OMD! Challenge Day 11-Stripes

Hello lovelies,
I'm back with another one of the OMD! Challenges today!

Today it's stripes so I busted out the striping tape for a simple horizontal-striped mani. I used one of my new birthday polishes from Rara-Avon's On Point Blue which is a gorgeous cornflower blue-this is three coats.

on top of that I added my tape and then Barry M-Gold Foil and Revlon-Silver Screen, alternating the colours on my fingers.

Simple, but effective I reckon! Love these colours together =)

~Nail Art Novice~

Featured on Imperfectly Painted

Today I have a mani featured on Imperfectly Painted in her 'Share With You Sunday' post

Here's a sneak peek:

but you'll have to go to Imperfectly Painted to see how it was done and find out what polishes I used [LINK]. Why not submit one of yours while you're there too?

~Nail Art Novice~

L'Oreal Color Riche Collection-604 Metropolitan

I had completely forgotten I hadn't uploaded my final two swatches of my Color Riche polishes, so apologies! These last two are definitely my favourites of the ones I got from Fragrance Direct.

Today's swatch is number 604-Metropolitan which is a lovely grey creme.
This is three coats with no top coat-you can see that it's really lovely and glossy. I could have easily only used two coats for the same effect. The thumb and ring finger show stripes done with all four colours that I purchased-607-Rue Montmartre, 608-Luxembourg Garden, 604-Metropolitan and 502-Purple Disturbia. I think the bubbles on these were caused by my application technique as opposed to the polishes themselves.

Natural Light in this photograph

Unlike the other two polishes I've swatched thus far, there is no ambiguity about colour with Metropolitan-it's a lovely shade of grey-not too dark or too pale. Application was lovely because it has the same long, flat brushes that the other Color Riche polishes have (see this post for a picture) which allow you to cover the nail in two strokes. I didn't need to do any clean up following applying this polish for these pictures, which I was particularly impressed at as I hate cleaning up!

I got these from Fragrance Direct priced £1.20 (they have about 15 shades currently) but they are also available (in limited shades) at Boots and Superdrug for £4.99. Bearing in mind they only have 5mls of polish in I think that's a little pricey! A word of warning though, if you do order some from FD then search for swatches first because the colours on their website are very misleading!

I've got one more swatch to come, and keep an eye out, it's a gorgeous colour-my favourite of the bunch!

~Nail Art Novice~

Ask A British Blogger III + Nail Art!

This fortnight's British Blogger question is 'What is the oldest polish in your collection?' and to answer it instead of just taking a couple of pictures of what is frankly a rather boring bottle, I thought I'd do some nail art with it.
Introducing Avon's Fabulous which is about 10 years old I would guess. I can't find any information on it on the internet but I did get a lot of Avon stuff when I was 13/14 so I guess it's from then. It's actually the only Avon one I've got left as it survived the years much better than any of the others which turned into watery messes or hardened to the point where they were un-usable. It's quite a pretty colour though, so I am glad that I've still got it in my stash!

Check out how dated the bottle looks!

I couldn't decide what I wanted to do so I opted for a skittle using various techniques, and using Collection-Electric Dreams which looks awesome against the bronze. This is two coats of Fabulous and it was very nearly a one coater, which I was surprised at! It didn't have a horribly strong smell, but definitely more than newer polishes which I guess means it's not 3-free.

It's also a pain to try and hold comfortably too

The two colours together reminded me of Egyptian artifacts so on my thumb I did an Eygptian-inspired design (the Eye of Horus-Egyptian symbol of protection and good health) with my Barry M nail art pen in black.

I really like my thumbs and also my double dotted little fingers-I think they look quite nice without being too overwhelming. I love the colours together too.
So that's my oldest polish! What's yours?

