked with violet, on the nail this looks like blackcurrant crush, the clash of the bruised skin mixing with the sweet inner juices.

This reminds me a little of some photos I have seen of Merry Midnight – that beautiful clash of the dark and the bright.  There is a holiness to this colour.  It should be bowed down to, worshipped, prayed to.

This, girls, is BEYOND magical. 

Enjoy !

Top Tip – if you’re ever unsure what a nail colour looks like, go to Google images, which will give you plenty of contrasts and compares.

Nail Fun - The Volcano!

Nail Fun

Nail Fun is all about having fun with your nails.  Layering it, splattering it, making pretty patterns with it … it’s the most fun you can have on your own with a child in the house !!  J 

CREATIVE LAYERING – The Volcano !

I have been striving for a cool volcano style look for a while and MAY just have made myself happy.

The colours used – for my red, I used Ruby Pumps, a little extravagant, but I felt at least one of the polishes needed some lava-like glitter.

I used a plain black base and then the cling film splatter technique (see Cling Film mani blog).   This made a wonderful swirly mess which was ALMOST good enough … but hey, what’s life without a little tinkering ?

I then added a coat of KleanColor Chunky Holo in Poppy – this gave it some sparkle and looked really cool.  It also made the oranges really pop.

The coup de grace though, was a 2^nd top coat – this time KleanColor’s  CHUNKY COPPER – bright coppery round pieces of glitter.  Simply too yummy for words!!!

I am BEYOND happy with this mani – it’s also versatile.  Icy blue version next !

Happy nailing J  xx

Nail Fun - Pink Galaxy

Nail Fun

PINK GALAXY

Well, this certainly didn’t start out as a galaxy, and I’m not even convinced I like the finished article.  I took a few wrong turns, but might have *just* gotten away with it!

So, the base.  Pick 5 pinks from palest baby pink (OPI Steady As She Rose) to medium to dark (Zoya Moxie was my darkest, and the ones in between were CG).  I wasn’t totally happy with the pinks I’d chosen once they were on the nail – some had a cream base, others a white base, and it just didn’t look  … right.   2 of my pinks were also far too similar – oh well, you live and learn!

The next step was to splatter them.  Initially this was to be a tale of 5 pinks, with each nail splattered with 3 of the pinks.  However, because the pinks just looked *wrong*, I turned to a little bit of purple (CG Spontaneous) for some of the splatter, and to Color Club for the leopard spots.

Finally, each nail was topped with KleanColor chunky glitter in Fuschia –absolutely amazing – look at it in the bottle!  KleanColor balances out all sorts of nail crimes, but it does come with a side effect – it’s quicker to watch paint dry than to watch your KleanColor dry!  Seriously, this stays tacky for ages, although you can smooth most smudges out.

So, once ye olde glitter was in place and I could call it a galaxy, I felt a lot happier. I really like about half the nails and think the other half are a bit meh.  My favourites are the thumb and middle finger of the right hand – the splatter just blended better here.

Oh and I’m still practicing my leopard print – maybe I’m getting there, maybe I’m not lol.  I keep doing them too big then too small then too many ….. argh, but I WILL get there!

I love reading your comments, so let me know what you think, and how you perfected doing freehand leopard spots!

Happy nailing J  xx

Nail Fun - Franken Time !! Raindrops? Pah!

Nail Fun

Nail Fun is all about having fun with your nails.  Layering it, splattering it, making pretty patterns with it … it’s the most fun you can have on your own with a child in the house !!  J 

Franken Fun …. It’s all The PolishAholic’s fault !!

This is actually my 3^rd Franken, but the 1^st I have been asked to share.  My first was a copy of Rebecca’s Cupcake Franken, and then I added some large silver glitter to OPI Mat-adore Red to create my second.

This one though required a bit more thought and thanks for all of you who chipped in with ideas.  So, ladies this is UNDOUBTEDLY The PolishAholics fault lol.  Earlier in the week she posted an amazing swatch of Illamasqua’s Raindrops and as usual, my reaction was “I want that.”  EBay for once let me down, and the more I stared at its soft grey glimmer, the more I wondered if I could make something similar enough to make me go “Ooooooh”.  So I did.

1 large empty OPI bottle (by the way – when I rinsed it out with acetone, the wand started to split near the brush – is this normal, was the acetone too brutal?).

I bottle of Rimmel DISCO BALL glitter.  It was only 8ml and decanted beautifully into the larger bottle, and this was my first big lesson.  The more “air” you have in your bottle, the better it all mixes, and the more room you have to experiment.  When I tried to do Cupcake I had to keep emptying mix OUT of my bottle as it wouldn’t shake – not good!

I then added some OPI Nail Envy that was going to waste (not much, maybe  2-3mm worth).

Whilst Raindrops was my inspiration, I wanted to create something that was soft grey, but  a little but blue, and with a hint of lilac, so that looking at it, you would never be totally sure what it was.

I added 2mm worth of OPI Totally Fort Worth It (as it was close to the overall tone I wanted.  I debated using Zoya Harley, but couldn’t bear to do that to her!) and then added a similar amount of CG Sea Spray and Agent Lavender, which, I quickly learnt, were too pale to really have any effect.

I added a bit more Totally FWI, and then started to wonder what I could add.  I new I needed to go a bit darker to add some more pizzazz.  So in the end I added –

• About 10 drops of Essie Chinchilly
• 8 drops of OPI Grape Set and Match
• 10 drops of Zoya Kotori (an inspired choice due to it’s sheerness)
• And I *think* I added a couple of drops of CG First Mate as well
• At the end, there may have been a couple more drops of Chinchilly

By now it was bedtime and my bottle was gunky.  The lighting in my house is not good when the sun’s gone, so I decided to look at it in the light of day, and to be honest, I still wasn’t wowed by it.  It looked ok on my hand though, so I begged Beth to steal one nail of my hand back from the next manicure she was subjecting, no *treating* me too and …. Welllll, I likeyed.

On the nail it was much softer.  Undoubtedly grey of birth but with some blue to it, and some lilac in some lights too.  Hurrah!  The Rimmel glitter is silver with predominantly blue bits, but when the pink bits in there catch the light it does look pretty.  If you do decide to try this, I would suggest a pinkier glitter to balance out the blue colours.

And, for an impatient Crumpet like me, sadly it’s true.  You do have to do it a little bit at a time.  Now, if I could just find a hunky young man to do all that bottle-shaking for me …..

J  Let me know what you think !  Oooh and baby needs a name – either PAA inspired or something wintry maybe ??

Much love xx