Simple sponged & decal mani

Hey all :) I'm far behind on my BornPrettyStore reviews, time to catch up, starting with some palmtree decals! Or well, I only used leaves for this mani, but most of the decals on the sheet are palmtrees. These waterdecals are available in 2 colors, black and red/pink, and I chose the black ones. I started with a light purple base and randomly sponged 2 other purples on top, then I applied the waterdecals and finished with top coat. Here's how that turned out:

Essence No More Drama sponged with Essence Go Wild and Color Club Uptown Girl, with waterdecals from BornPrettyStore.

And here's how this sheet of decals looks! Aren't these trees perfect for a summery mani? You can find them here, a sheet costs $2.02 and as always, using code ABJ61 will give 10% off on your BPS order :) Thanks for stopping by and have a lovely day!

The product(s) in this post was/were send to me for review. For more information, please have a look at my Disclosure Policy.

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Rose Bower for stamping?

Yes, it works! I couldn't wait to try out all 3 polishes shown in this post for stamping, and I've already shown the result of stamping with Sleeping Palace, today it's Rose Bower's turn :) This stunning polish became even better after seeing how well it worked, just like Sleeping Palace ♥

Color Club Uptown Girl with A England Rose Bower and Bundle Monster plate 314.

Thanks for looking! :)

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Pointy tips with BPS glequins

Howdy! Here's a mani I did with small BornPrettyStore glequins, more on them below, but let's see how that turned out first!

China Glaze Sweet Hook with Color Club Uptown Girl and BPS glequins.

As you can see, this set of glequins has plenty colors to choose from! I went with the magenta pink ones on the right for this mani.

Swatches of Sweet Hook.

There are 6 different sets that come in these cute little bottles, you can choose between bar glitters, hexagonal glitter (as I'm showing today), various shapes glitter, diamond shaped glitter, nail beads and loose glitterpowder. Each set comes in 12 different colors, these hexagonal glitters come in 6 solid colors and 6 see-through ones that shift color, as you can see below. I think those see-through blue ones will be excellent for a sea inspired mani!

I also compared them to a BornPrettyStore glequin set I've reviewed before (you can check out that review and how to apply them here), I think those little jars are easier to open and the glitters can be used straight from the cap, which does work a bit easier. With these I pulled the top of the little bottle and gently tapped the bottle so a bit of glitter fell out, onto my placemat, and then I took it from there. Wasting a bit of glitter isn't something to worry about with either of these sets, they both contain sooo much glitter!
The jars do have larger glitters, and almost all colors in that set are solid. I prefer solid colored, smaller glitters, haha, so a mix of both! So it depends what you prefer, but I think both sets are nice to have and can of course be combined as well :) One thing to note though, the colors of the set that I received aren't completely the same as the colors of the set shown on the website!

You can find this set (and the other 5 sets) here, the set with 12 bottles costs $4,59, and with coupon code ABJ61 you'll get 10% off.

I think glequins are great, they can be used in so many different ways (glittery French, framed nails, details on stamping, ...), but I especially love them as I showed above to complement a taped mani. Perfect, crisp clean lines aren't needed, and if you have a steady hand you won't even need tape, because these glequins will cover up the lines anyway! What do you think of glequins, and do you prefer smaller ones like shown here, or the bigger, the better? :)


The product(s) in this post was/were send to me for review. For more information, please have a look at my Disclosure Policy.

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Wild purple stamping

Here's a mani from the vault, and I forgot to write down what I used, so I'm not 100% sure on the basecolor. But I think it was OPI, so I'll just go with that :P Every time I stamp with WAH i wonder why I don't use it more often, it gives such a gorgeous result!

OPI Rumple's Wiggin' with Color Club Wild At Heart and DRK-C.

Thanks for stopping by :)

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DRK plates B/C/D1/D2

Hi guys! As you might have seen already, I received some DRK plates for review. And let me tell you straight away, they're awesome! :D These plates have all kinds of images, and they're huge compared to the average stamping images, so that makes them great as well for people with longer nails. But also for people with shorter nails, because I know I'm not alone on having too big thumbnails for a lot of images! No more doublestamping needed with these :)

The plates come with blue, easy to remove protective foil on the front, and a protective cover on the back. They're not completely smooth on the edges, but nothing that can harm you, so I really don't care much about that!

