Gold and Green Leopard Print Nails

Look at my nails! I don't konad often, but I was inspired by the colours of green and gold. And I have leopard print nails!

I used my favourite konad plate of all time, M57, for this KOTD (konad of the day). For the base, I used China Glaze Westside Warrior (which has made a brief appearance on my blog before, and for the gold, I used my favourite gold of all time, Orly Luxe (also featured on the blog before, not once, but twice).



I rather like this, it has a very safari-like feel. I'm also actually thinking this colour combination would make a great eye look - in fact, I have done a gold and green eye look before.



So there you have it, my nail look of the moment! What are your nails like right now?

BCA Manicure: Pink and White Freehand Nail Art

Breast cancer awareness month is every October, and so I thought I'd do my little bit by doing a couple of BCA manicures.

This manicure is pink and white. For the pink, I used Orly Rage, which is a very pretty BCA-ish metallic pink, even if the name of the polish isn't BCA-like at all. I mean, usually BCA polishes have very uplifting and inspiring names right? Like Courage, Hope, Strength, etc etc. I find it rather amusing that this is called Rage, nevermind that it isn't actually supposed to be a BCA polish. For the white, I used my trusty old Wet n' Wild White. Still the best white around, oh yes it is. Opaque in one coat, but I used two here to even out the surface.


All the art was done freehand with a skinny nail art brush (as you can probably tell). It was really quite easy to do. I just painted two coats of the base colours on the nails, then freehanded the ribbon and pink lines. Not much else to say, I guess!


So that's my BCA mani! Breast cancer is the 5th top cause of deaths, so if you're in the at-risk age group (50 to 74), the best way to detect breast cancer is to get a mammogram once every 2 years!

Tribal Nail Art: Summer Colours and Geometric Shapes

One of this Spring/Summer's trends is the tribal print, combined with eye-catching, bright colours. While I'm not actually a fan of wearing tribal print, I thought that it would be awesome to do a tribal-inspired mani on my nails. I've also been seeing a few tribal-inspired nail looks too, so I thought I'd join the club.

Let me show you a few photos that were indicative of the trend that inspired this nail art. The tribal feel is acheived by a mix of bright colours and geometric prints.

(Source)

Here, less geometric shapes, but bright colours nonetheless!

(Source)

For this look, I was really going for the bright shades and geometric shapes feel. The base is Essie Fondola Gondola, the green bit is Nails Inc Spring Mews (which I've used in an NOTD before), while the coral shade is Eyeko Coral (which, if you don't know yet, makes a fantastic pedi colour for summer. The gold lines were done with Orly Luxe, which has to be my favourite gold polish ever, because I keep raving about it.



All this was done freehand. I simply painted Essie Fondola Godola, then I painted Nails Inc Spring Mews and Eyeko Coral at an angle to get the geometric shapes. I then painted over the lines with Orly Luxe, and painted in a small triangle with Luxe as well. It isn't the neatest nail art around, but it was quite fast to do, and if I probably had a bit more control the lines would turn out neater. Oh well, nail art isn't exactly my strongest suite. You can see I really messed up the gold lines badly.



I liked the combination of colours - so gorgeous and summery and girly, as I liked the geometric shapes, but I think it was marred by my own crappy application.



What about you guys? Have you tried a tribal-inspired manicure yet? Tell me!

Anti-Valentine's Day Nail Art: Shattered Hearts!

Not everyone loves Valentine's Day. Some don't have a significant other, some don't like the crass commercialization, and some just aren't the type to make a big deal out of things. So, here's my Anti-Valentine's Day nails - shattered hearts!

I figured, since I already paid my dues by having Valentine's Day nails (not once but twice! C.f. my Valentine's Day nails with a touch of spring and my Neon pink and black Valentine's Day nails), why not do an Anti-Valentine's Day mani? I decided to work with the theme of being heartbroken, and decided to have a girly pink base with broken hearts.

The pink base was Orly Rage (I've previously compared Orly Rage and GOSH Frou Frou), a gorgeous opaque, non-streaky and non-brush-strokey pink foil. (Is non-brush-strokey even a word?) The black hearts were made with OPI's Black Shatter, although any black crackle polish would have done too.



In my head, this seemed like a good mani, since shatter polishes naturally crackle, so they lend themselves well to the "shattered hearts" look I was trying to achieve. The hard part was getting them to take the shape of a heart! I tried everything - freehand, tape, self-made stencils using paper and scissors - and nothing worked really well. They just looked like random shapes, not hearts. In the end, I just filled out the heart shapes more fully using my Wet n' Wild Black nail polish.



I don't know if these look anything like hearts to you, but that was probably the best I could do. I liked the concept and the "shattered hearts" idea, but I'm feeling a bit meh about my execution. But still, here's my Anti-Valentine's mani! What do you guys think? Shattered hearts, or just mere blobs?

Orly Fantasea NOTD: Multi-chromal, Multidimensional Shimmer

Orly is one of the most underrated nail polish brands to me. There's something about the Orlys I have that just makes them that little bit more special. Maybe it's the range of colours, or maybe it's that the application and the wear time of Orlys works very nicely on me. In fact, their Foil FX Collection sometime back was the only nail polish collection of which I bought every single colour, and I would totally guard Orly Luxe with my life.

Today I present Orly Fantasea, another guard-with-my-life shade. I love, love, love this shade so much, and truly, I have never seen another shade quite like it (if you know of anything similar, let me know!). I bought it after reading one of the older entries on Scrangie's blog, and I'm so glad I did! It's absolutely, gorgeously multi-chromal and multi-dimensional, and the base colour is purple, my favourite colour! What's not to like? Behold the beauty!

Orly Fantasea is hard to describe, just because it's so complex. It's a purple multi-chrome that looks pink and bronze in different lights. I also love the shimmer - you have that smooth duochrome due to the pink/purple base colour, but there's also some bronze-ish shimmer thrown in, that just takes that shade to the next level. In the photo above, you see how it looks purple. In the photo below, Fantasea is showing off it's pink size, with a little bit of bronze.



And here's Fantasea, in indoors light. With this light, you can really see that there are bronze/copper/gold-ish shimmer bits in the polish. They contribute to that bronze/copper flash that sometimes appears at certain angles in the polish. Apologies for my fingers being in the same pose for all 3 photos - this NOTD was actually taken a year ago (that long, yes!), and I happened to stumble upon it when I was looking through some of my older photos in my laptop.



The only downside there is to Orly Fantasea is that it's very sheer. What you see on my nails is 3-4 coats, and you'd need at least 3 coats to prevent VNL (Visible Nail Line). Thus, when I use Fantasea, I tend to layer it over another polish, as in this previous NOTD where I layered Orly Fantasea over Barry M Vivid Purple. If I were to wear it alone all the time, I'd probably run out of my bottle of Fantasea, so I try to save it by layering (purple and black make great options)! But I thought, why shouldn't I wear such a great colour on its own, for once?

Orly Fantasea, how I love you so much! There's nothing I don't like about this shade - the duochrome effect is gorgeous, the shimmer adds depth to the shade, and I love that everytime I move my fingers, my nails display a different flash of colour, whether I'm indoors or outdoors. And I don't even have anything that's remotely close to Fantasea in my collection! What can I say, despite the sheerness, this shade is just such a beauty.