Winter Wonderland: Ombré Tutorial

I know I said my next post was going to be an alternative to the French tip manicure...but then it snowed and everything looked so beautiful and I couldn't resist creating a Winter Wonderland design (inspried by this cutepolish Disney tutorial). Here's a picture of my "Narnia"; I went for a walk in the snow on my lunch break at work, but felt like I'd gone to another world!

This snow scene design also gives me the opportunity to talk about other types of ombré designs that you can try.

So back to my Winter Wonderland...start by preparing your nails, applying a base coat, and two coats of a light blue. I used Barry M's "Blueberry" from their Gelly range. Ideally, I'd use something lighter, more of a pastel blue, but I didn't have anything to hand.

Then use glitter nail varnishes to layer up your sparlinking snow, from the cuticles to the tips. I used a thin layer of a silver glitter with small pieces (namely E.L.F "Glitter Glam"):

...followed by a sliver glitter with larger pieces: No. 7, "Glitterball":

...and finally Nails Inc. "Devonshire Street", which has a silvery base colour with a purply tone too:

So, I did the blue as my base, then a thin coat of the E.L.F right to the cuticle, then the No. 7 from about a third of the way up to the tip, then the Nails Inc. from two-thirds up to the tip and finally I ran the Nails Inc. just across the tip once more.

As a feature nail, on my ring finger, I used a silver colour base (Nails Inc. "Cambridge Terrace"), and covered it with the No. 7 "Glitterball" I used on the rest of my nails. I find that putting a glitter of the same colour on top of a base gives the colour an extra dimension.

And, once I've finished it off with a top coat, my Winter Wonderland is complete!

Other variations are black base with a silver glitter, for a night-time snow scene, or a deep navy blue, with gold glitter for a starry night, but can really do any colours you like with this same technique!

I promised other ombré ideas - so, instead of doing the fade across one nail, you could try fading across all of your nails. To do this, you'll need 5 (or 10, if you're brave) different shades of the same colour. Then, starting on either your little finger or your thumb, paint the lightest colour and moving across your hand increase the shade on each finger. I've done this with pinks (as shown below) and greens and well as from white to black (or "5 shades of grey", you could say) but would be great with blues, silver through to gold, yellow to orange or with purples. What I would say is that you should plan this before you do it...paint the colours, in order, on paper or card before you paint them on your nails: the colour you see through the bottle isn't always the colour it looks when painted!

The colours I used (from light to dark) are:

Nails Inc "Elizabeth Street"
Barry M "Bright Pink"
Avon "Viva Pink"
No. 7 "Perky"
Nails Inc "Piccadilly Circus"



Another idea is to use a makeup spongue to create an ombré fading effect going up your nails (rather than using glitter as I did in my tutorial). I've not quite perfected this yet but there's a really great tutorial by pixiepolish and with a bit of practice, you too could get this great effect.

(Design by pixiepolish)

Enjoy creating your own Narnia (let me know how you get on in the comments) and I promise I'll do my alternative French tips tutorial next!

Leopard Print Tutorial

For my first step-by-step tutorial, I thought it'd be best to show you my "go to" design - an easy leopard print.

With neutral colours, it'll go with any outfit and is really simple, but so effective. I like to do this with a feature nail on each of my ring fingers and designed tips on the rest of my fingers, but you can totally mix and match. This would look great with plain fingers and just a feature nail, all designed tips, or all fully designed - you can really make this as complicated as you feel! This design was inspried by this ihaveacupcake tutorial and here's my take on it.

Start, as always, by cleaning off your previous design, washing your hands and moisturisng. To try this design, you'll need:

a good base coat, a neutral, nude colour as your base, a bronze or a brown for the spots, a black striper (or a black varnish and a striping brush), and a top coat (I tend to use a matt effect top coat with this design). A dotting tool would also be useful, but is not essential. If you don't have a striper brush, you could try using the point of a cocktail stick. My varnishes are: Sally Hansen "Double Duty", Model's Own "Nude/Beige", Mac "Originality" and Rimmel "Matt Finish".

