Happy Halloween!

Today is halloween, a not super celebrated holiday here in Sweden (at least compared to the states) but I still think it is fun! I decided to do two pairs of halloween-themed nails this year, and here you have the first ones!

My newly purchased glitter polish from Urban Outfitters W.I.P (name Hooch) felt just perfect for halloween in terms of colours. I am also a big fan of orange so this mani really tickles me, so to speak. It has been a long time since I've done a glitter gradient, so I thought that the time was here. 

This design is really pretty and super easy. It also fits great on my new nail shape. I started off with an ordinary black and then painted only the tips with the glitter polish. For the next layer I painted even further down the nail, making the coverage of the glitter to build up, the closer to the tip it came. I finished off with a quick-drying top coat as usual.

I was kind of inspired by the famous halloween-candy candy corns. I had never ever even heard of these cute sweets until some years ago. Apparently they are really popular across the Atlantic, and a must for many in this time of the year. I still haven't seen them with my own eyes but I will one day, that is now on my bucket list, haha!

Just because I love this polish so much I will show you a close-up picture. It surely is a cool polish but it is even cooler to look at up close. I love the 3D effect the different layers creates.

Kiko 286

I just realized that now that I have changed my nail shape, I can't post old manis and pretend that they're done recently haha. I have a lot of pictures from before I started this blog, so old pics will probably be posted just as much as new ones, if not even more. I also am very proud of some prior nails I've done and I feel like it would be a shame not to show them here, even if they aren't painted of late.

Today I will show you my first try at my new Kiko polishes. 286 is a deep red which leans a bit to purple, and it is really pretty. There is something classic and timeless about red nails, especially in a darker shade. I just felt so fancy and exclusive wearing this polish!

It was easy to apply and had a fantastic opacity, I think I could have gotten away with just one coat if I had been a little bit bolder and done a thicker coat. I wasn't though so I ended up with two coats this time. I topped it with the top coat HK Girl Glisten & Glow as usual.

If I should say something negative about this polish, I would like to complain a bit about the bleeding. Despite the easy applying, I am not a professional so of coure I mess it up one a few places, which in turn requires clean-up. The bleeding made it pretty hard to do a nice clean-up, and as you may have noticed I didn't got my cuticles entirely clean. It also took a hell amount of time to remove and stained really bad. But do not get discourage now, the beauty of this nail polish was actually worth the aftermaths.

New in!

With a collection of 200+ nail polishes, I try to restrain myself from getting myself more. Sometimes it works fine, other times, not as fine. To my defense I can say that my most recent newbies have either been gifts or on sale - one must take the chance when it appears, right?

First of all I will show you five polishes from Kiko Milano Cosmetics, that I got from my father and his girlfriend after their trip to Italy earlier this autumn. These are actually my firsts from this brand, and I am very pleased with them. The formula was great, the brushes really easy to wield and the opacity awesome, they all got full coverage with two coats. I also love the colours, for me they feel totally right for the season and they also look nice beside each other. Maybe they could make a nice skittle mani together?

Kiko 286, 357, 279, 343 and 333.

Last weekend I and my friend Ida made a little trip down to our capital - Stockholm! Of course we went shopping and I found some real bargains. The China Glaze classic For Audrey for only 30SEK at H&M? Yes, thank you. Visiting some fancier stores didn't disappoint either - a beautiful orange glitter polish by Urban Outfitters W.I.P and three creams from & other stories - all on sale! You can expect to see some nails involving these polishes very soon!

China Glaze For Audrey, W.I.P Hooch, & other stories Swanskin Beige, Lake Orange and Lawn Green.

Claws

Yesterday I did something I haven't done for as long as my nail career stretches - I changed my nail shape. It was all very spontaneous, after some time with my edges and corners chipping and breaking more than usual, I figuered that maybe it was time to try something new. I googled how to get a stiletto/almond nail shape (I will take no risk and improvise this change) on the Wednesday and after school on Thursday I went and bought the roughest nail file I could find. The whole process from start to finish took about 45 minutes, but it was totally worth it. I followed Ariane's video tutorial and started with thin, white outlines to make the shaping easier. I used a file from Depend Cosmetics and it worked great, I can recomnd it to all of you, really easy to manoeuvre.

I am so so pleased with the result and now I just can't figure out why I haven't done this earlier, haha. My nails look so pretty, even without polish. I kind of feel like madamluck (go check her out, super talented woman!), with poorly nail art skills in comparison though. ;)

Glow in colour

Last Friday I and some of my friends went to a quite special event, it doesn't usually happen much in this small town of ours. The event was something called Life in Color - a house and paint festival, for the first time in Sweden! It wasn't really what we expected but it was super fun and we danced, sang and jumped for 5+ hours - until the very end. Give it a quick google if you want to know more.

Of course I had done my nails in honour to this special event. When I turned 18 back in April, I got two glow in the dark polishes from my friend Amanda. I have obviously tried them since then but havn't really had a good opportunity to really try them if you know what I mean? But this was my (nail's) time to shine.

I started off with a pretty thick coat of white to get a nice coverage, when the green polish is a jelly and very sheer. I decided to go with three coats of the green polish on top of the white, and finished with the colour you can see on the photos, which is much lighter than it shows in the bottle. The polish was really thick and took an extremely long time to dry. Despite this, it was very easy and nice to apply, and together with the strong effect it weighs up the disadvantages.

After reading maaany tutorials of how to photograph glow in the dark nails, I tried my best but came out of the dark room without any usuable pictures at all. I just don't understand why it didn't work 'cause the glow was super strong in person, but my camera flatly said no. Fortunately, my friend Sandra took a picture at the actual festival. It is a little bit weird (don't ask what happened) but at least it shows how cool my nails were. B)

Back to black (and white)

Five years. Five years I have waited for new material from my early teen love no. 1 - Tokio Hotel. A couple of weeks ago the wait finally was over. I absolutely love the new album Kings of Suburbia that was released earlier this week. It's really different to their old sound but I really like it, go check it out! 

Now, this is after all a nail blog and not a music blog. In honour to the rebirth of the band I will show you a mani I did a couple of weeks ago, inspiried of the singer and frontman Bill Kaulitz nails that he always wore back in 2008/2009.

Starting of with a classc, all black base, I used a white polish and the bottle's own brush to paint the french tips. I did two layers for full coverage and fixed eventual mistakes with a clean-up brush and a bit of nail polish remover.

Nail polishes used:
Essie Licorice
China Glaze White On White
Seche Vite (top coat)

Aztec Blues

First of all, I just want to say Hi! and welcome to my blog. My name is Emma and the main reason behind this blog is my graduation project, which is, this very blog. I am graduating in June next year so you'll have to put up with me until then, but hopefully I'll continue blogging even after that. Only the future will tell. I also want to say that neither the design nor all of the pages are completely done yet, but I am trying to fix it all as soon as possible. :)

With that said, here is my first blog post! Today I will show you a mani I did last weekend and that I am very pleased with. I started off with a simple blue gradient which I then topped with my all time favourite glitter topper - the perfect Fairy Dust from China Glaze, After a quick layer of top coat I painted the aztec pattern freehand, using my newly purchased striping brush (I am planning to show my brushes in an upcoming post) and white acrylic paint. Finally, I sealed the design with top coat.

Nail polishes used:

Isadora Baby Blue
China Glaze Sunday Funday

A nameless blue from Snow Flake Nail Polish

China Glaze Fairy Dust
Glisten & Glow HK Girl (top coat)