WAH Nails Pink Stripes and Zigzags

OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls, Essie Coral Reef, Kester Black Fairy Floss, BYS Black Striper

Like every other nail art fan on the planet, I follow WAH Nails on Instagram. A while back I saw this fabulous manicure by WAH Girl Ellie and had to try it out on my nails. 

This mani reinforced the fact that I really need to keep practising my freehand painting. Some of those zig zags are a bit iffy, but from an arm length away it's hard to notice those little mistakes. I loved this design so much I did it in blue a few days later when this one chipped. 

Day 24 - Inspired by a Book

OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls, OPI Don't Touch My Tutu, OPI Dutch Tulips, OPI Lincoln Park After Dark, Essie Coral Reef, China Glaze For Audrey, Seed Lemon

I'm being naughty and skipping over Day 23, which is inspired by a movie to jump right into Day 24, inspired by a book.

I've only really started caring about make up in the past two years. Before that, I just wore mascara, some tinted moisturiser and kind of hoped for the best. My housemate swears by Zoë Foster's Amazing Face and I've been reading it recently. Zoë is one hilarious lass and her make up and skincare tips are fabulous!

Amazing Face was sitting on my desk while I was painting my nails the other day and I thought the colours and patterns would be perfect for nail art! The mani ended up looking nothing like the cover but it did alert me to the fact that I need more deep reddish purple nail polish.

Day 22 - Inspired by a Song / Hottest 100 Day Nails!

OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls, OPI Jade Is The New Black, Essie Coral Reef, OPI Panda-monium Pink, Orly Liquid Vinyl

Happy Hottest 100 Day everyone (and Happy Australia Day too!). If you guys were around here last year, you'll know I love the Hottest 100. I thought I'd start a bit of a Australia Day tradition and have another Hottest 100 themed manicure. This year, it also coincided with my inspired by a song post of the 31 day challenge. This manicure is inspired by the amazing Aussie band Alpine and their album art, designed by Tim Royall. I used nail art tape and sponged on the colour with a makeup sponge. 

One of the songs I voted for was Gasoline which I'm hoping will place really high in the countdown. I'm also seeing Alpine next weekend at Laneway. So excited! I might have to recreate these nails for the day!

Day 21 - Inspired by a Colour

OPI A Grape Fit, China Glaze Grape Pop, OPI The Man With The Golden Gun, Essie As Gold As It Gets

I love gradients and I haven't done one in what feels like forever. I knew that I wanted my 'inspired by a colour' day of the 31 day challenge to be a single colour gradient and when I sat down to paint my nails I couldn't go past purple. I love these purples together and they both have 'grape' in their names. They're perfect for each other! 

My friend Julia gave me Essie As Gold As It Gets for my birthday earlier this week and I can't stop using it! It's so gorgeous! I also added a light coat of TMWTGG to make my mani extra golden.  

Day 20 - Water Marbled

China Glaze Kinetic Candy, Topshop AWOL, Essie Coral Reef

Guys, water marbles are hard! I usually avoid them at all costs. They're messy, only seem to work half the time and usually end up with me angrily painting my nails just one plain colour. 

But, they are day 20 of the challenge, and though I may be taking my sweet time working through the 31 day challenge, I fully intend of completing it. So... this is my water marble. The thought of doing more than four nails scared me, so I complemented them with some spots and stripes! 

Does anyone actually like doing water marbling  I love the look of it, but the effort and failure rate (well, my high failure rate) is normally enough to send me running! Does anyone have any tips?

Day 18 - Half Moons

Orly Glitz, OPI Dutch Tulips, Essence Make It Golden, Essie Matte About You

I'll admit I kind of cheated on this whole half moon thing. I know they're meant to be done with little circular stickers over your cuticles, but every time I attempt it that way they just look really bizarre on my hands (and weirdly not anything at all like everyone else's  Perhaps my stickers are too big?) and I have to change my mani straight away! So, for Half Moon day I decided to go for the skinnier moon and rock it ruffian style. It's still moon shaped so I say it still counts.