I left the images below quite big, if you'd like to see more detail of the plates, please click them for an enlargement! They're not crispy sharp anymore then, but I wanted to reduce the size of the images a little.

Oh man, where to start, look at all those swirly patterns! And I really like as well how they added 3 different sizes of some of the smaller images, making them suitable for all your nails instead of having a flower that's tiny on your thumb and way too big for your pinkie.

This plate offers more small images in different sizes, and look at the bricks, postage stamps, snake print, and those doggies! Especially loving the bamboo and top left image!

But the awesomeness doesn't stop there, these 2 ruler shaped plates have some great images as well! A cat version of the doggy image on plate C (and for the people that have DRK-A, that cat image has butterflies as well, these are just cats in various positions), an Egyptian themed image, puzzle pieces and a braided image, ...

But from all the images there were a few that I really LOVED straight away, one of them was a dotted image from plate B. I did a simple stamped mani with it, tried out another China Glaze for stamping which worked fine, and here's how that looks!

Color Club Uptown Girl with China Glaze Don't Make Me Wine and plate DRK-B.

Look how well that transferred! The images are also fairly deep, which means you have a little more time to place them on your nails (a shallow image gives a very thin image on your stamper, which dries even faster). And I did all 4 nails without cleaning the plate in between, that's some impressive detail transferring right there! I am SO excited about these plates, and yes I easily get excited about new plates, lol, but if there's something that makes me love new plates it's when they inspire me straight away! And these did just that ♥

I told you before these images are big, right? This might give you a good idea of the size of these things, and I kept my nails fairly long for this review, lol! And if I want to transfer an entire image, I'll have to get a bigger stamper first!
This can be a bit of a downside as well though, because my nails are obviously too tiny to fit the entire image, and it might be a little trickier to get them all straight. But I'm very happy to see a brand offering plates with various styles, larger images for all you ladies with longer nails :)

And you may have seen this comparison before, but I updated it to add that it's not just plate A which has those big images. What I measured is the average though, some images on all these plates are a bit smaller, and there's also a bunch of images that are even bigger!

Please note: the up-to-date comparison can always be found at my Stamping Plate Sizes page.

You can buy these plates online, in the Esmalteria da KK webshop for R$49 for the bigger plates, R$20 for D1 and D2 combined. You can also find them at the Ninja Polish webshop, for $23,50 and $14,50. And lastly, you can find DRK on Facebook as well :)

What do you think of these plates? Have a lovely weekend and thanks for looking! ♥


The product(s) in this post was/were send to me for review. For more information, please have a look at my Disclosure Policy.

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Blogger Inspired Mani: The Polished Perfectionist

There are thousands of nail blogs, Instagram accounts, Facebookers, you name it. And then there's AmyGrace... yep, this girl is on a league of her own if you ask me! She doesn't only have stunning nails, manicures ánd matching photos, she seems to master it all. Freehand, stamping, gradients, all flawless and fab. And if that's not enough, she makes these amazing cakes with matching nails as well! I'm sure you would've known who I'm on about even if I didn't mention her name, and if there's anyone I have a nailcrush on, it's The Polished Perfectionist! ♥

Right, now there's plenty posts on her blog that make me think "ohh gotta try that!" but one of the things that jumps out for me, is the sponged glitter tips she does so well (and lets be honest, that's also because it's doable, if I attempt to freehand the way she does it looks like a toddler had fun with polish). When I saw her sponge the base of her nails, I knew I had to try that sometime too! So that's what I did today :) And here's a tip, don't be stubborn like I was and think, nevermind taping off my fingers I'll just do a cleanup afterwards. Ohh man, glitters e-ve-ry-where! That cleanup was so horrible, I almost took it all off to start again and then with taped fingers, haha.

Essence Found My Love sponged with Color Club Jingle Jangle.

And here's a daylight photo, the lamp made the basecolor look a bit too blue.

Anyway, time to go type! Earlier I bought some polish sticks, you know the clear nails on a stick? I'm currently using nail wheels for my stash, but I wanted those sticks for quite some time. They can be switched around easily, and I can't wait to have fun with them! What's less fun though, if that I want the name of each polish printed on a label and taped to the stick. That means I gotta pull out each precious bottle from my Helmer and type the name... Ouch!

