Don't Panic

...and carry a towel.
Hi! I'm super excited about this post. Another week, another Nail Art Ideas Linkup theme, this time it's A Great Read. It wasn't hard to choose a book as I needed something internationally known, easy to picture and most importantly something I love reading. I chose The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy written by Douglas Adams. I read all 6 books, some of them twice, and I had such a great time reading them. To the manicure!

Summer, don't leave!

Hey people!
I woke up and it was raining. Sure, rain is fine, we need rain. But it was cold, I was cold, the weather was all autumn and the only thing keeping me from feeling under the weather was my manicure. I did it the night before, my first skittles (I wanted to try a new technique but I couldn't decide which colour).

NOTD - Indian Skittlette

Last night I sat down and I knew I wanted to do a skittlette mani, but the question was, what would the main design be. I was lost, no ideas in my head, and in such cases, choosing a polish combo first usually works best. So I chose two colours that I really liked together - Rimmel 405 Rose Libertine and Rimmel 312 Ultra Violet - and tribal came to my head right after that. Problem solved.

NOTD - Bad Ass

Hey! Yesterday I went through nail art inspiration photos I have in my phone and I decided to recreate one of them.

BTW: My Every-post Products

In my posts, you can see the same products over and over again, so I figured I'd summarise it up a bit.

I want to shortly introduce you the nail products, "basics", I use (or used) regularly, though I'm not doing full reviews (yet), as you can find plenty of those elsewhere.

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In this order I'll introduce you:

Base Coat: Dermacol Base Coat, NYC Base Coat, Essence 24/7 Nail Base, Essence Peel Off Base Coat

Top Coat: Essence Better Than Gel Nails Top Sealer, NYC Turbo Dry Top Coat, Essence BTGN To Sealer high gloss

White Polish: S-he 306, Gabriella Salvete 148, Rimmel 703 Hot White Love

Treatment: Gabriella Salvete Cuticle Oil, Rimmel Nail Rescue
Tools: brushes, acrylic paint

Base Coats

Dermacol Base Coat

source (my bottle is almost empty and damaged)

This was the first base coat I bought. I didn't know much about nail care back then, so I just took it because it was quite cheap, that's it. I couldn't see it helping the quality of my nails much, but it protected them well from stains. 

NYC Base Coat

ingredients (click to enlarge)

I decided to buy this one when the previous Dermacol bottle got low. I read a lot on the internet about nail hardeners back then, because I decided to buy a formaldehyde hardener (Rimmel Nail Rescue below) and I wanted to know what it does. I also took hand creams and nail polishes "with hardeners" and went through all the ingredients, I googled which of them are vitamins or good for my nails in any way and then I used all that info to choose a base coat (and hand cream). Since then I really hate when there is no ingredients info on products' bottles.

I THINK this base coat helps to keep my nails strong, it definitely protects them from staining and it dries quickly (though sometimes I feel like the dermacol base coat dried faster). I would recommend it.

Essence 24/7 Nail Base

Looking for matte top coat I ran into this base coat with matte finish. It's highly useful as both base coat and matte top coat. Read more in this post.

Essence Peel Off Base Coat

source (my bottle is ugly again and I didn't keep the paper)

This is one of the products that would deserve a full review, but you can really find a lot of those on other blogs.

I use this quite often, it smells like glue and it most probably IS glue, hopefully modified for nails. When I do a manicure that I don't intend to wear for more than a day or two I use it under the whole thing so I don't need to use polish remover that often. It serves me well, the only downside is, that it comes off my tips pretty easily, especially on the thumb, which I use a lot to open things.

Top Coats

 Essence Better Than Gel Nails Top Sealer

source

When I decided to buy a proper top coat long time ago I went though a lot of reviews of top coats and this one was recommended so much, so I gave it a try. It's great and I would be still using it, but it was discontinued, sadly. The thing I love the most about this is that I can (almost) fully use my hands about 5 minutes after application. Search the internet for more blabla about this top sealer, I'm not much into repeating what others said hundred times before.

