The Weekly Haul - N.Y.C.

This week my new purchases came from the Beauty Bargains stall at Bolton Market. My attention was draw to the basket of N.Y.C. polishes for £1 and I found a lovely glitter jelly from the Expert Last range called Party Time Blue. It has medium sized blue hex glitter and lots of small red and holographic silver square glitter in a rich blue jelly base. It is really glossy and in real life it is much more sparkly and the flecks of red glitter really pop.

I also picked up an N.Y.C. Foil Explosion polish in Magic Earth, which is a metallic silvery sage green. I love the Foil Explosion polishes because they are great for stamping and excellent value even when they are full price, so I was really excited to find this one for half what I usually pay!

You'll only have to put up with my badly lit photos for another few posts because I have a light tent on the way!

Although the two polishes are are not an obvious combination to put together I really liked the way they looked next to each other when I took them out of the bag. I used three coats of Party Time Blue on all of my nails, except my ring finger on which I used two coats of Magic Earth.

I stamped over my thumb and middle finger using Magic Earth and this QA65 Born Pretty stamping plate which I bought when it was $0.99. On my ring finger I used Konad Blue Special Polish for the stamping and I like the inverted colours effect this gave.

It's not my most elaborate nail art but I've enjoyed wearing it and I'm very pleased with these bargain polishes. Have you found any good polish bargains on market stalls recently?

Klingon Nails

HoSghaj nItlhpach! Which is Klingon for "Powerful fingernails".

On Saturday I was supposed to be joining my husband and his friends to drink lots of coffee and play a Star Trek tabletop war game (yes, that is exactly as geeky as it sounds). I always play as the Klingons so I decided to give myself some fierce Klingon themed nails. In the end I woke up on Saturday with a cold and as I didn't want to spread my germs about, I never found out whether these nails improved my game and terrified my opponents.

I started with two coats of black Jess polish (exclusive to Poundland) in shade Midnight. It's impossible to read the label in the photo as the writing is black on black. This polish really is excellent, very opaque and if you are careful you could just use one coat. While the second coat was still tacky I applied some patches of red and yellow foil from this multicoloured gradient holographic foil from Born Pretty. You can use adhesive to stick this foil on, but tacky polish worked well for the distressed look I wanted. To fill in any big gaps I applied a coat of clear polish (Voltage by L.A.Colors, £1 from my local pharmacy) and when that was tacky I applied more foil to those areas.

On my left middle finger I painted the Klingon symbol with some acrylic paint and a fine paintbrush. As I was experimenting, I decided to see what the foil looked like if I brushed a little more black polish (from an brush with hardly any polish on) over the top on my left hand to distress it further. I topped all my nails with Konad Special Top Coat from a hard glossy finish. I really like the look of the foil on both of my hands and I can't wait to try some of the other colours.

Here you can see the difference between the foil on my left and right hands.

I like to think that a powerful and fabulous female Klingon warrior would wear nails like this, but I imagine that Klingons don't agree with frivolous things like nail art!

The Weekly Haul - Jess Nail Polish

Jess is a new budget nail polish brand exclusive to Poundland with an exciting selection of cremes and glitters, all available for (surprise surprise) £1 a bottle. Today I'll be doing a review of two of the creme polishes, Brazen and All That Jazz.

The polishes come in 9ml bottles labeled as Made in UK, and the only criticism I have of the packaging is that the ingredients are not listed. All That Jazz is a neon primary blue. It's quite an unusual shade and although I own a lot of blue polish I have nothing similar to this. Brazen is a bright, almost neon, blue-leaning emerald green. My camera has a real problem photographing bright and neon shades accurately and I tried every background colour and type of lighting I could think of to make these colours pop, but with no luck. In real life the green is a saturated, rich shade much brighter than the washed out shade in the photos and the blue is also richer and brighter than it looks here.

Both polishes apply smoothly and are very opaque for budget polishes. The brushes are a little narrower than I prefer but the caps are easy to hold. Both shades require two coats for total coverage and dry quickly. They dry to a really glossy finish that seems pretty chip resistant. I wore these for 24 hours without top coat and despite being bashed around aplenty they stayed looking perfect. The quality of these cremes is much better than the Technic cremes I own and as good or better than the best Primark P.S. shades I've tried. I'm really impressed with these polishes and I have a feeling I will be buying quite a lot of Jess shades!

I used two coats of Brazen on my index, ring and little fingers and two coats of All That Jazz on my thumb and middle fingers, then used a floral pattern from Born Pretty plate QA59 to stamp some of my nails with white Konad Special Polish. These photos are all taken without any top coat to show how glossy these polishes really are!