Enjoy your Sunday and thanks for stopping by :)

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Revvvolution

Here's one from the vault, Color Club Revvvolution. I usually prefer lighter colors and even though it works for stamping too, it stood unused in my Helmer for ages! So it was time to wear it again, and this time I really enjoyed wearing it :) I think it'll be great for the coming seasons as well, for those colder days that still have some sun. And it applies and covers great, this was 2 coats, but 1 thicker would've been enough as well.

Color Club Revvvolution.

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Essence Peel Off Base Coat - Review

Yesterday I bought the Essence Peel Off Base Coat from their Ready For Boarding LE (which I'll call POBC from now on). This base coat is also in their new core line, and if you're lucky, you already have the new displays in your store including this base coat. I've read some positive and negative reviews about this, so I wanted to test it myself and show you how it works!

According to the press release, this POBC is handy for when you're in a rush, you won't need remover but can just peel it off. Then reapply the POBC and polish again.
But ehm, I still need remover, I always do a cleanup! And having to wait for 10 minutes before I can start with polishing doesn't sound ideal for when I'm in a rush either, if I slap on a 1-coater and do a cleanup I'm done within that time.

So no, for those reasons I wouldn't use it. But when I heard about this POBC I thought of glitter polish, as many of you did as well. Imagine this would work! I have no problems with having to apply a base coat first and waiting for a bit before applying glitters. The removal of the glitters should be faster like this and hopefully nicer to your nails than using the foil method. So today I'm testing the POBC with 3 different glitter polishes and a flakie, because I can't say I like their removal either (fish scaled fingers, lovely!).


Here are the instructions that are on the bottle:
Step 1 Apply a generous layer of the peel off base coat to your nails. Allow approximately 10 minutes to dry until the white base coat becomes transparent.
Step 2 Paint your favourite colour nail polish and/or effect nail polish over it and let it dry.
Step 3 Simply peel off to remove! Does not harm to your nails.
Advice: Avoid hot water for 3 hours after application.

The POBC is a white polish, and it reminds me of the craft glue I used as a kid! The white goes transparent as well, it's a bit goopy too, and even the smell reminds me of that glue! But I'll just assume this isn't glue mixed with a base coat, haha.


Here's what my nails looked a few minutes after applying the POBC. After the application all nails look white, and you can clearly see where I applied it a bit thicker, those areas are still more white here. The areas that are becoming transparent have dried more. After the 10 minutes all my nails have a glossy, transparent coat.

Tip: if you get the POBC on or near your cuticles, do a cleanup straight away. When you wait and do it afterwards, it gets all rubbery (like the glue again, haha) and a bit harder to remove without peeling off the POBC and polish from your nails as well.

I applied the polishes and used 1 layer of top coat on all nails, because that's what I'd usually do as well. From index to pinkie: Color Club Candy Cane, Nfu.Oh 51, Essence Time For Romance, Nubar Hyacinth Sparkle. The little bit of tip wear on my indexfinger was caused by me using my nails, not by the base coat.

I've left the polish on for a few hours, to make sure it was fully hardened. Then I started to peel...

And here's what came off, eek! :)

And the result on my nails. Please note the little bits and pieces on my nails are NOT my nails that peeled as well, but tiny bits of rubbery base coat that remained after the peeling!

After this I used some remover to easily wipe off the last bits, and my nails looked smooth like they did before! I just didn't feel the need to add another naked-stained-nails-photo =)


So all in all, I think this works like a charm! Although I'm not sure how long the polish will last, I didn't want to wear the same glitters for several days to test that. What I really liked was the oh so easy removal of the glitters, and the peeling itself (I actually had to resist the urge to start peeling as soon as the polishes were dry, lol). I wouldn't wear this POBC under a normal polish, because it felt like the whole mani gets a tiny bit thicker, and I think it's just too much hassle. But for glitters? Awesome! I do think I'll be wearing glitters more often now ^^


Update: Turns out it's pretty much glue with some preservatives. So I wasn't that far off when I said it reminded me of glue, lol! Several people tried it and you can use pva glue as well, just pour it into an empty bottle and you're good to go!

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