The Lacquer Legion Challenge - Bollywood Glam

The prompt for this April's Lacquer Legion Challenge is "GLAM".

I just couldn't feel inspired by this prompt to begin with. I am a very un-glam person and I'm not very interested in things that most people would consider glamorous.

In the end I found inspiration on my doorstep. One of the things I love most about living in the area I do is that there is a large Pakistani and Indian population which makes the place seem rather exotic to me, partly because I grew up in a tiny rural village. In my neighbourhood there are many shops selling beautiful imported fabrics, stores specialising in Asian designer fashions and jewellers selling stunning gem-set gold jewellery. It is a goldmine of inspiration for nail art.

On special occasions many of the local women wear brightly coloured and intricately embroidered clothes, often featuring stunning beadwork and rhinestones, usually worn with an amazing bejewelled pair of shoes and impeccable makeup. If these ladies aren't glam, I don't know who is! This post should really be called "Daubhill Glam", but I doubt anyone reading this would have a clue where Daubhill is or what it has to do with red, rhinestone encrusted nails.

As I have recently cut my nails very short I decided to use some long oval false nails for this nail art so I'd have more room for sparkly stuff. I used Jess polish in shade Hot Date (Poundland), a shimmery red, for the base colour. I used a gold P.S. Love nail art pen (Primark) to draw a semicircle at the base of the nails and stuck red and silver rhinestones (from the Nail Art Get Creative set) and gold caviar beads (Poundland) to it while it was still tacky. I drew a paisley shape using the gold nail art pen and used a cocktail stick to place caviar beads individually around the edge then stuck down more rhinestones in the centre using blobs of gold polish. I finished everything with a coat of Konad Special Top Coat.

I am a bit annoyed that after all my work the top coat took the gold colour off some of the caviar and left it silver, but I am still quite pleased with these nails even though I don't think I can really pull this look off. The red and gold together make me think of bridal outfits in Bollywood films. I only kept these on long enough to take the photos because the length was driving me crazy. I have no idea how anyone copes with having long nails. I'd end up losing an eye!

What do you think? Did you do any glam nail art for the Lacquer Legion Challenge this month?

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!

P.S. Pop Art Skittles

I bought a box of four P.S. polishes for £2 from Primark at the same time as I bought the very exciting matte top coat from the last post. The bottles are 6ml each, so about half the size of a full sized polish. There were three or four sets like this with various colour schemes and the one I chose contains a lavender, a rich purple, a neon pink and a bright red.

Here I have two coats each of the red (thumb), lavender (index finger), purple (middle and little fingers) and pink (ring finger):

The pink looks like a bubblegum colour in this photo, but in real life it is a vivid neon that my camera is unable to capture. The red is similarly neon-bright.

I was really impressed with the lavender and purple polishes. They were both highly pigmented and opaque in one coat and they dried with a nice glossy finish.The pink is a shade I would never usually wear and was a little more streaky to apply, but was totally opaque in two coats. The red was rather disappointing as it was really sheer and was only just opaque after three coats. It seemed to have a totally different formula than the other polishes in the set. Both the red and pink polishes dried to a satin finish. The tiny bottle caps and brushes are tricky to handle but all the polishes were smooth and easy to apply.

The colours of the swatches were so bright that I thought I'd turn them into a pop art inspired skittles manicure.

The formulas of the purple and lavender polishes were excellent, easily the best I've come across in a budget-brand polish, and it got me wondering if they would work for stamping. It turns out they are not bad at all - not completely opaque, but better than any other non-metallic polish I've tried that isn't a special stamping polish. I used Cheeky Jumbo plate N for the stamping, and stamped the purple on the lavender and vice versa. I topped all my nails with Konad Special Top Coat to make them all super glossy, then used some striping tape and the P.S. Matte Top Coat I was raving about in the last post to add some diagonal stripes to my thumb, ring and little fingers. I still really love this top coat and I think I'll be picking up another bottle next time I'm in Manchester as they only contain 7ml and I have a feeling I'll be using a lot of it!

This manicure is far brighter and bolder than anything I'd usually wear, but I quite like it. Please excuse the dry cuticles. I had put on handcream to try to disguise them, but that just caused fluff to stick to me, as you can see in the photos!