Mish Mash Challenge - Around the World. Rising sun manicure. Bohem.

Well hello :)

Super late post for the *Around the World* prompt like 27 weeks ago in the Mish Mash Challenge... 

I give you the rising sun though, that's gotta count for something! 

This gorgeous jewel-like orange is from Kiko's Sugar Mat Collection, and the rising sun silver nails are from Bohem.

I am missing in action and will probably be for a while... Have a nice Christmas :)

M.

Mish Mash Challenge - Hot. Fire nails!

Hello there!

I hope you're having a nice week 'cuz today this blog is ON FIRE! :) Yup, today's Mish Mash Challenge theme is hot and... what can be hotter than fire? [pffff, The Boyfriend of course!]

As I can't really draw a person (and it honestly never crossed my mind to draw a hot guy on my nails) I decided to go for some burning hell flame nail art:

I thought I'd spend two lives painting those but I managed to get them done in 1h, trial and error included; picture me pleased! 

For this I used two coats of OPI Lucern-tainly Look Marvelous, which is a stunning metallic grey that I'll wear again despite of its ridiculous-slash-neverending name. On top of it I drew the flame shapes with white acrylic paint and filled them in with white to make the colors pop. I then painted the flames with red, dark orange, orange, light orange and yellow acrylic paint that I mixed myself on the go. Add the studs, and the look is complete!

How do you like this?

M.

Mish Mash Challenge - Music. Cassette nail art!

Hey hey hey!

How's the week going? I hope everyone here is wanting to party 'cuz todays theme is... Music!

I don't favor any particular singer or music band, probably because my mental health state of mind varies a lot; so much so that I am thinking on using the Richter scale to rate my mood swings. 

Whatever; I use music as my therapy and so I have come to stock a shitload of music in my player, basically prepared to counteract each and every of my states of mind [Author's note: it works!]. Choosing one of them songs was a no go, so I finally set my mind in some vintage-y cassette nail art!

I searched inspiration on YouTube and guess who had already done not one but two cassette nail art videos? Yup, the extraordinary Robin Moses! I seriously love watching her videos. She's amazingly nuts, and so spontaneous that you get the impression of being in her salon. 

So here's my take:

I had so much fun doing these! And I am pretty proud of myself; I had decided to take advantage of my holidays to improve my freehanding skills, and I guess I did :)

Ingredients: The base color is Kiko no. 338 Light Lavender (two coats) and the dots are Zoya Zuza (teal), China Glaze Heli-Yum (hot pink) and Kiko no. 356 Melon (orange). The cassette has been entirely done with acrylic paints and a teeny tiny nail art brush.

What do you think?

Take care,

M.

Dotted flowericure; flowered dotticure...

Hey hey hey! :)

Today's was a pretty sucky morning in my polish-filled world. It's the third day of my Yes Love hunt, and quite an unsuccessful one, might I add. You see, I went crazy over Illamasqua Scarce and its gorgeous little siblings, but their price and a month and a half of waiting put me off on my quest to complete the collection. Until Yes Love (cheapo chinese brand, I believe) brought a suspiciously similar line to life, that is.

I've seen it pop over a gazillion Spanish blogs on which it is deemed to be an affordable and easy to find collection. I don't know about the first, but I can only f*cking disagree about the second, ladies. It is nowhere to be found in the Barcelona area. I lost three hours looking for it today, and I think I am done with it. I will find it, eventually..!

The nails: that too is brought to y'all after a fail. I attempted some deep V sick nails and obtained some deep V sh*t that I took off immediately. That's what followed:

I will skip the info about the base color because you know it just too well by now, it's become my nail's best friend ;) After that, I used five neons to do the dotted flowers: (from thumb to pinky) China Glaze Sun- Kissed, Tokalon nº2, Kiko nº 336 Electric Blue, Nfu-Oh FS12 and Maybelline Orange Fix. The black is China Glaze Liquid Leather.

That was fun to wear but not my style much, I doubt I would ever wear this again... What about you? Oh, and my questions here are never ambush questions: you can always say no. And I point out "here" because my BF would surely disagree otherwise...

And same thing goes for: what do you think of my new blog title?

Take care,

M.

TUTORIAL: Totum Revolutum manicure

Hey you :)

As promised, here's the tutorial for my multi-colored manicure, that I called Totum Revolutum (click here)! Here's what you will going to need:

Introductory notes:

• Your base coat should be chosen wisely according to the result you are willing to achieve (i. e. for a neon finish, pick up a white), especially if the colors you have chosen are not 100% opaque (hello jellies!).
• The plastic sheet can be replaced by almost anything plastic, provided that it is easily pliable. You will need to bend it, so try to avoid anything too stiff.
• The plastic sheet can be transparent or opaque, but remember that only the first will allow you to see: (i) if the polish has covered the wole nail, and (ii) the approximate pattern you've obtained.
• The paper sheet is merely here to provide you somewhere to stick the plastic pieces after using them, you can replace it by anything of your choice that suits this purpose.
• I chose three cremes for this tutorial, but there's really no number limit (between 2 colors and the infinity, you're good).

Let's get started:

1. After applying your base color and letting it dry, the first thing you should do is prepare all the nail ware you will going to use for the Totum Revolutum. 

