The Lacquer Legion After Dark: Vampire Nails

It's been a while since I've participated in The Lacquer Legion monthly challenge! This month's subject is After Dark and since I love everything Halloween related, I couldn't resist joining in. To make it a bit easier for me, I got my inspiration from a great nail artist: Christina from Starfish on the Beach. She did this beautifully creepy vampire teeth design for Halloween 2013 and I decided to recreate it on my current manicure, which is Essie - Leading Lady. I used black nail polish and white acrylic paint for the design and added one coat of Sally Hansen - Insta-Dri on top. You can find all of the other designs of this challenge with the hashtag #LLAfterDark.

My previous designs for The Lacquer Legion:

#LLGlam

#LLAdoration

#LLReinvention

Incoco: Real Nail Polish Strips - Bone Rattling #2 UPDATE

This is the promised update for my review on Incoco Real Nail Polish Strips. I was wearing the design Bone Rattling for six complete days and I only removed them because I got tired of the design. I'm very impressed by the durability of these strips! I added pictures from a top view, which is how usually other people will look at your nails. There was a bit of tip wear already from the beginning due to the filing of the strips, but this tip wear didn't get significantly worse in six days. Then I made some pictures from the front perspective where you can see the tip wear really good. I didn't use top coat at any time and even though there was tip wear, I couldn't feel rough edges on the tips of my nails. The only thing that was a bit annoying for me, was the edge at the cuticle line, because it was rather sharp and my hair got stuck there a lot. I will post the second design from Incoco including my experience with nail polish remover later today.

Incoco: Real Nail Polish Strips - Bone Rattling (Halloween Collection/Glow in the Dark)

Today's post is the first (incomplete) part of a review on Incoco Real Nail Polish Strips. Incoco sent me two of their designs to review and today I will start with the first one, which is part of their Halloween collection and is called Bone Rattling. This glow in the dark design is sold for $ 9.99 but some of the other designs are $7.99. Incoco strips are made of real nail polish and this is quite the advantage over the usual nail strips. These were the first real polish strips that I tried and I'm really impressed. This review is just for the time being though, because I'm only wearing the strips for 24 hours now and I can't say much about durability. I will keep wearing them and update the review with the next design. What I can say for now is that the application was flawless, there were no wrinkles at all and it took me about 20 minutes to do all my nails. I followed the instructions for application which you can find here. This means that I used the file to remove the excess strip and I still don't like this part. But I saw something awesome over at Wacky Laki: she removed the excess with acetone and I'm definitely going to try this with the next design. I wanted to follow the exact steps for the first review though. So the plan for the second part of this review is to remove the excess with acetone and then add top coat, because I do actually have a bit of tip wear already. Stay tuned for the complete review! 

They glow really strong and fast!


Happy Halloween! 

Halloween: Ripped Zombie Nails (Warning: Nasty!)

After seeing some pretty awesome Massacre Nails on Rundum Schön with a link to a Tutorial by Klaire de Lys for a ripped up nail I decided to try some real Halloween nails this year as well. It can't always be cute and pretty, right? And since my Water Decals didn't arrive yet, I started to paint my nails in a different way for once. I took some cheap fake nails, broke them in two pieces and glued them onto my natural nails with clear nail polish (since I don't own lash glue). Then, as shown in the video, I used red lipstick, fluid blush and food coloring to create bloody skin. As soon as my fake nails dried, I used green and grey eyeshadow to color them and my hand. I had so much fun doing these, but of course I didn't leave the house like this. We don't celebrate Halloween in Switzerland, so me dressing up as a Zombie and going out at night would have been a bit weird. 

Halloween Mummy Pusheen Nails

As promised, Pusheen is back today! Inspired by their new post "Lazy costume ideas (for your cat)" I created some Mummy Pusheen nails. It felt a bit weird at first, painting toilet paper on my nails, but then again it's Pusheen, so I didn't mind. I used Essence - Ice Eyes Baby as my base coat, which is a shimmering light grey of a last year limited edition. I used light grey because I somehow forgot to pack my pink nail polish in my bag and since I didn't paint these at home I had to make do with my light grey. I used two coats and then one coat of Essie - Good To Go which led to a lot of shrinkage. I tried to make the most out of it with clean-up later, but it was still annoying. Then I used acrylic paint to make Pusheen. I started with white paint to do all the outlines, filled them in and then started to paint the details. On top is one more coat of Good To Go.

