NOTD: OPI Stay the Night Liquid Sand

A few weeks ago I posted here about the OPI Liquid Sand collection, and tried out Can't Let Go. The rest of the collection has so far sat untouched in one of my many make-up drawers, so I decided to give a different one a go today, Stay The Night. Textured nails are still really popular at the moment, and I am loving the OPI ones. One review of this, I can't remember whose, said it reminded her of scabs (lovely!) but I really like it! Stay The Night is a matte black sprinkled with red glitter. You need a good few coats to get a strong effect (I used 3), but you get a lovely textured finish. I think this would be lovely for a night out, its just glittery enough, without being over the top.

I found these wore really well last time and I got a good 3 days wear out of Can't Let Go, which is a lot for me! They aren't as hard to remove as glitter polishes either, which is a bonus!

What do you all think? Which is your favourite textured polish, or are you not loving them?

Make-Up Free March: Week 1

Anyone who has been reading my blog will know that I am on a spending ban for beauty and make-up products for March. I thought I would post a quick update on my first weeks progress...basically I failed. I have been really bored between working and attempting to write my dissertation, so I felt like I needed a treat to cheer me up!

Polished Criminails was having a blog sale, so I ended up buying 5 polishes, although they only came to the bargain price of £14.50 and would have been much more than that to buy new, I still should have resisted!

Apart from that I have done really well and the only other new product I have got was the Elemis moisturiser which is free with Cosmopolitan at the moment, so technically I didn't buy it!

I am a little disappointed that I couldn't even last the first week, but next week shall be better! I am struggling a little with things to write about though, and seem to only be posting my NOTD at the moment, although I have a few things I am using which  will be reviewing soon!

Total beauty spends this week: £14.50

I am lusting after: The new Models Own Fruit Pastel polishes! Scented pastel colours? Yes please!! They look amazing and although I am tempted to pre-order them, luckily they don't come out until near the end of March so I am convincing myself to wait! I love the look of the purple and blue ones!

Wish me look for next week! Hopefully I will manage to resist buying anything else new!!

NOTD: NYC Lights-Camera-Glitter

All I seem to be posting recently are NOTD posts, but its harder than I thought to blog without buying anything new! Although I do have a few things I am trying out and will be reviewing soon. For today's NOTD I dug out a glitter polish as I haven't really been using glitter recently and this is one which had really surprised me. I hadn't (and still haven't, maybe I should, after my spending ban of course!) paid much attention to NYC as a brand, just passed the stand in Superdrug, looking for my old favourites. This glitter caught my eye though, just sitting there among all the plain nail polishes. I have used it a few times now and think its a beautiful mix of colours and a lovely polish for £2.49!

I used it today over the Blueberry Barry M Gelly so that the glitter would really stand out. You get tonnes of silver sparkle with lilac and blue glitter pieces. As a top coat I love this polish just for the amount of glitter you get. You do have to place the pieces but I find it better to do this with most glitters anyway. It also dries really quickly compared to other thick glitter polishes.

Has anyone else tried NYC polishes? Are the rest of them worth a try?

Barry M Gradient Nails

I ended up giving in and buying the entire new range of Barry M Gellys. I didn't intend to get them but they were on offer and I love the Gelly polishes! I haven't really done anything interesting with my nails recently as I have been using a lot of textured polishes, so today I thought I'd go back to an old favourite, gradients. I thought the new Gelly colours would make a lovely summery gradient effect, so this time I have used Dragon Fruit as it is a lovely pink with a bit of shimmer, and thought it would look nice with Blackberry for a nice contrast. I'm sure everyone knows how to do these by now but I'm going to stick a quick description in of how I did them.

In order to create the gradient effect I first painted my nails with a coat of Dragon Fruit and let that properly dry.

I then cut small sections out of a normal cosmetic sponge. I got a huge bag of these from Bodycare for about £1.50 ages ago and they are perfect for nail art, I don't really use them for anything else. I cut them down as I think its easier to work out where you want the gradient to go.

Paint onto the sponge the stripes of colour you want in the gradient, not using too much polish though or it will drip. Then dab the sponge onto your nail, blending the edges between colours. You can build this up until you are happy with the colour. I sometimes find the colour on the tip of my nail isn't dark enough so you can sponge this on alone to get a deeper colour if you need to.

Wait for the whole lot to dry and add a thick coat (or two coats) of top coat to smooth out the effect as it can dry bumpy. This always makes a huge mess so I use cotton buds (the pointy end ones) dipped in nail polish remover to clean up with.

I love this colour mix, the contrast between light and dark makes a really gorgeous effect! I love gradients and will be using some more summery colours for them, they look so pretty!