How To: Patch a nail

Here's a How To I've been planning for a while, but either I forgot to make photos, or I simply filed my nails down when I had a chip/tear/whatever. But at last, one of my nails could use a patch ánd I remembered to photograph it =)

Meet my right indexfinger! And there's a sight I don't like seeing at all, I'm not sure what I did but my nail got folded so to say, making it very weak and I know it wouldn't take long before it would tear off. You can use patches on these kind of things, but if your nail has a tear, you could even help it grow out with a patch, without having it tear off completely. The right picture shows the patched nail.

Here's what you need to patch up a nail:

• Remover
• Nail files, I use a coarser one and a 3-way buffing file (yes, those are cat teeth marks on the end :P)
• Scissors
• Cotton pads or a similar product
• Basecoat 
• Nail glue *optional*
• Nail wraps or an empty tea bag *not shown*. I've ordered these strips of wraps online years ago and I can't fully remember, but I think it was the cheapest silk strip shown here.

And here's how it works!
1) Use the remover and cotton pads to fully clean and dry your nail, and cut your tea bag or wrap to the preferred size. I think the pyramid tea bags work better than the regular ones, they seem to have a different structure and feel more like nail wraps to me. But the wraps have an advantage over teabags, they're a bit sticky already, which makes the rest of the process easier! I usually cut them smaller than the size of my nail, to prevent glue on my cuticles or making the filing harder near that area.
2) Stick the wrap or teabag to your nail.
3) Now you can take it 2 ways, either a quick and short-term solution: apply basecoat over your patch and let it dry, now you're good to go! Or a longer lasting solution: apply nail glue on top of the wrap, as shown here. Be careful though, that stuff is nasty on your skin, and a little often goes a long way :)
4) You can see when the glue starts to dry, the structure of the wrap is showing again.
5) Filing time! Gently file till you have a fairly smooth result, and no hard bits and pieces sticking out. I use a coarser file for the first bit, then smooth it with a buffer file. Don't file too much though, the goal is to smoothen it a little, not to file the whole thing off!
6) Apply a basecoat, or for an extra smooth result, a ridgefiller. Done!

To remove your wrap, either soak it with some remover with acetone, or gently file it down some more. If you're wearing polish on top of your patched nail and want to remove it, just be quick about it and the patch should stay in place. And I haven't tried it, but I suspect remover without acetone could help as well with making your patch last. If you went with the simplified version with basecoat only, the removal is of course easypeasy!

Hope this helps, thanks for looking!

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Another gradient stamping & tutorial

Hi all :) I haven't stamped in months, and when I was looking through my platefolder I didn't even know where to start, lol! So many ideas came to mind! But I already picked the colors for a gradient stamping, which helped, because I think some images look best stamped in a creme or in 1 color only. I think I saw the gradient stamping for the first time on the always awesome The Polished Perfectionist, and loved it from the moment I tried it! You can see my previous 2 manis here and here. Stamping after such a long time was a bit tricky again, I didn't get such clean transfers, but an image like this is very forgiving (which makes it ideal for when you're just learning how to stamp as well) :)

Because the previous gradient stamping (such a mouthful, but shortening it to gramping or stradient just sounds so weird :P) that I did turned out too subtle, I went for 3 colors that are a bit further apart this time. And man, I am loving how this one turned out! ♥ Unfortunately it just wouldn't photograph though, which was highly frustrating tbh! Because I used metallics it all just looked too light and cool on photos, while it's such a warm colored and obvious gradient irl. This morning I tried again, still no succes, so what to do then? Mattify it of course! =) And that helped luckily :) I loved it both shiny and matte, but because my shiny pics failed so badly, I'll just show the matte only. But you can get an idea of the shiny version from the tiny pic in the bottom-right of the tutorial below though. Really, if you have these colors, try them together sometime, I promise it'll look way better irl even!

Catrice C02 with Kiko 630 Golden Rose, 629 Copper, 619 Red Peony, Essence Matt TC and Pueen plate 05.

