Hipster Mani - with MoYou new Hipster plates 1 and 2 and R&R Lacquers Steve

MoYou new Hipster plates 1 and 2 and R&R Lacquers Steve

Long title for this post, lol! MoYou released some fab new 'Hipster' plates last week so when mine arrived I dived straight in with a hipster style mani! I went for a beige, blue and red combination, with a bit of check! The plates have some great designs and all those I tried stamped perfectly.

I painted most of my nails with Essie Case Study; the accents are M&S Autograph Bordeaux and RBL Cuprum. I chose the accent colours because they were the nearest I had to the glitters in R&R Lacquers Steve. All the stamping is Barry M Lychee. I added R&R Lacquers Steve (from R&R's current collection 'Assemble') to my check stamped nails. Steve has matte dark red and blue hexes in a clear base along with white squares and small gold and holographic glitter. This is just one coat - application is very easy and the formula is smooth. I also added a single blue glitter to the red accent nail on each hand. For the blue accent nails, I added double dots with Essie Case Study and Barry M Lychee.

MoYou new Hipster plates 1 and 2 and R&R Lacquers Steve

Here's a closer shot of the check stamp and the glitters in Steve!

MoYou new Hipster plates 1 and 2 and R&R Lacquers Steve

I purchased Hipster plates 1 and 2 from MoYou's website; I purchased the fabulous Smash from R&R Lacquers Assemble collection recently and Rebecca and Rachel very kindly sent me sample sizes of the rest of the collection for review :) R&R Lacquers are available from their Etsy Shop; follow their facebook page for details of upcoming colours (there are some spring colours in the pipeline I have my eye on!). All the other polishes I used here are from my collection and were purchased by me at some point in the past.

Mentality 12K Gold

Mentality 12K Gold

I like gold leaf nail art a lot, although I always use torn up bits of real gold leaf to get a more dramatic look (as in this mani here). I've been around for silver or white gold leaf for ages, so when I spotted Mentality's 12K Gold topcoat, which is white gold leaf,  I couldn't wait to try it. I've bought a few Mentality polishes recently (mattes and microglitters), and I've been really impressed with the colours and formula. And the price is also extremely reasonable!

Mentality 12K Gold

I used just one coat of Mentality 12K Gold over Rescue Beauty Lounge Jane for this mani. 12K Gold is incredibly easy to use, no need to fish around for the gold leaf in the bottle. One coat of Seche Vite to finish this off, and I had a subtle and elegant design that I've been wearing for the last four days. I think 12K Gold would look fab over a dark plum or navy base, or over a bright colour. I'll be sure to be trying other combinations soon!

Mentality 12K Gold

I purchased Mentality 12K Gold from Sally Magpies. Mentality have their own website and shop, it's just so much easier to buy from Sally in the UK!

Indy's Indies Balloon House

Indy's Indies Balloon House over Rescue Beauty Lounge Opaque Nude

OK - this post is more pic-spam than review, but I love how this man turned out so much I just can't help it. Indy's Indies Balloon House is a fabulous mix of multicoloured matte (awesome) circle (awesome) glitter. Awesome x awesome = awesome squared; I think that just about sums up this polish.

There's so much going on in Balloon House itself I didn't want to detract from it with a brightly coloured or complicated base, so I choose a simple nude - Rescue Beauty Lounge Opaque Nude ~ one of my favourite 'nudey' (than porcelain) nudes.

Balloon House is an interesting one to apply - it needs a bit of care and a lot of topcoat if you're going to get a smooth glassy finish on your nails. The glitter is VERY generous, no need for fishing here; in fact sometimes I thought I was getting too much glitter on my brush at a time and put some back into the bottle.  The individual glitters are quite thick, so I was careful not to let them pile up on top of each other on my nails - I used a dabbing sort of application to spread them around. Emma at Cambridge Nails placed the glitters from this polish individually to get a great effect in her nail art design!

Then the topcoat - I used two coats of Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food (which is really thick and as the name implies, great for smoothing out glitter manis) before my Seche Vite. As it started to dry, it was still looking a bit bumpy, so I added  second coat of SV. So four coats of topcoat. And these are thick topcoats too. But totally worth it. I just had a look at my pal Cazzy's post about this polish (SpecialGirl Nails), and she used four topcoats too......... so I'm in good company here. Cazzy wore it over plain black - which also looks great - I think there are endless possibilities with this one!

More pictures, lol!

I purchased Balloon House from  Danielle at her Etsy Shop (sorry international ladies, shipping just in the UK, due to Royal Mail regulations). This is the last of the four glitters I got this time (I was definitely saving the best for last) - you can see The Snowman and Belle in this post here and I used Crushed Candy Cane in my Christmas Nail Art guest post at The Crumpet.

RBL Opaque Nude is an old staple from my collection but is still a current colour and available from the RBL website.

Pocket Money Polishes Brown Eyed Girl

Pocket Money Polishes Brown Eyed Girl

Today I want to show you the last of my Pocket Money Polishes September colours. This is Brown Eyed Girl - a complex mix of brown, gold, copper and hot pink glitters with a sprinkle of holographic microglitter that holds everything together!

