Drip Drip Drip Little April Showers

Ready for April yet?

 

These nails will help you. Simply grab two colours of your choosing here I used white and Mint Green and get started. 

Prep your nails by doing your cuticles and applying a protective base coat. Then grab your white polish or whatever colour you feel like using and apply two liberal coats as a base colour. 

Then simply grab the next colour of your choosing, and holding your hand nails facing up to the ceiling drip the polish on in a stylised manner and have fun creating slightly different designs on each nail. 

This design is so fun and can look so dynamic and differently using different colours. 

So have fun playing around, I particularly like using my Maybelline Colour Show polishes for this design see my Review post on them to see the colours in my collection. 

I'm On Etsy!

La Belle Affaire.

So I've started a new Etsy shop so I have somewhere to sell my crafts and things! 

Would really appreciate some NailsatNoon love over there, if you fancy taking a look, have listed two items so far, of some Kawaii iPhone cases I've made :) 

So please have a look. I'd greatly appreciate it. 

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/LaBelleAffaire

Maybelline Colour Show - Review

Colours left to right:
130 Winter Baby,  282 Glitter, 220 Brocades Range - Knitted Gold, 181 Charged and Ready, 214 Green with Envy, 654 Superpower, 749 Electric Yellow, 118 Urban Coral, 248 Power Red, Brocades Range 224, Brocades Range 221, 198

Maybelline Colour Show, is a super fun collection at a crazy affordable prices. At just £2.99 a bottle it is Maybelline's answer to Barry M. A collection full of fun bold bright colours, with sparkles, and texture to knock your heart out! There is a little something something for everyone, and with regular promotions on their cosmetics you can get more for your money. 

I kindly, being the brilliant blogger I am (just kidding) swatched each colour on my nail art wheel and stuck them to the bottle so you can see exactly how the pigmentation holds from bottle to nail. As you can see, it holds pretty well. Colours are exactly as they appear in the bottle, the texture of the formulation changes with each range. For instance the standard Colour Show range is although quite thin in formulation lovely and smooth and easily build-able and the more coats you apply the colour just gets more rich and shiny! The brocades range, which is a glitter based formulation is a little thicker, designed I believe as a top coat you can apply to colours to add lovely textured glitter look, or for a bold statement you can use them simply on they own using two coats to create party ready nails in no time! 

If you love bold colours and statement nails then this is the collection for you, and it won't by any means break the bank either! So get yourselves down to Superdrug or Boots and get looking. 

Lily Allen Nail Art

So Lilly Allen is awesome, as you should all know anyway. But particularly because of her love of Nail Art, and Lily being the babe she is, is running a competition to create a nail art design for her new album, the winner of which will get the design chosen by Lily herself and re-created for Lily by Maybelline's Nail Artist Michelle Humphrey. AND the winner will also win a hot air balloon ride - in celebration of Lily's new single 'Air Balloon'.

So I've been racking my brain trying to think of a design. So I went with the following look - Nude nails with highlights of neon pink, lilac, mint green and peacock. By using geometric shapes I am hoping to create a funky modern take of the patterns you see in the stitching of the balloons. I am really rather proud of this design. Its cool and I can see it working really well with some stiletto acrylics.

I will be doing more designs of course, as I am bound to think of more. So will keep posting Lily Nail Art posts on here showing my designs.

If you want to enter yourself. Simply create a design can be on your hand, or a drawing. Post a photo on Instagram and hashtag it - lilynailart and you'll be entered! Good luck everyone.

Polish used: 

Barry M Gelly Hi-Shine in Nude 

Stargazer - Silver

L'Oreal - Lilac and Mint

Sinful Colours - Hot Pink

No.17 - Peacock 

Kelly Brook - Nail Polish Review

So I learnt something new this week - Kelly Brook has started a makeup range for New Look, which includes my fav thing; nail polish! They are super affordable at £2.99 a bottle which is the same price bracket as the likes of Barry M and some of Rimmel's range. They have some super bold brilliant colours. I incidentally had to buy one to try them out... of course!

I chose this cherry red colour which has a subtle shimmer to it, its lovely, and I mostly bought it to try as it was on sale for £1.50! A steal if you ask me.

Not expecting a lot from till side purchases I was expecting it to be an average polish, but actually it is pretty decent. The formula is average thickness I would ballpark it similar to Barry M Nail Paint. You could get away with the one coat, but for a flawless even coverage you have to do the second coat. The brush is nice and flat similar to L'Oreal polishes so you can apply easily and tidily up to the cuticle line. The best part of this polish is that it smells every so slightly of strawberries, which blew my mind. If you sniff directly into the bottle - which I do not recommend then you can't smell it, but painting away you get a subtle whiff of strawberries. Which makes inhaling all those chemically smells that much worth it when painting your nails.

The packaging is super cute, I particularly enjoy the polka dot design on the lid, as it makes it easy to find in my bag of hundred odd polishes. Thats one thing that annoys me, most polish has a simple black or white lid, making finding the exact bottle you want near enough impossible when sifting through a bag with 100+ polishes in. Whereas you would not have that trouble with Kelly Brook's Nail Polish as she cleverly popped polka dots on there.

If you are looking for bulking out your collection with some polish of bold colours perfect for slapping on to go with outfits then this is a collection for you. The colours speak so much by themselves theres no need for the little extras of Nail Art.

Safe to say I'm impressed with Kelly, I would deffo buy more, and am looking forward to hopefully seeing the collection expand into more colours! :) So I would recommend you pop down to your local New Look and grab yourself a cheeky bottle to try. For 10ml at £2.99 or £1.50 for sale price, you can't really go wrong, and there is a large enough range of colours that you are guaranteed to find something you'll like!

Below I did a swatch of Kelly Brook Nail Polish in 'Cabernet'.

Oddballz and Watermelons.

So for Christmas, I was a very fortunate young lady and received a box of SIX O.P.I Shatter Nail Paints. Two of which were Nicki Minaj special edition ones, 'Super Bass Shatter'. So I decided to finally start experimenting with various colours from my little treasure box of O.P.I - my first bottles of O.P.I I have ever owned, which in itself is very exciting to me.

Incidentally these beautiful creations were made. My sister and I deciding that they looked like Watermelon design and Oddballz - a 90s computer game where you hatched your own little dinosaurs from this eggs (Oddballz) which had these crackle effects in funky colours on them... for those of you who do not know this game but loved Tamagochi's and Catz and similar programmes you deffo need to get a copy of Oddballz - you may get addicted but you won't regret it!

Anyhoo, back to the nails....

For watermelon nails, the polish used was Elf's 'Mint Choc Chip' and O.P.I Shatter in dark green. For Oddballz nails Barry M Gelly Hi-Shine in 'Prickly Pear' and Nicki Minaj for O.P.I 'Super Bass Shatter' in Purple.

Simply protect your nails with a base coat, apply two coats of the base colour. A lighter colour works best for dark shatter colour - and reverse for dark base light shatter colour works best. Once dry apply a top coat to smooth out the base colour ready for the shatter. I find that putting the top coat on now works best, as applying it after the shatter can shrink the polish underneath. Then apply a thin layer of shatter for the Watermelon style to get that thin stroke shatter look. For the Oddballz look apply a thick layer of shatter on top, to create the bigger shaped shatter effect.

Have fun playing around with colour combinations, this look is very simple yes, but get the colours right and you can have a great look on your hands!

For more Nail looks follow me on Instagram - http://instagram.com/itsher92