Minion Manicure

I love the Despicable Me minions!!

Love is an understatement at this point. I'm obsessed with the cute little things - my text tone is minions laughing at the word 'bottom.' So I had to try a minion mani! I bought some transfers from eBay seller sparkley_nails who has a huge selection of nail transfers (no bumble bee though!). The specific ones I bought can be found here.

They come in sheets and you need to cut out the individual transfers for each nail. They are really easy to apply - you just soak them in water for around 30 seconds (if you soak them for much longer the film gets harder to handle and can break) to remove the backing paper, then transfer the clear, thin film with the design on it onto your nail and seal with top coat. I had a couple of air bubbles but I managed to smooth most of them out using a cuticle pusher and then did three coats of top coat to smooth out the design so there were no lumps or bumps.

You do need to apply them over a coat of polish (though it can just be clear) so that they will stick. I went with Gelish 'Sheek White' so that they would stand out! I did glitter a couple of nails on each hand too just for something different. Here is what they ended up looking like:

I love looking down and seeing these little guys every time I look at my hands!



I've even started shouting out 'Minions, assemble!' every time someone at
work needs me to type something out for them. It's making work much more fun!

I have had so many compliments on them at work - a few clients have even taken photos to show their friends (who are also minion obsessed!). I will be sad to see them go in a couple of weeks when it's time to change my nails again! 

Barbie Nails

I love a good dress up party!!

Over the weekend I attended a friend's 21st birthday party with a 'flashback' theme. We were asked to dress as a character we remembered from our childhood, and I, of course, chose Barbie. Princess Barbie to be exact (I already had the tiara, so why not?). Plus I've spent my entire life waiting for an excuse to wear a ball gown!

I figured this called for quite a special nail design, so I started experimenting with a few of my colours (shades of pink) and eventually decided on a pink, glittery French manicure. Unfortunately though, the nails on my right hand are significantly shorter than those on my left hand, and so I had to use some stick on fakeys to make the look work.

I prefer round nails, but they all seem to come in a square shape, so I had to file off the corners in order to get them looking (slightly) more natural on my fingers. Also because the nails I bought weren't all that long (and my nail beds are quite long and my nails are very skinny) a couple of the shapes (mainly my ring and pinky fingers) didn't really work, so I had to stick them higher on my nail than I would have liked in order to get the tips of the fake nails to line up with the tips of my natural nails. In the end this is what I ended up with:


You can see how much space there is between the end of the fake nails and my nail
beds - it is especially noticeable on the pinky and pointer finger in this photo!

I wish I had taken a photo of my own nails while they were naked (it's not a sight people often get to see!) to show how much bigger these look on my hands than my regular nails. Because I have long skinny fingers I thought they looked absolutely gigantic on my hands but I think I needed the larger area to get the design looking good. And I was glad to have the French tip already on the fake nails so I could use it as a guide when painting them as I have never done just the tips before! Unfortunately I am not ambidextrous so I know my right hand would have looked like a finger painting if I'd gone without a guide while painting with my left hand!

I chose a very pale, sheer pink for the main colour. It was a Bluesky Shellac colour I bought from a cheap supply store at my local shopping centre. I didn't want to buy an expensive bottle because I HATE sheer colours so knew I would never use it again, but obviously needed something sheer so it didn't look too tacky. Even though it was sheer I hoped that the base pink colour would have helped conceal the lines where the fake nail met my real nail, but I think it actually made it more noticeable - very disappointing! 

For the tips I chose Gelish 'Carnaval Hangover,' which is another one from the Neon Rio collection. It happened to match my dress perfectly so I was very happy with the colour! It is a very Barbie pink too and I can tell I'm going to use it a lot! I've got it on my toes at the moment and don't fancy changing it anytime soon!

I took this photo after I'd completed the base colour and the tips. I meant to photograph each stage but it was getting quite late at night (I underestimated how long this whole process was going to take) and so rushed through a few steps and forgot to take photos in between!


You can see how much more obvious the join is! I was really disappointed with
how this turned out but didn't have the time or resources to re-do it al so I dealt with it.

After curing the base colour (I only did one coat as I thought if I did two the tips might be way too thick by the end and start to peel) I roughly painted the tips with the bright pink colour and cleaned up the smile line using an eye shadow brush dipped in alcohol. It came away a lot smoother than I thought, but I had to remember to wipe the brush in between each stroke otherwise I got hot pink smudges on the rest of the nail which were harder to remove with the brush!

For the glitter component (glitter improves everything) I used Gelish 'Vegas Nights' which is a stunning fine silver glitter that sparkles really nicely (especially in sunlight). I like to use it a fair bit to dress up colours when I get bored of them, but it seemed absolutely perfect for a Barbie manicure! After applying the glitter I felt it needed a little something extra so I used a couple of pink diamantes as an accent on the smile line of my ring fingers. I stuck them on with a dab of top coat (before curing) and once I'd put them in place I cured that for two minutes before applying the final top coat over the top of the accents (adding a little extra around them to hold them in place). This was the end result:


Barbie Nails!

Flash Off                                                   Flash On
They were the perfect match for my dress (and my ring)!

