Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2015

It's almost 2015! I honestly can't believe how fast 2014 went by! For my last design of the year I have a New Year's Eve design for you.


Monday, December 29, 2014

Cozy Christmas Sweater

It has come to my attention that I've been using a lot of blue for my holiday manicures. While I do love that colour I think it's about time to mix it up with some pastel pink!

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Rudolph

Happy Christmas Eve! Who else is really excited for tomorrow? One of my favourite things about Christmas is all the holiday specials that are on. I can basically quote the entire half hour animated "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," and have watched Frosty the Snowman more times that I'd like to admit. One of the other Christmas specials that I love to watch is Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which is what today's design is based on!



Saturday, December 20, 2014

Rustic Reindeer

Good news: I'm finally finished exams! Yay!! I finally have time to do things that are not studying! As soon as I finished my last exam I hopped on a bus and headed to the mall to get started on my Christmas shopping and when I got home from doing that I finally had time to redo my nails. 
More holiday designs for you today, this time featuring a deer instead of a polar bear.


Thursday, December 11, 2014

Warm Wishes

Second winter design! I'm really excited about this one because it's a combination of sweater nails (which I've been meaning to do forever) and tea which are basically my two winter essentials. How is tea involved in this you may ask? Well, after seeing a ton of super cute Tim Horton's holiday cups around campus I picked up a tea for myself so that I could use the cup as reference for a design!



Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Holiday Houndstooth

It's my first holiday design of the year! I feel like I'm a little behind with my holiday manicures but exam season started last Friday so I've been studying a lot and haven't had much time for anything else (even though I would have much preferred pouring over nail polish colour choices than accounting notes).

This design is mostly an excuse to try out a new polish that I picked up, Glametal by Ciaté.



Sunday, November 30, 2014

Not Everyone's Cup of Tea

Today is the last day of November which means this is also the last design in my "Inspired By" series!
It's kind of bittersweet seeing this series come to an end because on one hand it's been so much fun recreating some of my favourite artists' designs but on the other I'll be doing original designs again! Yay!

For my last muse of the month I had to recreate a design by the amazing Ladycrappo! I'm always blown away by her her designs; they're so creative, detailed and classy. I had a hard time deciding between two of her designs but I finally settled on her bondage and floral one because my nails aren't quite long enough (and aren't the right shape) to do the other.



Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Bamboo

For the third manicure in my "Inspired By" series I decided to recreate a design from the amazingly talented @anna_xiewei on Instagram! I wish I had her talent for painting ridiculously detailed portraits on nails but sadly I do not. Instead I decided to recreate this cute bamboo design of hers that I love!


Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Nailed It

I have another Inspired-By design for you guys today and this time around my muse is Nina from Ninanailedit!
She's well known for her amazing floral and tribal designs and though I am pretty in love with those I decided to recreate this design of hers that's heavy on caviar beads and charms.


Thursday, November 13, 2014

Dress to Kilt

I think this is the first design I'm posting in November that's actually on my own nails - how have I not posted in so long?! I'll definitely try to get a few designs done this weekend to make up for it.

All of my creativity recently has been going into schoolwork and projects so I decided to give myself a break from making an original design and instead decided to do a recreation of a design by @nailove2807 on Instagram whose designs I always love!



Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Nails for Friends: Baroque and Snoopy

Midterms are finally almost over! Yay!
Since midterms are basically over and I have (a little bit) more free time now, I went over to see some of my friends whom I haven't seen in over a month and did their nails!



Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Boo-tiful

Halloween is just around the corner! Less than 3 days! Are you guys as excited as I am?
Speaking of things I'm excited about - I may be a little biased in this matter since they're my own nails - but I'm really excited to share this super cute Halloween design with you guys! After my previous manicure with the glow-in-the-dark bats I was really undecided about whether I wanted to go for a creepy or a cute design this time around. As much as I love a good, creepy Halloween design, I have about zero resistance to cute things and so this happened!
(Warning: I may have went a bit overboard with the amount of pictures I took of this design so be prepared!)


Thursday, October 23, 2014

Not a Morning Person

It's finally time for the first Halloween manicure of the season!
My goal is to get three Halloween manicures in this year so hopefully I'll be able to squeeze the next two into the following week.


Thursday, October 16, 2014

Argyle

I did a guest post for Nerdy & Fleurty this week!
You can check out the full post for that here, and you can see the condensed version below!



