Mish Mash Challenge - Holo. Chained love.

Hey there!

I hope y'all are doing fantastic! :) Today's prompt of the Mish Mash Challenge is holographic. You would think I had a lot of ideas featuring a bunch holo polishes... But I didn't. 

I like holos, but I've never gone crazy about them. The holo trend seemed to pass just near me without getting me all in - my pocket feels relieved. So I decided to slap on the one I never used: Nfu-Oh NFU 66. 

For the "nail art" I used Nailz Craze stamping plate no. 06 and then added some dotted chains... I will not further comment on this as I totally disliked it. Well, this is also about the fails, so there you go!

I have to say I am not in the best nail art period of my life, it's as if my creativity had gone dry. I am just able to lust over other people's work and never seem to get the courage to sit at my table and light up the nailporn demon inside of me. Off I go!

Take care,

M.

Mish Mash Challenge - A technique you have never tried before. Newspaper nails & a dandelion...

Hey there!

How are you doing? I hope you're ON for today's installment of the Mish Mash Challenge, which involves a "technique you have never tried before". I love this theme; I want this challenge, along with my artist inner self, to push me to do new things, better things... 

Believe it or not, I had never tried newspaper nails before. This blog has been running for over a year now (d'uh... I missed my own bloggiversary, but my battle with remembering dates is a lost one so let's just move on), and this week's topic has been a great push. Of course, I watched some tutorials on YouTube and took good note of Lisa's newsprint nailz, and this is what happened:

Long story short, at first what happened is a whole lot of nothing. No transfer of characters + ruined polish, that's what I got. So I decided to keep ruining the left hand's polish by trying other ways to transfer the darn text to my claws. Clear polish? Nope. Alcohol? Nope. Clear polish and alcohol? Not yet. Plain water? YES!

Then started again: 2 coats of China Glaze For Audrey + 1 coat of Kiko's Sparkling Touch topper. Let that dry and transfer the text. Any text may work, but I decided to teach my nails some tolerance by transferring an article about the persisting homophobia in France (and Europe in general). Why not?

It lacked something more, so I made good use of my Nailz Craze stamping plate NC01 and its beautiful dandelion design... Voilà!

I was so happy with the result that I sent a picture of them to The Boyfriend right away with a simple text: "Getting artsy. Like it or not?". Except I didn't really send it to The Boyfriend, but to Girona's airport. It wasn't even watermarked... *laugh* NEXT!

Take care,

M.

Do not forget to take a look at the other ladies' posts:

Flower stamping - Nailz Craze 03 + Kiko Mango (nº 281)

Hello fellow polish devotees :)

I hope everything's okay: polish is on, cuticles are looking nice and no tipwear is showing yet. You know, all those essentials one can't simply live without...

I lusted and lusted over Nailz Craze plates 1 and 3, and guess what? I finally discovered Natalie's Etsy store (epic win, I'll make no further comments...) and bought myself the goodies ^^ I couldn't wait longer to use them, so here's the gorgeous flower pattern in Nailz Craze plate 03:

AND it is being my current NOTD, believe it or not! I think it's the first time I wear a stamped manicure at work and I am not regretting it one bit. I started with two coats of Kiko Mango (nº 281) which does not look at all like mango... But is a very in your face supposed-to-be-pink-but-appearing-red kind of color. Weird, really weird how hot hot pink it looks on the bottle and how red it looks 99,9% of the time!

After, I stamped the pattern with Kiko Nude (nº 372). The pattern seems to soften the base color, and the combination of nude and red is not as eye catching as it seems, which makes the combo quite wearable on a sunny day (week) of work.

Regarding the plates, what can I say? The design came out perfectly well on the stamp: the lines are crisp even if the stamping color is a neutral one. I can't wait to try the matrioshkas, the butterfly wings and the dandelion... in this order, please! 

Take care!

M.

Born Pretty Store stamping plate Review

Hola, señoritas!

I plead guilty today. Guilty of waiting too long to review this stamping plate, that I haven't been able to find on Born Pretty Store's site anymore. I hope it has not been discontinued, because otherwise this post makes absolutely no sense.

The plate I was sent contains a great deal of designs, mostly flowers, but you can also find some butterflies here and there. Close up of the plate:

And here's the results, stamped on a piece of paper using a very pigmented black I had at hand: 

As you can see, the designs came clean and surprisingly detailed, except one. I am positively impressed about the quality of this plate, and as the only con I'd mention the sharpness of the edges. Make sure you don't handle it with a recently painted manicure, otherwise you'll end up with little markings, no doubt. If you're as clumsy as me, that is ;) I am not willing to underestimate your abilities!

And that's just some testing I've done on my current manicure and Gosh Silver.

The latter also illustrates the fact that Essie Bahama Mama is one well behaved polish: the picture has been taken after 5 days of wear and you can only notice nail growth (I can't blame Essie for that, though) and some minor tipwear. Nothing to complain about!

Have a nice weekend! :)

M.

Breast Cancer Awareness month - Pink manicure nº4

Señoritas,

See, I realized with this pink manicures series that... I am not THAT much into pink after all. Yeah, I hadn't faced that fact yet because I don't wear any single color in a row that many times, so now I have to it's become obvious that my totally unsensitive and selfish inner creature would pick another color if the well-behaved part of me wasn't always in control. 