Pocket Money Polishes Brown Eyed Girl

Brown glitter is a real favourite of mine, and so is hot pink matt glitter, so this one presses all my buttons. I considered using a light pink base for this, but Char at SoYouBeauty has already done that (and it looks fantastic), so I decided I'd go for a more autumnal look effect with a pinky brown base. I used Rescue Beauty Lounge Bruised, which is somewhere between a brown and a plum depending on the light, and added a bit of simple water marbling with Pretty Serious The Pink One to accent the pink glitters in Brown Eyed Girl. Pretty Serious The Pink One is a stunning pink - click through to my post from a few weeks ago when I wore this on it's own to see just how bright it is!

I wanted quite a heavy, glitter-bomb look for this mani, so I used two coats of Brown Eyed Girl. The glitter is perfectly suspended and applies smoothly and plentifully without any need for fishing or careful placement. The arrangement of glitter is just how it came out of the bottle. Because I'd put a lot of glitter on my nails, I used two coats of Gelous to make sure the mani is perfectly smooth and then a thick coat of Seche Vite to seal and dry.

Pocket Money Polishes Brown Eyed Girl

Brown Eyed Girl (and the other colours in the September Sparkle collection - which includes the black and white glitters Angels and Forever and the pretty blue Keep The Faith) go on sale at 6pm today at Pocket Money Polishes website. I was lucky to be able to buy a preview bottle of this last week. RBL Bruised is an old favourite from my stash (I got this in swap a while ago, if I remember correctly) and I purchased Pretty Serious The Pink One from Sally Magpies. Llarowe also stocks Pretty Serious polishes and ships internationally.

Blue water marble with glitter (Pocket Money Polishes Keep The Faith)

Here's a manicure that evolved over a several days! I started out with plain, light blue nails - a sort of palate cleanser from all the glitter and nail art, lol! This is Zoya Blu - a really pretty light blue cream from Zoya's spring pastels collection earlier this year. I choose my colours by mood more than *season* as defined by the manufacturer!

Zoya Blu

Next day I added a water marble. I'm a relative beginner at water marbling, but I love the effect, so I've decided to try to a water marble every week to get more practice! In my last water marble I used just a single colour and clear polish to make a marbled pattern over a gradient, but this time I wanted to marble with several colours. I used Zoya Blu, Zoya Jacqueline, American Apparel Passport Blue and Rescue Beauty Lounge Cuprum.

It's not perfect of course, but I do like the way the patterns came out. RBL Cuprum worked in an interesting way, it spread really quickly and thinly over the water, and on the nail it looks a bit like a water colour wash.

My favourite nail was my middle finger on my left hand - here's a macro of that one. You can also see the coppery flecks in RBL Cuprum on the edge of my middle finger nail rather well in the macro. Although I like the fact that every nail turns out different in water marbling, I wish every nail came out as good as this. Obviously more practice is needed!

GLITTER, however, is great for covering imperfections! And because you can add it selectively, you can use it just to accent some areas of a nail art design:

The glitter I used is Pocket Money Polishes Keep The Faith; this is a mix of slightly teal-ish blue glitters in hexes of various sizes, some tiny blue bar glitters and bigger pale gold holographic hexes. 

Pocket Money Polishes Keep The Faith 

I chose this glitter because the tone of blue matches up nicely with the blue shades in my water marble, and the pale gold hexes set off the warm cream of Zoya Jacqueline really well.

Water marble with Pocket Money Polishes Keep The Faith 

Zoya Blu and Jacqueline were part of a gift from a lovely polish friend, as was American Apparel Passport Blue. RBL Cuprum is a favourite from my stash - I got my bottle in a swap a while ago but the colour is still available to buy from the Rescue Beauty Lounge Website.

Charlie, the maker of Pocket Money Polishes, very kindly sent me Keep The Faith as a sample when I last ordered polish from her. Keep The Faith is one of the new Pocket Money Polishes colours for September, and goes on sale on 1st September at the Pockcet Money Polishes website, which includes a blog with information on new colours and release dates. You can also keep up with Charlie and her polishes on her facebook page

An InLinkz Link-up

Rescue Beauty Lounge IKB:2012

Rescue Beauty Lounge IKB 2012

This is a bit of an accidental post. I'd picked out this colour, a firm favourite of mine, as a base for a new glitter, but once it was on my nails it ended up staying there for a couple of days on its own before the glitter. I enjoyed it so much, and I don't want to swamp my next post (which is about the glitter topper I chose to go with this) with these pictures, so in the end I decided it was worth a post on its own!

Rescue Beauty Lounge IKB 2012 was from the RBL fan collection 2012. It was a limited edition and is sold out now. It's a wonderful, bright primary cobalt blue - one of the best blues I've ever owned - and the finish is a very richly pigmented jelly. The formula has gained a bit of a reputation for being difficult to work with; it's kind of goopy but thin at the same time but really you just need to hold your nerve because it does come out great in the end. This is two coats plus Seche Vite topcoat.

