My First Skittle Mani!

Though this is a post I prepared months ago and have dragged out of the vault whilst I am busy getting life organised in Italy, I'm hitting a first with today's mani, my first (and so far only!) skittle! I don't actually know why I haven't done a skittle mani before, I guess it just never appealed to me more than all the other stuff I wanted to do, but then I got these 2 polishes that were sent to me for review (I already showed you swatches of them late last year so they may be familiar!) and they were just such great colours together they actually inspired me to do a skittle for the first time!

So the polishes I used were as follows: Mint Green = Mode 'Cool As'. Lavender = Mode 'Gorg'. Holographic glitter is Nfu - Oh GS07.

Despite many previous dodgy and wonky dotticure attempts I managed to do a nice even polkadot pattern  on the index finger. On the ring finger I used masking tape cut into chevron shapes and painted over it, and for the little finger I used a fine striping brush. Of course I had to have a glitter finger too to give it some sparkle!

I'm actually quite pleased with my skittle mani, it was more fun than I imagined it to be, and it was actually quite simple and not very time consuming, you've gotta love those designs that have high impact with minimum effort!

                                                                                                                                            

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Carneval Nails - What I should have worn!

I'm back today with the last of my carneval themed mani's, and today's design was inspired by the 'costume' of Brazil's 'Miss Carneval' Pageant winner. I say 'costume' in parenthesis because it's actually just body paint! Brazilians don't have any problems with plenty of lady flesh on TV!

Basically the pageant was held by the leading TV channel in Brazil who went on to do full coverage of the parades in Rio, and Miss Carneval's role was to do a cute little samba dance to the opening and closing credits of the show, and they also super imposed her in giant size onto the parade runway to introduce the next samba school of costume clad people! The channel is called Globo, and the word for beauty in portuguese is 'beleza', so her title is the 'Globeleza!'

Though her body painting was rather daring and didn't leave much to the imagination, it was rather amazing and done in glitter gradients up her legs, take a look at the picture and see how fab it is!

I decided to do a stripes and spots design with glitter polishes, but it turned out I didn't actually have that many on me, when I left Australia I posted the majority of my polish collection to my mum in the UK so I wouldn't have to travel to Brazil and then Italy with it all, and so I didn't really have a good selection of glitter colours to be able to blend them and do a gradient, but I'm still happy with what I came up with and it looks really fun!

I chose to replicate the glitter paint on naked skin effect by using a nude base.The base is a Brazilian brand which I borrowed from my mother in laws stash, the brand name is 'Risque' (I didn't buy any of their polishes in the end because they have a very basic colour range and I was looking for special effects and glitters mostly) the polish is 'Meia Calza' which my husband tells me means 'stockings'.

The glitter polishes I used were from my Brazilian Cora milky way collection, and one Hits Specialita' glitter, all of which have been swatched for you just a couple of posts ago. ;)

So here is my mani!

As you can see I wasn't exactly spoiled for choice on glitter colours and I would have had a hard time getting a good gradient by combining these colours, but I think that once I get my full collection of polish back I'll give it another go with gradient stripes. I am rather impressed by my dots, I have really struggled in the past to get a nice unifrom effect with my dots all the same size, I think I pulled it off really nicely this time!

As I'm currently nursing two teabag repairs on my blogging hand, the next few designs you will see on the blog will be past designs from the vault that I have still yet to show you!

Carneval Nails - What I could have worn!

I have another carneval inspired mani today (I'm playing catch up for those of you that are wondering why I'm so late!) and today's is a pretty glitter placement design that I would have loved to have worn if I had actually had the time to do something this complicated!

I took my inspiration from my location for this one, and choose the colours green, yellow and blue from the Brazilian flag! I didn't take a pic in full sun as it was too harsh on the glitter and you couldn't make out the colours of the glitter properly for the reflections, so have a couple of different shade set ups because I couldn't decide which one was best!

The index finger is a little extract from the brazilian flag, and the middle finger represents the parade where the different samba schools who march have their own color theme, resultings in large coloured blocks of people that make the parade look stripy from above! The ring finger is a part of a flower as the costumes are covered in millions of them, and the little finger, not being able to fit much on there, represents the special stadiums in which the brazilian carneval parades takes place, it's kind of like a gigantic concrete models runway with bandstands on either side, called a Sambodromo!
I placed the glitter over a base of Ludurana 'Ouro Puro' (pure Gold)

I did the index finger first and I was super impressed with my very careful and neat glitter placement, after that I'm not sure what happened, It all got a bit higgeldy piggeldy! It looked awesome though! I just wish I had had the time over carneval weekend to do these nails for my partying, I'm sure it would have gotten lots of compliments from the Brasileiros!

Carneval Nails - What I Wore

Hello Lovelies!

Been out of touch again for a month as I made my move from Brazil to Italy, but now I'm here and things are settling so I can get back to it! 

As some of you my know I got to spend carneval in the best place for it - Brazil! But as soon as carneval was over I had to crack on with packing my stuff and getting prepared for the big move here to Italy, so I didn't have time to work on some carneval inspired nails, which lets face it, due to my location at the time was an absolute must!

So all be it late (as has been the case more often than not in these last few months of world travel!) I decided to do some carneval nails anyway, I only managed to get a couple done which I will show you during this week, for today I'm going to show you the nails I actually wore to attend carneval, as even though I didn't get time to do any blog stuff, I did at least manage to snap a couple of pics of my nails before I headed off for a wild weekend of partying Brazilian style!

The mani I wore is a simple glitter gradient, it was a pretty intense weekend and I just didn't have the time to do something elaborate, so being forced to keep it simple I went for a super bright colour and glitter! What more do you need for carneval anyway!?

The base is Australian brand Mode ' Love Me' with Cherimoya 'Electric Heaven' Mylar Glitter topper in a gradient. I love this colour and this glitter together!

Here are two pictures that I took in direct sunlight and in shade.

This week I will post a couple of manis a bit more elaborate, with designs that I might have worn had I had the time to do them!! One is a glitter placement mani which took me hours! and the last is inspired by a 'costume' worn by a lady who won Brazils 'Miss Carneval' Beauty pageant!

Stay tuned!