Road Trip Nail Art & China Glaze Swatches

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Hey there!
Today is a first. First swatch post! I didn't want to do a post with swatches only, so I took some inspiration and created new nail design for this collection I was swatching.
It was China Glaze Road Trip, which has been around for few months already, but for some reason it came to local (=Czech) distributors just about now. I got 6 shades of total 12 of the collection.
My road trip nail art was inspired by a top I bought on my last trip. I wanted to go detailed and really stick with the fabric pattern but I failed there and went with whatever-comes-to-my-mind tribal.

Keep reading for my first swatches and more nail art!

Retro Chic (+tutorial)

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Hey guys!
I have a tutorial for you today :). I was looking forward to posting this but I didn't get to do it until now. This design was somehow inspired by Boom Nails, who did several similar designs earlier. I took pictures during the process so I have a tutorial for you below and a short review of the base polish: Nubar InstaChic.

Sugar & Cream

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Hey!
Todays design was inspired by something I was seeing around this winter, simple sweather-ish pattern. The base is Cuccio polish Sugar & Cream, a colour I would probably never buy myself, but I got the chance to try it for a review. It didn't really go well with my skin tone I think, but I surprisingly like it now, looking at the pictures.

Melting Stripes (+tutorial)

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Hello!
I have a tutorial for you today! I haven't done any in a long time so I was definitely up for doing this one when I was asked for it on the Instagram after a posted a picture of this design. The design was partly inspired by Try My Hand, talented nail blogger who stopped posting about a year ago.
Besides the tutorial I'll be doing a short review of the Nubar #loveit polish you can see below, Polycolor acrylic paint and Platinum nail art brush.

Tutorial and my tools after the jump.

BP Store Review: Brushes & Acrylic Paint

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Hi!

After I did the first Born Pretty Brush Kit review I realised I didn't have many detailing brushes. So I got some...

I painted these nail art wheel nails and then I trimmed the brushes down, they are thin, but I prefer thinner. Keep reading for a closer looks and some more about the paint I use.

Matte Dots & Candy Colors Fluorescent Polish #11 Review

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Hello!
You know I have a thing for glowing nails, right? So far I only saw my nails glowing green-ish and I was quite curious about this red glowing polish I was about to try. I'll show you the nail art first...

I didn't know how to use neon pink in nail art, I don't really wear pinks and reds much, so I ended up with the simplest design: dots. I say neon but you see subtle pink? Oh yes, I'm sorry, my camera didn't capture the colour properly.

Continue reading for the review, photos of the red glow and most importantly more photos of glowing dotticure! Oh, and just so you know: picture heavy!

BP Store Review: Nail Art Wheel & Brushes

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Hello!
Do you know my nail-art-brushes history? No? Oh, wait, there wasn't any until today.
You see, for the first year or two of my nail art obsession I used regular craft store brushes that I cut down a lot, the bristles aren't really soft, but they are cheap and work just fine. About a year ago I bought cheap 5pc brush kit, but I ended up using most of the brushes for makeup instead of nail art, only one of them was useful, perfect for floral designs.
And now I own 15pc nail art brush kit from Born Pretty Store, wow.
I was wise and also I got nail art wheel with the brushes to have something to try them on. I didn't fill it yet, I painted seven designs and tried almost all the brushes. I took photos of the brushes after I used them for the first time, that's why some of them aren't completely clean, the paint wouldn't come off. In the photo below you can see what I painted next to the brushes I used.

Hipster Nails & Candy Colors Fluorescent Polish #9 Review

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Hi! 
I'll warn you in advance: this is going to be a long post. I have a review to make. Oh yes, I do reviews now. Like this one. And possibly one more in following weeks. But that's it, so no, I'm not planning to overwhelm you with reviews. Mostly because that would mean overwhelming you with posts in general and I'd rather stick to the one or two per week. Forgive me, lovely readers.
Enough of the bla bla, to the point!

I'm actually not sure, why I painted so-called-hipster nails. I wanted to paint a deer and I had this purple galaxy-like base (below) and one thing led to another...

This is the polish I'm reviewing today, it's hard to tell what it's called from the bottle, but in the BP store they call it Candy Colors Fluorescent Polish. 
Keep reading for swatches, glow in the dark photos and most importantly the rest of the design!

Upper Green Side

Hey! Today's title sounds funny, but it wasn't me who came up with it. It's the name of Essence polish I bought and painted my nails with few days ago. To make this a quick mani I just added simple aztec-chevron-ish pattern to the green colour using black and white gel pens.

I also matched my nails to my outfit - or was it the other way? It got all together in my mind somehow.

Irradiated Tie Dye

Hi! In previous post, I mentioned buying a glowing top coat and of course I couldn't wait to use it in a full manicure. I did a bit of testing on fake nails and figured, that the best colours to use it on top of are white, yellow and mint. And what design goes perfect with these colour and glowing? Tie dye! Or, you know, my version of tie dye, which is not really tie dye, but I don't know what else to call it.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

Mistero Grey and Tie Dye

Hi!
In my previous post I promised to talk about the Gabriella Salvete STARS 04 Mistero Grey textured polish. I will also mention the Gabriella Salvete 148 white polish, because white is the colour I use the most and this white is the best I could find in local drug stores.