Monday, October 13, 2014

19

Hey guys! So you might have figured out from my lack of posts recently that October is a busy month for me. Between midterms, assignments, (Canadian) Thanksgiving and Halloween it's also the month of a thousand birthday's including my own!
Between studying on Saturday and celebrating my birthday on Sunday I took some time out to do this birthday design!


Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Apple of my Eye

Today I have a bit of a continuation of my summer fruit obsession. I was so close to doing this design in the summer to go with the whole fruit thing, but I felt like apples were more of a fall fruit so I forced myself to hold off.


NYAN Turns Two!



Hey guys! I'm really excited today because it's the second anniversary of the blog! I can't believe I've been doing this for two years already; it seems like just yesterday that I was making my very first post!

I don't think I really made a long post about the 1 year anniversary of the blog last year so I'm going to take this opportunity to take a quick look back over some of (what I think are) the highlights of the past two years!


Thursday, September 25, 2014

Autumn Leaves

It's officially fall! Yay!
Well, kind of yay. I personally like summer a little better because of the warm weather (and no school work!) but autumn does have it's good qualities as well. Sweatshirts, darker nail polish colour palettes and my birthday all make my list of good things about the season.

To kick off the season I have a leaf-inspired design for you!



Thursday, September 18, 2014

Holler

Welcome back to me! I've been m.i.a. from the nail art scene for over a week because University started again and it's been kicking my butt. It's weird to actually have to go to class and hand in projects after being off for 4 months; it's hard getting back into that rhythm!

But on a brighter note I finally managed to find some time to do my nails and it was just in time for TaeTiSeo's comeback! Super excited about it and thus I just had to do a design inspired by their title track Holler.



Monday, September 08, 2014

Product Review: Silver Flat-Back Rhinestones

More reviews for Born Pretty Store! Don't forget to check out their nail art section for the product I'm reviewing as well as other cool items!

Today I have some silver rhinestones to review. I'm not going to lie, I literally spent over an hour trying to figure out just what to do with these rhinestones. In the end I decided on this super cute design!

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Product Review: Wave French Nail Tip Guides

Welcome to this week's edition of BPS product reviews! As always, you can check out their nail art section for the product I'm reviewing as well as other cool items.

Today I have some french tip guides to review. I had a plan on what to do with them from the beginning - a scaled gradient! I'm probably a little late to this trend, but I just had to try it out myself and this was the perfect opportunity.

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Saturday, August 30, 2014

Mani Swap!

I'm super excited to share my first ever mani swap with you guys!
I've never done one before but they've always looked fun, so I was ecstatic when Robin of Roaringnails agreed to do this swap with me!


We teamed up to recreate each other's designs; she chose to recreate my Naughty Nautical design and I chose to recreate her awesome leopard print design!



Thursday, August 28, 2014

Under the Sea

I can't believe summer is almost over already!
I mean, I have had four months off but it just feels like it went by so quickly. I'm definitely not ready for school to start again! So to take my mind off of the impending school year, I decided to do a really summery, beachy manicure!


Monday, August 25, 2014

Then and Now: Scaled Down

Hello, hello! I've been gone for a week but for good reason: my cousin was getting married in Scotland and I was at the wedding!
My best friend let me borrow her prom dress for the wedding and I accessorized with black and gold; obviously my nails needed to match!



Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Electric Shock

The weather around here hasn't been the best this summer, it's been overcast and threatening to rain more days than I can count and I've been trying to counteract this depressing weather with cute, bright nails.
This week I decided to do something different and instead embrace the rain!

Friday, August 15, 2014

A Whale of a Time

Still haven't been feeling very inspired lately so I decided to do a design based off of a notepad I have.

Saturday, August 09, 2014

Going Bananas

More pop art, more fruit. That's pretty much all there is to this manicure.


Wednesday, August 06, 2014

L(ove)

Question: what do you do while waiting over a day for a confirmation email?
Answer: You obviously do a nail art design based on the page you want to log into but can't wiTHOUT THE EMAIL.

Basically that's how I ended up doing this design in honour of Exo getting an official fan club name, exo-l.

Monday, August 04, 2014

Sunset Boulevard

I wasn't feeling very inspired this week so I turned to pinterest to find some patterns to remedy that. I ended up settling on a design based on this pattern:



I originally tried to do the design with all the colours in the gradient, but it wasn't looking very good so I focused on just the pinks.


Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Naughty Nautical

I was going through my polishes the other day when I ran across my bottle of Essie's Naughty Nautical and fell in love with the colour all over again. I've had the polish since last summer but I've hardly used it because of it's slight shimmer. Now don't get me wrong - I love shimmer - but I can never seem to work it into a design. With that in mind I was determined to create a design just for this super pretty, shimmery colour.


Given the name I obviously had to do something nautical with it so this is what I came up with. 

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Darling

Technically I'm a little late with this since Girl's Day had their comeback over a week ago, but I still wanted to do something for their super cute new song Darling!


Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Product Review: Floral Lace Water Decals

More reviews for Born Pretty; as always don't forget to check out their Nail Art section for other cool products.

Today I tried out some lace and floral water decals. When I asked to try them out I had a faint idea in my head about making a tea part theme and I kind of expanded that to Alice in Wonderland Tea Party.

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The decals come in a 1 sheet package with 20 individual decals per sheet.

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There are 5 different decal designs on sheet #Y148: 3 large, floral, corner pieces that are shaped to be positioned at the edge of your nail; and 2 straight lace decals, one of which contains the writing "All is Well."

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Sorry the photo is so dark, it was hard to see the words with a lighter picture. This brings me to my first point about these decals. Even before any attempts at applying them they are very hard to see on the sheet since they're white. It was difficult cutting around them as the only way you can really tell where you should be cutting is from the way the light hits the decals vs. the paper backing.

With that being said, once the decals were cut out the application was ok, (they separated from the backing easily and didn't adhere to the nail too quickly). I did have some issues with getting the larger decals to lie flat though, and I think it's because of their size. They were a bit too big for my nail and I ended up just making sure it was as flat as possible and using a paint brush dipped in acetone to "trim" the edges a bit. After applying the top coat they seemed to flatten out a bit more, though, and integrated well with the polish.

I had the opposite problem with the smaller, straight decals: they were too small for my nails!

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They didn't have the length to go across the whole nail and I didn't really want to use another whole decal for like 3 mm of uncovered nail. The decals might have fit across my pinky finger, but being too short for every other finger makes them kind of useless to me. I don't know how else I could use them.
As another side note, while you can see the decal in this macro shot, I wouldn't recommend using them on light colours because they aren't very visible from further away.

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The decals are very pretty and visually I really like them, but I think their sizing makes them fall short in their usefulness and I also can't see the design (meaning the floral decals and the ones stating "all is well") being very versatile. If you'd like to try these decals out for yourself, they sell for C$2.46 (US$2.29) per sheet and come in one other floral design.

Don't forget you can use the code FHX31 for 10% off your order at BPS, (also free world-wide shipping which is always a bonus!).



Thanks for reading!

xo,
Becca.

** These products were provided for review. All opinions are my owns and have not been influenced by anyone. **

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Red Light

Another comeback, another manicure. This time it's in honour of f(x)'s new album Red Light!


Thursday, July 03, 2014

#TBT: Tamagotchi

For the second Throwback installment I focused on some toys I'm sure we all remember: Tamagotchis!





I don't know about you, but I had four of these at the very least, all of various generations/versions. I think I had up to the Tamagotchi Connection V4 (a lot of research went into this manicure, I definitely wouldn't have been able to tell you that if I hadn't been searching these things up).

I also remember these being so big that I literally gave one to all of my friends for their birthday's. Tamagotchis were so simplistic but so much fun. In case you're feeling nostalgic for your old toys, there's now an app for that! Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. on Android phones lets you re-experience Tamagotchi's right on your phone, (without the hassle of trying to press the reset button on the back when your Tamagotchi inevitably perishes...).



Products Used:
Ceramic Glaze - 109 Pineapple Breeze
Coco + Lulu - 432 Macaron
Essie - 008 Blanc
Essie - 720 Licorice
Essie - 1018 DJ Play That Song
Essie - 1027 The More the Merrier
Essie - 1064 Serial Shopper
Essie - 1065 I'm Addicted
Essie - 1067 Vices Versa
Essie - Grow Stronger Base Coat
Maybelline - 390 Audacious Asphalt
OPI - NL E82 My Vampire is Buff
Revlon - 471 Fashionista
Sally Hansen - 360 Barracuda
Seche Vite - Quick Dry Top Coat

xo,
Becca.