Snow Covered Windows - Nail Polish Canada's Holiday Nail Art Contest

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Helloooo Everyone!

This is a super late post from me, but I wanted to make sure I could get these nails into Nail Polish Canada's Holiday Nail Art Contest Week 1! The theme this week is SNOW! I couldn't narrow down my idea for this week until I was chatting with my roommate and she came up with snow covered windows! Like when all your window panes have snow built up in the corners. All I can imagine is sitting in a cottage somewhere with a hot chocolate curled up by a fire staring out at the evergreen trees through the snow.

These nails were quite easy to do and pretty cute from a distance! I started off with Pure Ice Bikini on all my nails to mimic the beautiful blue sky I imagined. Then I freehanded on the evergreen trees using China Glaze Running In Circles and my favourite cut down small nail art brush.

I then freehanded on the window sills using China Glaze Desert Sun to mimic wood that would be in this winter cabin I'm dreaming of. Finally I added the snow on the sills using Cult Nails Tempest and then added a layer of Pretty & Polished S'no Mans Land from last years holiday collection to give the snow a little texture.

I had a lot of fun doing these, partly because this is the first nail art I've managed to get done in a long while! I'm really glad I was able to get them done :) If you'd like you can vote for me HERE in the Snow week for Nail Polish Canada's Holiday Nail Art Contest! Or just vote for whomever's nail art you like best! Hope you're all having a fabulous week!

31DC2013: Day 31 Recreate Your Favourite

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Afternoon loves!

WOW! We did it! We finished another year of the 31 Day Challenge. It's been a rough month, but we got through it and I am reaaaalllly proud of some of the manicures I came up with. You can check them all out tomorrow in my challenge round up post. It has also been really fun checking out the rest of the bloggers participating this month in the challenge. I especially enjoyed reading through my blog list this month!

Today I had to choose which one of Emily's manicures I was going to recreate. It was a tough job as so many of her manicures rocked this month. Emily also has an awesomely distinct nail art style and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do her manicures justice! I eventually settled on her Day 26 Inspired by a Pattern because her wood grain idea was genius!

I did not have the same base colour as Emily, so I decided to use one of the only cool browns that I have piCture pOlish Demeter as my base. Then I used my It's So Easy Stripe Rite Black to draw on the wood grain pattern.

These were super cute and fun to do and although mine is a tad darker than Emily's original creation I still think the overall look is similar! It is a genius idea !!

WOOOOW now I am officially done the challenge! I'm still shaking my head that it has gone by this quickly. You can check out Emily's original post here and make sure you head over to see what manicure of mine she recreated! I LOVE IT!

If you haven't yet this is your LAST CHANCE to enter our giveaway for the chance to win one of 2 $30 gift cards to Born Pretty Store.

31DC2013: Day 24 Inspired by a Book

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Morning friends!

Today's nails are inspired by a book! I really wanted to do Harry Potter nails, but was struggling to come up with an original way to do it. My 8 year our cousin is absolutely obsessed with Harry Potter and this past summer he went to Universal Studios and to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter! Not only did he make me eat some rather disgusting Bernie Botts Every Flavour jelly beans, but he was so proud of his new stuffed toy Hedwig! So after thinking about him I decided to do some Hedwig nails!

Full disclosure, I did these nails by looking at this photo of Hedwig that I found on Google. After I was finishing I decided to google Hedwig Nail Art to see if anyone else had done something like this before. I found almost the exact same manicure on Coewless's blog! So full credit goes to her for thinking of the idea first even though I didn't know they were similar until after I was finished lol.

I started these nails off with two coats of my absolute favourite white creme Cult Nails Tempest on all my nails. Then I started drawing the eyes with Wet n Wild Black Creme. The yellow of the eyes was done with Sally Hansen Lightening and mixing varying amounts of white and black to that to get the shading. The shading for her feathers and beak were done with black and white creme as well as Revlon Hot For Chocolate again mixed with varying amounts of white creme.

On the rest of my nails I ripped a sponge up and sponged on a mixture of Hot For Chocolate and white creme. I sponged most of the polish off onto wax paper so that the sponging was as light as possible. I also went back and added a little bit of white creme over the brown to give it a different feel. I finally went in with a mixture of Hot For Chocolate and white creme and my smallest nail art brush and added the feathers in U shapes!