NYC Turbo Dry Top Coat

source

I bought this after BTGN was discontinued and it has been perfect replacement. Drying time is pretty much the same, no problems here. It is generally thinner, so sometimes I have to apply two coats to get smooth nails. I like that I can see inside the bottle to know how much I have left. I read a lot of positive reviews before buying this and now I can say the same: I would repurchase.

 Essence Better Than Gel Nails Top Sealer high gloss

You know how it is: you fall in love with a top coat and they discontinue it. That's how I ended up with this top sealer - its brother BTGN with regular gloss was discontinued. The reviews were not all good but I decided to give it a try and I was really happy with it, it's just as good as the regular BTGN, will repurchase! (unless they discontinue it)

White Polish

(yes, white polish is a basic for me, I use it in almost every manicure)

S-he 306

(this is how it looks when I use my own photos of my old bottles)

This was the second white polish I bought (the first one was Maybelline miniColorama, but it was too long ago to talk about it). It was in the dark times when I didn't want to spend much on polish and I also found out, that not many brands do have white polish (what a shame!). So I found this old version of s-he polish in a small local drug store and bought it for 25 CZK (=1 €). I repurchased it two times mostly because of the price. It is solid two-coater, dries super fast and lasts, BUT it looks terrible around the cuticles. I'm not sure what is to blame, whether the brush or the formula (or me :D).

Gabriella Salvete 148

(I hate my pictures of bottles)

When the price of GS polishes got lower I invested in this white polish and I would not go back. It doesn't dry as fast as S-he polish, but it looks perfect around the cuticles, has great brush and much better formula. I will most definitely repurchase (unless I find better white or the bottle turns out to be endless). You can find more pictures in this post.

Rimmel 703 White Hot Love

I found a new favourite white polish. It indeed is my white hot love. It is opaque in two coats, with microshimmer that is barely visible on nails. As all of Rimmel 60s polishes it dries really quick, definitely quicker than the 148 Gabriella Salvete (above), which makes it perfect base for nail art.

Treatment

Gabriella Salvete Cuticle Oil

source

When I run out of an old cuticle oil we had at home for some reason I had to buy a new one. This one got me with its smell. It smells like orange/lemon, I wanted to lick my cuticles the first week of using it :D. Otherwise it's probably the same as any other cuticle oil, I'm not very experienced in this area.

Rimmel Nail Rescue

source

As mentioned above, when my nails got week I started looking for a good hardener. I studied the way hardeners work on this blog and figured that I needed a formaldehyde one. I chose Rimmel after good experience with their lycra polishes and after reading some reviews on the internet. I used it pretty much the way the polish says and my nails got stronger. I think the two weeks treatment should be repeated after about 4 months, but I wore it again after two months for a week, because I wasn't happy with the quality of my nails again. (The bottle is quite big for simple two weeks treatment.) I definitely do recommend this if your nails split and if you feel like they are too week to be ever left unpolished.

Tools

Brushes

For a long time I had no real "nail art brushes", I used just some cut down brushes from local craft store. I still use those, mainly because they are cheap and easy to get, I don't have to feel sorry if I damage some, plus I now use brushes from Born Pretty Store, some of them cut down again.

If you want to know which brush I used for a certain manicure go ahead and ask me in the comments!

Acrylic Paint

(click for full post)

I switched to acrylic paint just before I started this blog, which means in the summer of 2013, and I wouldn't go back. The details are so much easier. And you know how polish always dries so fast on your plate? Acrylics don't. And you know how expensive polish is, so you want to be careful with it? Acrylics... well, they are cheaper. And how your nail art brush is all weird after you use it with polish? And your room smells like nail polish remover since that's the only way to dissolve the polish? Yeea, you can dissolve acrylic paint with water. Do I have to continue? There are countless reasons, really, go ahead and buy acrylics.