And here's how I did that:

Hope you liked it, have a great weekend! ♥

Edit, thanks to a little fail with scheduling this post, I ended up having 2 posts today! Have a look at the first post here :)

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BornPrettyStore waterdecals (and how to apply them)

Good afternoon! Today I have a review of some BPS decals for you, and a little how to: as well. Let's see the result first :)

Here are the decals, they arrived in plastic and most of the sheets have the same decals in black and white.

And here's how you use them :)

1) When your basecolor is completely dry, cut the decals to the right size and have a little bowl of water and some paper towel ready.

2) Remove the plastic foil from a decal and put it in the water (go 1 at a time).

3) Make sure your fingers and nails are wet as well, and carefully try to slide the decal of the paper. When it's soaked long enough, it'll come right off. As long as your fingers and nails are wet, it won't stick to either of those and you can gently slide it in place on your nail with your fingers. Even when it gets a bit crumpled up as it did on the tip of my nail here, as long as everything is wet, you can unfold it again.

4) Be careful with your nails that already have a decal while you place the rest on, as long as your nails ain't fully dry, the decals might accidentally move a bit.

5) Gently use the paper towel to dab around the decals so it soaks up most water, and let the decals dry further, which doesn't take long at all.

6) As you can see, there's some bits of decal sticking out on my fingers. I prefer to use a polish remover pen (one with a hard tip, like on the photo) to remove that, soak it in remover and just place it on the bit of decal that's stuck on your finger. Hold it there for a moment and it'll come right off. Apply your top coat floating (don't let the brush hit your nail too much) else the decal might smudge a little, as it did on my pinky.

I used OPI Thanks a Windmillion as base here. I think these decals look nice and sharp, there's plenty of choice and with most of the images you get enough strips to easily cover all your nails and maybe have some spare for accent nails as well. The one that I used here however, wasn't enough for all my nails, if they would've been shorter the thicker strip would've been enough to cover 4 nails. So these would work best combined with the matching strips, or just as accents.

You can buy these waterdecals from BornPrettyStore, the ones that I have are these, which cost $4,73. With coupon code ABJ61 you'll get another 10% off :)

Thanks for looking, take care!


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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Striped gradient & tutorial

As I said yesterday, I had several ideas in my head for striping tape, and here's one of them. I think it turned out great! I considered adding a little stamped flower in white somewhere as well, but was afraid I'd ruin it, lol, so I just left it like this. Maybe next time :)

China Glaze Sweet Hook with China Glaze Gothic Lolita.

 
And here's how I did it:

1 Apply your light basecolor and let it dry completely. Cut off strips of striping tape.
2 Start with a strip of tape in the middle of your nail, then add more on each side. I'd advise to keep the strips longer than I'm showing here to make removing them easier later on.
3 Apply tape to the sides and top of your nail (or nailwheel in this example), because you'll end up sponging on your fingers as well.
4 Apply your basecolor and a darker color on a piece of sponge. I used a makeup sponge here. It doesn't have to be neatly applied, you'll end up with a gradient on the sponge anyway (for more sponging tips, have a look here).
5 Sponge one part of your nail until you have a nice gradient. If needed you can add more dark polish to the sponge and pay extra attention to the base, to make it extra dark there.
6 Remove the striping tape (tweezers can be handy for that) and the tape from your skin and apply your top coat.


After typing sponge several times, that word now looks very weird, haha. But luckily the result doesn't :) Hope you'll like it as well, thanks for looking! ♥

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Striped with silver & tutorial

Today I did a mani with striping tape, which is one of those things that I've tried out but never really did a full mani with. I think it turned out ok, but I have several ideas already that'll look better - at least in my head =)

China Glaze Cheers To You with W.I.C. by Herôme Gothenburg.

I think it looked pretty fun, although using a lamp here wasn't so handy as you can see on the photo above, it made it harder to see where the lines are. Oops! Anyway, here's how I did it:

1 Apply your basecolor and as always when working with tape, make sure it's completely dry. Cut strips of your striping tape, I usually put them on the side of my desk so I can easily take them off.

