Home About Me Polish Wishlist Contact
Showing posts with label Models Own. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Models Own. Show all posts

Wednesday, 30 January 2013

Models Own Bottle Shop & Colourcopia at Westfield London

Okay, so I had the most amazing day ever yesterday. I went to see Rita Ora in concert in Newcastle. But not only that, I only got to meet her before the show! How crazy is that?! The experience was unreal. If you know me well you'll know that I absolutely adore Rita and she's one of my idols, so it meant so much to be able to meet her like that. I know this isn't related to my blog but I'm going to do a post on the full night later this week, I'm just waiting for the picture I got with her to be put up by her management team. :)

But anyway, just a quick post today on two of my favourite shops to go to when I visit London! As you've probably established by now, I'm a huge fan of both OPI and Models Own. In Westfield Shopping Centre at White City/Shepherd's Bush, London, there is a pop-up Models Own stand and a shop named Colourcopia that stocks OPI. Lena White (OPI UK Distributor) opened Colourcopia a couple of years ago in addition to the nail bar they have in Selfridges on Oxford Street. Both of these stores are on the first floor of the shopping centre, pretty close to each other - how convenient!

Not really sure what these two girls are doing?
The Models Own bottle shop is quite simply fab. It's so unique because yep, you guessed it, it's in the shape of a nail polish bottle! How cool is that!? The bonus about the Models Own store is that you can get the full range of products (unlike at other stockists e.g. Boots) and still not have to pay postage to buy items from their website. They also usually have some description of offers on. I've heard that these are almost the same if not similar to the deals offered on the website, so I guess you're not missing much - it just means you get to avoid p&p, which is always a bonus for me. When I was there this weekend, they were offering 3 nail polishes for £12 and 6 bottles for £20 - saving you a considerable amount as one bottle of polish would usually cost you £5.

Here you can see the "bottle shape" of the store
Colourcopia also have a range of lacquers on offer, compared to if you just went to a local beauty supply store. They are currently clearing their stock of Nicole By OPI polishes as they are no longer stocking the brand (sad times), so they are all £5 at the moment, but only in store. I'm not sure how long the polishes will be available so if you want any I suggest you get down their quick! I also noticed that all bottles of Shatter lacquers were £4.50 and a "last chance to buy" section of regular OPI containing a few older shades like Fiercely Fiona, but I already had all of these ones so didn't get any. There was however no prices specified for these so I'm not sure if they were even discounted but still, a good way to get your hands on some discontinued polishes, even if you do have to pay the £11 RRP.  Again, not sure now long these will be there for so get down quickly! Perhaps they rotate the shades on offer here throughout the year? There is also the option to have your nails done here or at the nail bar in Selfridges, which is a nice touch. If you look on the Lena White or Colourcopia website you can see the various packages available with the prices for each one. I think you get a discount if you buy a polish towards your manicure.
Colourcopia is the store in the middle of this shot, next door to Pret (sorry it's not the best picture)

Have you visited either of these places before? What do you think?

Also who likes my new blog look? I'm really proud as I managed to do it all by myself!

That's all for today's post, so bye for now!

Monday, 28 January 2013

18th Birthday Weekend & Nail Art!

Hey everyone!

It was my 18th birthday on Friday (25th). I did mean to do this post then but I was just so busy and didn't have time over the weekend either as I took a trip to London. For my birthday I got money, nail polishes (duh!), jewellery, a new pink OnePiece, Juicy Couture Perfume and some other bits and pieces. I also got a really cute box full of little surprises from one of my friends at school with some makeup and nail polish in, it's so nice! The trip to London was also part of my present from my mum and I went to see 'Stomp' on Friday night. It was amazing - so much better than I expected! I would recommend seeing it if you haven't already. It's choreographed really cleverly and has lots of humour throughout, considering the actors don't talk at all. I also went to see Pitch Perfect on Sunday morning. I had wanted to see it since it came out back in December but I was so busy with revising for my English exam that I just didn't have the time. Glad I got to finally see it before it leaves cinemas. It was really good! It made me want to live in America and be in an acapella group like that haha. Some parts were absolutely hilarious, Rebel Wilson gives an amazing performance as 'Fat Amy' throughout. I can't wait until it's out on DVD so I can watch it again! But anyway, enough about my life and onto the nails!

Birthday cupcakes with a number 18 accent nail
I absolutely love doing my nails for special occasions like this. I received many compliments on these across the weekend. In particular, when I visited the Models Own Bottleshop at Westfield Shopping Centre (White City/Shepard's Bush) one of the sales assistants couldn't believe that I'd done them myself and they were my own nails! She even ended up getting all of her colleagues over for them to have a look at my nails too. We then went on to have a conversation about our favourite shades from the brand. It's so nice when you speak to fellow polishaholics!

The polishes I used were as follows:
- OPI Play The Peonies as a base underneath the cakes
- OPI Kiss Me On MY Tulips for the cupcake cases and the accent nail
- OPI PEdal Faster Suzi! for the icing
- OPI Rainbow Connection for the sprinkles
- Nicole By OPI Step to the Beat of My Heart for the cherries on top
- My trusty WAH Nails x Models Own Nail Art Pen in white for the stripes on the cupcake cases and the '18'

I did originally intend to do a tutorial for these nails but I forgot to take pictures step-by-step :( sorry about that!

Hope you all had a lovely weekend, until the next time :)

Thursday, 6 December 2012

WAH x Models Own Nail Art Pens

Hi everyone!

