GuestNails

We had so much fun last time I did her nails, so we decided to throw ourselves at it again.
This time we swapped the wine, for a non-alcoholic wine spritzer, which meant more stable hands and more intricate work could be done.
This was perhaps the most elaborate mani I have done so far.

I showed her my most recent purchases, and we had a little brain-storming session going.
Minions, smiley-faces, school art... ideas was thrown around.

She works with kids, so we wanted to do something that would be fun for them to look at.
That's when we came up with the idea to try a pond manicure with koi fish. I had just received some nail mail from Bundlemonster, and one of the plates I bought was BM - 725, and it has some lovely koi fishes on it.


For this manicure we used Barry M - Speedy - Supersonic for base manicure, and stamped with BM - 725 in Wet n Wild - Black Creme, filled the koi fishes in with China Glaze - Midnight Kiss, Seventeen - Bronze Shimmer, Kiko - 492 and lastly Kiko - 493. I made the kelp using a striping brush and Kiko - 531, and Kiko - 534. Let the decals dry and cut them up to fit the nails.

Guest-Nail at Secretary's Nail Art

To finish it all off, I added a few drops of Barry M - Speedy - Supersonic to a clear polish and added 2 coats of that over the design, added the waves and the kelp, and then two more coats of the Barry M - Speedy - Supersonic with clear polish mix and one coat of topcoat to seal the design.

Guest-Nail at Secretary's Nail Art

I had so much positive feedback from the last time I was showing Sam's nails here on my blog, so we decided to aim at making this a regular thing. I teach her in the ways of a polish-aholic, and she lend me her time, and nails.

Guest-Nail at Secretary's Nail Art

The kids loved her nails, and she reported to me that they had asked to see them many times. So I would say that these nails where a definite hit.
I do not think we will do something THIS elaborate nex time.

Thank you Sam for your patience!

My first indie polishes

I was very quick to dip my toes in the indie world.I was not so good at staying there, and actually using them. A bit over 3 years ago, I posted on this blog about my indie haul. 3 years. Imagine that...
Long time ago.

My first indie - haul

But it was going to take awhile until I tried them all. Matter of fact, I still have not tried them all.
Girly Bits - Wet Bikini and Girly Bits - Promise Me, are both still untrieds(!!!).

The original reason was the hassle with glitter removals, so they just stayed in their box, later they moved into a Helmer, and there they stayed. Never tried, never loved.
I feel sorry for them. So I will definitely take them out and put them on my talons, soon. 

I hope. 

It's on my to-do-list. I will get there. 

I am quite embarrassed over my old swatching pictures, so I will be doing new pictures of them as well. 

The reason for this trip down Memory Lane, is because I wanted to show you all that #itrustindiepolish 

My indie collection might not be as large as many others, but lately (since the whole Mentality thing blew up), I have made a point to order more indies. So the next month or so, I will mainly focus on indie nail polishes, and show them to you in all their glory.

As long as they are fully disclosing ingredients, and do testing, I don't see the problem.
If you where to have a problem with a polish, you would be able to point to what you reacted to.
Open and honest communication all around.

Raise your hand with me and say: I Trust Indie Polish

The Dictionary of Colours

I think shades within a colour group sometimes can be hard to nail down.
Ingrid Sundberg is a writer, and wanted to be better at describing colours in her work.

That is how "The Dictionary of Colors" became a thing on Imgur. I hunted down the owner of the pictures, as I wanted to share it with you all. If you follow me in Pinterest, you might have seen it already, as it's been saved over a 100 times!

The cool thing about this, is that it is not just genious for writers that want's to be more colorful in their novels, but it works great for us nail polish geeks for describing our nail polishes. I have also added some other words that would go in the same colour family underneath the pictures. I have to thank Once Upon A Lexicon and Wikipedia for those.

So without further ado.

Other shades of white would include: milk, chalk, oatmeal, champagne, crystal, vanilla, blonde, linen, cornsilk, honeydew, seashell, eburnean.

Other shades of tan would include: Khaki, biscuit, buff, ecru, camel, mushroom, taupe, nude, bisque, toast, dun, suede, sarcoline.

Other shades of yellow would include: sunshine, straw, goldenrod, citrine, taxi cab, sunflower, apricot yellow, jasmine, papaya whip, lemon chiffon, ecru, arylide yellow, aureole, chartreuse, jonquil, mikado.