2 Start with one line over the middle, make sure to press the edges down well on the sides of your nails.

3 Then add more tape, have the edges slightly overlapping, but not as far that they stick out from other lines, if that makes sense. If you have your tape overlapping a lot (for example if you want a start-shaped design and everything overlaps in the center), try to remember in what order you applied them and remove them the opposite order later on. 
If you want, you can use a small hobby scissors and cut off the edges of the tape now, add top coat and finish your mani with stripes of tape.

4 Work one nail at a time! Apply 1 coat of polish, if the polish usually doesn't cover completely in a single coat, just apply it thicker than normal, like I did here. If you would normally use several coats, I'd suggest to go for a different polish.

5 Remove the pieces of tape right after applying your polish (if you wait too long you'll pull up parts of the top color). I used a wide tweezers to easily grab and pull off the stripes. You can do it with your fingers as well, but the stripes will have polish on them and so will your hands then =)

6 After finishing a nail, repeat it for the next one, and when you're done with all your nails do a cleanup and apply top coat. As you can see on the last picture where I didn't use top coat yet, the top color will be higher on the nail than the basecolor. If you really want a smooth finish it might be needed to apply a 2nd coat of top coat.


You can buy striping tape online in places like BornPrettyStore and eBay. Hope this helps! :)

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BornPrettyStore hexagon glitters & tutorial - Review

Hey everyone! Today I have another review for you, from the hexagonal glitters from BornPrettyStore (which are commonly known as glequins). These glequins were on my "must try" list for quite some time, so I was happy BPS gave me the chance to try them out!

Here's how I recieved them, wrapped in plastic per 6 pots. There was some loose glitter in the plastic, which made me worried that some pots maybe weren't fully closed, but that wasn't the case! They were all closed well and those glitters must've escaped during the fabrication and got stuck in the plastic (and I quickly found out they easily stick to your hands as well, haha).

I've placed these pots onto a standard size cotton pad, to give you an idea of their size. As you can see the pots are pretty small, but they're also jam-packed with glitters!

Look at all those darker areas in the pot, they're loads of glitter piled up. I don't think I'll ever get through one of these =D

I never used anything like this before, so I went for different ways and colors to try them out. What I did notice after sealing them in with top coat is that they didn't bleed (lose their color, which you then drag along with the top coat) at all!

Glequins used: Dark blue, dark green, bright blue, silver. Polishes used: W.I.C. by Herôme Örebro, Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm. (I'll post a review of the whole Sweden collectie soon!)

Here you can see better how flat your nail surface becomes after using top coat on them, no obvious bits sticking out (anyone else find themselves easily picking off things like rhinestones? >.<)

I was a bit scared I'd end up with glitter everywhere but my nails and misplaced glitters on my nails before I tried these, but they went on so much easier than expected! So I decided to do a little tutorial as well, if you have doubts about trying these, I hope this helps :)

1 Start with your basecolor and wait for it to dry. Use a toothpick or something pointy alike (I used a rosewood stick). Apply a thin coat of top coat, I'd advice one that's not too quick drying, and also place a drop of your top coat on the side (I used my placemat for that).

2 Open your pot of glitters, there should be enough sticking to the cap but if not, hold it upside down first before opening it. Put the pot in a safer spot, so you don't accidentally knock it over (yeah, I can totally see myself or a cat doing that!)

3 Dip your toothpick lightly in the top coat, then pick up a glitter from the cap and place it on your nail. I noticed you can slightly move it around if you're careful, because it's so thin it won't damage your basecolor too quickly. Keep going until your toothpick isn't sticky anymore, then dip it again.

4 I kept a cotton pad nearby, if I picked up too much glitter that got stuck together I could wipe them off on it. But if you use a pad as well, make sure you don't get bits of your pad stuck on your toothpick.

5 After you're done, there might be some loose glitter on your work area and fingers, I noticed they can be quite persistent! But with a cotton pad with remover you can wipe them away easily.

