Rainbow Candy Cane Nails

A rainbow candy cane, that's what this mani reminds me of.. just perfect for a sweet tooth like me! The base colour I used is OPI - My Boyfriend Scales Walls and the design is from Bundle Monster plate BM-301. I wanted a gradient look for the stamped lines, below you can find a little how-to.

1. Pick two colours and paint two stripes on the image. Leave some space between the stripes.

2. Swirl the colours together with a toothpick.

3. Grab a scraper and scrape the excess polish off. 

4. Place the stamp on the design, check if it transferred well and roll it over the nail. Work fast or the polish will turn too dry to stamp with. Some parts of the design are missing on my stamp because I had to take pictures. ^_^

Thanks for watching!

products used

white (base): OPI - My Boyfriend Scales Walls

red: Essence - Hot Red

orange: Essence - Andy, You're a Star

yellow: Catrice - Bye, Bye Birdy!

green: NYC - High Line Green

blue: Barry M - Cobalt Blue

purple: China Glaze - Grape Pop

stamping plate: Bundle Monster BM-301

How-To: Pretty Pictures of Polished Paws

One of the subjects I get a lot of questions about is how I photograph my nails and of course I want to share with you how I do this. Be aware that I'm not a photography expert, but I do like to try out different camera settings to get great pictures. Who doesn't love a beautiful and sharp photograph?

The things you need: 

The obvious: a camera

If you want to spend a lot of money on a big fancy camera I won't stop you, but I have good news for those of you who rather spend their money on some pretty nail polishes: a standard compact camera can do the job! I use the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS6, a standard, not too expensive, compact camera. What's really great about this camera is the Leica lens. Leica lenses are known for their excellent quality, which was one of the reasons I bought this camera a couple of years ago. You can try using the camera of your mobile phone, but I can assure you that you'll get the best pictures by using a real photo camera, 'cause well.. after all it's made for only one purpose: making photographs. :)

Light

Another very, and I mean very, important thing is light. Without light no photograph. The only way to get nice and sharp pictures is with decent lighting. You can use the light from a lamp, but I prefer daylight. On very cloudy, rainy days it can be really hard to take good pictures, so I rather take pictures of my nails in sunlight. Especially prismatic polishes photograph well in sunlight (hello rainbow!), but sometimes colours can wash out in full sunlight, so it's not always the best option. Take pictures at different spots (by the window, in the garden, on your balcony..) to find out what works best for you. When you found the perfect spot, remember Tyra Banks' words: 'find the light'! Try to find an angle where you think the light hits your nails the best. Does a nail polish contain a beautiful shimmer? Just move your nails around to find the right angle to capture that shimmer on a photograph. Shadows and reflections are inevitable, but try to keep those to the minimum in your pictures because they can be very distracting.

A calm background

If you want all the attention on the nail polish and your nails try to use a calm background. Clutter in the background will distract the viewer from looking at your beautiful polished paws and we don't want that, do we? I often use a wall or a (clean) table as a backdrop, but you can also use a large piece of (coloured) paper, a beautiful piece of fabric, grass... whatever you want! Just remember to keep it calm.

Explore your camera settings

Most cameras have an auto function, if you want to use that, fine! But believe me, it's so much fun to find out what others things you can do with your camera. As I said before I'm not a photography expert, but I recommend taking a closer look at some camera settings. I focus on the following things:
 ■   macro setting (often displayed with a flower icon on cameras):  this setting is great for taking pictures from up close and ending up with a lot of detail in a picture. Needless to say this setting is awesome for photographing nails;
 ■   white balance: this setting can help you get colour accurate pictures. Different light sources have different colour temperatures, making the colour of your hands/nails look totally different if you change from light source. Play with the different white balance options on your camera to get the most colour accurate pictures;
 ■   ISO values: these values tell you more about the camera's light sensitivity. I won't go into much detail on this one (Google is your friend!), but if you have enough light you can use a low ISO value. The lower the ISO value the finer the grain in your picture - a finer grain means a sharper picture. Most of the time I use the value 100 or 200. But make sure you have steady hands when you're photographing with a low ISO value to avoid blurry pics. This brings me to the next point...

Steady hands or a tripod

To get sharp photographs you need steady hands. So either stop drinking coffee or use a tripod. :O

I hope this post was helpful. If you have an unanswered question let me know in a comment!

How To Clean Up After Polishing Your Nails

Today I have a how-to for you about a frequently asked question:

'How to get that smooth line between the cuticle and the polished area?"

There are great articles about the clean-up method I use on other nail blogs, but I get this question so often I thought it wouldn't hurt to make my own article about it. I don't know who invented this method, but I can assure you: it's brilliant! Edit: I believe it was Megan Chair, so she's brilliant. :) Using corrector pens and q-tips for cleaning up? No more. Well, for me that is.