Start by painting all of your nails with a base coat, and two coats of the nude colour. Next, paint bronze, irregular sized dots on the tips of all of your nails and the whole of your ring finger nails using the dotting tool (or, carefully, with the paint brush as I did in the picture below).

You should make the spots different sizes, and they shouldn't be perfectly round. Leave some hanging off the tips and the sides of your nails too. Then, use the black striper to draw lines around two edges of the bronze spots. Don't make them all uniform - do some lines on the top and bottom of the spots, and some to the left and right. My black striper tends to get really gloopy so I pour a few drops of nail varnish remover into it, put the lid on and give it a good shake and it thins out well enough to use. You'll probably have to do it every few times you use it, but it's easy enough to do. It's an old trick, but it seems to work!

Now - leave your nails to dry. For as long as possible. Like, a LONG time! You could even leave your design as is and cover with a top coat the next morning to avoid smudging your black lines. Then use either a matt effect top coat, or a regular top coat (you can use Double Duty as a top coat as well as a base coat).

Et voila! You're ready to enjoy the compliments your bound to receive!

My next post is going to be tutorial showing an alternative to the classic french manicure which is even easier to personalise than this one!

Nail Art: The Basics

In my last post, I gave you a list of "manicure essentials": in this post, I'm going to outline "nail art essentials". You won't need everything on the list for every design, but they're certainly good things to have for when you need them.

So, let's start at the beginning, and the end - base and top coats. A base coat is essential for protecting your nails underneath, and stopping them turning an awful colour when you remove your design. Top coats give your design a nice sheen: with glitter manicures, a top coat can stop your nails feeling rough to the touch and with smooth manicures they can help seal in the design (and stop your varnish chipping). I use Sally Hansen, usually "Double Duty" (which can be used as a base and top coat) which I love, but you have to be careful as it can sometimes smudge the detailing of your designs. At the moment I have the separate base and top coats which work brilliantly too.
Another great nail art staple is a matt effect top coat. The one I use is by Rimmel. This looks great just over plain polish, but can be used for creating textured french tips (as opposed to creating them with different coloured varnishes), creating detail, or giving a luxurious finish to your nail art designs.

To create intricate designs, you'll need a striper and dotting tool(s). The striper I use the most is part of a black polish (which is great, as most detailing is done in black). You can also buy sets of nail art brushes, which can then be cleaned using nail varnish remover and water. Dotting tools are used for creating polka-dot style details and you can get them in sets with tips of differing sizes. If you don't have them, you can use cotton bus or cocktail sticks as an alternative (but you can find them online - they're relatively inexpensive).

Of course, nail art requires a variety of different colours. I have a lot (like...a LOT) of different colours, but you can just get them as you go. You'll work out which brands you like best, and the more expensive ones won't always be the ones you like. It's nice to splash out on colours you use the most, to get the best quality you can (like black, red, pink, nude), and maybe save a bit on colours you only use rarely (yellows, oranges etc.).

Creating great designs can also take a bit of time - for intricate designs where you have to wait for each coat to dry before adding a new one, you can be waiting quite a while. And once you're done, you'll also need to make sure you leave them to dry fully before doing anything. So the last item on my "essentials" list, is the time and space to work on your design to make it the best it can be. Most designs usually take around an hour to create...but remember you also need drying time after that!

In a future post, I plan to outline other nail art products which can be used to create great manicures, other items which you might want to try. My next post will be my first step-by-step tutorial, and it's a design I've done time and time again - I hope you'll enjoy doing it as much as I have!