6 Add another layer of top coat when you're done, and there you have it! I used 2 colors blue to make flower-like things and added some random glitters as well. I've noticed that glequins don't photograph so well, but it looks really nice! :)


I can totally see myself using these a lot, they're flat, which is a big plus for me, easy to use, and I think they make a great addition to your mani. I'm thinking of using them as extra line over a taped mani, or as details on a stamped image, or just the way I showed above!

You can buy these glitters from BornPrettyStore, the ones that I have are these, which cost $6,45 for 12 pots (free shipping worldwide). With coupon code ABJ61 you'll get another 10% off :)


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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How To: Polished paintings

This How To: is quite different than what you usually see on my blog. I've just started with this but wanted to share it already, because I think you can create great things with polish and canvas! A while ago I saw painting made with polish, and with the amount of polish that I have, I don't think it's a problem to use some on paintings. My awesome sister has a huge stash of hobby stuff so with her help I could easily get started ♥ But I struggled with hand drawing on a piece of canvas, and came up with another idea. If you like getting creative and don't mind using your pretty shinies, this might be fun for you as well :)


Materials needed:
- Painting canvas
- Polish
- Brushes
- Something to apply your polish to (I use -as always- my placemat)

Optional materials:
- Aceton
- Stamping stuff
- Dotting tools
- Sponge (for gradients)
- Straws (for splatters)
- Nail art pens
- Tape
- Saran wrap (for saran sponging)
- Hobby knife and/or scissors
- Shaped scissors
- Rhinestones, glitters, flakies, etc.
- A printed image for transfer
- Another copy of that image
- Alcohol and something to apply the alcohol with


If you want, you can of course just freehand something onto your canvas and go nuts with different polish techniques; use nail art pens for fine lines, go for big sugarspun lines, drip the polish on, decorate with glitters, rhinestones, etc.
Here are some quick examples of different techniques, as you can see using a brush with aceton can create a water color look. I used masking tape to make sure that the saran sponging and the stamping didn't go outside the golden background. If you stamp, make sure to press pretty hard on your stamp. As you can see, I didn't and because of the texture of the canvas, ir didn't transfer well on all spots. Although that can have it's charm as well!

But as I said before, freehanding didn't work out for me, so I decided to print an image and transfer it to the canvas. The images that I'm using are some of my mandalas. I applied the printed image upside down to the canvas and folded down the edges, to help me keep it in place. Because the paper is slightly see through, I could easily see if it was somewhat centered. The canvas that I'm using is 20x20 cm.

When the image is in place, use alcohol and a cotton pad (or something alike) and just keep rubbing the image. It's the same as doing newspaper nails, but then with a printed image and canvas instead of newspaper and nails :)

I did notice I had to keep adding alcohol and rub every spot quite a bit, but you can check in between by holding down 1 side of the paper on the canvas so it doesn't move, and peeking under the other side.

When it's transferred well enough, let the canvas dry.

When it's dry, you can start coloring it, here's the one that I'm working on now. Polishing like this reminded me of paint by numbers from when I was little :) I just went for basic polish for this one. Most polishes that I used did need 2-3 coats, but when the polish thickened up a bit on my placemat 1-2 coats were enough. You could of course just go for 1-coaters straight away, also to save polish!
I also noticed shimmers and glitters aren't as obvious as they'd be on your nails, because of the texture of the canvas (I don't plan on using top coat when I'm done :P), and metallics look great!
Here I'm working on the outer leaves kinda things.

You could also use saran wrap, sponging, splattering or stamping to add extra detail to your design, the area around it can be taped off (make sure the polish around it is fully dry) or use your second printed image and a hobby knife/scissors to cut out the area you want to work on. Then place the paper on your image and sponge/stamp/whatever.
The example on the photo here isn't flat because it's the image I used for transferring which got wet from the alcohol. I didn't print a second one of this image because it's my first one and I'm just going for basic polishing (maybe a rhinestone here and there, will see later).

I can't capture the shimmers and different shades so well, and my image is far from finished as you can see, but I really like how the image changes color depending on from what angle you look at it!

