Hey everyone! I've been revising all day so it's nice to have a break for a bit, although if you follow me on
Instagram you'll know that I may have got distracted from revision earlier and painted my nails, but unfortunately I don't have my lightbox at the moment so I can't take a proper picture! My last exam is tomorrow and I am so so excited to be free for 2 weeks, but until I can am properly finished, and until my lightbox returns on friday, the lovely Lucy from Lucy's Stash has kindly done a guest post for me, and I'm sure you'll love it as much as I do! I was lucky enough to share a hotel room with Lucy before/after the Cosmo blog awards and she's such a lovely person, and amazing at nail art, so I'm honoured to have her here today!
Hi everyone,
I’m so excited to be guest posting for Alice! Not only she is a freaking Cosmo Blog Award winner but I’ve also had a chance to hang out with her in person she is such a lovely person.
I have prepared a dotticure for you that I hope you’ll think is very intricate but to tell you the truth, it’s dead simple to do. Just start with two big dots on the opposite side of the nail and then create small dots around it in opposite colour. Then continue on both circles alternating the colours until they ‘meet’. Continue creating the dot circles in alternating colours until you fill the whole nail. Once you’re done let the design dry for few minutes and topcoat it.
For this manicure I have used two coats of SpaRitual Breathless (light pink jelly) for the base and then Imaginarium (neon pink shimmer) and Crystal Waters (turquoise blue shimmer) for the dots.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this manicure and feel free to stop by
Lucy’s Stash and check out more nail art and tutorials! Love, Lucie x
Hey everyone! Today I have some very bright polka dot nails for you. I know polka dots have been done a million times, but I always like to come back to them now and again because there's something about them that just entices me. These nails were inspired entirely by these
wellies* - or 'rain boots'/'galoshes' (definitely didn't google that) from
Shop On My Go Go. I got mine in the post a few weeks ago and I absolutely love how warm and comfy they are. Also, now it's starting to snow (yay!) I can finally wear them without looking like a fool. As you can probably see, the nails don't exactly match the colouring of the wellies, but I wasn't at home and the only colours I had to hand were the
Butter LONDON Colour Clash collection, I'm sure you don't mind too much?
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Alice
*some of the products in this post were provided to me for review but all opinions are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way. Please see my disclosure policy
Hey everyone! It's 1am here in the UK, and I just got in to bed and turned out the light, only to remember that I'd completely forgotten to do a tutorial tuesday! So the light is back on and I'm going to be super quick in writing this so I can go to sleep, second time around. This week's tutorial is for these glitter bow nails, which you might remember from
here. This time I used a base of the gorgeous
Shimmer Polish - Kim*, which you can see swatches of below. I'm going to include the rest of the post after the jump otherwise it might be too long!
And now for the tutorial:
Step 1: Paint your nails with a glitter base coat
Step 2: Using a brush, toothpick or dotting tool, paint the shape of a bow in a corresponding crème colour. (For instance, because the glitter is blue, the bow is blue too)
Step 3: Using a dotting tool, or a cut down toothpick, paint white dots on the bow shape
Step 4: Using a Black Barry M nail art pen, outline the bow shape. Start with the centre circle and then do the edges of the bow itself.
Step 5: Using the nail art pen again, draw the creases of the bow coming out from the centre
Step 6: Finish off with a topcoat to seal in your design and you’re done!
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Alice
Hey everyone! Just a quick post today, I did these a couple of weeks ago before my old laptop broke and then I completely forgot about them. If you follow me on instagram (@onenailtorulethemall) then you will have seen these partly already, but here's the full thing!
I can't remember the base colour and I'm in a different county to it at the moment so I cant check, but the white is acrylic paint, the blue is Barry M - Blueberry and the green is Sally Hansen - Spring Green, topped off with Seche Vite
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Alice
Hey everyone! Recently there's been a new 'tag' on instagram called 'themanithatstarteditall' and I was 'tagged' to do it. So I decided to incorporate it into this week's Then and Now post. So today's design were the first nails I ever took a picture of, and I remember that I was super proud of them. I have created a tutorial for this design so please let me know if you want to see it! As always, the 'Then' post will be after the jump!
As usual, there's a significant jump in quality. And also my ability to use top coat, but aside from that I think the original design wasn't too bad.
Another reason I chose to do these nails this week was because of the reemergence of nail art pens back into my life. This design was originally done with nail art pens, and I was apprehensive to recreate it with a brush, as I'm still not very confident with brushes. So the new
Barry M nail art pens were the perfect opportunity for me to recreate these.
For this design I used the same base colour as with the original design; Rimmel - Perfect Plum. I used the pink and white
Barry M nail art pens for the flowers and filled in the blue with Essence - that's what I mint (can you tell I'm obsessed with this colour?)
For the first time in a very long time I also decided to brave it and do my right hand, I normally just have a solid colour on there, and I was so pleased with how it came out that I decided to show you a picture. I've never shown you my right hand before, ever, so enjoy!