What you need is a nail polish remover with acetone or pure acetone (make sure there is some acetone involved, it won't work well without it) and a small flat brush. I prefer a flexible slanted brush. This one came in a cheap brush set from eBay, but you can use whatever brush you like. I don't recommend using a fancy expensive brush, because the acetone (not the friendliest stuff) is going to damage your brush. After a couple of months (or weeks, depending on the brush you use and how often you use it) you'll be needing a new one.

I tried my best to polish one nail messy. That was actually quite hard to do as I'm not used to doing it like that anymore, lol. The more often you polish your nails the better it's going to look even without cleaning up, practice makes perfect (yeah, blah-blah, but it's true! ^^ ).

So, here we have a somewhat messy painted nail. Let's do something about that.

• Wait a couple of minutes after applying the last coat of polish or top coat otherwise you'll make the line even messier. Trust me on this one. :)

• Pour a little bit of remover in a small bowl or what I like to do: in the bottle cap of the remover.

• Dip your brush in the remover and dab the excess off on a paper towel. You don't want the remover to drip off your brush and ruin your freshly painted nails. 

• Now I have a couple of pictures to show you how to do the actual clean-up. Swipe your brush lightly from the left side of the nail to the right side to remove any mistakes and create a perfectly smooth line between the cuticle and the polish. You probably have to dip your brush in the remover a couple of times more (don't forget to dab the excess off) and swipe again. If you're wearing glitter polishes or polishes with flakes it will be hard to get a smooth line. So try to be as precise as you can when you're polishing your nails with these.

That's it! A simple trick with a great effect. Now it looks like you see below. Much better, right? 

After using acetone for the clean-up your skin will scream for moisture so you can apply some hand cream or cuticle balsam around the nail now. Be careful not to touch the polished area if it's not completely dry. We don't want to mess up the perfectly cleaned up nails now, do we?

I hope this was helpful! If you have any questions let me know in a comment.

Thanks for watching! :h

How To Wrap Your Tips

Did you know that applying a little bit of polish at the end of the free edge of your nail (the nail tip) makes the nail polish last longer? The free edge of your nail suffers the most from everyday chores, so the polish will damage easily. That is what we call tip wear. A bit of polish on the nail tip can prevent that. And it doesn't only extend the wear of your beautiful polished nails, I think it looks very nice too.

I tried different ways to apply nail polish on my tips. The way I'll show you in this post works best for me and is in my opinion the neatest!

First a picture of my nails with three wrapped/covered tips and one unwrapped (I guess I don't have to explain which one that is :O ). The polish I'm using is Kristi from Zoya, a juicy red.

Ok, let's go.. How to get neat wrapped nail tips without globs of nail polish under the nail?

• Make sure your nail is clean, dry and oil-free;

• Apply your base coat. Also put a little bit on your nail tip (the same way I explain below) to protect the nails from staining;

• Start off with the first layer of polish;

• When you covered your whole nail make sure there's just a little bit of polish left on the brush, wipe off the excess if necessary;

• Place your brush in a 90 degree angle (see picture below). You're going to use the side of the brush for wrapping;

• Wrap those tips! Put the side of the brush against the nail tip and swipe the  brush from left to right to cover the whole tip with polish (see picture below);

• Add a second layer of polish on the nail if necessary. You can wrap your tip again;

• Wrap your tip with a little bit of top coat. Then cover the whole nail with top coat to seal everything.

And voila, you're done! :) Then it looks something like this:

See? Nothing under the nail, just on the tips.

Another picture of the end result:

I hope this howto was helpful! Do you wrap your tips while polishing your nails? Or do you change your nail colour so often it's not worth the extra trouble?

Thanks for watching!

Purple Gradient Nails

sunlight

Today I was going through my nail polish stash and saw a lot of purples which I've never worn (shame on me! Purple is even one of my favourite colours). So I decided to combine those purples in one manicure. One way of using multiple polishes in one manicure is making a gradient with the sponging technique.

I achieved the result above following the next steps: 

1. paint the entire nail with the polish of your choice (I used China Glaze - Grape Pop), let it dry a little;

2. put a drop of another polish of your choice on a piece of paper (I used Color Club - Wild at Heart);

3. dip a little piece of a sponge (I use a kitchen sponge) in the drop of polish;

4. press the sponge gently on your nail, begin at the nail tip and sponge toward the cuticle. Stop when you covered three quarters of the nail, you want to keep a part of the base colour unsponged;

5. repeat step 2, 3 & 4 with a third polish (I used Zoya - Mimi), stop halfway the nail to keep a part of the first sponged layer visible;

6. repeat step 2, 3 & 4 with a fourth polish (I used Orly - Out Of This World), only cover the tip (one quarter) of your nail; 

And you're done! The result can be a bit bumpy, so cover the nail with a thick layer of topcoat.

*of course you don't have to use so much different polishes, even with two colours you can make a nice gradient manicure, but with more colours the result will be more.. eh.. gradient :O 

Thanks for watching and good luck with the sponging! :h