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Wow, so long, but I wanted to write this in case anyone would be interested - honestly I hope you will be, after so much time spent writing IN ENGLISH, probably making horrible grammar mistakes and not being able to correct them myself because of lack of knowledge (if you can see any, tell me, please).

Do you have an experience with these products?

Sandy Egypt

Hi!
I've got a bit carried away with this design. It was caused by getting over 100 new followers on tumblr over a night. This might seem like no big deal for an "old" blogger, but I have just started and knowing people ARE interested after being ignored for a while... Well, I got excited and thought I should give you some proper nail art, a lot of photos and stuff. I painted my left hand for this weeks Nail Art Ideas Linkup (join us!) and I've been taking photos (A LOT of photos, because most of them end up being useless) and then I had to try hard to not make this seriously picture heavy as I couldn't decide which pictures to use. I, personally, really like those nail photos where you can see the person in the background (my gurus at this point are Pshiiit and Spektor's Nails), so that's what I'm posting today.

NOTD - High on Pink Tie Dye

Hi! Right now I'm wearing these pink sort-of-tie-dye nails I did for a big family reunion (which means to me a lot of people to see my nails, obviously :D) we had this weekend. For a long time I didn't know what kind of design to do. I knew what I was gonna wear, white girly dress, pink-red sweater if it gets colder and pink accessories, so my nails had to be pink. I don't wear pink nails very often and I don't even own many pink-red polish bottles, I'm much more into blues. It hit me Wednesday evening: when I was doing High on Nails design about two weeks ago, that came to my mind through tie dye, originally I imagined something like today's design.

It ended up better than I imagined, quite decent but still interesting, it matched my outfit perfectly and I received a lot of comments on them. But if someone asks how long they took I'm going to lie. I would go crazy if I was to paint both hands in a row, I did my left hand one day's evening and the right another day's afternoon.

Sea

Hi!
This is a manicure I have for this week's Nail Art Idea Linkup theme, which is Sea. Painting sea on my nails just didn't suite me, I couldn't come up with anything original for a long time and when I did, it didn't come out the way I imagined anyway. But here goes, I also added some seashells for the photos to make you feel more like "oh, that looks totally like sea!".

Yellow Triangles

Hello, this is a design I've been wearing for a week on a trip. I needed something not complicated, neutral and nice to look at, something light coloured so a bit of wear and minor chips wouldn't show. I reached it.

(I took the photos on the trip, they are weirder then usual and I'm not entirely happy with them.)

Aztec Sun

Hi!
Today I came across this Nail Art Ideas Linkup over at Craftynail. I very often run out of ideas so I decided to give it a try. The first week's theme is Sun, I didn't want to do anything too predictable, like sky or sunset, so I went for Aztec inspired design, I googled some pictures of "Aztec Sun" and simplified it a lot for my nails then.

Geometric Diamonds

Hello!
I long time ago I did design inspired by a tutorial by Precious Polish. The first time I did it was in April and it turned out just the way I imagined, sadly I don't have high quality photos of that. I re-did it in June, I thought it could look better when smaller, but it didn't.

Left hand. Middle finger is an example of how I thought smaller would be better and was wrong.

Right hand. My hands were shaky that day.

The old version, left hand. I wish I had nicer pictures, because the first try was a more successful one. I really liked it and enjoyed wearing it. It was similar in June, not that precise, better colour combo though, yellow and violet go nice together.

What I used:
S-he 306 (white)
Rimmel 312 Ultra Violet
Miss Sporty 453 (yellow)
Rimmel 500 Peppermint
black gel pen (for lines)
blue gel pen (darker blue in April design)

I'm unhappy with the result, better next time, I guess?

NOTD - High on Nails

Hi,
today I'll be showing you another NOTD, another design I did using acrylic paint (there will be no acrylics in next post, promise).