Lacquerlicious

Nails, Nails, Nails!

[billydor-nails]

Actual brand new, not saved in drafts forever, nails! Snap! Just like my poor right pointer nail. DX I want to stamp over these, but they’re so pretty that I can’t do it just yet. Anyone else have that special dominate hand that can’t get it together for a damn picture? Because mine is struggling today.

Colors Used:

Cult Nails- Tempest

China Glaze- Son Of A Peach, Highlight Of My Summer, Too Yacht To Handle, That’s Shore Bright, Neon & On & On

(Does it surprise anyone that I used this damn collection? I mean, honestly.)

[deleted12345678987654321-deacti]

Decided to recreate this retro-ish pattern that I found on Pinterest.

[lacquerlicious]

pink gradient nails with fine lines stamping Follow me on nailpolis!

[simlicious]

I bought some new stamping equipment and had to try it out immediately :) I love the Enchanted collection by MoYou London. Lots of cute animal designs!

[ladycrappo]

Hey, I’m a fungi.  From pinkie to pointer, Marasmius haematocephalus, Cantharellus cibarius (chanterelle), Amanita muscaria (fly agaric), and Clitocybe nuda (blewit).

[lacquerlicious]

My newest attempt at stamping. Finished off with a matte top coat. I still need to practice. I now have new stampers to choose from, now that my order from bornpretty arrived  :) I found that a badly stamped result is easiest to be removed with a buffer. I just filed that stamped layer away and was able to stamp again without problems :)

[heavensims]

I normally don’t do my nails, or, if I do, I do two coats of something plain. I have stupid nails that peel and chip usually within 24 hours. Even gel polish chips within a few days instead of the weeks it should stay. But I saw this polish and thought it looked so pretty and festive in the bottle.

[lacquerlicious]

this is a really cute polish! <3 Glitter polish tends to stay longer on the nails too. Hope this one will last a few days for you without chipping! I added some basic tips on how to prevent polish chipping under the cut :)

 Make sure your nails aren’t moist/have not been in water prior to painting. If you remove your cuticles beforehand, allow the nails some time to dry off afterwards and rub your nails with alcohol (try to avoid cuticles). Rubbing your nails with alcohol before applying the polish will remove any oily residue that some soaps and lotions leave behind. Using a basecoat can help prevent chipping. Best results are achieved with a combination of basecoat, color and topcoat. In my experience, many people who do not paint their nails very often don’t want to do a full routine using base- and topcoat. But most of the time, the extra steps do pay off. Today’s gel-like topcoats are super quick drying as well, so it won’t take much longer to dry. On the contrary, it can acutally help speed up the drying process :) Coating the thin edge of the nail tips is also a good practice to make sure the entire nail is sealed in and protects the nail against moisture. Moisture is one of the main reasons for chipping (along with using the nails as tools to pry things open.) Coatint the tip edges can be a bit tricky with short nails. You could try simply coating the edge with the topcoat only (instead of doing it with base and color coat as well), as it is transparent and it won’t be hugely noticeable if you get it on your fingertips. The bit on your skin it will peel off after a while, or you could remove it with a cotton swab dipped in nailpolish. A cotton swab or brush dipped in nailpolish remover can also be very helpful if you got nailpolish over your cuticles. Painting perfect nails takes lots and lots of practice, but why not cheat a little. A nailpolish remover pen is one of my most cherished utensils when painting my nails :)

[fakehousesrealawesome]

It’s not time for another one of my semi-regularly scheduled nail art posts, is it? OH WAIT IT TOTALLY IS.

I swear, I don’t show you guys half of the shit that goes on my nails, but these in particular are making me so happy that I just had to share them. They’re opals! On my fingers! I used this nifty tutorial from @basecoat-topcoat—with just some minor changes because I proved to be quite inept at the suggested method. I love how they turned out and have been wiggling my fingers around like a lunatic all day because ~look at the pretty sparkles~

[lacquerlicious]

Looks like your nails turnend into opals! Amazing :)

[fakehousesrealawesome]

I feel like it’s been a while since I posted some of my nail art so I thought I’d show you guys what I have on today. These unintentionally turned out kind of Christmas-y but I like them anyway!