I was quite happy with this mani before I added the glitter, but some days you just can't help but add glitter and I couldn't resist! And who doesn't love mattified glitter?

NYE 2013

China Glaze Grape Pop, Essie Silken Cord, Sally Hansen Celeb City, Sinful Colors Queen of Beauty, Orly Liquid Vinyl, Glimmer by Erica Drizzt

Happy 2013 everyone! I hope you all had a fabulous New Year's Eve. I celebrated my first NYE in Sydney with a bunch of friends in a park overlooking Sydney Harbour and the Sydney Harbour Bridge (where the greatest NYE fireworks in Australia are!). Our park had a view of the bridge to the front of us and cliffs that overlooked the ocean behind us and it was so beautiful! 

Of course I needed a glitter fest on my nails for this amazing event! I based this mani around Drizzt, which is one of my favourite glitters. I even attempted to write 2013! After a lot of touching up with black polish I was quite please with how it turned out. I have even more respect now for people who do insanely intricate nail art with little bitty brushes. I think I'll stick to my dots and stripes!

Day 15 - Delicate Print

Essie Mint Candy Apple, Essie Lapis of Luxury, Essie Coral Reef

In the end, this mani didn't really end up being the most delicate looking thing, but they're dainty little spots and stripes so I'm going to say it's a delicate print. A few months ago I bought a new little set of drawers for my nail polishes, and these three Essies were sitting nicely in a row in their drawer and I couldn't resist using them together!

Day 1 - Red

Essie Silken Cord, OPI Alpine Snow

Well, I'm jumping on the 31 day nail art challenge bandwagon! Only my wagon started late and is a lot slower than everyone else's. So often have no idea what to paint on my nails so this challenge seems to be the perfect thing to give me a bit of nail direction! 

Day 1 is red, which suited me perfectly, because I bought a dress on the weekend that has red and white stripes so I decided I'd match when I wore it to work.

Fair warning to you all... judging by what I've done these first few days (yes I'm a little ahead!), I won't be posting every day, I may paint my nails out of order (but I'll try to post them in the challenge order) and sometimes I may take the theme for the day as a gentle suggestion rather than a direct order (which you'll see when we get to day 3, the infamous yellow day). 

P.S. I just would like to say thank you to Essie for giving your mini polishes regular sized brushes.  OPI you should take note (and make your mini bottles bigger too!).

Cookies, Cream & Stripes

Kink Ink, Essie Marshmallow, LA Girl Uninhibited

While perusing the nail polish section of the interwebs this week I saw Sarah's (of Chalkboard Nails fame) cookies and cream manicure and I thought, finally a use for the mess of a polish that is Essie Marshmallow! 

Because I've been a bit slack (actually quite slack) lately in the nail art department, I thought I'd go all out with the cookies and cream theme and do some stripy nails using tape, as well as black glitter sandwich accent nails. I love how the glitter sandwich looks like cookies and cream ice cream, and the stripes look like stacks of Oreos (yes, we do have Oreos here! I was slightly obsessed with them last year, eating packets upon packets!). 

I'm in the middle of making batch of chocolate chip biscuits at the moment, so this mani is quite fitting! (Here in Australia, we call cookies biscuits, although if people say 'cookie' we know they're talking about)

Blue, Green & Purple Watercolour Mani

OPI GelColor Passion, Essie Mint Candy Apple, OPI Fly, OPI A Grape Fit, China Glaze First Mate, Ozotic 505

My second watercolour mani! This time in blues and greens, with a bit of sneaky purple. I had this on at the same time that I received my package from Picture Polish. PP recently had a sale and I bought Ozotic 505 and Ozotic 530. I couldn't resist adding a coat of 505 to this mani. It gave it a subtle bit of shimmer and sparkle.