Manicures: The Basics

In this post and the next one, I thought the best thing to do would be tell you what I would term 'the basics'; I'll tell you everything you need to give yourself a great manicure in the first, and the things you'll need to create amazing nail art in the second.
Giving yourself a mincure is a great 'Friday-night' thing to do; after a hard week at work, its a nice way to chill out whilst watching a rom-com to prepare for your Saturday night party. And here are the essentials...
Nail varnish remover and cotton wool pads. I know it's sad when you have to take off your design before it's chipped, but rather than picking it off, it really is best to take it off properly. The best I've found is actually one of the cheapest and is 'Boots Clean Off Nail Polish Remover' and I find that using double sided cotton wool pads are the best things to use with it.

Next things: hand cream, cuticle pusher and cuticle remover. I've got so many hand creams that have been given to me in toilettries sets for Christmas and Birthdays that I dont really buy a particular brand, I just use up the ones I've got. Cuticle removers may look like some medieval torture device, but are really essential for leaving you with a completely blank canvas on which to work!
A buffer and a file are two bits of kit that you'll need to keep your nails in great shape and looking tip top. Again, files are things you can just pick up as you go; my Cath Kidston ones are really good though. I've never tried the glass nail files but have heard they're really good! There's also the 'S shaped' file the 'Stylfile' which can be used to file your nails to a natural rounded shape (and can be found on Amazon.co.uk) - looks really good, but I prefer to file mine to a square shape.

Lastly, you'll need a place to keep everything! Preferably somewhere portable, so you can take your manicure kit with you, and something with compartments so that you'll know exactly where to find everthing when you need it is ideal. I've got mine in a set of drawers and I've painted the fonts with blackboard paint so I can categorise everything - one for base and top coats, one for nudes and neutrals, one for all my colours and one for all my other things.

I'm close to outgrowing it now so have been looking for something bigger and better. Acrylic stands can be bought online, but are quite expensive so I've been looking at making something. The best tutorial I've seen on YouTube is here (In the process of finding the link for the storage tutorial, I've just found this one too which is a great idea) I'll let you know how I get on if I decide to make anything!

Fairydust at your Fingertips - Welcome!

I started doing 'nail art' around 2 years ago when I was at uni. Me and the girls I lived with used to sit watching girly movies (read 'girly' as 'Disney'), reading gossip magazines and painting our nails.
I've always wanted to have brightly coloured nails: from being about 5 or 6, whenever my Godmother came to babysit me, I'd always ask her to paint my nails. I always wanted 10 different colours, a different one for each finger, but she'd never let me. Then, as I got older, I never felt that I could enjoy having lovely coloured fingernails because I was a nail biter!!! I'd buy rainbow coloured nail varnishes with the hope of one day being able to wear them with pride and had quite a collection! So when I was in my third year at uni, had time to spare, and nail art was making a definite appearance in the fashion and beauty scene, I decided to jump aboard! I've gone from having short, icky nails, to being asked at least once a week if if I've painted them myself!
As I said before, nail art was, and still is, having "a fashion moment" so I had lots of sources from which to draw inspritation. There are so many youtube channels where girls post video tutorials of their latest designs, magazines are writing about the latest nail trends, and celebrities are sporting wacky and alternative styles (remember Zooey Deschanel's adorable tuxedo design?).

My favourite youtube channels are cutepolish and ihaveacupcake; they have really great designs, which are easy to follow and not too difficult (check them out!). I copy some of their designs, but mostly use them for inspiration, and that's what I plan on showing you guys here. I want to show you some step-by-step guides on how to do my favourite designs, so that you and your friends can have the same 'movie, nail painting, and chocolate eating' shaped fun that me and my friends have had. I also want to tell you about my favourite products and colours, and how I like to use them. I'll point you in the direction of any new youtube channels or magazine articles that I think you'll like, and will take requests for any trends or designs you'd like to see my interpretation of.
I've posted a couple of 'taster' photos below so you can see what's to come. This is my first blog, and something I'd like to do just as a bit of fun. I'd be painting my nails all the colours of the rainbow anyway, but if you guys want to get involved too, then that's great!