Overall I was happy with how they turned out - I think they would have been perfect if it weren't for the horrible join lines! It was for that reason that I ended up removing them the day after the party as I knew they were only going to get worse! That and I'm not used to having such thick nails so I was finding it difficult to perform even the simplest tasks with my hands!

I just had to include a photo of the removal process. It was horrible! I don't have any acrylic nail remover so had to soak the nails in acetone until the gel polish was removed and the fake nails dissolved! I did my hands separately so I could still use the other hand (to operate the TV remote and my phone), and it took around an hour and twenty minutes (for each hand!) to completely remove the colour and nails. It was about halfway through soaking the first hand that I realised I could have dealt with these nails for a few more days if it meant delaying this process, but by then it was of course too late, haha.

The skin around my cuticles is still suffering
almost three days later!

I really did love this design and will have to try it again on my natural nails so I can show it off for a bit longer!

 

Gelish 'Shake It Till You Samba'

I don't care what anyone says. You can't go past neon pink.

This has to be my favourite Gelish colour so far. Shake it Till You Samba is a cream neon pink from the Neon Rio collection which was released in 2011. I usually rate CND Shellac above Harmony Gelish in terms of application and wear (and I much prefer the Shellac top/base coats to Gelish as I find them easier to spread thinly which ultimately leads to a better result), but I love love LOVE this colour.

It went on quickly and easily, and while it is not completely opaque, you can't tell unless you're staring at your nails close up or you're under fluorescent lights. The colour it appears in the flash photo below is pretty accurate to how it looks in real life (just obviously not so highly illuminated).

Without flash, natural indoor light.

With flash.

I'd highly recommend this colour if you're after a bright, fun, eye-catching pink (and you don't need anyone to take you particularly seriously while you're wearing it, haha). I wore it proudly to work for the first time yesterday and received several compliments on it. Plus bright pink nails just make boring work tasks a bit more fun! It does look slightly orangey under the oh-so flattering fluorescent lights of my office (see photos below) - but you can see what I mean when I say it isn't totally opaque if you look closely enough at my pinky and ring fingers!

Under fluorescent lights.

This photo probably shows the colour most accurately :)

Overall, a fantastic colour that I'm pretty much in love with. I can see this one getting a lot of wear in the summer time (being the middle of July right now it's not exactly 'in theme' with a lot of my drab coloured winter clothes), and it even inspired me to order 'Carnaval Hangover' (a deep purply/pink) this afternoon (from the same neon collection) in the hopes it will impress me just as much!

Let me start by saying, I have a decent sized nail polish collection.

'Decent' may be an understatement, but I suppose it's all relative ;)

From where I sit in my bedroom I can count at least 70 bottles of nail polish (TIP of the iceberg). Most are OPI, with the odd China Glaze or Orly thrown in for good measure. Once I discovered the essentially endless array of colours available to buy online (at a much better than retail price), I just couldn't help myself. I became obsessed and would buy 5-6 bottles at a time, wait for them to arrive and once they did spend hours staring at my new additions trying to decide which one to try on first. I'd then go to the trouble of prepping and primping my nails,  carefully applying the colour and waiting what feels like a ridiculous amount of time (especially when you have an itchy nose, ear, elbow etc.) for them to dry. This was followed by a few days spent admiring the colour and then doing it all over again with the next lucky polish to grace my fingertips.

Initially, it was oh so worth it. 

After a few months of this though, I started to get a little depressed every time I had to watch my new mani chip away after only a day or two of wear. You have to understand that at the time, I was working in a jewellery store, and handling chains, earrings and watches all day certainly takes its toll on your nails, so I was lucky to get a whole day of decent looking wear out of a single colour.

Then I discovered the magic that is gel polish, and it was a whole new world. 

After having it done in a salon a few times, I was convinced it had changed my life. While I never got a whole two weeks of totally chip-free colour out of a single mani like they claim, it was still a game changer, and it increased the life of my manicure by about a week. As you can guess, I went back to the realm on online shopping.

Quickly bought myself a cheap UV lamp and all my supplies, then waited desperately for my first ever bottle of Shellac to arrive so I could have a go myself. It was easier than I thought! I'll admit I layered it on a little thick my first few times, but after a bit of practice the whole application process became second nature and I was enjoying whole weeks or more of chip free colour. 

Needless to say my personal selection of gel polishes has grown considerably since then. I have been reasonably restrained in my purchases though, as I only really need change it once a fortnight (I could do it more frequently but the removal process is just too time consuming for my taste) meaning it takes me a while to test out all my new colours when I order five or so bottles at a time. 

This does however make the decision of which colours to buy next that much harder, as in addition to being about twice as expensive per bottle, I know I'll be stuck with the manicures for much longer than I was with regular polish - so I damn well better like all the colours that I buy (and we all know the colour samples provided by the manufacturer are hardly ever all that accurate). For this reason I rely a lot on photos from blogs, forums etc to help me judge what a colour looks like in real life before I decide whether or not to buy it - and I've only ever been disappointed with a colour choice once. And one out of twenty or so isn't bad. 

So I think it's time I start doing a few swatches and reviews of my own so that I can maybe help someone, somewhere make the near life altering decision of what colour to paint their nails. Enjoy! xx