Girly lightning bolt


Hello dear readers, I felt it was time for a lightning bolt mani again :) And it became a quite girly one. The pink base color I used is called Sexy Lady, the silver is Millenium and both are from China Glaze. As my final color I used my favorite black Where's The Soiree? from Color Club. But just black was a little too plain for me today, so I added a black jelly with silver glitters from Hema to it. The silver glitters aren't very visible on the pictures but they are in real life and go well with the silver chrome finish of Millenium, if I do say so myself, haha. Hope you all are having a wonderful day and thanks for reading!

Comparison: Grey/blue pastels


Hi guys, my first comparison post! I noticed I had a couple of pretty similar greyish blue pastels in my stash. To be exactly: China Glaze Seaspray, Eyeko Rain Polish and Essence Got A Secret. I just showed Take Me To Your Cheateau next to the three 'cause I didn't want a naked nail on the picture lol. Anyway, I applied two coats of each polish. The Essence (and Color Club) had the best formula, followed by Sea Spray. Sea Spray applies pretty okay with the first coat, but it tends to get a bit streaky with the second one, still manageable though. And Rain Polish was quite a disappointement. When I bought this polish about a year ago, the greyish blue color it has wasn't very common, so I was very excited about it. But the streaky formula was such a blow that I've never used it more than one time to swatch! And one year later I ordered Sea Spray, 'cause it was "so unique" and "I didn't have anything like it yet"... Boy, was I wrong. They both have that same, very subtle, silver shimmer. And I think Rain Polish is a tiny bit lighter and more blue, but I'm talking about the tiniest bit ever here. So not a soul would notice if you'd wear both on the same hand. And then there's Essence Got A Secret, which is more an obvious grey and lighter than the last mentioned two. Also it doesn't have that blue quality but still it's a beautiful color.

Thanks for reading!

Chacalaca and some glitter


Hi guys, yesterday I showed your the lovely blurple polish Chacalaca from Essence. The dark color seemed great for a base for glitters, so here used it to create a subtle glitter look. (Doesn't sound very logical, right?) I applied two different glitters from Diamond Cosmetics with the unique names Purple Glitter and Turquoise Glitter, then I mattified it with my favorite matt topcoat from Essence.

Essence - Chacalaca


Hi everyone, for today's post I have Chacalaca to show you from Essence's limited collection Whoom Boooom. Chacalaca is a rich and dark but vibrant blurple, kind of like the color of ink. The polish looks darker on the nails than in the bottle, but that doesn't make it less pretty. It's a serious color but because it's so vibrant it's not too serious at the same time, if that makes any sense. The formula was nice and smooth and covered perfectly in two coats.

If Chacalaca looks familiar to you it's probabaly because it's very similar to Essence Just Rock it (which I used here and here). Just Rock It has a tiny bit more blue, but if you wouldn't hold the bottles next to eachother I'd say they're dupes. So if you missed out on Chacalaca you can always get Just Rock It, which is part of the permanent Colour&Go collection. What do you think of today's polish?

Cute skittle

Hi lovely followers, today there are over 500 of you! I can't believe there are so many people following this little blog of mine! I couldn't even fill my wedding with this many people! Not that that has something to do with it or that I'm intending to get married soon, just saying 500 souls is a lot, haha. Thank you so much for reading Nailside and leaving your comments, it makes blogging so much fun! Okay, let's have a look at my NOTD then. (Pic heavy!) For this happy day I decided to do something happy, in a cute way. So I did a skittle in pastels. I suppose the pink on my thumb doesn't count as a pastel, but it fitted the rest so well :) The polishes I used, from my thumb to my pinky:

Essence - Let Me In Pink
Essence - No More Drama
Rimmel - Aqua Cool
China Glaze - For Audrey
Orly - Ancient Jade


And then flakies! ...to add some 'Wooow', lol. This time I used Golden Rose #4


And just for fun a layer of matt topcoat, to see how it would look. After the pics I made it glossy again, because this time I actually liked it better shiny :)

Awesome sauce from Golden Rose: #4

Thanks for stopping by again!

Modern mummy


Hi guys, today is another gloomy day here in the Netherlands so I've got pictures for you from the vault. This is a mummy mani I did a little while ago, I used China Glaze Sea Spray for the base color and LA girl Matte Blue Twilight on top. Matte Blue Twilight was a delight to work with, the formula was quite smooth for a matt polish, so the lines came out surprisingly crisp. And as you can see I didn't use topcoat, because I wanted to keep the matt/shiny contrast :) Thanks for visiting!

