Leopard Print / Glitter Recreation

Hi everybody! Today's post is all about a recreation of an old favourite mani of mine. The original was done about two years and you can read and see all about it right here! I absolutely loved that design and recently I was going through some old photos and came across it again and decided to recreate it and kind of update it a bit.

This time round I used Sour Grape by Ulta3 and the same glitter polish, Silver Gleam by Maybelline, as well as Snow Me White by Sinful Colors.

I did a gradient and only used the purple to do the leopard print as opposed to using the colour and then black polish to outline. I think it looks simpler and neater and you can fit more pattern onto the nail.

I really love how this turned out compared to the original, not a bad upgrade! The original is definitely still one of my favourite designs though but it's nice to recreate something like this and I might consider going back and redoing some older designs every so often.

Thanks for reading!

- Melissa.

Reverse Stamping / Colourful Stripes

Ever since I bought an Uber Mat from UberChic Beauty, I've been trying out stamping and reverse stamping and making some easy decals. I've learnt from this that stamping is a lot easier when you can stamp the design onto something else and not straight onto the nail because sometimes it doesn't work out how you want and in that case, you just swipe some acetone over the design on the mat and start again! Life is incredibly easy with a silicone nail art mat!

For today's nail art I picked a simple design that I could do some reverse stamping with. If you're unfamiliar, reverse stamping is when you essentially colour in the stamping design to make a decal and then place it onto your nail, it can be done either on the stamper or on a silicone mat. There are heaps of designs like this on Instagram if you want to see some videos or tutorials on how to do it!

I wanted to do all the nails with reverse stamping but did not at all have the energy to reline the circles to be darker and then colour them in, so I went with an accent nail and my go to stripes.

I used Black Out by Sally Hansen, Sweet Clementine, and Babe It's Blue both by Maybelline, and a pink Kester Black polish I got in a BellaBox a while ago.

I love how this turned out! It made me really proud that I did something I'd wanted to do for a while but hadn't been able to until I got the Uber Mat. It's one of the best purchases I've ever made in relation to nail art so expect some more designs like this in the future!

Thanks for reading!

- Melissa.

Watercolour Sharpie Nail Art

Lately I've been seeing a lot of people using sharpies to create some cool watercolour looking designs and after seeing this video by Simply Nailogical a while ago I'd wanted to give it a go too. I didn't use any vinyls to create a pattern, I just did a simple two colour design as a sort of practice for this technique.

Essentially all you have to do is water down the sharpie ink with some rubbing alcohol. I scribbled the sharpies onto a plastic plate and mixed it with some rubbing alcohol antiseptic spray I had and used a brush to apply it to my nails. The brush wasn't the best and I was disappointed with how it distributed the ink but it's still a cool watercolour effect!

This is such an easy design if you want something quick to do that looks like you put a lot of effort into it. I'd love to get even better at this technique because there's some amazing designs out there that are done this way and I'm jealous of how they look.

That's all for today, thanks for reading!

- Melissa.

Sheer Tints / Glitter

Hi everyone! Today I have a design that's been around for a while since sheer tint polishes became a big thing. I'm going to start off by saying that this design is quite popular and I couldn't narrow down who first thought to put sheer polish over glitter, it could have been ermahgerdperlish on IG because that just sounds really familiar to me, but I did a bit of a search and couldn't find exactly who or when it was first done, so please excuse my lack of proper credit for this!

On to the post! I've wanted to do this design for a while with the OPI Sheer Tints since I've had them for over a year but just never got around to it, plus I hated using glitter polish because of how annoying it was to remove. But I recently got the UNT Peel Off Base Coat (which is the literal best nail related purchase I've ever made) which makes glitter removal ridiculously easy so there was no excuse to not try this design out!

I used all four of the OPI Sheer Tints and a glitter base of Maybelline's Silver Gleam. I tried to do the colours in order so that when it ended on one nail side, it matched up on the next nail.

I love the look of this and think it's pretty cool! And there's a lot of ways this design could go depending on how you want to apply the sheer tints over the glitter.

That's all for today, thanks for reading!

- Melissa.

Valentine's Day Nail Art

Good morning everyone! As it's Valentine's Day today, I thought I'd do some nail art to coincide. I'm not someone who celebrates the day or has a lot of thoughts towards it because in the end it's just a day and people can do as they please with days like this. But despite my neutral thoughts towards it, I still felt inspired to do some nail art based around it. It also helped to force me to do some more stamping as the idea I had involved just that.

I actually ended up doing some reverse stamping and creating a decal using my Uber Chic Beauty Mat (there's a bunch of tutorials out there if you want to learn how to do it). The stamping didn't transfer as solidly as I would've liked and I was going to fix up the black outline but when I applied it to my nail I liked how it looked as if it'd been drawn on a bit roughly and quickly. So I'm very happy with how the accent nail turned out. I think it's pretty cute. The polishes I used were Snow Me White - Sinful Colors, Black Out - Sally Hansen, Sour Grape, and Fairy Floss both by Ulta3.