Silver Chevrons

Essie Marshmallow, China Glaze Devotion, Bundle Monster BM-201

I'd been thinking about getting Essie Marshmallow for quite some time. I'd read a lot about it, good reviews and bad reviews about it, how it was a lovely colour, but could be quite troublesome to apply.  I'd read some reviews that all it needed was a bit of thinner and a bit of patience and it was all good. I finally gave in and bought it. 

Why didn't I listen to everyone when they said Marshmallow was the ultimate problem child of white/pale jelly nail polishes??? My experience was the usual Marshmallow disaster - a super streaky, too many coats, thick, disaster. This mani had something ridiculous, like 4 or 5 coats. I wish I'd gone with the new OPI Don't Touch My Tutu! which according to Jen from The PolishAholic reminds her of Marshmallow but is much more user friendly. Why didn't I trust you Jen? 

Marshmallow ended up looking more stark white than I wanted, so I decided to stamp over. And that is the whole sad story of this manicure.

Easter Eggs!

OPI Sparrow Me The Drama, Essie Mint Candy Apple, China Glaze Electric Beat, China Glaze Peachy Keen

After all the fun I had with my Christmas manis I decided that this week my nails should all look like little easter eggs! 

I also wanted to play around with the nail art striping tape I bought a little while ago. Before this I'd just been using it instead of cutting up sticky tape for tape manis, and taking it all off. This is my first time using it and leaving it on! It looked awesome, but about an hour after I took this photo one of the lines of tape had peeled off, and by the end of the day the topcoat was peeling off it and it was looking a bit shabby. It was still pretty cool and shiny though!

Mattified Pointy Moon Thing

OPI Skull & Glossbones, OPI I Eat Mainely Lobster, Milani Gold, Essie Matt About You

Whoa, am I obsessed with Skull & Glossbones or what? I've only had it a few weeks and already I've used it at least twice a week! Which is an amazingly massive amount of usage for one nail polish! In fact, I'm using it for the mani I'm doing tonight! I just can't get enough! 

I've been seeing these triangular reverse french manicures (does anyone know what on earth these things are called???) on the interwebs and finally got around to doing one. My lines aren't all that crisp because I was a little impatient, but from arm's length they looked pretty cool! 

For a bit of bling I used my dotter to pick one piece of glitter from Milani Gold and stuck it on the point. Then I mattified the whole lot!

Minty Spots

Essie Mint Candy Apple, Ulta3 Gold Rush Fever, Bundle Monster BM-211

Again with the new polishes! This whole living in the city, having access to lots of nail polish is not good for my bank account! Myer was having a sale and Essie was 30% off. I only have one Essie polish and Matt About You, but I've always wanted Mint Candy Apple. I've been really into green nail polish lately, which is a bit strange because I used to have so few greens now I have about a billion of them! Mint Candy Apple is a beautiful mint colour, but was a little b*tch to apply. It was a bit goopy, a bit chalky, kept on making little bald spots, not levelling properly and just generally being annoying. But I forgive it because it's so pretty! Might add a few drops of thinner and see how it goes next time. Of course, I couldn't resist so I stamped a spotty pattern from BM-211 over the top too. 

Glitter In The Sandwich

Essence Forget Me Not, Essie Lapis of Luxury, Essence Make It Golden, Milani Silver

This is a bizarre sort of mani. Lots of different layers happening here. I'd spent the whole day before I did this mani lusting over Deborah Lippmann's Glitter In The Air. When I got home I felt like doing a bit of a glitter sandwich and Essie Lapis Of Luxury is usually annoyingly sheer to me so I thought it'd do well as a top colour! The layers here are 1 coat of Forget Me Not, 2 coats of Lapis of Luxury, 1 of Make It Golden, 1 of Silver and another 1 of Lapis of Luxury.

I took this photo the next evening, after a very busy day at work. I think it held up quite well, considering my job is very hands on and they get banged about quite a bit!