Aussie Christmas 13/12 - BBQ

I am so sorry to the ladies who joined this challenge. I don't know what was going through my head when I created some of these themes. LOL. Well, it was 1am when I was coming up with them so that might explain it. Even I, the person who came up with these themes, couldn't come up with a design when it came around to this point in the challenge. :( SORRY.

So, of course being summer time now in Australia, we have a lot of BBQs! :) Lots of people have a big barbeque with their family on Christmas Day, but my family actually doesn't do a barbeque on Christmas Day, we usually do a roast lunch/dinner like most people would probably do in the US, being winter, but I absolutely loooooooove my roast Christmas dinner. :D My family has a lot of barbeques in summer time though, where we "chuck some snags and shrimp on the barbie".... LOL. Just a note for all of you non-Aussies: we don't say "shrimp on the barbie", OK?! :P I've never heard someone seriously say that in my whole life. We call them prawns, not shrimp. LOL.

So because I couldn't come up with an easy-to-do barbeque nail art design, I decided to try and franken the perfect barbeque sauce colour! I've heard that OPI's Mrs O Leary's BBQ is a great barbeque sauce colour but I don't own it.
Polishes I used:
Ulta3 Mulberry, Flashback Fuchsia, Bo Peep, and Black Satin, and Essence Fateful Desire as well as a little bit of clear topcoat.

I don't know how close I got to Mrs O Leary's BBQ, but I still like the colour! lol. I tried to make it as brown as possible but if you can believe it, I don't own a warm brown polish that isn't a shimmer or something. :O I fell in love with this franken I made! I will totally wear it again!

31DC2012: Day 8 - Metallic (FAIL)

Soooo, today the manicure I have to show you is a fail. :( I was looking forward to today's mani but it sucks!  I'll just get it over and done with... :(

Today's theme is metallic. I am not a fan of metallic nails just on their own but, metallics are good for stamping! So I decided to do some stamping with a metallic. That's why this was a fail. But everyone has their bad days okay? :P

As the base colour, I used a franken I made the other night! I don't have a suuuuper light baby blue in my collection so I decided to franken one. :) It's a little bit on the minty side of blue under some lights, rather than a true blue.

I then stamped over it with Sally Hansen - Celeb City. I don't know if it's just this polish that made the stamping a fail, or user error, but I'm gonna show you anyway. I use the Konad M63 plate. I stamped using swirly design, it sort of looks like ribbon to me. I didn't wear this mani for long at all but my boyfriend said the ribbony design looked cool so maybe I'll have to try it again soon.

So I'm sorry that I had to show you this fail mani but I promise I'll have better ones to show you coming up! :)

Elissa

A Franken By Lissa: "Elizabeth Purr"

Hello there! I have another franken to show you today! You can see my first franken here. :)

Sunlight

This was actually my first franken, but I never swatched it until yesterday! I decided to name it "Elizabeth Purr", some of you might recognise the name right away but a lot of you probably won't, so just keep on reading to find out what the name means! :)
This was inspired by some indies I've seen. I can't remember the names of any of them now though. :/
It started off as a super white base (Ulta3 Lily White) with a ton of multicolour glitter (including Revlon - Sparkling, Radiant, OPI - Rainbow Connection, Divine Swine, BYS - Million Dollar Baby and some random iridescent glitter). But when I swatched it I wasn't a fan because the base was way too pigmented and covered a lot of the glitter. It also looked really chalky and too "stark" white. I'm not a fan of stark white nails on myself. Plus, the glitters aren't that chunky so when I saw my nails from further away, they just looked like white nails.
So I decided to mess around with the polish a bit. I dumped out a bit of the polish to make room for more and added probably a quarter of a bottle of clear polish (Sally Hansen's Mega Shine... Probably shouldn't have used that because it's quite fast drying and that's not always a good thing!), and maybe a fifth of the bottle of BYS - Marry a Millionaire for some more large glitters! I also added maybe 4 drops of China Glaze - Dance Baby and about 6 drops of Sally Hansen - Commander in Chic to make the polish more of an off white.

Artificial Light

I wish the polish came out on the nail as chunky as it looks in the bottle! All the glitters seem to have just stuck on the sides of the bottle. :(

So the polish turned much more "jelly like" after adding the clear polish which is much better for glitter polishes anyway because otherwise you can't see the glitter through the base! I wish I had some chunkier glitters to add into this! I think it'd look a lot better if the glitter was chunkier.

Artificial Light

Artificial Light

I'm happy with how this polish turned out! I like that it's subtle and from far away you can't tell there's glitter but up close you see it. :)
It still looks white on my nails but not like I just painted white-out on them! (Lol! I used to do that in primary school!) It looks like more of a SUPER light, almost-white-lilac-taupey colour.

Sunlight

So, I was trying to think of a name for this polish. Some people on Instagram said that they thought it looks like a jawbreaker! I agree, but I didn't want to name it 'Jawbreaker' because there's an indie polish by Pretty & Polished with that name.