Cut as many pieces of plastic sheet as nails you will be polishing, and even some more just in case. The pieces should be rectangular, as shown below, so that you can rest your finger on it, securing it, and still use it to mix the colors you have chosen.

2. Work somewhere polish-proof; I used the same ol' plastic mat I use for all my manis.

Start adding blobs of colors randomly, and be sure to be generous. Otherwise, the colors will not mix and the result won't be as nice:

3. The result should look something like the picture below. Let's pospose the cuticle flooding worrying here and let's enjoy the mess!

4. Place a plastic sheet under your finger and secure it so the plastic won't move. Take the other end of the plastic piece and place it over your nail:

5. Stick the plastic to the wet polish on your nail...

6. ... and press your finger randomly over the plastic and the polish, so that the colors will start to blend together. No need to be gentle, but try to cover the whole nail! When you see a nice result through the plastic, take it off.

If you're not satisfied with the end result after taking off the plastic, you can add some more blobs of color and start again right away, until you're happy with it.

Remember to stick the plastic you just used face down on a piece of paper so as to avoid making more of a mess than necessary ;)

7. Use a wooden stick to take the excess polish off your cuticle area and try to trace a nice and curvy line to follow duning the clean up process.

8. Messy as it is, let it dry. 

I waited for around 15 minutes before moving to the next step. It worked for me, but you will want to wait for a little longer if you haven't used speedy dry polishes, or if you have re-started the process on some of the nails ;)

 9. When dry, clean the whole thing up and top coat it! Voilà!

I hope this tutorial will help you in your manicure adventures :) Please do not hesitate to comment below with the links to your own Totum Revolutum, I'd be happy to see what y'all came up with!

Take care,

M.

Totum Revolutum manicure

Howdy! :)

This weekend was as calm as it promised to be, and I took advantage of that to be creative.

I have been eyeballing gorgeous watercolor manicures for quite a while (if you have any good tutorial at hand please figuratively throw it my way!) and... this manicure came up:

The technique I used is very simple, but I will let the pictures do the talking for today ;) The colors used were: Astor's Tickle my Triangle (pink), China Glaze's Kinetic Candy (blue) and Kiko's Melon (orange). But I think it offers endless possibilities... and will probably recreate this with neons, for a start! 

The way the colors end up blending together in some areas, the latin expression Totum Revolutum came to mind... It will be a Totum Revolutum manicure for me, from now on! How do you like it?

As creative as I was I managed to get a photo-tutorial done, for those of you who are interested! I will post this next week, so stay tuned :)

Bonus pic:

Take care,

M.

Kiko nº 356 Melon / Dripping Melon

Hello you polish-infatuated creatures!

How are you doing? I hope you're at the beginning of a calm and sunny week :) I am for now, and so in the mood for a polish which pairs fairly well with Barcelona's weather: Kiko Melon!

This light orange shade has the advantage to suit every skin tone, apart from being absolutely stunning in its simplicity. I say that because it obviously matches amazingly well with my pale skin [cough, cough], but it does match my much tanned friend Sara's skin too! She has been complimented while wearing it with me, so it's not only my positively-predisposed view speaking ;) 

I bought it on my last Kiko spree... which I hope to be soon forgotten and improved by the next one, 'cuz hey! Sales arrived to Kiko! Woohoo! Sadly, I am broke for the occasion... *sigh* 

And... after my first freehanded roses, I decided to try my luck with some blue drips; this is my first time not doing them with a dotting tool but with nail art brushes:

Take care,

M.

ABC Challenge: Letter O - Orange & Neon summery manicure!

Hello there!

Have you noticed how summer is slowly settling in? Barcelona is blooming right now, and that led me to sport my first extra girly summer manicure ^^

Today letter O stands for Orange. But heck, I felt like adding a touch of neon pink in there... And rhinestone stars... and even a pair of flip flops on my thumbs! Those two were ripped off when putting my stockings though :p they litterally never saw the light of day.

Warning: the neon pink looks über faded in my pictures. It's honestly a pink able to rip off your retina just by looking at it. Crazy shit I am in love with...

That orange color is two coats of Leticia Well 516, the neon pink is two coats of Nfu Oh FS12 over two coats of white. The stars are quick eBay buys, great value for money. I am reconsidering calling it EvilBay, with my 93 purchases already... Jeeze!

Lastly, let me specially thank Mr. and Ms. Bamboo for making this manicure possible, as they gave me the orange polish and the nail decorations :) Both are great additions to my collection! 

Cheers!

M.

Myrta over Ivory

Hey there!

Have you been rocking the weekend? I hope so. I've been lazy as hell, it feels so good sometimes...

The Boyfriend and I headed to the mountain where we treated ourselves with a marvelous lunch, it was legendary. I must say that we had many things to celebrate: his good grades, me being promoted to Junior Associate in my firm, being young and happy and so on. 

So, I've been playing around with the Zoya Surf collection, and this time I sponged Zoya Myrta over Dior Ivory. I really felt like wearing a bright orange. I confess, it was the first time of my life. So yeah, it was quite shitty that the polish came with an awful brush; then I decided to sponge it and all was good again.

Be bad, always.