Deborah Lippmann - Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree

I know it's a bit late but this is the polish I wore for Christmas. 

This is Deborah Lippmann - Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree. Quite an appropriate name too!
It is a gorgeous mix of small and large metallic green and red hex glitters suspended in a black jelly base.

This is three coat with a thick coat of Seche Vite. The black jelly base was opaque after only two coats! The only reason I added one more was to make it even more glittery!
There was no glitter placement required either, bonus!

Apologies for the state of my nails. I have to keep them short to stop them continuously breaking at work, but my job totally dries my hands out too! :(
Anyways, I'm sure you'll agree that this is a totally gorgeous polish!

A England Saint George

Here is one of my all time favourite polishes! This is A England Saint George, the most amazing teal holo polish I have ever come across!

Saint George is a green leaning teal shot through with scattered holo. This is the most saturated teal polish I have ever come across! It’s just so rich and lux! The holographic aspect isn’t mind-blowingly strong. Rather it is scattered throughout and I think that was a better choice than a linear holo because it looks so luxurious this way!

The application was amazing! Like seriously it was buttery smooth, flowed beautifully AND a one coater! (Although I did two for photographic reasons.) It was thick, but in a good way! Also there was no dragging, no streaking and no bald spots! Dry time was great too! Less than a couple of minutes and its dry! Oh and by the way? No topcoat!! It dries to such a glossy shine that it’s simply not needed.

I wore this for about a week and besides minimal tip wear, it still looked perfect! Also, removal was blissful! And for such a saturated polish, there was no staining what so ever!

As soon as I first saw pictures of Saint George, it seriously stole my heart! Now that I own it, I just can get over how awesome it is!

My photos really don’t do this polish justice!

Do you own A England Saint George? And do you love it as much as I do?

Angelica Brit Pop

I think I may just have found the ultimate budget glitter topper!

Glitter? Check. Multi Coloured? Check. Multi Sized? Check. Densely Packed? Check. Less than £3? Check. Easily Available? Check!

I think we've got ourselves a real gem on our hands!

So what is this gem I'm talking about? Well if you haven't read the title yet, this is Angelica Brit Pop.

And where did I get hold of such an awesome polish from? Primark! Yes, that high-street clothing store that has popped up everywhere! And they have a whole range of polishes available from neons right through to duochromes. And every single one is only £2.50 in store! (You can also purchase them directly via the Angelica website here for £2.75 each)

Anyway back to the polish:

Brit Pop is a mix of large and small hex glitter in a whole array of colours: Red, Gold, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink and Silver suspended in a clear base. Basically a rainbow party in a bottle!

But the thing that really won me over was that it was SO densely packed! A chunky glitter at that sort of price point is usually really sparse but this one definitely was not! And what you see in all of these pictures is ONE COAT!

I started with a base of Bourjois Rose Lounge, which is a neutral jelly/sheer polish. I did about 4 coats to achieve the opacity you see here. I then added one coat of Brit Pop. I didn't use any topcoat at any stage.

And since you probably all know that I love a matte glitter, I obviously had to try it out!

And I love it! Especially since the base was such a neutral colour, it made it look like it wasn't a polish at all. Instead, it looked like all that glitter was carefully placed on, or as if I had confetti on my nails!

Best of all was that the actual glitter didn't go matte, it still shone through and looked really cool against the neutral matte background.

JELLY SANDWICH TIME!! Haha, bit over-exited? Me? Never! ;)

I thought, since I had this polish on anyway, and the fact that the base colour was a jelly, I may as well try out a jelly sandwich! And it totally worked! I used two more coats of Bourjois Rose Lounge on top of the glitter and this is what I got:

(It looked good with just one extra coat but from a distance still didn't look like a proper jelly sandwich so that's why I used two)

So basically, for £2.50 this is one freaking awesome polish!

Mini Italian Polish Haul

A couple of weeks ago one of my best friends went to Italy and asked if I wanted anything....

Of course I said yes! I sent her a nice long list but told her only to get one or two of those things otherwise it would have cost her an arm and a leg and so here's what she got me:

Here's a quick swatch of each of them:

From left to right: Layla Bubbly Effect-Black Forest, Layla Ceramic Effect-30, Kiko Sun Pearl-River Green, Kiko Magnetic-704 Purple

She also got me a couple other bits and bobs that were on the list including some Kiko stuff and perfume from Duty Free (SO much cheaper than in the shops!).

So thank youuuu Aisha!! I love them! :D

31 Days of Nail Art Challenge - Day 31 - Re-Create Your Favourite Challenge

Okay, so I'm not actually doing my favourite day, but one that I wanted to have another go at.

Truthfully there was about 6 days I wish I could have done again, but I picked Day 10 - Gradient Nails because at the time I wasn't confident about my gradient skills so did a glitter gradient instead. I liked what I created the first time found but felt like I wanted to do a "proper" gradient, so here it is:

I used two of the new Barry M Gelly Nail Paints in Key Lime (green) and Guava (blue). They made the whole process so much easier because the formula was brilliant! I then added a layer of sparse iridescent glitter and then mattified it.

Here's what it looked like before the glitter:

 I really really like these! And I feel like my gradient skills have improved vastly!

Look forward to seeing more gradients from me, I just love the look of them!

Barry M Sequin Nail Effect - White

I have a new product for you all!