Let me know what you think in the comments! Alice
Hey everyone! It's been a while since my last 'Then and Now' post. I think until the end of may (when my exams finish) I probably wont be doing it every week, but I shall try my best! This week's post I wasn't actually going to do, because I really hated the original nails and I remember taking them off after about 10 minutes, but I decided it would be a good test of how far my skills have come if I could make the same design look good, and I think it worked because I really like how they came out, I think they ended up looking a lot like buttons actually. As always the 'then' post will be after the jump
Look at that brilliant photography!
This time around I used Essence - Stuck On You as the base colour, and then I painted on large dots using a nail art brush in Essence - Free Hugs, That's What I Mint and Upper Green Side and then I used acrylic paint for the white
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Alice
Hey everyone, today I've got some really lovely bows to show you. I know I promised a really exciting post yesterday but I didn't have time to edit them so these shall have to do. I received these from
KKcentreHK to review and I absolutely love them. However, I was really struggling to think of any ideas for what to do with them, even though I've wanted bows for ages, so I just decided to do a simple design with a dotting tool, but I actually really like how this turned out. I'm sure you'll be seeing plenty more designs with
these bows as they're definitely reusable.
There's not really much to say about these as they're pretty self explanatory. I started with a base of Collection 2000 - Angel Wings, and then used China Glaze - Liquid Leather for the black dots, which I did with a dotting tool. Then I put a coat of Seche Vite on, and then a coat of Essie - Matte about You. Then I used nail glue to add the bows.
You can get these bows
here for $4, and you get 2 in a pack. At first I did think that was a little bit pricey, but considering the amount of times you will be able to reuse them I think it's definitely worth it. You can also use my code 'ONTRTA' for 10% off :)
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Alice
Hey everyone. I went swimsuit shopping yesterday! I got my first swimsuit in years for vacation last year after losing about 15-20 pounds. Well, I lost another 10 or so this year. That brings my total to just over 30 pounds lost. Yay for me! However, I'm still not at my goal weight so swimsuit shopping is a fairly trying experience, but I guess that's true for almost anyone, isn't it? Are any of us truly happy with every feature of our bodies? Isn't there something, small or large, each of us wants to change? With the horrors of swimsuit shopping in mind I did a quick swimsuit manicure for luck.
I've seen bikini nail art before but I don't think I'll ever look or feel good in a bikini so I decided to do a combination of swimsuits. The first is a sexy pink one shoulder. Next is a sporty blue and white striped swimsuit. Then a red and white polka dotted one-piece that I fell in love with while shopping online (it was $160 though), and then a shiny purple bikini.
And on my thumb is a bright orange and yellow polka dotted tankini. I must have done something right with these nails because I came home the proud new owner of a sexy (and slimming) black one-piece suit at a great price!
Here's a picture of my new swimsuit, front and back, taken from the JCPenney website. I will look nothing like this in my swimsuit of course, but I'm thinking of sewing some of those pushup bra swim cup things into mine in an attempt to give myself something on top since it has such a deep neckline but don't want to ruin a $40 suit. Has anyone, or do you know anyone, who has done this? How did it work for you or them?
With all these awesome owl nails I wanted to try some of my own. I saw this design on Pinterest first and just had to recreate it. It's originally from Chalkboard Nails and was then recreated by Let them have Polish as part of a challenge—inspired by a tutorial.
I couldn't have chosen a worse time to do this design though. It was very hot and humid; the kind of heat that nail polish doesn't dry well in. I also had very little time to do my nails before I had to start getting ready for my niece's dance recital. I thought I could do it though. How hard could they be? Well, I'll admit they weren't that hard. I didn't think out the color choices very well. I mostly just reached into my nail drawer and grabbed the closest colors.
The base colors worked well together but once I started lightening it for the chest, dotting on the chest spots, and adding the beak everything just kind of blended together.
The spots and beak look nearly perfect on the mint and purple, shows up slightly less on the pink and red, but really just blends completely on the orange. If I had more time I'm sure I would have tested each color on paper before using them, but I was in a rush.
How much of a rush you ask? So much of a rush that I didn't realize I had scraped the eye off my thumb owl and dented the tip of the middle finger owl until I was in the car and far away from my nail supplies. I told my nieces that the orange owl was evil and attacked the pink owl. *giggle* I'm so mean. :)
I'm actually pretty proud of how well my right hand turned out all told. I'm right handed but through much practice I've gotten my left hand able to do much of the fine detail work. Still, it's never as good as doing nail art with my right hand. However, besides the googly eyes on the red owl I think everything came together very well.
For those who are wondering ... a groups of owls is called a parliament, hence the title. Yeah ... I had to look it up too. ;)
Polish Used
- Revlon - Base Coat
- Wet n Wild - I Red a Good Book
- Wet n Wild - I Need a Refresh-Mint
- Wet n Wild - Club Havana
- Wet n Wild - Bite the Bullet
- Wet n Wild - Tropicalia
- Sally Hansen - Mellow Yellow
- Sally Hansen - Sun Kissed
- LA Colors - Black
- LA Colors - White
