Naturally Nails: Pink glitter accent nails

Hey hey

Once again, my favourite day of the week is finally here. IT’S SATURDAY! I don’t like Fridays because it’s still a school day and Sunday = school tmr so SATURDAY IS DEFINITELY THE BEST. If I could help it, I’ll have a 4 day work day and 3 day weekend. That would be my ultimate goal in life. I hope it comes true! Evertually I wanna find some way to make my money grow itself without me doing anything. Ahhh… that would be the life. Then I’ll go travel the world sampling great from all over the world just like ladyironchef! HAHA! Dreams

Got myself a very interesting nail “accessory that I couldn’t wait to try out. Here’s what I did with it!

Etude house: Matte pink
LA splash Daytona beach

The breakdown:
1. Use a matte colour of choice (etude house matte pink)
2. Choose accent nail and paint another coat of base polish over. 
3.While polish is still wet, dip nail into glitter of corresponding colour (LA splash Daytona beach)
4. Dust off excess with brush and tap off excess glitter
5. Top accent finger with top coat (if not glitter will fall out)

OMG I’m seriously loving how this turned out. I intentionally chose a matte polish to accentuate the shine of the glitter. It’s like the star of my nails right now! Look at it twinkling like little stars in the sky! You can NEVER achieve this with any ole glitter polish. Even OPI’s teenage dream doesn’t come close. The only down side? The glitter can make your nails look super chucky because it forms such a humongously thick layer.

Oh! I have to complain about the formula of the etude house matte polishes. It’s really bad. While I have never worked with any other matte polishes, I still feel that this one is REALLY bad. I think it dries too fast, there’s no time to create an even coat because it sets. It’s TERRIBLE. It’s ok on my fingers because the surface area is small but can you imagine my thumb. I redid it 3 times and still….. extremely streaky. I had to use thinner to improve the consistency. =(

Here’s a close up of the lash splash glitter. NOTE, this is NOT safe for the eyes. Nonetheless, this glitter really surprised me. I had expected a chunky, gritty texture but NO, dipping my finger into this pot transported me to coasts of Australia! The glitter was so smooth and soft it reminded me so much of the gorgeously fine sand of Australia! Lovely Lovely! Ok so Daytona beach is mainly a soft pink studded with sliver, purple and blue glitter. The colour combi is really pretty. I love this shade of pink as well. Not too hot, not too light. JUST RIGHT *Noms on porridge just like goldilocks* LOL

Alrighty, I’m off to enjoy my well deserved Saturday. Fatigue, you shall not hinder me from my happening life.

~END~
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Naturally Nails: Neon French Tips

Hey hey,

Omg, I’ve been missing for 2 weeks already! Apologies cause I’ve been super caught up with school. Yes yes the same old excuse but at least it’s TRUE! >.< Would you also blame if I said I wanted to leave my butterfly nail design on longer as my feature post?

Just like that, March is upon us. This is a super belated post that I have wanted to post since CNY but never did. But, but, all is not lost, afterall, better late than NEVER. Today’s post features my SISTER’S nails. *applause applause please*

Base: TFS WH001
Tips: Butter London Trout pout

How conservatively spring/ boldly winter appropriate don’t you think? Besides the fact that it’s freaking summer all year round here. I’m melting in my chair as I blog. Why is it so unbearably hot and sunny over here!!! >.<

The breakdown
1. Paint your nails with a sparkly/glitter white polish of your choice (TFS WH001), the shinnier the BETTER
2. Carefully top your nails with French tips using a crème neon colour of your choice (Butter London trout pout)
3. Top coat of choice (Poshe)

There’s all there is to it. How simple is that?! I totally failed on the French tip shape again, ended up looking like 1 straight line. Ughhh… I will master it I WILL MASTER IT!  

Anyways, totally love the pop of colour that trout pout brings to this look. It’s so glam yet subtly in your face at the same time! Esp since the crème texture of the French tips totally balances out all that jazz going on proximal to it (LOL just had to use that word, I meant to say the sparkly goodness of the white base polish shining brightly further down from the tips)

Here are some other look/swatches of the colours 
TFS WH001 – winter wonderland 
Butter London Trout pout - Swatch

Kudos to my sister for keep her fingers in a rather photographic manner. Did much better than me when I first started off. Of course it was thanks to my marvellous OCD-ness. Ok I shan’t claim the credit. If you are wondering about the reason for the random feature of my sister’s nails? Well, it happens to be an annual affair. Since she’s still schooling in a rather strict environment if you get my drift coupled with the fact that she has sports training everyday including the holidays, there are only so many other days where she can don on prettily painted nails. One of those days happen to be CNY! She’s taken a serious liking to manicures now. I’m so proud of her *tears of joy*. NOT TO MENTION, one of my first ever nail post was also featuring her MANICURE! So you could say, she was the one who got me started on blogging! That was some serious years back. Wow, we have come really far haven’t we?!