The other nails are a base of Snow & Ice by Savvy, top coated with Don't Violet Me Down, and Be Magentale With Me, both OPI Sheer Tints. I applied them in a sort of diagonal gradient way, but that doesn't show up too much on camera. It's there though, trust me.

I'm genuinely really happy with how these turned out. A lot better than what I had planned in my head. 

That's all for today, I hope everyone has a lovely Sunday!

Thanks for reading.

- Melissa.

Mermaid Scale Nail Art - Born Pretty Store Review

*This product was sent to me for review, all opinions are my own

Hi everyone! This is my last post for the products I was recently sent from Born Pretty Store. Today's post is all about some mermaid/fish scale, I won't call them vinyls exactly, more like stickers/stencils I think. So let's get started! 

I tried out these nail stickers which essentially are the same as all the nail vinyls and stencils that are really popular in the nail art world, so they work the same way. I completely forgot to take progress shots throughout this mani so apologies for that but I'll explain how I used them anyway!

I started with a base colour and applied a quick drying top coat over it so I could use the stencils sooner than if I didn't apply one. As they were stuck down on a plastic sheeting and were quite thin and sticky I was really worried that once I pulled the stencil off my nail, it'd pull all the polish up with it. Thankfully it didn't, but I still stuck the sticker flat on my hand to remove some of the stickiness before applying it to my nail. I think it helped a little bit.

Once the sticker was applied I then sponged on the four polishes I'd chosen to use which were: Berry Blue, Corsican Rose, Violet Rumble all by Ulta3, and Darling, You Are Fabulous! By Maybelline, which was the gold polish. I'm not a huge gold polish fan because I don't think it suits me, but this one is growing on me a bit!

Once I had done two quick coats of the sponged polish, I then carefully peeled the sticker off and up until this point I'd had huge doubts as to whether it'd work that well. But it turned out amazingly and I love it. Made me wish I'd done all the nails instead of just an accent. 

I know that the photo below is super blurry, but since I'd forgotten to take progress shots I wanted to showcase the stencils themselves and didn't realise how blurry this photo was until after I'd removed the design, so oops! But look how gorgeous the stickers are! I love just looking at them.

I enjoy how they turned out because I've wanted to try this kind of design for a while but can't justify spending so much on other brands of nail vinyls because shipping isn't cheap to Australia from indie brands, so I'm glad I found these!

There are just one design of the many stencils/vinyls that Born Pretty Store has on offer and they're incredibly affordable if you wish to give them a go to see what all the fuss about these kind of stencils are! And don't forget you can use my code MEPUK31 for 10% off at checkout!

Thanks for reading.

Blue / Grey Marble Nail Art

Today, as always, I have a simple design to show you all. There's nothing special about this design and I actually wrote this post once before but it didn't save or publish and I lost it all, so I'm a bit annoyed and therefore this one will really be just a short and simple post. 

I did a simple water marble design on the accent nail and used some bunched up cling wrap to blot the grey polish onto the blue polish. Those polishes are Bestival Blue by Rimmel which is quickly becoming my new favourite blue polish and Impeccable Greys by Maybelline.

That's all for today, thanks for reading!

- Melissa.

Teardrop Rhinestones - Born Pretty Store Review

*This product was sent to me for review, all opinions are my own

Today I have a review of some rhinestones I received from Born Pretty Store. In this post I'm focusing on only one of the rhinestones as that's all I used for this design, but I'll still be reviewing the whole wheel.

As you can see above, this rhinestone wheel has two of each design and they range from bows, to teardrops, to stars, to flowers and the standard square and circle studs. They also have a slight holo, shimmery look them which I really liked. You get 200 pieces for $2.25AUD. 

For today's design, I sponged on a few different colours, then dropped some black polish into a small cup of water and sprayed it with a hand sanitizer to spread the polish and create a water spotted design (I think that's what it's called). I did this design with the intention to use only the teardrop rhinestones, because I thought the design and the rhinestone would go really well together. 

I think the design really worked out well and the rhinestones were so easy to pick up with a dotting tool and a tiny bit of clear polish on both the dotting tool and where I placed the rhinestone on the nail. They did slide around a bit, but once the polish underneath was dry they stayed put and didn't budge till I wanted to remove them. And if you're very frugal, they can be used again if you take care when removing them from the nail. I didn't top coat after placing them so I don't know if they change or dull down with a top coat.

This is absolutely one of my favourite designs of the year so far, it looked so pretty and delicate in real life and the colours were more vibrant. I'd never done a design like this before and was happy with how it turned out. I think the rhinestones added that finishing touch to them because it definitely looked a bit dull without them!

Don't forget you can use my code MEPUK31 for 10% off the Born Pretty Store website if you'd like!

Thanks for reading.

- Melissa.