I love this cat so much! :) 

Halloween Stamping: Scream

This is one of my favorite stamping designs on my Dashica Big Sdp D plate and it fits perfectly for Halloween. I wasn't sure about my color choice first and I tried a few with orange and purple, pink and black etc. but then I decided that a simple black and white would fit best for this design. I started with three coats of Essie - Blanc to get a very opaque base for my stamping. Then I added one coat of Essie - Good To Go to let it dry completely and to protect my base in case something went wrong with the stamping. After that I used Wet 'n' Wild - Black Creme and the above-mentioned design to create the scary faces on my base. On top is one coat of Essence BTGN Top Sealer. 

I'm planning on doing two more Halloween designs this year, one tomorrow and one on Wednesday. I can tell you that Pusheen will be involved once again and hopefully some pretty water decals I ordered on Ebay. I really hope they will be here in time! After that I'm done with Halloween and will move on to snowflakes, reindeers and Co! Since we already had our first snowfall here I think that moving on to winter will be fine ;) 

Halloween Water Marble

And some more Halloween nails! The classic Halloween colors combined in one Water Marble. Before I started on my own nails, I tried three different purple nail polishes on a plastic nail. I tried Essence - Passion For Fashion which would have been exactly what I was going for - in the bottle. Through the marbling however it got really bright and almost sheer. Next was Catrice - Doris' Darling which worked fine for marbling but didn't fit with my orange. So I tried Manhattan - Acai Power Berry, a dark purplish blue which turned out to be the perfect fit. As a base I used two coats of Essie - Blanc and then started the marbling with China Glaze - Papaya Punch, p2 - Eternal and Manhattan - Acai Power Berry. On top is one coat of Essence - BTGN Top Sealer

To see the marbling technique I used in this design, have a look at her video. 

Halloween Ruffian Nails feat. China Glaze - Ick-A-Bod-Y

I guess I don't longer need to apologise for being early with Halloween designs, since it is approaching fast now. So here is a very simple and fast Halloween designs including the perfect Halloween nail polish by China Glaze. I've just realised I haven't used this since last Halloween, shame on me! But then again the polish is kind of difficult to combine with summer or spring, even winter themed designs. Anyway, it is still in perfect condition and I decided to use it in a Ruffian design. I started with two coats of Wet 'n' Wild - Black Creme and then did the bow with two coats of China Glaze - Ick-A-Bod-Y. On top is one coat of Essie - Good To Go. I had the greatest idea and mixed my remaining drops of my old GTG bottle into my current bottle which is now coming to an end slowly. Then I added some drops of nail polish thinner (p2) and got an almost new Good To Go. I hope it won't influence the fast-drying formula, we'll see! 

As you can see I got into the spirit of bottle pictures with my Essie Girls Design! I really love the lighting with this hand position and I think I might keep it up in the future. Also, it is nice to see how the polish looks like in the bottle, I have actually no idea why I stopped doing that. 

By the way I am at the moment in the top ten of the Essie Girls contest! Thank you so much for voting and please vote some more if you can! 

Click here to vote for my nails:
http://www.facebook.com/essieSwitzerland/app_260985374013280

Have a nice weekend! 

Día De Los Muertos / Day Of The Dead - Sugar Skull Nails

I hope you're not bored with Mexican themed nails, because there's more where that came from! I wanted to do Sugar Skull nails since I first saw them. They're so colorful and that's always a good reason for nail art. Sugar Skulls are part of the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, which is honoring the deceased. 

I originally planned to go for full Sugar Skull nails but that would have been a lot of work, especially with my weak hand. So I just went for an accent nail with one Sugar Skull while leaving my other nails with a simple, matching design. The accent nail is done with acrylic paint on one coat of Wet 'n' Wild - Black Creme. My other nails are done with two coats of H&M - All Eyes On Me. Then I added striping tape and filled out the triangle with Black Creme. On top of each triangle I placed a single stud. As always on top is one coat of Essie - Good To Go. 

Check out my Mexican tag, if you are interested in more Mexican related nail art! 

Thank you for reading!

Reasons Pusheen Loves Fall: Halloween / Fall Pusheen Nails

I know, I might be a little early for Halloween this year, but I am already in the mood for Christmas so time can't really go fast enough now. ;) 

The newest post on the Pusheen blog really caught my eye and I knew right away I had to do some fall/Halloween inspired Pusheen nail art. Check out my earlier Fancy Pusheen Nails and my Mexican Pusheen Nails as well, if you like that cat as much as I do! 

You can find the post I'm talking about here: Reasons Pusheen loves Fall! Too cute to be true. I used China Glaze - Papaya Punch as my base color, as always when it comes to orange. Everything else is done with acrylic paint and a nail art brush. 

If you're not too sure about my pinky and index finger nails, they're supposed to be leaves, as in the ones that Pusheen is sitting in and eating pie. I left out the pie though, since Pusheen was already sweet enough ;)