Posts Tagged ‘Nail Art’

Thought all my Gum Leaf Mafia Australian/NZ nail polish girls would be interested in this ^_^

Over here in Aus the range of Sally Hansen has up until now been rather scarce. Even though they’re stocked by a billion major chains the range usually only consist of a few nail treatments and maybe 2 of the light pink polishes. Imagine my surprise when I walked into Priceline to a whole new display of them *_*
There was a whole shelf of the Insta-dri’s in some pretty weird colours. They didn’t have the fluros which lovely Brooke sent me from the US but if these ones are anything like them I would definitely grab some if I had the money.

More interestingly they had some really pretty looking HD colours…

There was also a deal where if you bought anything from the lip/nail collection you could get one of the treatment pens for free… So I bought a light pink nail art pen for $13 and got a Corrector pen (which cost $16) for free…

While it looked like a good deal at the time here’s my review…

So nail art pen first. The best way I can describe this is it’s like a paint pen. It comes with a clear tip to begin with…

To get the colour out you have to press up and down on some paper a few times.

Colour of the tip:

I put a falsie on and did a base coat of and Opi white so I could see how opaque it was. Because the tip is super pointy and thin I thought I would be able to get a nice detailed stroke.

Not so much.

It’s more like trying to paint using the wrong end of a paint brush. When colouring with a normal felt pen you press the pen to the surface and it leaves a trail of pigment, when colouring with this it basically puts out a watery blob that you can sort of move around with the tip.

It did nice even dots very easily and the colour was very opaque straight out of the pen.

Unfortunately because it puts out such a huge amount of polish the drying time is a bit much. If you smudge it you end up with this:

Verdict: I don’t think it’s great for doing detailed work but for basics like dots and little designs it would be good. The drying time might be a turn off if you’re working on your natural nails. I think it’s not so great for the price though.

Ok now on to the corrector pen. The idea of it is just say you’d done a fantastic nail art design and then go to finish with a French tip and make a huuuuge mistake *o* rather than starting again you can just wipe away the mistake by drawing on it with the corrector pen. It comes with 3 different tips depending on the size of the mistake.

*Edit* A couple of you lovely readers have pointed out that the corrector pen is actually used for removing polish from the skin and cuticles if you make a mistake rather than polish mistakes on the nail. Firstly the pen was actually recommended to me by the clerk at Priceline with the nail art pen saying that it was great to use and clean up mistakes in nail art, so firstly fail on the clerk for not knowing what she was talking about and fail on me for not reading the package properly. I did actually test it out on the skin too but apparently when I was posting half asleep this morning I forgot to include that part of review, double fail on me!

Anyway on the skin/cuticles I found it to be a little bit pointless as it took quite a bit of effort to remove any polish rather than just mushing it into my skin and turning it purple. For a highly pigmented polish you would have to stop and clean the tip several times if you needed to clean more than one finger which I found frustrating and time consuming. I think for the price (assuming I hadn’t gotten it on sale) I would rather just use an orange stick with a little cotton and polish remover >_< */Edit*

Oh noes I made a huge mistake with dark purple nail polish what ever am I to do?!

Following the instructions I wiped over the mistake. The pen didn’t specify if the polish should be wet or dry when I used it. When removing wet polish it just kind of moved it around. To be honest you might as well use an orange stick covered in a tissue because it really just smudged everything. You can see the results below:

I let the remaining polish dry and then tried the pen again. All it seemed to do was scrape off polish layers  and mush them around together. Results:

Verdict: I wouldn’t buy it. I tested it in several different situations and with different polishes etc and all it didn’t do anything different. I don’t think it would be useful for removing small mistakes without destroying the rest of the design. It’s a pity though because it’s such a good idea

Next post is going to be a circle lens review

I’m sure you’ve all noticed a few of the changes I’m making around the blog by now ^_^ I’ve been quite busy over the weekend and fixed a lot of the issues we were talking about last post, there is still more to come so when I’m finished (probably in the next few days) I’ll do a round up post of what has changed. Please keep in mind that I’ll be tinkering so if something doesn’t work, don’t stress just wait a little bit and try again

So it would seem that my heart shaped measuring bowls and spoons are a bit of a hit! I was inundated with emails and comments asking where you could all get one. So here are two websites that apparently sell them or very similar to them. These sites both stock the spoons and other cute things as well.

Hear Mum Roar found this site: http://www.littlebetsybaker.com.au/store/pc/Heart-Shaped-Bowl-143p962.htm

My Mother found this one which is definitely the same: http://www.chalet.net.au/home

Now onto what you all really want to see: NAIL ART! Because I’m going to be spending the day making a heap of sets of nail art for my Etsy store I though I’d treat you to some eye candy I know a lot of you have only just started reading my blog recently so I wanted to show you some nail art I did quite a while ago, most likely before you all started reading ^_^ If you’ve been reading for over a year feel free to skip this one Apologies for the size of the photos, these were all edited back when my blog was even tinier on blogspot.

These ones are all done with a Konad stamper for a competition, there are non-konad ones at the end.

Omg back when I had red hair

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Hope you enjoyed and look forward to the designs I’m doing today, some of them are pretty spectacular ^_^

The way we get to the end of this story is a little long and rambling but it ends in nail art so I’m sure you won’t mind

A few months ago my Mum went on holiday to the Gold Coast and discovered a shop called “Del Sol” which makes products that change colour in the sun. Very 1990′s right? Well that was my attitude until she mentioned that they made nail polished that change colour in the sun!

She brought me home 4 of their polishes to try out. I was a bit skeptical at first but they actually change surprisingly well!

These are the colours in normal inside light:
Red with silver glitter
Blue with a pearly finish
Clear with silver glitter
Pink with a pearly finish

In outside light they change to:
Purple pearl finish
Red glitter
Purple glitter
Green pearl finish

I couldn’t remember the order I had them in while I was taking the outside photos so here are the photos matched up to their outside colours!

How freaking cool is that?

So back to the nail art story, I’ve been wanting to do some Alice in Wonderland themed nail art for years now but I’ve never been able to think of a design that would do it justice. Now that everyone is talking about Alice again I thought it was high time to try it out and the first thing that came to mind was colour change. You can’t get more Alice than that!

This is them inside:

This was also my first attempt at doing 3D acrylic. To be honest I’m not really happy with how these turned out, the idea was so much cooler in my head. Also I think that if I had spent more time practicing my skills I would like the end result better. I’m all out of the acrylic liquid now but I’m going to get some more and try again! Practice, practice, practice! The 3D parts are the Heart and Club card suits, the playing card and the White Rabbit on the thumb. I didn’t have coloured acrylic so I used clear and painted them after.

And outside:

I really loved the idea of the colour change polish but I don’t think I used as well as I could have. It works great on the index nail that says “Alice” because it looks plain until it’s in the sun but the other little details like the Cheshire Cat turning red-purple weren’t as obvious.

Another problem I had when taking the photos

Comparison between the two:

A close up of the hat and rabbit on the thumbs. The hat band changes from red-purple but because it was over the black it’s hard to see. The background of the rabbit also goes from silver glitter-red I am really proud of my White Rabbit though! My first 3D thing that actually looks like it’s supposed to

So conclusions:
-I currently suck at 3D acrylics but I will practice and get much better!
-These Alice nails weren’t great but I now have ideas for even more spectacular ones.
-Colour change polish is completely pointless but also very cool.

Also on a side note the adorable Momoberi gave me a mention on her blog too and I didn’t find out until I’d already written that last post! She was inspired by one of my hair tutorials ^_^

Have a great weekend everyone!