This is still however, only the beginning. To more awesome nail-tastic posts to come!

~END~
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Naturally Nails: Butterfly wing ombre

Hey Hey

Happy Belated Valentine’s everyone! Hope you had a great one with friends, family or special other half. I had a whale of a time helping my friend chase a girl for vday! Mine was spent rather quietly at my other half’s humble abode. We prepared our own army stew pot and basically dumped all kinds of delicious goodness into the stew. HAD A SUPER HEARTY MEAL! And a great time cooking it as well. We never like celebrating Vday on the day itself because everywhere is too damn crowded. Even terrible restaurants sprout ridiculous queues. Yup, just becomes a super turn off even if we had pre booked seats. Imagine Vday when we hit 6.9milion. WOW. I don’t even wanna think about it.

Nonetheless here’s what I did on my nails to celebrate the coming of my recess week! WHOO to being able to leave my nail colour longer than 2 days! =)

Base: OPI The IT colour
Gradient: OPI the IT colour à OPI I eat mainely lobster à China glaze ruby pumps
Design: TFS black, Etude house white

BAM! I am so proud of this design, so proud that it brings tears to my eyes! Real tempted to change my thumbnail now. Can you tell that they are butterfly wings? Specifically it is modelled after the Monarch butterfly! Drew inspiration for 2 vids on YT and put my own gradient spin on it. This is by far, my most ultimate, intricate, awesome nail design ever that took FOREVER to finish. The sheer amount of work that goes into painting on the wing design really takes a toll on your concentration. Nonetheless, the effort is totally worth it. LOOK AT THE END RESULT! A show stopping design IMO. I, obviously love this design the MOST! AMORE! Can't wait to show it off! *Breaks into song* "Oh I just wanna show you off to ,y friends, making them drool down their chiny chin chins"

Fair warning, this design is not the easiest and requires a heck load of patients and a crazy amount of OCDness to achieve

The breakdown

1. Paint a yellow/light orange base colour over the nails (OPI the IT colour)
2. Create your gradient on a sponge and dab all over nails making sure to blend blend blend (Best gradient nail tutorial by nailasaurus     HERE)
3. Wait for polish to completely dry and in the mean while clean up the edges of your nails
4. Using a stripping brush, dip into black polish and draw on the butterfly wings meticulously. This step takes the longest. (Pssst: A good tip is to draw the lines away from you as this makes the brush much easier to control. Sometimes, moving your fingers while keeping the brush in the same place also works)

NOTE: Round out any sharp edges esp where the lines intersect. – This is the part where you need to be very OCD about the edges if not they won’t look real. I couldn’t do them at well as I wanted to but still OK

5. Using a dotting tool/ toothpick, randomly dot on some white dots but rmb to add some where the vertical lines and horizontal tip meet.

6. Add rhinestones as you wish. Use SMALL ones so they look more intricate
7. Wait at least half an hour or more before applying top coat. You do not want to smudge your design after you’ve gotten this far. Patience, patience, PATIENCE!

Tada you are done! And I just lost my train of thought… ok OK right got it back. Basically you want to be very patient with this design. Definitely works with other colours as well. Just model them after the colours of butterflies to make them for realistic. Bear in mind thought that dark colour will not make the black wing design stand out.

Hallelujah! I have successfully made OPI the IT colour work. Terrible colour SOLO but gradient when used with other colours. Added in rhinestones for the fun of it, afterall rhinestones never fail to glam up anything it’s put on. 
Ugh, some of my lines aren’t as crisp as I had wanted them to be and some edges aren’t as round as I wanted them to be but hey, nobody can seem them from afar right! Super proud that I could achieve the same design on my right hand, drawing with my left hand really tested my hand dexterity max. Well right brain, you have served me well!

Swatches:
OPI the IT colour 
OPI I eat mainly lobster
China glaze Ruby pumps

Here’s a narcissistic picture of my thumb on which I think the wing design looks the best on! Probably because there is a bigger surface area to work with so I can draw more lines!

Totally can’t stop looking at my nails now. Imma continue to gaze bimbotically at them through the week and marvel at my work of art! I am not an artist and drawing ain’t my biggest forte, it fact it’s probably one of my worst so being able to pull this off really amazes me. Ahhh there ain’t no better art than nail art. It’s so unbelievably therapeutic. ESP when the you reap the fruits of your labour at the end.

Anyways, CHEERS to the coming of my recess week. This week shall be spent wisely!

~END~
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Naturally Nails: Butter London Trout Pout Swatch

Hey Hey,

Hope everyone's been surviving their respective examinations. HALLELUJAH! It is finally december, the marking of yet another end of the year. I've been seen friends post status about advent calender?! Took me a while to recell, can you guess recall where this particular word came from?! Can't recall? Keep reading to find out!