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out everyone else's posts here:

L'Oreal Color Riche Collection-608 Luxembourg Garden

Here's my second post of swatches from my (random assortment of the) L'Oreal Color Riche collection and today's is number 608-Luxembourg Garden. This is another difficult one to describe-it's sort of dark greeny grey with lots of green shimmer running through it, so it sort of comes out as a metallicy green. I realise that doesn't make sense, but it's a bit of a chameleon, it seems to change colour depending on what you put it next to!

For instance, on my green swatch wheel, it looks distinctly out of place and very dark, hardly green at all:

Luxembourg Garden is number 1
(If you want to know any others, just ask!)

(Incidentally it makes me really happy that I've not found any colours the same as each other during my swatching, means that all my polishes were totally justifiable!)

But on my fingers it definitely looks quite green:

Natural light shot

This is again 3 coats without topcoat. This one definitely needed the three, unlike Rue Montmartre, which could have escaped with two-this is a lot more sheer. It's not as shiny either, it's definitely more on the metallic side of the spectrum. Application was easy and dry time was pretty fast! I really like these long flat brushes, it makes the polish really easy to control-again this required no clean up (except on the accent nails, but that's because I was being naughty and polishing horizontally across the nails!).
I even remembered to take a picture of the brush this time:

As you can see it's super long and very wide, it splays out quite a lot when you apply pressure and covers your nails easily in two strokes (one for little finger) but without getting polish all over your cuticles which get a massive thumbs up from me, coz I hate cleaning up!

I got my Color Riches from Fragrance Direct for £1.20 each but they're also available in Boots and Superdrug (although they don't seem to have all the colours anywhere!) for about £4.99! You only get 5mls in each bottle, so you have to really want one for that price!

Thanks for reading!

~Nail Art Novice~

Check out the lovely British Nail Bloggers magnificent work this week:

ABC Challenge: N is for Nautical

Ahoy Sailor is the alternative title for this post ;)

In case you didn't spot my mini announcement at the end of my last post, I've joined a nail art challenge group and am participating in an ABC challenge hosted by the lovely Kimberly at Kimber's Lacquer Korner. The idea is to post a mani that features a polish/brand/technique/nail art design etc in each letter of the alphabet and this week is N (because I joined half way through! But I intend to start at 'A' after completing 'Z' if all goes well.)
I didn't really have any good polishes for 'N' so I thought I'd go with a nail art design in Nautical style.

Polishes used were: Colour Me-Colour Me White, Maybelline-Dark Denim, No 7-Siren and Colour Me-Pure Gold. I used striping tape over a white base to create the stripy sailor-eqsue look and then freehanded the details using a dotting tool.

I really like this mani, it's cheerful and fun without being overwhelming and was really easy to do-bonus! I'm loving how vibrant that red looks over a white base too.

(Ladies who are visiting me for the first time from the link up [Hello!], please let me apologise for my less than perfect pictures. I hate cleaning up and I'm also really bad at it-no matter how long I seem to spend scrubbing away at my cuticles I never seem to get crisp neat edges like so many other people and I've yet to fathom how to do this apart from learning to paint neater. I've tried really hard before to clean up and just ended up removing the sides of my manicure instead, so now I tend to leave it looking a bit rough and ready-hope this isn't too offensive on the eye!)

Right, I'm off to swash some buckles and swab some decks (check me, I have the lingo and everything...), but do check out the other awesome ladies taking part in this challenge in the link-up below.

~Nail Art Novice~

L'Oreal Color Riche Collection-607 Rue Montmartre

I thought I'd bring you some swatches of some of the Color Riche collection by L'Oreal that I went and bought after I fell in love with Magic Croisette. I purchased them from fragrancedirect.co.uk which is an excellent site for getting awesome polishes for cheapy cheap from-the only trouble is that the colour swatches they use are really inaccurate for the colours the polishes actually are. When I was searching online for better swatches of these polishes, they were really hard to come by so I thought I'd make some of my own. I'm categorically not going to start swatching a lot of polishes on this blog, because there are enough sites out there that do that, with better pictures than I could ever take, but as these polishes seem to be rarer than a lot of others I hope you won't mind too much.