Essence skittle


Hi everyone! For today's post I'd like to show you a skittle I made with five Essence polishes from the Colour&Go collection; Perfect Plum, Lime Up!, Trust In Fashion, Just Rock It! and Break Through. Though I don't do skittles very often, I do like them very much. It's so simple, and I love simple :) Just pick five matching colors and BOOM! Awesome result. Zero effort. And it's an efficient way to go through your untrieds. Though I liked my skittle plain, I just couldn't leave it alone. I layered it with a beautiful flaky polish from Golden Rose Scale Effects, #15, which came from my untried stash. It's so pretty! And yes, then I mattified it... I'm really starting to get predictable... Anyways, hope you like it and thanks for reading :)

Golden Rose Scale Effects - #15

China Glaze - Watermelon Rind


Hi guys! For today's post I want to show you China Glaze Watermelon Rind, a beautiful teal/green shimmer with microglitter. I love the color, both glossy and matt, and the application was fine. But there's a but, this polish is really sheer! I had to apply four coats of polish to get it opaque, which is one coat too many for me. Fortunately this is easily fixed by using a green base color underneath. And instead of seeing the sheerness as a con, why not as a pro? It looks pretty as a topcoat too! In the last picture you can see it layered over black. What do you think of Watermelon Rind?

Watermelon Rind mattified

Glitter overload

Hi everyone! Yesterday I showed you swatches of a pretty shimmer polish from Beyu, #325. The blue flecks were gorgeous in the bottle, but unfortunately they didn't show up that well on the nail. So I added more blue bling myself, as you can see in the first picture. It was amazing to look at, but then I wondered how it would look if I added more, different colored glitter... Only one way to find out!

So here's #325 with a blue glitter topper from Claire's.


Then I layered it with a red glitter, also from Claire's...


And finally a coat of Edward from Essence.


Sparkling!

And of course the inevitable matt topcoat, because I can't resist mattified glitter! :)


Thanks for stopping by!

Beyu - #325


Hello dear followers, today was a very gloomy day; really depressing and not good for nice pics! So here are some pictures I made a few weeks ago, on a bright and sunny day. Pictured is two coats of Beyu #325. To me, Beyu is a pretty unfamiliar brand, I've never heard about it from others or seen it on other blogs. Anyway, it has a modest but nice nail polish collection and next to polishes it also sells make-up. Among the nail polish collection are some regular colors (reds and pinks) but also a few quite interesting shimmer and glitter polishes and #325 is one of them. #325 is a dark grey shimmer polish with little, medium blue particles. Unfortunatey the blue isn't as noticeable on the nails as in the bottle, such a shame because it looked so promising! Despite of that I still like it. It's pretty unique and kind of edgy (and would look really gorgeous on short nails!). However, more of that blue wouldn't hurt :P So right after these pics I started sniffing around my stash for something blue to add on top. And how that turned out will be posted tomorrow! Hope you don't hate me now, hahah. Lots of pics! So I had to split it up :) So see you tomorrow!

Beyu #325 was €5.95 for a bottle of 8ml/0.27 fl.oz.

Close-up

Subtle blue shimmer

Evil enemy nails


Hello dear followers! After a superhero mani there should of course be an evil enemy mani as well, hahah. It's still a lightning bolt design, but this time it's used vertically instead of horizontally as a funky French. To achieve this look I placed the tape strips as described in the tutorial. Only to make the pattern vertical, the position of both tape strips had to be twisted 90°, so that's basically it. (In this case I also unintentionally mirrored the design, but that doesn't affect the final look, as long as the design's twisted 90° it will come out vertically.) How to "double" the lightning bolt is a bit difficult to explain (and boring to read, lol) so I will make an individual tutorial on how to do that soon, with pics ;)

The gold base color is China Glaze Millenium, the black Where's The Soiree? from Color Club and the dark silver foil is from Hema (a Dutch department store) and looks pretty similar to China Glaze Jitterbug and OPI Lucerne-tainly Look Marvelous.

My boyfriend thinks the mani is "badass", haha, what are your thoughts?

Superhero nails


Hi guys! On my previous lightning bolt manis I got many comments saying how they have a superhero quality, I really liked the comparison and I do have a thing for stereotypical superhero outfits ;) You know, with the bold colors and graphical patterns. So for today I made actual, intentional superhero nails. And yes, I used my last lightning bolt mani to achieve this look ;) The colors I picked are Diamond Cosmetics Blue Bell, China Glaze Millenium and a red shimmer from Etos, a Dutch drugstore. I really like how it turned out, I think it definitely says superhero! Hahah. This mani would probably work well too with the MAC Wonderwoman polishes, but with a gold lightning bolt in the middle instead of silver. Unfortunately I don't own those cute polishes, but I'll live :) Anyway, hope you guys like it and have a great weekend!