Because I'm not fully sure yet how I'll finish this painting and because it does take quite some time (at least, it's my first and so far I paint fairly slow), I went ahead and posted this how to already.

For my Dutch readers, you can buy canvas and brushes cheap at the Big Bazar, but Kruidvat and Action often have these kind of things as well!

Besides paintings, I also polished rings and wooden beads. My sister made a pretty necklace for my mum and included some of those beads as well, I think that was a nice personal gift :) You can see those beads here, and some polished rings here. But there's a lot more you can polish, like clear phonecases, Christmas decoration or even furniture!


I hope you enjoyed this different How To and that it might inspire to get creative as well :)

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Sideways French & tutorial

Heyhey :) I was in the mood for something different today, and I think it turned out pretty classy! I decided to do a little tutorial for this look as well. Hope you like it!

China Glaze Sweet Hook saran sponged with China Glaze 2030 and tips and sides with Essence Black Is Back.

The lines look crisp clean on my nails, it's just on these big photos that it looks a bit wobbly. And yes, that annoys me big time, haha. Of course you can freehand these black lines, but if you struggle with that, tape works great! Here's how I did it:

1 Apply your basecolor and let dry.
2 Use a little ball of saran wrap to sponge your 2nd color on your nails.
3 Cut a piece of tape straight off, then cut off the little corner rounded.
4 Apply the tape on a nail and press the edges down firmly.
5 Apply your 3rd color, and remove the tape straight after. If you wait too long, the chance of messing up the lines is bigger, ad you can see on the last photo.
6 Wrap your tips with the 3rd color (I forgot that, looks better if you do) and apply your top coat.

For more info on taping, have a look at my How To: Taped mani.

What do you think of this look and my tutorial? First time I'm doing one of those so feedback would be great!
Thanks for looking :)

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How To: Nail photos

A while ago someone asked me to do a How To: on making nail photos, but I don't change the settings of my camera much at all. So this How To: isn't about what settings to use on your camera, or how to get the most color accurate pictures with your camera. Instead it's about the things I've learned while making pics! Some of the pictures I use in this post are done over the top, but it's just to show clearly what I mean (and I had fun with making them ^^). I'm not using a lightbox because I haven't found the ideal lamp for me yet. So here's how I do it :)


Find your spot
Try making pics at several places in your house, see what spot gives the best lighting. Have a look at what direction you're sitting when you're taking the pics as well, this can make a big difference! I make my photos in my livingroom, and I'm sitting next to a window. Here's how my photos would look if I turn to the other sides.

Straight forward

Turned to the left

Turned to the right

Hmm, what ís that thing?!
Keep your background clean, so people won't end up wondering what that thing in the background is! I always use the same background nowadays, because I noticed that if I keep it close, the color doesn't change too much. If I look at some of my older pics, where I had the floor as background, it looks a bit weird grey-brownish, while it was actually creme.
If you always want to use the same background as well, choose something that's easy to move and not too big, like a piece of cloth or a sheet of paper. If you have pets, don't go for something that attracts hairs. I thought I had a nice background at some point, until I realized I had to de-hair it first every time. Not so handy! Of course you can use something else as background as well, like real flowers can look great and complementary to your mani!

Dewey with my standard background, a grey-blue top that doesn't wrinkle so fast. Picture taken while photographing for this post

And here I shoved stuff on my desk together to show you how distracting a background can be!

It's all in the angle!
The angle matters a lot for me, and I keep moving my hand and place my fingers in different positions to hopefully get some nice shots. I constantly move the camera as well, and when the lighting is worse I often hold my cam a bit higher, for me that helps! Here's what happens when I hold my hands at different angles.

If I look at my nails, I look straight at them. But on a pic? I'd rather use a different angle!

Holding my hand a bit more backwards here, it's better already, but I think that my skin still looks a bit odd.

Whoops, that's clearly too far backwards!