I got four colours-607-Rue Montmartre, 608-Luxembourg Garden, 604-Metropolitan and 502-Purple Disturbia but I'm going to dedicate a post to each so that I don't overwhelm you with pictures all in one go.

Today's offering is number 607-Rue Montmartre, which is a dusky purple/grey. This is 3 coats with no top coat, with accent nails featuring all 4 colours:

Natural light, and probably the closest to its actual colour

It's a bit of a weird one this-it's too grey to be purple and too purple to be grey. In my head it's a kind of 'lavendery grey' so I put it in with the rest of my purples. You only get 5mls in these teeny bottles but for the Fragrance Direct price of £1.20 a bottle I don't mind! I definitely wouldn't pay the full price of £4.99 for such a small amount of polish though. 

Application was pretty good-they have a wide flat brush which splays out a little when you use it-I managed to cover my little finger nail with one stroke and the rest only needed two. I didn't do any clean up on these nails and I managed not to get too much on my skin, which is a bonus and shows that even Novices can use the brushes well! It was fairly opaque in two coats but I put a third on just in case. As you can see, it's really shiny and lovely when it dries and doesn't leave obvious brush strokes behind. 

Overall I do really like this polish, although I think I'm going to struggle to wear it with other colours as it's such an odd one to match. She'll have to be a stand alone girl!

What do you think of my first swatching post? Did I do OK or did I forget something important?

~Nail Art Novice~

It's British Blogger link up time-check out these ladies and their beautiful nails:

I Ain't No G-G-G-G-Ga-Ga Girl!

If you recognise the title without reading the rest of my post then you just gained +1 Awesome points in my world, maybe even +2, so well done you.
For the rest of you, worry not, I am about to explain.
Basically yesterday I went to see my FAVOURITE musical of all time. For the 9th time. The title is a quote from it, because I can basically dictate the entire thing. I thought it might be nice to do some nail art using the logo for inspiration.
What musical was it?
Why, We Will Rock You*, of course! I am a massive Queen fan, but what a lot of people don't realise is that I saw the musical first and then became a Queen fan afterwards, because I loved the music (and haven't stopped loving it since). I have all the albums and know all the words and am basically a LOT of a fangirl over it. Well, you can't blame a girl for having a hobby now, can you?

So onto the mani! This is the logo I was using for inspiration:

Picture from here

although I wasn't going to attempt anything quite so complicated, I'm not that talented! I decided I was going to do a layered orange stripe pattern using Barry M-Satsuma, Rimmel I Heart Lasting Finish-Tangy Tangerine and Rimmel Wear Maxx-Serene and then added details with Barry M-Black. The colours don't quite match perfectly to the ones in the picture but I think they look quite good together regardless.
These are messy pictures again because I ran out of time to clean up before I left and by the time I had got home to take pictures the polish had set like concrete into my cuticles and so was impossible to clean up. I have now ordered some better nail art brushes, which means I can sacrifice one of my old ones to clean up for (hopefully) better looking pictures.

Anyways:

I know my tiny Freddie is not as good as Rara's was the other week, but I'm still impressed with him considering I can't draw at all! FYI the smudgy bit behind his leg is supposed to be a guitar, I just didn't want to fill it in any more because it would just look like he had a massive tree trunk leg, which wouldn't be good. My right thumb just has the letters 'WWRY' on because I wasn't going to attempt him twice!
As you can see I layered the oranges on top of each other from darkest-lightest using the brushes in the polishes. Serene is actually creamy shimmery white (as you can see here) but I kind of like the fact that it looks slightly orangey because of its sheerness. This is two coats of Satsuma and Tangy Tangerine and three of Serene.

So yeah. It might not be the most complicated nail art in the world, and it might not be executed perfectly but I am still proud of it. Plus I had an awesome night out to wear it to, so who's complaining?

~Nail Art Novice~

*Don't click the link if you don't want spoilers!