[lacquerlicious]

Yay for negative space! Your mani looks gorgeous :)

[lacquerlicious]

Heya! Today, I want to tell you about my new stamping equipment.

What you see in the first picture is my “stamping workspace”. I got used to do stamping on a workspace not bigger than a folded napkin, my desk is never really tidy and I literally live at my desk *lol* (the blackness in the background is actually my keyboard), but I usually try to have everything laid out on a paper towel, with old newspaper ads underneath to prevent polish stains on my white desk (not that I haven’t had accidents already...)

The reason for the whole endeavor: my new stampers from faburnails.com arrived a couple of days ago! I was positively surprised, the package arrived much faster than I anticipated. Interestingly, it came from Sweden! I really liked the small personalized thank you note with my name on it that was in the package. I ordered two of the sticky jumbo stampers and the XL gold one with four additional silikone stamping heads. I also received several plastic scrapers, some small, firm ones and a larger, flexible one. I read somewhere that the flexible ones are good to use with cheap plates that are not etched as deeply. To test the stampers, I used the Cookbook stamping plate #02 from Moyou London. In fact, I’ve never gotten around to using it yet.  My best friend moves away tomorrow (*cries*) and I cooked a big batch of oven vegetables tonight to feed all the volunteers that will help carry stuff in the moving truck tomorrow morning. I’m not much of a lifter, but I like to be useful in the kitchen :) In fact, really enjoy cooking at or for parties. Thus, food-themed nails will fit nicely for tomorrow. I painted my nails in a nude shade yesterday evening to prepare for the stamping. I always like to let the polish dry for several hours before I stamp over it, so usually I paint my nails the evening before and wear them with the bare shade the next day and then do the stamping the following evening. In this case, I used a nude peachy pink shade (Catrice Ultimate Nudes #050 Moulin Rouge Light) and stamped with a brown Konad Princess stamping polish.

I didn’t want to test the stampers with an unreliable plate first thing, and the Moyou ones are hands down the best quality plates I own. I definitely need to get used to the squishiness and found myself using the smaller, golden stamper for most of the nails. Due to its shape and lightness, it is just really great to handle. The small head allows for precise positioning and is still big enough to cover my entire nail. I have a hard time placing the designs so that they are not crooked and with the smaller stamper, it was easier to line it up somehow. Also, I figured out that this stamper can be pressed down straight onto the nail. That gave me better results than rolling it and it is so easy as well! I like that the head is pretty flat and only has a very light dome shape. Some designs came out a bit warped or wonky on my nails, I guess that was due to the squishiness  of the stamper and applying too much/uneven pressure. Takes some getting used to :) I love using lint rollers to remove stamping residue from the stamping heads (you’re not supposed to use nailpolish remover on the squishy heads). Scotch tape also works pretty well to clean up the skin surrounding the nail after stamping! I also checked out the refill stamping heads and found out that the colored one are squishier/softer than the clear ones (that also goes for the jumbo stamper). It is not much of a difference, but noticeable. For now, I only used the clear stamping head. So far, I really like the small stamper!  I can definitely see myself ordering from faburnails again. I will test the jumbo stampers more thoroughly in the future.

Unfortunately, The topcoat I used wasn’t so great, it is a pretty thick, quick-drying topcoat from Essence. It caused bubbles and I also smeared the design on some nails (after noticing, I was extra careful not to touch the nail surface with the bristles and then it was better). Meh. Gotta experiment with a couple of other top coats to find one that is well-suited. I think thicker ones are easier because the risk of smearing is reduced to to the “pillowy” effect of the thick polish. With thin polish like Sally Hansen’s Miracle Gel topcoat (my favorite top coat for regular polish), smearing is even harder to avoid. It also depends on the polish or base coat whether there are going to be bubbles or not. I have a base coat that bubbles polish like crazy :( I’m ready to chuck that one out. Luckily, my nails are usually not viewed from up-close, so for normal everyday use, the mani looks fine. The closeups are brutally honest, though, as you can see :) That’s it for today....until next time, thanks for reading!