I really like these and I really hope that my cousin approves! These are for you Nathaniel! :D What do you think of these Harry Potter Inspired nails?!

Remember to head over to The Lacquerologist to see what book inspired Emily today! Also be sure to ENTER OUR GIVEAWAY for a chance to win one of 2 $30 gift cards to Born Pretty Store!
Check out last years inspired by a book nails here!

31DC2013: Day 22 Inspired by a Song

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Morning friends!

Today I have some nail art that I am very excited to share with you. I'm pretty much doing these nails day by day right now and I didn't have time to even start these nails until last night around 11pm. I was only supposed to work until 9, but ended up having to stay until 10:30pm so by the time I got home I had very little energy to think about what song I was possibly going to be inspired by. So I texted my boyfriend and said I need a song, pick me one! He immediately said Roar by Katy Perry as he had juuust heard it on the radio as he was coming home from work!

I absolutely love this song and am super thrilled that I created nail art based on it! As soon as my boyfriend said Roar I watched the video and I was instantly hit with inspiration! Check out the embedded video below. It is such a happy, feel good song!



Let's get back to looking at the nail art, because well I love it! :D

My thumb is from the opening scene in the music video, it starts off graphically saying, A Motion Theory Adventure Filmed in Junglescope with ROAR in big orange letters. My index nail is another scene from the music video where Katy is scared in the dark and can see all the eyes staring out at her. My middle nail is my favourite!! It is the tiger ROARING! I'm rather proud of how he came out :D My ring nail is pink and yellow flowers with green leaves quite like the flowers on Katy's grass skirt in the second half of the video. My pinky nail is leopard print to represent the scarf she's wearing that magically turns into a fab bralet lol.

I used waaaaay too many polishes and spent waaay too long on these nails, but I mean come on? They were worth it right? I must sound so full of myself right now! I used 24 polishes and pretty much every colour on my nail was custom mixed to get the right shade that I wanted. If you have any questions about a particular colour leave a comment below and I will let you know :)

I was sure these nails were going to be a giant fail because I was tired after work coming home, but listening to Roar on youtube like 5 times for sure put me in an awesome mood!

What are your thoughts on my Katy Perry nails?! Do these seem roar appropriate to you? Yes I make bad puns when I write posts at 2am :P

Be sure to stop by The Lacquerologist to see what song inspired Emily today! Also be sure to ENTER OUR GIVEAWAY!
Check out last years inspired by a song nails here!

31DC2013: Day 16 Tribal

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Good Morning!

Today's challenge is Tribal, I really enjoy doing tribal nails, and have done a number of different tribal designs in the past, but I have never looked up any specific tribal art and recreated that! It has always been just a random application of colours and patterns. When I was in Alaska last month I learned a lot about the Tlingit Natives, pronounced Klinget, one of the groups of native people that still call Southeast Alaska home. At the stop of Icy Strait Point, Hoonah, Alaska we discovered much of the history of the Tlingit Natives and got to experience much of the art and totem poles that exist there. I took a number of pictures of the carvings that were on the walls and I decided to recreate one of those works today!

Here is the picture I took of the carving I recreated! The lighting isn't the best, but you get the idea. In person these were so beautiful.

For this manicure I started off with a white base using Cult Nails Tempest just to have a good surface for creating the art on. Then I drew the outlines of the fish and the wings with Wet n Wild Black Creme. Then I began to fill in the coloured areas using Born Pretty Store Sweet Color #009, the teal, Cult Nails Evil Queen, the red, and a mix of Cult Nails Feel Me Up and Joe Fresh Caramel for the yellow. All the details were done with my smallest cut down nail art brush and a small dotting tool.

I went back in with OPI A-Piers To Be Tan and filled in all the remaining white areas to mimic the wood of the carvings. I really loved the final outcome of these!

I created this combination image in case any of you want to pin my tribal manicure! I had a lot of fun in Alaska and learned a great deal about the Tlingit People. If you would like to learn more, you can check out some of the facts on this Wikipedia page!

Be sure to check out The Lacquerologist to see Emily's tribal manicure today! She has been killing this challenge so make sure you're checking out her posts!
Check out last years tribal manicure here!