If you're one of those people who have this polish lying around unloved because of formula/application issues, here's how I applied it:

1. Apply base coat and let the basecoat dry thoroughly. If the basecoat is still tacky when you start to apply IKB it will get blobby and nasty.
2. Apply a thin coat of IKB. It will look very streaky, and matt (IKB doesn't dry to a shiny finish anyway, and it's a jelly, so the first coat isn't going to be opaque). Just ignore how horrible it looks at this stage and keep painting! The brush might start to dry out after a few nails. Just put it back in the bottle, wait a minute, gently shake the bottle and start again.
3. Apply a thicker second coat. This will go on even and dense and start to look good - although it won't dry shiny. If the brush gets dry and sticky, put the cap on and gently shake the bottle as before. 
4. Finish with SV. This will add high gloss and help the polish with its final levelling.

In indirect light it's a tad darker:

RBL IKB 2012 is a perfect cobalt blue - I'm holding a chunk of high quality lapis lazuli in this picture:

Rescue Beauty Lounge IKB 2012

And finally, just a blur of lovely blue!!  Other blues that I think come close to IKB 2012 are Nails Inc Baker Street, which is an opaque cream rather than a jelly, and Contrary Polish Santorini which has a glass fleck / flakie shimmer in it. Picture Polish Freya's Cats might be another contender; this one is a microglitter but I've just got my bottle and haven't worn it yet.

Rescue Beauty Lounge IKB 2012

And here's a teaser from my next post - you'll need to check back tomorrow to see what this glitter is, lol!

Illamasqua Smash with Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily Gradient

Illamasqua Smash and Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily

I don't often do gradients, I'm never satisfied my efforts are smooth enough! This was an attempt from a couple of weeks ago when I was on holiday, to while away half an hour on a rainy evening.

This was the mani I started with - Illamasqua Smash; one of my favourite green creams. This is two coats with Seche Vite quick drying top coat. Please excuse the sloppy edges, I didn't take my clean-up brush away with me!

Illamasqua Smash

Then I added the gradient with Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily, one of my favourite polishes. You can see my pictures of Aqua Lily on it's own in this post  here. For the gradient, I used a corner cut off a washing up sponge (all I had available) and finished the mani off with a coat of basecoat followed by a coat of SV. I used the basecoat to try to prevent the SV causing shrinkage, as if I'd just put it straight over the gradient, I think it would have been sure to shrink. As it was, there was still a bit of shrinkage, but not so much I couldn't live with it.

Illamasqua Smash and Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily

Overall I was pleased with the end result and I like the two colours together.

I bought Illamasqua Smash from the Illamasqua website a couple of years ago but unfortunately this colour now seems to be discontinued. Illamasqua do sometimes reinstate discontined colours though, Raindrops being a good example. Outside the UK, Sephora stores carry Illamasqua products; I suppose it's possible they may still have Smash in stock.  I bought Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily from Rescue Beauty Lounge; this is a very popular colour and sold out very quickly, although again RBL often reinstate retired colours so if this is a colour you like it's worth keeping an eye out for an RBL 'Bring it Back' release. Aqua Lily has already been re-released like this in 2012.

Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily with bold leopard spots (Barry M Nail Art Pens)

Barry M Nail Art Pens

I seldom do nail art, but when the Barry M Nail Art pens were released a few weeks ago, I couldn't resist buying a couple to try! They've been sitting around on my desk ever since, as I've not really thought up an interesting way to use them.

I'm a great fan of animal prints, so eventually I decided to try out the pens on a big-scale leopard design, which I copied from a leopard print cardigan of mine. I wasn't too sure this would work out, so I did my experimentation over an existing mani that was several days old - one of my all time favourites, Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily.

Here are a couple of pictures of RBL Aqua Lily on its own...... Aqua Lily is a vibrant teal. I'd describe it as a blue leaning teal; it reminds me of the colour of the sea on some of my favourite beaches in the Hebridean Isles. It has a subtle shimmer of pink running through it too.

Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily

On to the nail art pens, these are surprisingly easy to use. They have a very fine tip, and once you've got the polish (or whatever it is) flowing after the intial priming (you need to pump them up and down on a piece of paper until the pigment flows before using for the first time) the colour flows very smoothly and it's pretty much like drawing on your nails with a felt pen. MUCH easier than using a brush, as you don't have to worry about reloading the brush and the polish drying out as you work. I tried out a few simple line and dot designs first, and the pens are great for fine work. Also, if you mess up, it's easy to remove the design as you work; either scrape the bits where you've gone wrong off with another nail, or scrub the whole lot off with a nailbrush and hot soapy water!

For this design I drew on the white centres of the spots first, on all my nails, then went back and added the black.

I was really pleased with the way this turned out. Although it was only intended as an experiment, I ended up wearing it for several days, and I only removed it when I had a meeting at work that I thought it was rather unsuitable for.

Barry M Nail Art Pens

I bought the Barry M Nail Art Pens from my local Superdrug. Alternatively, they are available online at Barry M's website. I bought Rescue Beauty Lounge Aqua Lily from Rescue Beauty Lounge; this is a very popular colour and sold out very quickly, although again RBL often reinstate retired colours so if this is a colour you like it's worth keeping an eye out for an RBL 'Bring it Back' release. Aqua Lily has already been re-released like this in 2012.