All in!


Hello followers! Second post today. This mani was my entry for a national nailart contest at the Dutch site Girlscene.nl, sponsored by HerĂ´me, a Dutch nailcare brand. HerĂ´me already had many nailcare products and since a while they also have their own nailpolish collection called World Inspired Colours, consisting of 79 polishes, all named after big cities all over the world. The challenge was to let your nailart creation be inspired by such a big city, so guess which city I picked... That's right, Vegas, baby! Though I've never been to Las Vegas, or anywhere in the U.S., movies, TV shows, music, images and internet let you taste a little of what it's like there. So based on that, Vegas (partly) reminds me of money, luxery, odds/luck, decadence and glitter, all in the surounding of hundreds of casino's. And that's what I wanted to capture on my nails. I spent ages on this mani, but the price to be won would be worth it! The winner of the contest would receive the entire W.I.C. collection of 79 polishes! So all this time I had my fingers crossed... hoping they'd pick me out of all the entries... Though my hopes weren't high, since they must've had hundreds of entries. But! Today I received an e-mail from Girlscene... saying I had won! My Las Vegas mani had actually been chosen as winner of the contest! I just couldn't believe it and still don't. I've never won anything besides small coloring-contests when I was little, haha. So that e-mail really made my day... My week! Month! Year! You know... And it feels like a little make-up for not winning Orlica's Disney contest, hahah :P

All the designs are freehanded except for the index finger which needed a little help from tape. And that little shiny thing on my ringfinger is a rhinestone, pretending to be a roulette ball.

Thanks for reading this looong post, if you've made it this far, hahah. And have a great night :)

Blue and silver lightning bolt


Hi everyone! Today I have another lightning bolt mani to show, because frankly I'm still hooked :) And I hope you guys aren't bored with this design yet, because I've got more of 'em coming up this week... Mwuahahaha... This time I used China Glaze Millenium for the tips and the blue is Diamond Cosmetics' Blue Bell, which is quite similar to Essence's Chuck, so I'll have to do a comparison of those two soon.

Thanks for visiting!

Diamond Cosmetics - Sparkling Sherry


Great job, Diamond Cosmetics! Sparkling Sherry is a stunning, berry-pink foil and what every polish should be like. It covers in one coat, almost applies itself and dries fast. No clean-up necessary. It's so pigmented, so vibrant, so gorgeous, A+!


Bourjois - Bleu Asphalte


Hi everyone! For this post I want to show you a beautiful, modern polish from Bourjois: Bleu Asphalte. I think the name fits the smokey color very well, at first you'd think it's a 'regular' dark grey, but there's definitely hints of blue/purple in it. Blurple-tinted greys like this one are very popular at the moment and I didn't own anything like it yet so I'm happy to have Bleu Asphalte now. I had my eyes on this polish for a while, but I've had pretty bad experiences with Bourjois nailpolish, so I was hesitant about buying it. I've tried out six different polishes of the brand, and five of them were either streaky, creating bald spots or had a horrible drying time. And on top of that, they're not the cheapest out there either with €8.50 per bottle of 0.3 fl.oz./9ml or 0.33 fl.oz./10ml. But I loved the color of this one so much and I'd get the second polish for free, so I gave in... But this time the formula surprised me in a good way, it wasn't too thick or runny, just right in the middle and two coats were needed for perfect coverage. So I'm happy. And in a future post I'll show you that second polish I got, it's a muted blue with shimmer... Yummy! Thanks for reading :)

Laced up!


Hello everyone! For today I'd like to show you another tape mani I did last week and it's pink :) Basically the (not so original) title of this post explains it all. The design wasn't intended as laces but it was the only thing that crossed my mind seeing the outcome. The design is, again, very simple. I used four thin strips for each nail, which I've placed on the surface in two X shapes. I only wanted the pattern at the beginning of the nail, so I left the tips blank. I'm happy about how this look turned out, it's pretty girly, especially in pink, but it can also be grungy in dark, vampy colors, combined with metallics.

And another thing about this mani is it's great for solving tipwear AND outgrow of your old mani, so it's a win-win-win-situation! Lol. The polishes I used are Essence Let Me In Pink and China Glaze Designer Satin for the top color. Have a nice day!

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