I've never actually eaten a Jawbreaker before, but I always think of the movie 'Jawbreaker' when someone mentions it! I watched Jawbreaker with a friend when I was probably around 14.. I don't even know how my friend convinced me to watch it LOL. I get freaked out EASILY by movies if they have anything to do with death/murder. And if you've seen the movie, you'll know the whole movie revolves around a murder. I barely remember the movie to be honest. I probably wouldn't recommend you watch this movie if you're underage (the movie's rated M15 in Australia, and I believe R in America) because there's a fair bit of swearing & mature themes. ANYWAY long story short, I decided to name this polish 'Elizabeth Purr'. If you haven't seen Jawbreaker you'll probably have no idea what that means, so if you really want to know, go read the IMDB page, or watch the movie. It's over 10 years old so you might be able to watch it online.

I have two more frankens I've never showed you so I might show those to you sometime soon! :) I don't like them as much as the ones I've showed you so far but some people might like them?

I'm not loving my nails at the moment. I feel like the length is kinda awkward. I was thinking of trimming them but I think I might see if I can grow them some more. :) I've just had a few corners chip lately and it makes some of my nails look funny. I usually like to photograph my right hand but those nails are looking a little weird right now so I've been photographing my left hand which I feel like is what most people do because the polish looks neater on their non-dominant hand but not me LOL.

Hope you enjoyed my first franken that has a name! :) I quite like it!

Elissa

NOTD: A Franken By Lissa!

Hi guys! I'm sorry I've been lacking some polish posts in the past few days! :( But this has to be one of the most exciting posts for me that I've ever done so far! :) Hope you'll like it too.

Lately I've been loving making franken polishes, which is basically where you mix a bunch of polishes and sometimes glitters to make your own unique polish, or to try to recreate a lemming of a polish you may not be able to get your hands on. ;) I've made a few before but this one is definitely my favourite!

Deborah Lippmamn's Glitter in the Air (or Revlon's Whimsical - a dupe for Glitter in the Air) has been at the top of my wish list for quite a while now! I don't think I'll ever get my hands on the Lippmann but I'd still like to try and get the Revlon dupe!
So, I had an empty mini polish bottle and just randomly decided to make something similar to Glitter in the Air! :D

Click 'read more' to see more pictures and a list of which polishes I used in my franken! :)


I wish I'd taken pictures during the process so I could show you exactly what I did and which polishes I uses to create this franken but I didn't. I can't tell you exactly how much of each polish I added, but here's a list of the polishes I used to make my franken:

• A small amount of Glossyblossom - Bubblegum Baby Blue (Glossyblossom is a brand I've found at Morning Glory stores) to make the base blue
• Revlon - Radiant
• Revlon - Sparkling
• A small amount of BYS - Million Dollar Baby
• And some of a Satin - French White polish (sheer white jelly-ish consistency) to make the base more jelly like and lighter.

I also added in some iridescent blue and pink hex glitters that I got on eBay.

L-R: Glossyblossom - Bubblegum Baby Blue, Revlon - Radiant, Revlon - Sparkling, BYS - Million Dollar Baby, Satin - French White.

As you can see, I've used the Revlon polishes for a few frankens now! I need to stop using them for frankens because I only bought them a couple months ago and Revlon polishes really aren't that cheap here, even though they're a 'drugstore' brand.

Sadly today's weather was HORRIBLE. Raining for most of the day and the sun didn't make an appearance so I was unable to get any photos in the sunlight.

The bottle I used is TINY so I don't think I'd get many uses out of it, so I'm still on the hunt for Whimsical.

The polish I made obviously isn't an exact dupe of Glitter in the Air but it's enough to satisfy my lemming for now! Or until I go through this little mini bottle. ;)
My franken (kinda annoying calling it that over and over. Maybe I should've given it a name...) isn't as sheer as Glitter in the Air but it's not completely opaque either so I'm going to layer it over other baby blues when I choose to wear it. :)

Of course, right after making this franken I HAD to put it right onto my nails! :)
Here I used one coat of China Glaze's Kinetic Candy and one coat of my franken over it!

Macro

All I can say is that I am in love. I'm so happy my franken turned out the way I wanted! I'd definitely recommend frankening! It's so much fun and you can try to make some polishes that you may be lemming! :)

Hope you enjoyed this post and happy frankening!

I'd also like to say sorry for the obnoxious watermarks on my photos. I think it looks really ugly, but there's been SO many bloggers and nail girls having their photos stolen and reposted without credit lately and I want to prevent that from happening to me!

-Elissa

NOTD: Coral Fever

I've been really into mixing polishes lately! Mixing white into bright colours to make them more pastel, mixing colours into clear polish to make a "jelly" polish. It's so fun to me.
Here is the result of a polish I mixed!
I started with Essence - C'est La Vie. I wasn't a fan of that polish. I'm not sure why I bought it actually. I guess I thought it was more coral but it was actually very orange. So I thought I'd add some hot pink to it to make it more coral! I tipped out about a quarter of the Essence polish and I added some of Rimmel - Hot Shot to the polish; I don't remember how much exactly. And I then added a bit of a white polish to tone down the brightness of it. And I absolutely LOVED the result!

Daylight

More info & swatches after the jump! :)