You may have seen or heard about all the new Barry M releases coming out over the next few months (more Gelly polishes, new Sequin Effects and new Confetti Effects). Well I have one of the New Sequin Nail Effects Nail Paints to show you!

This is Sequin Nail Paint in White. (There is also a pink one with the same formula and a black and gold one too).

That is two coats of the polish over a white creme.

It is basically a sheer white base with small hex glitter suspended in it. The colours of the glitters are red, blue, green, gold and silver. I think there is also some sort of texture element to it because when the first coat dried there was visible opaque residue in the polish. Either that or I have a dodgy bottle.

The formula was easy to work with and applied smoothly, but the glitter did like to hide away on the first coat. On the second however, they spread out nicely and a good amount transfered onto the nail.

Okay, here's the truth. It is very sheer. As in so sheer it will NEED a base colour, otherwise it will take about 6/7 coats to get it remotely opaque. And if you actually do that many coat, the glitter will probably just fill your nails.

I decided to mattify it to see what it looks like and well... there wasn't much difference. The whole thing just went a bit cloudier and the base and glitter got duller, but apart from that nothing much else changed.

Removal was the same as any other chunky glitter. Thankfully no vicious scrubbing was required and eventually the glitter did slide off which is a major bonus!

So overall what do I think? Well it reminds me of sprinkles and I can see myself using this a lot for nail art, but I doubt I would wear it as a full mani very often. It was a tad bit 'primary school' if that makes sense to you and the formula was a bit annoying but I think it will quite popular since it's quite different.

You can purchase it from the majority of Superdrug and Boots stores and the Barry M website soon.

31 Days of Nail Art Challenge - Day 22 - Inspired by a Song

Music.

Not much to say about it... I like listening to music as much as the next person.

So for this theme I chose the song LaserLight by Jessie J.

No reason in particular, it just so happened to be playing while I was thinking about what to do for this theme.

I did a laser mani using striping tape. It was actually pretty easy to do.

"You make me feel good, You make me feel safe, You make me feel like I could live another day" - Jessie J LaserLight

And here's a video of the song:

31 Days of Nail Art Challenge - Day 19 - Galaxies

Galaxies.

Something I had never thought of creating on my nails.

But now that I have, I love them!

They were really straightforward as well!

What I did was first paint my nails with A England Tristam, then using the corner of a makeup sponge, dab on on A England St George and Color Club Eternal Beauty and Harp On It. Then once that was dry I very lightly sponged over it all with Color Club Beyond and topped it all off with Barry M Diamond Glitter. Then sealed it all in with some topcoat.

I love the fact that all the colours merge together but can all still be seen and the holographicness from the polishes and glitter topper just ties it all together.

So easy and so cool!

31 Days of Nail Art Challenge - Day 18 - Half Moons

Half Moons.

Something that never appealed to me much...

But I tried them out.

And as I suspected. They look awful. I did these quite a while ago, hence the rubbish painting skills, and before I thought about using hole reinforcers to get the shape -_- 

I'm not prod of these. At all. They are messy and ugly and look weird.

But every time I see others doing them, I think they look great! Sigh...

Maybe I'll try them again and give them another chance soon.

31 Days of Nail Art Challenge - Day 17 - Glitter

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I stayed over at my aunts house during the week and had a major nail-catastrophe when i was taking my little cousin out of her car-seat. Basically my thumb nail bent backwards and just ripped off! It was painful. It was gory. It was devastating. But its healing, which is good. Although, because of it I cant even really hold a pen, let alone paint my nails, so I won't be posting anything new for a while (old swatches/beauty/stuff like that instead)... I won't disappear though, I promise!

Glitter.

I LOVE glitter.

But, I hate the removal process that comes with glitter polish so I don't wear it as much as I would like to. (And because of my nail disaster, this isn't what i was planning, but had it in my 'to-post' folder so had to use it instead.)

 This is a Color Club Glitter Rainbow Gradient.

I love how, when i look at my hand from one side, I see these four colours! Haha, simple things please me :P

And these are the polishes I used (I don't know any of the name because none of them have labels) :

31 Days of Nail Art Challenge - Day 11 - Polka Dots

Polka dots.

One of the easiest nail art techniques in my opinion.

They're just so easy to do and all you need is a dotting tool or toothpick!

So this week, I did something rather funky!

I decided to do a different colour on each nail and a paler/darker version for the dots. I originally wanted to do something a lot more complicated but since I've got school and so was only wearing this for an hour max, it just wasn't worth the effort, hence the reason the clean-up wasn't that great either :/

Strangely, this turned out to be an O.P.I only mani! I didn't even plan for that to happen, haha!

31 Days of Nail Art Challenge - Day 4 - Green

Green.

Again, like orange, a colour I never used to wear very much...

Buuut... Now I love it! I actually have so many green polishes now but they're all so different!

My entry for yellow was really simple so I thought I should put a bit more of an effort in, so I chose....

Magnetic polish!

This is Barry M Magnetic Green Sparkle over H+M Envy Me.

I decided to layer it over a darker polish as the formula for the latest Barry M Magnetics are quite thin and so it was just easier to do less layers of polish. Also, looking at these photos, I think the dark base adds a bit of depth to the overall look too.

And there's holographic glitter in the too!

Magnetic polish is such a cheap and easy way to make your nails look more interesting!

And don't forget to check out what Stephanie and Wendy have created this week!