For this fourth edition of the Breast Cancer Awareness Month I've picked up a quite lame combination... I needed to be able to work with it. Two coats of ChG Heli-Yum and some black flowers ^^ Cute!

Heli-Yum looks kind of red in those pictures... I am sorry for that; it is one of those in-between colors that look redder or pinker depending on the surrounding. It's rich and its application is easy peasy. The perfect red/hot pink creme IMO.

That's all for now!

M.

Gold zig-zags over Orly Apple Green. And hey do you know Discordia?

Heya!

How's the weekend? I hope you had at least as much relaxing time as I have had working hours. But I am glad to announce that this schedule that I have where Sunday has been the new laborable day since May is about to come to an end. Oh yeah!

So, here's the mani I have on my nails right now, and that I am sadly going to take off right after posting this... I need a work-safe mani. This is two coats of Orly Green Apple (oh! how much imagination you've put into this, Orly!) and a subtle stamping done with IsaDora whatever gold. And posing with me in two of the pictures is my flatmate, Discordia. Yay!

 The mani was fun to wear, and I was complimented a few times at work (that's confusing, I was complimented at work on a non-working day... whatever). Life gets in the way? NO! I mean, what life? Hee hee.

And here's a close-up of Discordia. She's a Ghost Corn Snake, 9 months old, very well behaved and she's starting to get used to her big vivarium and me. She got to explore the house this weekend, under parental control that is. She's so small I am 150% positive I wouldn't find her back her if I lost her inside my 75m2. Poor thing.

Keep it up!

M.

Manicure party :)

Hey there,

This Monday's morning has been somewhat different at my place: my lady friends came over for a little manicure party, and we had a really sweet time ^^

I have to say they all made very wise choices, and that I am very happy with their performance at hand modeling, yay! Take a look at the cool designs they took home with them:

(Clockwise) Carolina, Iris, me and Marta

Those are the recipes:

Carolina - 1 coat of Flormar nºM109 + 2 coats of China Glaze Ahoy! + some flowers stamped in white with Konad and a rhinestone in the middle.

Iris - 2 coats of Catrice Heavy Metalilac + some polka dots done with Essence Fall for me.

Marta - 2 coats of Zoya Dove + striping tape and one coat of Kiko nº343 Spring Green.

So, how do you like them? Which one is your favourite?

We need to talk.

Ladies,

How are you all doing? I have to admit I am a bit disoriented for I had my day off yesterday and I my brain has assumed it's Monday today. I will be more than happy tomorrow, the weekend will be there much sooner than expected. Who said a two-day week? Sign me up. NOW.

I am not currently sporting the mani I am showing you today; I have to say I enjoyed it very much and would have loved to wear it a little longer. But the situation is like so: I have reached a point in absurdity where I am so desperate to take advantage of the free time I have that I rush for trying new polish-related things and end up taking fun manis off far too soon. Oh well. I never know when my free time is to vanish again, so I play around as much as I can. That helps feed my blog, so I guess it's not that bad. It just feels like coitus interruptus at times.

You are looking at two coats of Sinful Colors Let's Talk over a coat of white, which I stamped with Gosh Silver and Konad. Now you can already tell that color is quite in-your-face, but my camera was very reluctant to capture the color accurately... So I called The Boyfriend for help and we photoshopped a little one of the pictures, so that this post is not really misleading. Here's a closer glimpse of the color:

I'm off showing the Criminal Code some love [that sentence might be totally senseless for you, if so just pretend you never red it], take care of yourselves.

M.

Leopard Sugar High

Hi!


Now this is my fourth entry, Criminal Nails starts looking like a true living blog, and I love it! I even had my first comments, and yes, it made me smile like mad! I was on the sofa with my BF, showing my new stuff to him as he has helped me a lot to improve the baby, and then... I saw it: one comment. First thing I did was to yell "I have one comment" then, thinking about it, "is it yours?". It wasn't ^^ So yeah, a big thank you for Sneakerette!


Do you remember the first comment on your blog? Wasn't it orgasmic?

On to the mani now. I reversioned it like a bad girl, by simply adding some black leopard with Bundle Monster's plate 221 and a random black very very pigmented I bought on a tiny underground shop in Paris from an rather unknown brand called Make Me Up.

Of course, it's not a bad thing that Make Me Up was unknown to me, it could have been a happy discovery ;) And sure, it works great for stamping because it is highly pigmented, but... it really smells like crap! I don't have any Kleancolor to compare (no offense, Kleancolor) but this polish is the stinkiest polish I own, hands down.

I'm satisfied with this new attitude the leopard gave :) On the contrary some of my friends looked at my nails and seemed to think "Gosh! Please take my eyes out of their sockets!!". 


I have to say that some nail art is still not very popular here in Spain. We don't really have a tradition like in the U.S.A. or a high level of tolerance regarding other people's style, like in the U.K. or Germany, where no one turns back to stare at some trousers/nails/dyed hair/make up/whatever. Wait and see!


Have a good day!