NOTD – Goth Inspired Nails

After trying out my punk inspired NOTD, I was thinking about other lifestyles that tend to be strongly influenced by music.  So next up I tried some more gothic inspired designs.  I was mainly inspired by the rose design which I was dying to use.  The red base colour is Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in Right Said Red (I LOVE that name – I have such fond memories of dancing around the house as a little girl to Right Said Fred…I think there should be a partner polish called I’m Too Sexy For My Polish) and the black is Ulta3 Black Satin.  For stamping, I used Konad special stamping polishes in black and white.  I had wanted to use red but it wasn’t opaque enough over black so it looked brown 😦

Pinky – Stamped with a rose design from BundleMonster plate BM14

Ring – Stamped with a whole nail inverse diamond mesh pattern from BundleMonster plate BM208

Middle – Stamped with a cobweb design and a spider design, both from BundleMonster plate BM13 – this came out pretty cool considering I lost half the web.

Pointer – Stamped with small tribal design from BundleMonster plate BM12

Once I was done with some photos, I slapped a layer of Rimmel’s Matte top coat over the top and I think it fitted the theme much better than with a shiny top coat (yes I missed a spot on my pinky so there is still a glossy bit near the cuticle!):

Now for the bad news…I’m taking a mini break. Everything is almost ready now for thenailpolishproject.com to go live but I need to take a week away from writing to be able to focus on it and make sure its all ready to go on time.  I’ve always had a deadline of 10th October and if you head over there now you will see I’ve got a countdown happening to keep me on track!  So have a lovely week everyone and I look forward to posting next week that it’s time to move!

NOTD – Punk Inspired Nails

I was playing Green Day RockBand on the PS3 the other day and felt inspired to do some punk nails so I raided my Helmer and had a look through my stamping plates for some punk themed images.  Turns out BundleMonster plates left me spoilt for choice so these were the ones I picked in the end.  The pink base colour is Sally Hansen Salon Berried Treasure (from the old Salon range) and the black base colour is Ulta3 Black Satin.  For stamping, the black and white polishes are Konad special stamping polishes and the pink is the same Sally Hansen polish.

Pinky – Stamped with a whole nail diamond pattern from BundleMonster plate BM16 , then overlaid with a skull design from BundleMonster plate BM211

Ring – Stamped with a whole nail plaid pattern from Konad plate M60, then overlaid with a heart design from BundleMonster plate BM212 in white, then pink (I thought the pink was more pigmented and would stamp well but it was a bit of a fail)

Middle – Stamped with a star design from BundleMonster plate BM05

Pointer – Stamped with a lips design from BundleMonster plate BM02 – I liked this one the most, I could happily wear that on one or two nails anytime.

I’m thinking about doing some more music genre inspired nails…what do you think?  Would you like to see more themed nails like these?

NOTD – OPI Ink, Ozotic Pro 505 and China Glaze Devotion, Adore and Harmony

 

This manicure was a happy byproduct of chance.  I was feeling very uninspired yesterday – so much so that I pulled out all my Helmer drawers and sat there surround by nail polish and stamping plates for about 15 minutes and even at the end of that I had only managed to narrow it down to four plates and about twelve polishes.  So I decided I would play around and see what happened before I decided on something.  So I did some different layering skittles and I only had one nail left to stamp on so I had to test all the star colours in one spot and BAM, I had to have multicoloured stars suddenly.  I did try China Glaze Awaken too but it was too dark.

So what you see here is three coats of OPI Ink (A blackened purple base with pink and purple duochrome shimmer, a stunner all on its own!), then a thin coat of Ozotic Pro 505 (A multichrome that shifts from pink to purple to turquoise to blue – the full effect was washed out a little bit by layering it over OPI Ink instead of black but I didn’t mind), then finally I stamped random stars from BundleMonster plate BM14 in China Glaze Devotion (a slightly lavender leaning silver metallic), Adore (cyan blue metallic) and Harmony (purple metallic).  So now lots more photos for you…be warned there are quite a few!

Sunlight Photos

Shade Photos

Honestly I loved this manicure much more in the shade or artificial light than in the sun – I love how you could see the multichrome effect go right through from pink to blue in the shade – it made me want to call these twilight nails as it reminds me of as the sun goes down and stars come out.  The shade photos just don’t do it justice but as anyone who has tried to photograph a multichrome nail polish will know, it’s really difficult to show every colour at once.  I swear I stared at my nails for my entire train journey to the city last night, just flicking them back and forth between sunset and night-time colours!

In other exciting news, I have a week off work now so one of my main projects is to get some serious swatching under my belt while I have some sunlight hours available.  The forecast isn’t looking great and my super haul from Nail Etc still hasn’t turned up which was to be my main source of swatching so for now I will rummage through what I have and weed out my untrieds for you all as this morning is gloriously sunny… I’m going to hit up my Nubar Duochromes this morning I think.  What is everyone else up to for the weekend?