As you all know, Black Friday was somewhen last week. Singapore doesn't exactly have black friday, physcially at least. Come to think of it, there probably isn't a 24 hour mall in Singapore at all. Wouldn't it be cool if we had one, or maybe if shops in Orchard opened 24/7 on saturday nights. I won't have to worry about food places, hesistate to go out of the house at 8pm in the night and all that jazz. Anyway, thankfully though online stores give us the liberty of enjoying it. I got myself something I've been eyeing for the longest time. Just 1 small item. A really modest haul xD

Here it is!

Butter London Trout Pout

OMG it is finally in my hands, if you follow me on Instagram@Plainlypicturesque you would have seen my little glamed up picture of my most recent haul. WHOOOO. Can't tell you how excited I was when I placed the order for this. It was going for a good 30% of the normal price on Luxola.com. More on that later

Trout pout is a stunning coral shade that has the perfect mix of pink and orange in it. It has this almost neon quality to it that makes my tummy do loop de loops. It is what I envisioned Essie's Haute as hello to be and MORE.
This colour has been raved a bazillion times in the beauty community already so I shan't go on rambling about it. Just that I love it, and it is the perfect colour. Very flattering on olive skin tones.

Sadly to say though I have issues with the application. I read reviews on trout pout and a handful of them complained about trout pout being too thick awfully streaky, while I don't agree, I can't disagree either. Like that makes any sense.... I wouldn't say it's streaky because it really isn't, besides the fact that it goes on quite smoothly despite it being a really bright almost neon colour is already pretty spectacular. Trout pout is more patchy IMO. . 1 coat doesn't get you perfect coverage and leaves you with random bald spots that absolutely gets on my nerves! The part about the polish being thick is valid I guess but I feel that it's more of the brush's fault. The brush picks up a little too much product for my liking so you really have to clean off the excess product off to prevent a hot globby mess later on. The 2nd coat though seals the deal and assures you that:" yes, this is why so many people love this colour."
Still I have to say that for its steep price, this is not quality that I would settle with because again, OPI makes wonderful polish for half the price. They aren't all perfect but they are generally awesome. Then again, loads of other butter london colours I've heard are off the charts as well. They'd better BE for the price.

While this coral baby is finally MINE to own. My first EVER butter London polish. I have to just make a comment on the process of acquiring it. I bought this off luxola.com for a steal of $17.50. Thank you black friday. That's the price that you'll get it in the US, or at least from what I calculated. (Warning, I am born bad at math.) According to their website, you'll have to have someone BE home on the day that they are delievering the product to you if not you'll INCUR A SURCHARGE OF $10 FOR REDELIVERY (if your product is So.. on the supposed day of the delivery, I was home for the entire day (10am to 6pm as specified by luxola) and no one came to ring the doorbell... Strange but I thought perhaps they'd swing by the next day. Then, I received a call at 5pm saying that an attempt was made to deliver but I wasn't home. I was completely MINDBLOWN like how in the world could I have missed my door bell. (PS I was wide awake), even if I were taking a number 2, I would have heard it. Besides, there were others at home too, surely they would have gotten the door. I relayed this to the caller and he said ok, there will be a redelivery tmr. TheEND. At this time, I wasn't aware of the surcharge policy so I was like ok. It wasn't till like 10pm in the night when I scrutinised the fine print. Ugh. it really gave me a heart attack. No way in hell am I paying $10, MORE THAN DOUBLE the price of my product to get it delivered.. Being the super crazy anxious person that I am, I speedily wrote an email to them which they read early in the morning. Nonetheless there was only so much they could do cause the delivery guy already set off.
So the door bell rang the next morning at 9am. OMG SO EARLY. And I got my lovely product. THANKFULLY there was no surcharge given and I lived happily ever after since then. OMG can you imagine my horror if I were to be charged $10 buck. What's the point of the black friday discount then. -_-"
But yeah, that's the lame story of my so called "ordeal"

Ok, so I was clearing up my polish the other day and I chanced across Essie Haute as hello and I was like NO NO NO NO NO they look crazyily similar! I just had to swatch them side by side. To my relief they are WORLDS APART. In colour and in quality. For those complaining of the streakiness of Trout pout, do try out Haute as hello, you'll be pleasantly horrified. Haute as hello is what I call STREAKY. Not to mention, totally UNsmooth. See my previous post on it for more details. As you can see, haute as hello is exuberate a more orange outlook as compared to the strong warm pink tones from trout pout. Both top coatless. I think you can tell the winner from this picture.

Alright, for those of you guys wondering about the advent calander thing who haven't already googled it, it's from NEOPETS. The childhood game of my generation. Hahah it's great to reminisce. My favourite game was trouble at the neopian bank! 

Some random updates, I've been super into this acappella group called pentatonix. Go check them out if you haven't. They are GOOD. ESP carol of the bells and AHA. Awesome stuff. Can't wait for the exams to be over FOR I CAN GO FOR RETAIL THERAPY AND SEE MY BF AGAIN! Spoken like a true bimbo. 

END~
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