Other shades of orange would include: Pumpkin, ocher, ginger, flame, Princeton orange, persimmon, tangelo, Portland orange, bittersweet, sunset, tawny, peach, gamboge.

Other shades of red would include: maroon, burgundy, carmine, vermilion, ruddy, henna, terracotta, poppy, tyrian red, cardinal, rust, rosso corsa, auburn, folly, redwood, vermilion, Venetian red, Tuscan red, raspberry, lava, carnelian, alizarine crimson, falu.

I want to throw something in here about the color Saffron. Originally  Once Upon A Lexicon mentioned that this was a red shade. It was first used to describe a color in England around 1200 (thank you wikipedia). Wikipedia has it listed as a golden yellow. Below I attached a color chart from Adobe Color. As you can see Saffron could below to the colour group: White, Yellow, Orange, Brown and Red. Cool right?

Source: https://color.adobe.com/Saffron-color-theme-313744/

Other shades of pink would include: peony, raspberry, roseate, cerise, puce, amaranth, brink pink, folly, thulian pink, Mountbatten pink, carnation pink, Baker-Miller pink, desire, razzmatazz.

Other shades of purple would include: pomegranate, puce, wisteria, Byzantium, fandango, heliotrope, tyrian, thistle, cherise, cattleya.

Other shades of blue would include: turquoise, aqua, cyan, ice, cornflower, majorelle blue, Bleu De France, Brandeis blue, Cambridge blue, Carolina blue, duke, federal, midnight. Prussian, phthalo blue, zaffre, Tiffany blue, viridian, denim, Celeste, glaucous, Eton blue, Columbia blue, Dodger blue, Persian blue, Oxford blue, Palitinate blue, smalt.

Other shades of green would include: Kelly, grass, leaf, apple, jade, spinach, willow, avocado, bottle green, asparagus, artichoke, mantis, forest, malachite, harlequin,  shamrock, verdigris, xanadu. 

Other shades of brown would include: earth, copper, chestnut, burnt sienna, auburn, bay, bistre, russet, sorre, beaver, burnt sienna, burnt umber, camel, cordovan, coyote, ecru, fallow, fawn, field drab, fulvous, isabelline, lion, liver, rofous, russet, sepia, sinopia, tawny, wenge, wheat, titian, wenge.

Other shades of grey would: dust, stone, granite, cement, platinum, battleship grey, Payne's grey, slate, timberwolf, gunmetal.

Other shades of black would include: licorice, raisin, outer space, bistre, eerie black, Jet black.

So there you have it, a start to better colour knowledge, and colour descriptions. I hope you enjoyed it. Most certain that there are colours missing here, but it's a great start.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Frankening

So if you read yesterdays post about re-purposing your nail polish, you might be wondering what to do with all the empty nail polish bottles.

First we have to clean the bottles.  <-- Follow the link for more information on how to do that properly.

How about making your own nail polish?

Frankening (fránk-ən-ing) – The DIY practice of mixing one’s own unique nail polish using glitter, micas, pigments or eye shadow with clear or other polishes.

You can buy some really cool Frankening sets, where everything is safe and tested, and all you have to do, is decide how the end result is going to look.  As I am a Secretary, I have taken the time to collect this list of Frankening Suppliers. If you are missing a supplier on this list, please let me know, and I will add them.

1. GirlyBitsCosmetics Franken set
2. Nailite Franken set
3. Overall Beauty - pigments (I have seen that DrFrankenPolish uses these pigments alot for her frankens)
4. DrFranken's Lab (at the time of writing this, this shop is temp. closed)
5. ShebaNails 
6. Nail Super Store (AU) 
7. Glitties Nail Art  
8. Glitter Unique 
9. Manda Makes 
10. Micamoma 
11. Wonder Beauty Products
12. TKB Trading
13. NEL Beauty
14. Misfits on 8th
15. Frank and Shine Designs
16. BrambleBerry
17. Nail Glitter Princess

Here are two of my frankening polishes. 

Secretary's Nail Art - Beauty In The Beholder

Secretary's Nail Art - EmOzean

Now, if you would rather skip the mess and go straight to the fun of having your own nail polish?
I got you covered. 

NAYLL is a company where you can customize your own nail polish, and they will send it your way.
You choose, and they do all the mixing, easy right?

NAYLL - Fields of Marigold and I found Loot. (both polishes frankened by me)

NAYLL - Fields of Marigold (frankened by me at NAYLL)

Until next time, have fun frankening. 