I highly recommend seeking out Jess polishes if you have a local Poundland. These photos just don't do these lovely shades justice! I also picked up a few interesting Jess glitter polishes which I am saving for the next "Weekly Haul" post and I really hope that they impress me as much as the Jess cremes have.

Midnight in Morocco

After being so impressed with the Born Pretty stamping plate I used for my last manicure I decided to try out one of the designs from QA65, the other plate I bought.

I picked up a bottle of Rimmel Lycra Pro in Poundworld last week thinking it was a black polish, but getting it out in the sunlight and reading the label I realised that it was Blue Vogue, a rich midnight blue. I decided to use it as a base for this manicure and it's fantastic - perfect coverage in one coat, quick drying and super glossy.

I chose a stamp design which reminds me of Islamic tiles and made me think of the photos my parents brought back from their holiday in Morocco. I used NYC Foil Explosion in Aqua Mystic (often available as a 2 for £2.49 deal at Superdrug) which is a fantastic polish for stamping. Just as with the last Born Pretty plate I tried, the stamps came out perfectly. This plate was only $0.99, an absolute bargain, so I have a feeling I'll be treating myself to a few more Born Pretty stamping plates in the future.

The only problem I have found with the Born Pretty stamping plates is the designs are quite small. My nails are quite short and narrow and the designs just cover my finger nails, but my thumb nail is slightly too wide. Instead I used some silver diamond shaped glequins (a name I have borrowed from The Nailasaurus to describe sparkles that are too big to be glitter and too small to be sequins) from this set (#4) to make a star shape on my thumb nail.
I topped everything with a coat of Konad Special Topcoat, but unfortunately I didn't wait for my base coat to dry enough on my thumb, so the glequins shifted and the base colour dragged over the glequins a bit. Oops!

I also managed to catch the ends of my nails before they were fully dry so there are a few little wrinkles on my index and ring fingers. The moral of this story is don't drink a massive mug of tea while you are painting your nails - nature will call before your polish dries!

The shine on the topcoat makes it a bit difficult to see what is going on with my nails, so here are a couple of close up shots of my thumb and fingers without the direct lighting. The dark blue is a pain to clean up if you make a mistake, so of course I managed to get it all over my cuticles!

I love this pattern and colour combination, although I'm not so happy with the glequins on my thumb. What do you think?

Peppermint Paisley

Last year I fell in love with some swatches of Illamasqua's Fragile, a gorgeous polish that is way out of my price range. I realised that I could create a similar look by layering a sheer pastel polish with black glitter, and for a while I wore speckled egg nails in a different shade every week. I decided to use a more subtle version of this look for the base of this manicure.

I started with two coats of Pool Party from the Technic Pretty Pastels collection (Technic polishes are available for £1 a bottle at branches of Bodycare and other discount stores, or for £1.25 from www.lovethymakeup.com). Pool Party, like many Technic polishes, is thin and sheer. It's almost jelly-like, takes four coats to become opaque and it dries really quickly which means it is great for layering with glitter. It's a lovely pepperminty turquoise colour and I wear this polish quite a lot.

I added a coat of Violet by Chit Chat (a Poundland purchase). Chit Chat is another budget brand, apparently made by the same people as Technic. This glitter polish is a bluey purple with small and medium hex glitter. The violet glitter gives a more subtle speckled effect than the black glitter I usually use.

After another two coats of Pool Party the purple glitter shows through as a matte blue colour. These nails are pretty enough to wear as they are.

A month ago I discovered the Born Pretty store, ordered some goodies and last week my order arrived. I bought striping tape, some diamond shaped glequins and two stamping plates.

I've never used striping tape before so I thought I'd start simple. I found some Sally Hansen Sugar Coat textured polishes in Poundland last week and I thought the white Sugar Fix would work well with the peppermint colour and the texture would add some interest to horizontal stripes.

On the rest of my nails I used the paisley pattern from Born Pretty stamping plate QA59. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the plate. It's a really detailed design and it stamped just as well as the Konad and Cheeky plates I own, even with the slightly uneven nail surface due to the glitter. I used white Konad Special Polish for the stamping - it came as part of a Konad stamping set that I picked up cheap on Amazon. I used Konad Topcoat on the stamped nails.

I know it's not the neatest manicure - the stripes are messy and the skin around my nails is horribly dry at the moment - but I rather like these nails. What do you think?