31DC2013: Day 14 Flowers

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Good Morning friends!

Today brings us to the 14th day of the challenge, and I think I have one of my favourite manicures yet to share with you! The prompt today is Flowers and I have known exactly what I wanted to do for this day ever since Emily and I decided we were going to redo the challenge! I was at my Grandma's house for a BBQ earlier this summer and she had the most fabulous floral napkins out, at the end of the night I asked her if I could take one and she said yes! So I have been keeping the napkin close by to recreate for this day. I'll show a picture of the napkin later in this post.

For these nails I started off with OPI My Vampire Is Buff my go to nude polish. Then I went at it with my smallest cut down nail art brush to create the flowers and leaves! All the polishes I used will be listed below. Since this was a fairly complex design I won't get into specific details about how I did it other than I looked at the napkin and then tried my best to scale the pattern down to fit on my nails!

The polishes used for these are are as follows,
Cult Nails Evil Queen
Billie Zinfandel
China Glaze Def Defying
OPI Congeniality is My Middle Name
OPI A-Piers To Be Tan
Joe Fresh Caramel
I did a variety of mixing these polishes in different combinations to get the exact shade I wanted! Here is a picture of my nails with the napkin!

I seriously love these and never ever want to take them off! I think it is up there with some of the best freehand work that I've done and I'm super proud :) What do you think of my floral nails?!

Be sure to head over to The Lacquerologist to see what Emily has come up with for Flowers! Also be sure to enter our giveaway!!
Check out last years Flowers nails here!

31DC2013: Day 13 Animal Print

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Good Morning loves!

Today brings us to day 13 in the 31 Day Challenge with today's prompt being Animal Print! I just did an animal themed manicure for the Digit-al Dozen September Spectacular, so I did a bit if researching to find something interesting to do for today's prompt. I found myself on National Geographic's website looking at Dangerous and Deadly Sea Creatures! There are so many amazing animals out there but I decided to go with the dangerous theme once I saw the Textile Cone Snail.

Here is the snail if you're wondering how close I got to it's print!

The textile cone snail looks innocent, but is actually one of the planet's most toxic creatures. They "harpoon" their prey with hollow teeth, through which they inject a lethal venom. Their most common victims are mollusks, though they have been known to eat their own kind!!

These nails were pretty simple to do! I started off with OPI My Vampire is Buff and then mixed OPI A-Piers To Be Tan with acetone on wax paper to thin it out. Then I applied the thin mixture in random splotches on my nails. Then I used Revlon Hot For Chocolate and my small cut down nail art brush to create the lines over the brown patches and the V's over the rest of the nails. When I was topcoating instead of floating the topcoat over my nails, I dragged it a little over the brown patches to get the same effect as the snail!

I created the above image for easy pinning so people can see that this actually is an animal print!! What do you think of these animal print nails? Do you like the snail print?

Be sure to head over to The Lacquerologist to see what Emily has done for Animal Print! Also be sure to enter our giveaway!
Check out last years animal print nails here!

31DC2013: Day 11 Dots

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Good Morning!

Today brings us another installment of the 31 Day Challenge, this time the theme is dots! I went for a simple bold gradient of dots in some bright earth tones. I actually love how graphic this ended up being so let's get to it!

My inspiration for these nails came while browsing Pinterest, seriously it's how I find 85% of my inspirations. Unfortunately like many pins this was improperly sourced so here is the link to the image.

For these nails I started off with Cult Nails Tempest, what else really. Then I started dotting using a number of polishes which I will list below!
China Glaze Sunday Funday (bright blue)
China Glaze Def Defying (chartreuse green)
OPI A-Piers To Be Tan (caramel tan)
Essie Mesmerize (dusty blue)
OPI My Vampire Is Buff (light nude)
Revlon Midnight Affair (deep blue)
Pure Ice Bikini (light blue)

I always somehow forget about dotticures when I sit down to do my nails so I am really excited that I had another chance to try one! These were fun to do and to wear. What do you think of this dotted gradient?!

Be sure to check out The Lacquerologist to see what Emily did for dot nails! Also be sure to enter our giveaway :)
Check out last years dot nails here!