[lacquerlicious]

Hey guys, here I am again with a new url (I am a perfectionist, so I had to fix the spelling mistake I made when creating my first url *cough*). thanks for sticking around! Have a blurry vacation manicure pic as a welcome ( and a bonus ladybug) :) If you want to know more about this mani and about my experience with stamping, read on!

Today, I’d like to talk about my experiences with stamping. I love the concept of stamping and the endless possibilities it offers! But getting it right can be really tricky. A few weeks ago, I spent a week in Denmark on vacation and made myself some gel nails (used the essence peel-off gel nails set that was discontinued, sadly) with advanced stamping techniques beforehand. Because the peeling off part does quite the damage to the nails (it tends to peel off part of the nail surface with it), I only use it when I go on vacation and really need a lasting mani. I prefer it to soaking-off though. I can’t stand the thought of my nails soaking in acetone for 10 minutes, yikes... Sadly, the stamping was a disaster and many designs didn’t turn out the way I hoped, they were blurry, had holes in them and just didn’t stamp well. It didn’t help that I started the mani late in the evening and spent hours to get it to somehow look okay, I really didn’t get much sleep that night *lol* You can see my designs in the image above, though you can’t tell the problems from that out-of-focus image and I didn’t make any closeups because I found them to be sub-par) they only really look good because the image is out of focus ;)  On my ring finger, you can see my first attempt at an advanced coloring-in stamping technique (you basically create a nail sticker on your stamper: you pick up an image and fill in the design with nail polish while leaving it on the stamper and let it dry, then peel it off, cut it to the shape of your nail, apply top coat to your nails, let dry to the touch and then put the nail sticker on your nails). That one turned out pretty nicley :) The other fingers though, where I used regular stamping, didn’t go so well. I tried again several times and no matter what plate or design I use, the polish looks smeared on the stamper, sometimes the polish seemed to fray at the edges and when it looked okay on the stamper, it still came out bad on the nail... the only stamping polish that didn’t produce these effects as badly was the regular black konad polish. So it may after all be (partly) polish-related, maybe the konad princess stamping polishes are not the best choice for me... I only have stamping polish from konad, so at first I thought the problem was using cheap plates (q-girl, bp, hehe and the likes), but maybe I just haven’t found the right combination of polish and stamper combined with the right technique for me yet. I currently use the grey double-sided stamper from Moyou London. I also have several stampers from the bornpretty store (the rectangular one with the mint green head and the double-sided black one with the white soft head and small firm pink head), but they have not impressed me so far, even after priming them with a nail file. My nails have a very pronounced c-curve and I always found the rolling part very tedious, the designs often end up crooked or parts of the design didn’t transfer to the nail because I didn’t apply even pressure/roll it around enough. When I started stamping, full-plate designs weren’t even on the market and the firm konad stamper worked quite well for me in conjunction with konad plates, but only for the small single designs, and they always ended up crooked/not properly lined up. I love full-coverage nail designs and really wanted to try them out, but it was clear to me that I needed a bigger stamper for them. The softer white stampers that you had to prime with a nail file were all the rage when I bought them. I think I haven’t figured out how much pressure is just right for them. I am used to applying a lot of pressure from the konad stamper, maybe I just do it wrong/apply too much pressure and smudge the designs due to that...

I have spent a lot of time watching reviews on the new, squishy marshmallow stampers on youtube and the prospect of being able to just press down on my nail instead of rolling on the design had me sold on them. I finally decided I wanted to try the fab ur nails ones. I just splurged on the xl gold and the new jumbo stamper. Don’t know how much time they will take from the Phillipines to Germany, but I am really looking forward to them! Once I manage to create a stamping manicure that I am satisfied with, you’ll get to see the results, promise :) Btw, I am so in love with the new origami stamping plate collection by Moyou London. They’re on my wishlist now!