Re-purposing Nail Polish

Recent events regarding the whole Mentality Polish thing has people talking about throwing their polishes out. As a person who treasure our planet, I would hate to see nail polishes on the landfill. No matter how bad they are.

I have three suggestions for you.

1. Save nail polishes you want to get rid of for Zoya's Earth Day Promo
2. Send them to your local Household Hazardous Waste Facility (how to properly dispose of nail polish)
3. Re-purpose them!

I love DIY, so this was the perfect opportunity for me to talk a bit more about using nail polishes in DIY projects. Yay for creative outlets!! 

Re-purposing nail polish into gorgeous rings.

For this project I bought some 12 mm glass cabuchans from Ebay, and painted them with different polishes. Ones they had dried, I attached them to rings that I also found on Ebay.

All in all this project cost me less than 10 dollars, and I got cabuchans and ring bases to make a heap-load more. 

So get your glitters, and nail polishes out. 

Now this is only one idea on what to do with nail polishes, below I had added a list of other ideas and links to where you can find out more about the craft project. I hope you like it. Non of the links below are mine, and I take no credit for the ideas, I am just spreading the word. 

• DIY Wire tree with nail polish leaves/flowers
• Dragon Eggs with Nail polish (suggested by Brandy Ann Petrick)
• Marbled Easter Eggs
• Jewelry Craft (rings, pendants, earrings)
• Nail Polish Keys (remember to have a protecting layer on top after finishing painting the key.
• DIY Water marble room decor 
• Unique shoes - nail polish heels
• Holiday ornaments
• Nail polish flowers  or Nail polish - flower crown
• DIY Phone Case
• Pretend makeup for Kids
• Bracelets 

last but not least:

• How to clean your bottles for re-purposing

I hope you have enjoyed my this little post about Re-purposing Nail Polish. 

It took quite some time to collect all the ideas into one post, and find good YouTube videos on how to do them for you all.
That's what you have a Secretary for after all. 

Please leave a comment below if you have some tips and ideas that should be in this post. 

Tutorial: Wired Nails

I have done some Wired Nails lately as you might have seen. If not, here's a link:

1. Speedy Wired Nails
2. Wired Nails

I decided to make a tutorial for Wired Nails, seeing as there wasn't a tutorial up on Youtube, only on Instragram. A lot of you girls are not on Instragram, me included, so I wanted to broaden the horizon a little for this design. 

I discovered the Wired Nails design through a friend of mine, and it was  NailYourIdeas that originally posted it on Instagram. 

Interested in learning how to do nails like:

Then I got the video tutorial for you:

If you are wondering why you have not seen the red Wired Nails design that I did in this video, here on my blog. Then I can tell you that Wine and filming nail art tutorials is just asking for problems.

Haha, gotta learn some day.

Speedy Wired Nail

This design was invented by NailYourIdeas and is called Wired Nails.

For this manicure I used two new polishes that came out to the Speedy line from Barry M.
Barry M - Speedy - Supersonic and Barry M - Speedy - Turbo Charged.

First I started with a sandwish bag and applied two coats of Barry M - Speedy - Supersonic, and took a dotting tool and started making lines in the polish. You have to work quick here.

When you are happy with the look, let it dry before topcoating it.
Two coats of polish was enough for all my nails.

I applied one coat of Barry M - Speedy - Turbo Charged to all my nails except middle finger where I used Barry M - Speedy - Supersonic, and added the decals over.
One the middle finger I added a 3D bow for extra pow. 

Barry M - Speedy - Supersonic and Barry M - Speedy - Turbo Charged

What do you think?

My Nail Storage and Nail-station/space - Update

With a little update on my nail -station/space cave.
It's a part office, part hobby room and guest room.

The bed is huge and comfortable, and the room is still large enough to give me an almost 3 meter long desk with space for my Helmers and computer. Everything a girl will love.

I still got to get a proper chair for the room, but for now, I am using a dining chair.

As you can see, I currently got 2 Helmers, and I will be picking up a third one in a week. Overflow...
Vacation shopping does that to you. Haha.

My Helmers used to be decorated, but when I moved from Bristol, UK, I went back to plain Helmers. I actually thing they grey looks great with the white desk and the grey-blue walls in this room .

