Popping around to my corner store

My corner store just happens to be an Asda, so while I was picking up Oscar's food, I just took a stroll around.  Can I just say that England really loves their chocolate. Forget buying stock in oil, Cadbury is the company to invest in (yes I'm kidding).  No seriously, in this economic depression, you would not know it by the amount of chocolate that is being produced and being consumed. Too bad I'm not a chocolate lover, so I don't understand this craze, but I'll tell you what I'm a lover of.

Nail polish lol

Big shock right?

well I know right now lots of my fellow NP lovers are rushing to buy the Chanel winter collection.  I personally am skipping on this lot because it consist of pink and red nail polishes.  However, I do love the whole matte look, so if you don't want to spend £18 on a Chanel nail polish and then £18 on the matte top coat, then you will have to look at different (cheaper) avenues.  So if I was really into that pink matte look and was skint, I would go for this.

George has new polishes in their matte line.  I love twister and troll, so I can attest that these are really good for the price.  Right now it's 2 for £2.50.

 

I took this photo in the shop.  The colour is actually a bit more pink in real life.  They also had a baby pink matte, but I thought this one was more in line with the Chanel polishes that just came out.

So while I was grabbing some much needed supplies, and some British candy for a friend, the inner child in me woke up when I saw this...

 

£2 for a set of 30 Christmas cards

That's not a bad price, and if you love Hello Kitty then this is a must have.

Sadly, as much as the inner child in me finds this cute, I don't think I love Hello Kitty as much.

  It's not an age thing, it's more about it being so mass produced now and everyone has it.

So I grabbed the sweets and some supplies and that's about it.

This is going to sound really odd, but I really enjoy going to the supermarket, because I'm still getting use to all the new foods, drinks, and "ethnic" foods out there.  For instance, living in America, I never knew much about Polish food, but today I spent at least 15 minutes looking at all the different Polish foods out there.  It's just still very new and neat to me.  Yep, I'm definitely still an immigrant hahaha

Color Burst Nail Art

I find so much inspiration these days online, and this nail art was inspired by a blogger, but I can't remember who.  I'm always surfing through a sea of blogs late at night...it'll come to me eventually ( I hope).  Well this is my nail art and it is my first go, it was quite easy and I love how it came out.

Quite a colourful manicure considering I'm a dark vampy/black nail polish girl, but blame it on the hot weather we're having here. 

I love the blobs of colour, reminds me a lot of abstract expressionism.

And no I'm not comparing myself to Jackson Pollack LOL

just saying, I like it's very thrown together.

Colours I used and the order I used them:

Essie - Fill the gap (base coat)

Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme wear - White on (white)

Rimmel Lasting Finish Pro - Midnight Blue (dark blue)

Essie - Lolipop (red)

Chanel - Pulsion (pink)

George - Buttercup Shine (yellow)

Nails Inc - Electric Eel (teal)

Essie - Matte About You (matte topcoat)

George nail polish: Groove, Gambler, Buttercup Shine

I'm going through a weird stage in my life right now. I'm in between jobs, in between homes, just in between everything. The only constant thing in my life is my love for beauty products, so I've been on here a lot.  Something about the mindless swatches, and yacking about this colour and that is really helping me de-stress.


Well one constant definitely is this  brand George.  It's super cheap at £1.75 and the formula is very good for that price.  I got 3 new colours as part of a swap and I wanted to swatch them since I have a hard time finding swatches online for this brand.

Gambler

  

Groove

 

 Buttercup Shine

More like NYC cab yellow, but I can see why they named it that :)

I personally am not too keen on these colours, but that's just because i'm a bit hard to please when it comes to colours these days, but I have no complaint about the formula. Groove is slightly sheer and needs 3 coats, where as the others just required 2.

But if you are looking for a cheap thrill, these polishes are it :)

George Nail Polish: Hoax and Under the Sea

I had to go to Asda today to pick up garlic, what a great excuse right?  What I really went there for was to get some George polishes for friends.

I picked up two jewel tone nail polishes in Hoax and Under the Sea.  They looked gorgeous in the bottle, and I wanted to show you all just how great these inexpensive polishes were like:

While I was there, I also saw a really well behaved and HUGE German Shepherd that looked just like my Oscar, just 10 times the size of him lol

Now only if Oscar would sit there still if I left him outside a shop. Fat chance really.

What's that in the sky? It's.....SPACE NAILS!

OK. So I have a bit of an obsession about space things right now.  First it started with a gift exchange on a forum themed as "Secret Astronaut", then it was watching this movie called "Sunshine", playing with left over glow and dark star stickers (yep I regress to a child some days :p), and now it's SPACE NAILS!

Here's my first try on space nails. I found the tutorial on nails by asami and I loved the idea.  I did however deviate from her rules a bit to get different effects.

just testing out different options with different polishes

Here's a set I made for a friend:

Materials used:

Kitchen towel/paper towel

and 

Polishes:

Chanel Black Satin

George - Twister (matt finish)

Sally Hansen - DVD

Funky Fingers - Baby Baby Baby

OPI - Original DS

Revlon - Belle

Barry M - Hologram hexagram

Color Club - Worth the risque

Color Club - Revvvolution

Now Asami's rules were very clear and easy:

1. First apply matte black nail polish. Any dark colour works on the bottom, if you really want to make it matte, you can just get a matte finisher as well.  My recommendation is going to Asda and picking up their black nail polish and matte finisher for only £2 combined.

2. Take a holographic polish and place onto a patterened napkin/paper towel and in a sponging effect start dabbing the nails.

3.  Take a duochrome polish and do the same as above

Step 2 and 3 will give that misty floating space mass effect

4. Apply any glitter polish.  This will mimick the stars. I was lucky to have a hologram glitter, so I placed the Barry M hologram hexagram first and then topped it again with Revlon Belle.

What I love the best about Space nails is that, no 2 nails will look the same.  It's an easy and very cool looking nail art.  As much as I like nail art, I find a lot of it is too "kawaii" inspired, and some of the more extreme kawaii just isn't my style. So this type of nail art is just what I like.

I'll be doing a lot more of these space nails. I need to find a cheap black polish, since I don't want to use up my entire bottle of Chanel just for this haha.  I'll be going to Asda and picking up my £1 black polish from the George line soon.

Have you guys tried space nails? What techniques and/or polishes do you use?

NOTD: George - Troll polish & Franken"mistake"stein polish

You know  you're an addict if you go grocery shopping and you come back nail polish.
Come on...raise your hand if you do this lol

Admitting the addiction is the first step to recover,
well in my case, perhaps I'm enjoying this addiction far too much. :p

Today I'm wearing Troll, a matte finish polish from George. It's inexpensive, and formula is great. The bottle is tiny, so you're really not getting that great of a deal, but at least it's not like Le Metier polishes and you end up paying an arm and a leg.

I like this one, because I have not tried a coloured matte finish polish before.  I've always stuck with the black or dark steel/greys, but this one is nice.
Sorry if everyone is wearing pastels and spring colours, I just wear what I want, doesn't matter the season really.

Here she is...

So I realised that I never wear my wedding ring at home and none of my pictures show my ring, but yes I am married and happily too (Duncan..did you hear that? :p).

So before painting my nails, I had this mini bottle of no name clear polish given to me, so I decided to spruce it up. First I added some Inglot pigments, and I should have left it at that, but I wanted this copper glitter that I got recently into the polish, well that was a huge mistake....color clash and not in a good way either.  This is pre-screw up, here is my Franken"mistake"stein polish...

It was a nice pink and gold duochrome that I messed up. Oh well! Back to the labs!