To bottle or not to bottle
Some people like to hold something in their hands, and I'm one of them. I find it easier with a little bit of guidance, and sometimes the bottle shows the color better, or shows it well if a color dries up darker. But I'm holding the bottle very loosely and keep my fingers relaxed. You can of course hold different stuff as well, I see people make gorgeous pics with flowers or jewelry for example, but again, make it complement your nails.

Empty hands!

Squishing the bottle a bit, not so charming for my fingers

See, something else works too! But I wouldn't exactly consider this cat toy complementary...

Size matters
I take my pics at the max size that my camera can make, which makes my hands look like ginormous monster paws, but then I can crop the way I want and making a pic smaller is easy, making it larger when it's small doesn't give a good result.


Clean those fingers and keep clicking!
When you're ready to take pics, make sure your nails and fingers are clean. A fluffy bit or a cathair might be barely visible irl, but show up well on your pictures because your hands will be blown up so much. When it's all clean just keep on taking pics. Sometimes I don't take too much pictures, when it's a sunny day for example and the lighting is good, but other times I go nuts and just keep going! But I think I take on average about 30-50 pics. And when I think I have enough, I often click a few more. Yeah, I'm picky, hah! Perhaps I should learn more about my camera sometime afterall, that should help as well :P
Also, when I'm swatching I often put the pics on my pc before taking the polish off, and make sure I have some decent pics first. It's not so nice to find out afterwards that all your pictures didn't turn out well or there's hairs on your fingers!

No worries, my cats are fine =)

Cropping
Cropping can help a lot with your pictures as well, and here's an example of that. I sometimes take pictures like this, but then my fingers kinda take over the photo.

Uncropped

Cropped

Turn it around
If your picture looks a bit different than you'd like, turn it! It can look so different then, as you can see here:

Normal

Turned right

Turned left

Shinyyy!
Want shiny nails on your pics? Top coat is your answer, and for me nothing beats the shiny finish that Seche Vite gives. When I finish a mani with top coat, I do a quick final cleanup to make sure there's no top coat on my fingers. It might not be so visible irl, but your camera can make it look like a huge spot because it can reflect! And when I'm done with the cleanup I go make pictures straight after.
If I don't have time to make the pics straight away, I always polish up my nails later on by rubbing them on a piece of cloth to make them more shiny again before I photograph them. Do keep in mind that the shine can make your mani less visible, because it can take over and leave a white stripe over your nails, if that makes sense. I'm sometimes struggling with that, but what can I say, I love my SV!

Here's how it looks on a photo when there's top coat on my cuticles. Not so nice, huh.

Moisturize
If you have dry skin, it can be nice to moisturize your cuticles right before taking pics, and if needed, use a cuticle remover before you start with your mani. If you don't want your fingers to look oily, because it can reflect as well, you can wipe them off a bit so your fingers are still moisturized but not so shiny. I'm blessed with easy skin and cuticles (thanks mum!), but I'm also more careful with my left hand (although my foster kittens don't care about that as you can see on these pics, lol). For more tips on cuticles, have a look at my Tips & Tricks page.

Yep, might wanna wipe that oil off before making pics!

There, still a bit oily on the sides but much better already!

Camera
I use a simple digital camera, a Sony DSC-S2100, and I rarely ever mess with the settings. I set it lighter or back to normal at times, but besides that, the cam does the thinking for me and I'm quite happy with that =) If I adjust things it's most of the time not an improvement anyway, lol. But it can help to mess around with your cam's settings, just give it a go and see what works best for you!
Update 17 July: I now use a Canon PowerShot S120.

Update:
Lamp
When it's less bright outside and there's not enough light for my camera to make decent pics, I use a very bright lamp. I haven't found the perfect setup yet, I do have a lightbox but I'd need several lamps to get a good result, without the lightbox my fingers end up looking quite rubbery! You'll see that more on my pics in Fall/Winter, haha. Not so pretty, but luckily it does show polish well! The lamp I'm using is a 4000k Cool White lamp, but I don't know enough about such things to give proper advise here.


The polish that I'm wearing in these pictures is A England Perceval with Seche Vite top coat.

Thanks for looking and take care!

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