The room is not quite done, but it is certainly getting there. In the two top drawers in my Helmers I got nail art supplies and base- and topcoats. Then follows my nail polishes in alphabetic order after Brand. So A England to Barry M's in the second drawer, followed by the likes of Catrice in the third, and so on. I also got 3 drawers with makeup, and my makeup brushes are on my desk, as well as this cute cast iron mirror I found at Ikea.

I also have three glasses of nail polish swatching sticks on my desk. I use them to come up with new designs, and combinations.

Under my keyboard there is a desk protector from Ikea, I use it to make decals, and test polishes for stamping. I know a lot of people are raving about the UberChic mat at the moment, I might get it, but for now, this works great for me.

I also have a small notebook, in there I write down what polishes I use for what manicures, often when I sit down to do my nails, I don't write the post the same day, rather a couple of days later, so in order to remember the polishes and the plates used (while being able to clear up my desk after each nail polishing session), I write them down here as I go.

I have come a long way from having this as my nail area.

My office/nail area back when I started this blog in 2011.

My Nail Station in Bristol 2014.

If you want to check out my Nail Cave/Station History, you can check out these posts.

2012 - Nail Station
2012 - Swatching wheels
2012 - Nail Stickers Album
2012 - Nail Art Boxes

2014 - Nail Station

2015 - Swatching sticks

Bundlemonster - Shangri-La Master Set

This is my 400 blogpost!

I did a little Bundlemonster Haul, and by little I mean large.

Maybe not THAT large, but you know. An entire collection, and 6 single plates as well as the Bundlemonster stamper and two gorgeous scrapers. 

So big a haul in fact, I had to pay tax on it(!)

Bundlemonster - Shangri-La Master Set

If you are anything like me, you had to collect your jaw from the floor just by seeing the awesomeness of these plates. Below you can find a YouTube video I made about this set, as well as TONS of ideas on what to do with these plates.

If you are on a low buy, or don't want the entire set, I would recommend getting BM-S102 and BM-S109 just because they are very unique and I haven't seen that style on other plates that you might have.

Be sure to subscribe to my channel on Youtube for more videos. 

Bye for now, I have a plane to catch! 

Someone asked my to run some roleplaying games in Norway, and I couldn't say no.

Wired Nails

This design was invented by NailYourIdeas and is called Wired Nails.

For this manicure I used Seventeen - Bronze Shimmer and Collection - 20 - Storm Grey. 

To make Wired Nails you need a sandwich bag or something similar to make decals on. If you got the Über Chic Beauty stamping mat, then count yourself luck and use that.

I started out with 4 coats of Seventeen - Bronze Shimmer and made lines with a dotting tool, after it had dried I added topcoat. While it was drying, I made another decal using Collection - 20 - Storm Grey and did the same with that.

I applied Collection - 20 - Storm Grey to all my nails except the middle finger, which got Seventeen - Bronze Shimmer on it. I added the alternating wired nails decals on top.

Seventeen - Bronze Shimmer and Collection - 20 - Storm Grey

Seventeen - Bronze Shimmer and Collection - 20 - Storm Grey

As you can see from middle finger, Collection - 20 - Storm Grey did not show up that well over the base. It makes for a cool shaded effect, but if you want it to show up crisp, be sure to use a more opaque polish for these designs.

Barry M - Silk - Orchid

Contains affiliate link. Purchased with my own money.

I wasn't feeling for a bold design today, and wanted to do something more subtle.
I ended up picking up some decals I haven't been using yet. The BornPretttyStore Colored Flower Patterns #1619 water decals. 

For base color I used, as the title might suggest, Barry M - Silk - Orchard. 

Barry M - Silk - Orchard

Barry M - Silk - Orchard

Here you can see it in two coats, and it just look gorgeous. Vampy.
As the decals I decided on using are very dark, I knew they wouldn't stand out too much over this base. A sort of tone-in-tone design.

So I went a bit creative on showing it all off, and grabbed a mirror. I also added a more traditional pose with it as well. What do you think?

Barry M - Silk - Orchard with accent BPS #1619 decals

Barry M - Silk - Orchard with accent BPS #1619 decals

If you want to get your hands on the Colored Floral Flower Patterns Nail Water Decals Transfer Stickers #1619 they're found at BornPrettyStore and sold for $ 2.86 normally, but on the time of writing on sale for $ 1.43.

BornPrettyStore also offers free shipping worldwide, and if you use my code (RAMG10) you get 10% off your order.