Renaissance Cosmetics Guest Post - Victorian Roses

Hi Goddesses

Earlier this week, I was the guest post for Renaissance Cosmetics, which is the brand owned by Meghan of Willpaintnailsforfood.  She is one of THE most talented bloggers out there, and now she's diversified into making polish, and a bloody good job she's done there too!

Meghan sent me 4 polishes for review, and next week, you can see all of these individually on my blog, but for today, we have some nail art featuring all 4.


Let's look at the polishes first -
index finger - Rosie-Osie
middle finger - The Danforth
ring finger - Flirt
and the green is Emerald Envy

When I chose these colours, I immediately saw roses in my head, and what gorgeous semi-gothic, Victorian roses they made!   I used Meghan's favourite polish on base - OPI My Vampire Is Buff.

These polishes are intensely rich in colour and all of them are one coaters.  Although I wouldn't usually do this kind of nail art with glitters, they lent themselves admirably to the task.

I did my roses differently this time.  I've just bought the Sam Biddle needle pen, and did some scribbling with the pen to create the petal effect.


These polishes were sent to me for an honest review.  You can buy them - and the fabulous new collection - HERE.

GOT Polish and Purple Birthday Nails !!!!!!!!

Hi Goddesses

Happy Sunday!!  I hope you’re having a relaxing weekend.  As a lot of you know, Friday was my birthday, and I wanted to do some epic nails for the day.  I even made sure the GOT Polish prompt was purple so that I could be all colour co-ordinated.

I was very smitten with a mani that Chalkboard nails did a couple of weeks ago – HERE – and couldn’t get it out of my head.  In the end, I didn’t go for a copycat mani, but it was definitely my jumping off point.

I decided it was a great excuse to use some of my favourite purples, and used 11, plus the gold.  Sadly, it’s not my Top 11 purples because I decided to exclude glitters and holos.

Let’s run through the combos first –

·       Base polish – Cult Nails My Kind of Cool Aid – all time classic perfect lilac!

·       Thumb – Wet n Wild Buffy The Violet Slayer and Contrary Polish Purple Smoke

·       Index – OPI Grape Set and Match and OPI You’re Such a Budapest – tonally, I don’t think Budapest worked

·       Middle – China Glaze Let’s Groove (sooooo under-rated) and OPI Planks A Lot which was too similar to the base polish – you can barely see it lol

·       Ring – Rimmel Punk Rock and Indigo Bananas Hole In The Sky

·       Pinkie – OPI Who Are You Wearing and Sally Hansen Delphinium

·       Gold – OPI Love Angel Music Baby

Overall, I love the mani, and I am really chuffed I tried something more intricate, even though it’s not perfect.  It’s funny what the camera picks up – in the photos all I see is how the under-locking near the cuticle looks like I’ve missed something in clean up!

I had to matte this because there was just no seeing the pattern when it was glossy – mainly because a lot of the colours are so similar.  I prefer the darker nails – they definitely have more drama – and if I was going to do it again, I’d keep to that colour scheme.

Digit-al Dozen Dotting Days - Dots Within Dots Within Dots Within Dots ......

Hi Goddesses - and Happy Birthday to Meeeeeeeeeeee

Yesterday I posted a Jumbo Dots mani full of happy colours.  It was one of those manis where I had to talk to myself (honestly) – do I leave it as is, or do I carry on and do what I set out to do?

Well, I carried on.  The only difference between this conversation and the identical ones I’ve had over the years, is that I’m a cleverer pup now and I take photos before I carry on lol.  You know it’s wise!  I even took photos at the half-way stage of the dots within dotting ... you can never be too careful!

So this mani was always supposed to be a dots within dots extravaganza.  It’s only because I loved the jumbo stage so much that that became a separate post, PLUS you don’t get to see a mani like that very often.

So I started putting dots inside my dots, and then more dots inside my dots that were inside my dots lol.   You need to get the colour balance right, so that you’re not adding a central dot too close to a jumbo dot in the same colour, but for the most part, I think I got it right.

My only difficulty with this mani came where I’d overlapped my dots.  Some were fine, but with others, I had to add half a dot or ¾ of a dot, and it bugs me that the middle finger is a bit wonky.

That said, I still absolutely love it.   A reminder of your colours –

On base I have Literary Lacquers Tesseract, then

Barry M Lemon Ice Cream

Rimmel Ultra Violet

OPI Hot & Spicy

OPI Strawberry Margarita

W7 Neon Green

I added matte top coat quite early on in the re-dotting process.  Everything was just too damn shiny lol, and in photos, you really couldn’t see all the marvellous that was going down.

Plus, doesn’t the matte make it look all sherbert-y?   Sweet shop goodness.  

I hope you’ve enjoyed this extra Digit-al Dozen Week.  I have a couple more dotty manis that didn’t make it into this week – I don’t know yet whether to group them together and do another week in September, or just slowly release them into blogland.

Don’t forget to check out the other DD geniuses xx

An InLinkz Link-up

Above The Curve – Cecilia, Watermelon, Caty Perry-winkle, Raziel

Hi Goddesses

I honestly don’t know why these got stuck in the vault cos they sure are pretty.

We start with Cecilia, just the most charming gentle blue holo.

This is close to turquoise, but retains its soft blue base.  The colour is rich and mesmeric and absolutely gorgeous.

I could stare at this one all day :)

Caty Perry-winkle is cute in both name and appearance.  This is darker than Cecilia, but still a fairly light medium blue.

This smiles with periwinkle happiness and a gentle smattering of holo.   You can’t help but feel giddy with this polish on your nails.

This is a blue for all seasons – utterly charming.

Raziel I had to have.  A rich raspberry holo, this is just glorious.

This polish is more opaque than the others, and has an intense richness of colour.  There’s something very “winter nights round a roaring fire” about this one.

I love that the one is slightly off from your normal red, and the holo fires violet, for added beauty.

Finally, Watermelon, which is a crelly.  Super bright, with scattered holo, this is the very essence of summer.

I personally struggled with the opacity of this one, and needed 4 coats to hide any VNL, but it’s such a pretty polish I forgave it :)