NOTD - Powder Puff and Showgirl Chic

The weather here in England has been terrible for the past week.  Lots of snow and not much leaving the house.  I did brave it yesterday and am proud to say that I stayed on my feat the whole time. There isn't much snow around anymore, it's all starting to melt so in honour of the chilly weather I have given myself an icy manicure.

I started off with a base coat of Sally Hansen's Nail Quencher (essential for keeping my nails fitting fit).  Then I added Revlon's Powder Puff which is one of their Matte Suede shades, and a nail polish that I was lucky enough to find in the haven of bargains that is Poundland.

This is one of my favourite whites, it has a really lovely blue shimmer running through it which makes it a bit special.  Also because it is matte it dries pretty fast which is lucky seeing as I had to do three coats to get it as opaque as I wanted.  I normally find Revlon polishes to be one-coaters but the they couldn't escape the curse of the white polish.  One day I vow to find the perfect white nail polish (comment if you have any suggestions).

Next up was a recent purchase Sally Hansen's Gem Crush in Showgirl Chic (I think this is a dupe for a China Glaze Polish - Comparison coming soon).  This is a beautiful silver and blue glitter, The silver is very small and the blue comes in small hexagons.  It is the perfect sort of polish for this weather.  I didn't want a full set of glitter fingers, mainly because it is such a pain to remove glitter polish, so I decided to do a glitter gradient instead.  I wanted it to look like icicles so I did one coat pulling the polish down about two thirds of my nail in vague triangles.  Next I put another coat on the top third and finished it off with a coat of Sally Hansen's Maximum Growth Top Coat (one of my favourites).

I am really happy with how it turned out, now whilst the snowmen are melting outside the frost can survive on my nails.

Have you been rocking wintery nails this week?

NOTD - Fast Track, Gold Foil and Warm and Fozzie

I have become mildly obsessesed with glitter nails during the holiday period. This NOTD is one that I wore on the last day of work before Christmas. It is sparkly without being in your face obvious.

Firstly I put on a coat of the wonderful Fast Track by China Glaze.  It is a lovely taupe colour with gold shimmer.  It is very subtle but very pretty.  It featured in my October Beauty Chart.  The formula is really nice although it does need a 2 or 3 coats to become totally opaque.

I decided that although it is one of my favourite polishes I wanted to jazz it up a bit for the sake of being festive so I did a ring finger feature nail.

For this I used my go to easy nail polish Barry M's Gold Foil.  This stuff is amazing, one coat perfection and dries very quickly.  I often put this on if my nails are bare and I want to make it look like I've made a bit more of an effort than I have for a night out.

I drew a diagonal line across my nail freehand and then filled in the top part of my nail.  It did take a bit of concentration to make it look neat but I liked the effect it gave.  However it did make the proportions look a little off so I decided to add another colour into the mix.

I chose Warm and Fozzie by OPI (which is very similar to Barry M's Copper).  I added this, again in a diagonal to the top third of my finger nail.  The formula on this one wasn't quite as nice as I was hoping, it took quite a while to dry but that might have been because of all of the layers previously.

I finished my nails off with a coat of Sally Hansen's Maximum Growth Top Coat.  This helped blend the layers together and gave extra shine to all my nails.

Here you can see a close up of the feature nail (apologies for the state of my cuticles).  I really liked the effect of having just one extra special nail amongst a hand of fairly subtle nails.  This is definitely a look that I will do again, I may even try out the pattern in other colours as well.  The staying power on this was amazing, it didn't really chip other than a little bit of tip wear and probably would have lasted longer than a week had I not have wanted a change.

NOTD - Colville Mews and Luxe and Lush

Today's NOTD is a rather girly one.  I wore this combo to a recent wedding as it was subtle but a little bit special.   I think you could probably get away with wearing this to work if they weren't too fussy about nail colours and finishes.  To do it I used Nails Inc's Colville Mews, China Glaze's Luxe and Lush and No7's Stay Perfect.

Firstly I put on a coat of Nails Inc's Colville Mews, which is a wonderful putty coloured creme.  This is one of my favourite neutrals.  It is has tinges of pink and grey in it but is nice and opaque.  Below you can see what it looks like on.  That is just one coat - in my humble opinion that is pretty amazing for a pale neutral colour.  The formula on this was great, not too runny but not too thick.

Although I liked it as it was I wanted something a little bit less 'daytime' as I was going to both the church wedding and the evening reception.  So I decided to jazz it up a little.

To do that I added China Glaze's Luxe and Lush.  This is probably my ultimate favourite sparkly topcoat.  It is a wonderful flakie which, when it catches the light, changes colour between green, gold, pink and blue.  You can see the way it looks over several different polish shades here.  It really is beautiful and photos cannot do it justice.  This polish is thicker than most due to the nature of the flakes.  One coat is enough to get a thin even coverage of shards, as seen below.  They also lie nice and flat, there is nothing worse than uneven nails.  Due to the fact that it is thicker it takes longer to dry than normal China Glaze polishes, but not a ridiculously long time.

Here you can see the final result.  I finished it off with the No7 stay Perfect top coat and it lasted an impressive 5 days.  Even then I took it off because I was getting a little bored and it was starting to show a bit of wear and tear around the tips.