Today I just wanted to do a quick post on the WAH Nails and Models Own collaboration nail art pens. These aren't new on the scene, but I'm going to do a post on them anyway because they are some of my favourite tools to use when doing my nails. The colours they are currently available in as follows: Black, White, Blue, Pink, Yellow, with recent additions of Silver & Gold (festive season, yay!).


I absolutely love these pens! I have them in all the colours. They're great because the have one end that acts as a dotter for precise detail and then the other end is a striper brush to create smooth, straight lines. They are really easy to use, even if you don't have the steadiest of hands. I was really surprised even when I did my other hand, yes the result is never quite as perfect as my left hand, due to me being right-handed, but it still looked great - much better than trying to do free-hand patterns.

If you haven't got any already, they retail at £6 each and can be bought at Boots (in stores nationwide and online), the Models Own website and the Models Own Bottleshop located in Westfield at White City, London. Boots quite often run promotions such as 3 for 2 or a free nail art pen when you buy two other MO products so it's definitely worth keeping an eye out for any special offers.

Here is some striped nail art I created with the help of my all time favourite WAH x Models Own Nail Art Pen in White.

OPI Planks a Lot is the purple base colour.

In terms of the colours themselves, the shades are actually really lovely. The pink, blue and yellow are all very bright but I didn't have a problem with that because I like my statement nails, haha. The gold pen that I bought most recently appeared to be not as gold toned as I would have liked, more of a bronze to me, especially when applied on the nail (see previous post on Rita Ora Nails). However, I don't know if I just got a bit of an "off" bottle, so they might not necessarily be all like this. All in all, I would definitely recommend this product to anyone, regardless of your skill with nails.

Which colour is your personal favourite? I don't think I can call it!

Friday, 2 November 2012

Mini Bow Nail Art with Tutorial

Hi guys! I can't believe it's friday already - school half-term holiday has gone so incredibly fast, but it's really cool that the next time we break up, it will be for christmas! I'm so excited for it already haha. Anyway, time to get onto the post.

Today I'm going to give you a tutorial on how to do a cute little bow manicure yourself.
Please bear with me as this is my first attempt at doing a tutorial!

Here you can see the finished product:



Now onto the tutorial! I hope it all makes sense - like I say, bear with me. It's actually a really simple look to achieve.

See steps below that refer to each picture! Enlarge this if you need to.


You will need:
- 2 different coloured nail polishes (here I've used OPI's 'If You Moust You Moust' and Nicole By OPI's 'My Lifesaver'). You could do this with just the one colour but I personally think it looks prettier with two.
- Striper brush with black and white nail polishes / or white and black nail art pens.
- Dotting tool or a toothpick, hair grip etc
(- Base and top coats)

STEP 1) If you're using a base coat, apply it and make sure it's dry. Then move on to paint each nail with 2-3 coats of your chosen polish (obviously this depends on how sheer your polish is).

STEP 2) Once you've made sure the colour is dry, you're ready to start the first step of creating the bow. You need to use your striper brush with white nail polish to make two diagonal lines that cross over each other in the middle. It doesn't matter too much if the lengths are slightly different because this gets tidied up in the next step.

STEP 3) Join up the ends of each line using the striper brush again so you end up with the basic structure of the bow itself.

STEP 4) Fill in the two empty sections using white nail polish. Top tip!: if you find your nail polish brush is a bit too big to do this neatly/without going over the lines, use a dotting tool or something like a toothpick to do it instead :)

STEP 5) Now you need to place a white dot in the middle of the bow using whatever you are using as your dotting tool.

STEP 6) Finally, we're going to outline the bow. For this you can either use the striper brush (if you're feeling brave haha - it can be quite fiddly!), your dotting tool or nail art pen. I used my WAH x Models Own nail art pen in black. Firstly, outline the middle dot/circle. Then do the very edges of the bow. Lastly, make two very small lines coming out of the middle part of the bow to give it depth. Be careful not to make them too long or they won't look as realistic! Make sure everything's dry and then add a top coat if you desire. (Be careful if you've used a nail art pen - I often find they smudge if you don't leave enough drying time or have too much top coat on your brush!)

And that's it! Hope this proved useful to some of you. Don't hesitate to leave me a comment if you have any additional questions or need some tips. I'd also love to see pictures if any of you do try to create this look yourselves :)

Wednesday, 31 October 2012

Happy Halloween!: Nail Art

Happy Halloween everyone! Hope you've all had a good day.Did anyone do anything nice to celebrate? It wasn't really for halloween, but I went to see Skyfall at the cinema earlier - it was fantastic! I'd definitely recommend a trip to see it if you haven't already.

Just a quick post today, I wanted to show you guys some Halloween nail art I did this morning. I absolutely love doing themed nails.



The orange I used is OPI In My Back Pocket and the black is Barry M Black. On my pinkie I also used OPI Metallic 4 Life for the glitter on the spider's web. My favourite nail art pens by WAH / Models Own were used in black and white and the orange nail art pen was just from a set I bought in Topshop (link here if anyone is interested).

Now onto my thumb, I'm really excited about this one! This is In My Back Pocket with OPI BLACK SPOTTED over the top. This was a French Sephora exclusive that launched with the spiderman collection over the summer. I won't got into too much detail about it because I'm planning on doing another post on it in the near future. But doesn't it look fabulous? I LOVE IT!!

That's all for now, thanks for reading :)

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

Diamond Jubilee / Union Jack Nails!

Hello everyone :) I've just started this blog and I hope to update it as often as possible with various swatches and my nail art designs. So I'll stop rambling and get on with the post now!

Happy Jubilee Weekend! Hope you've all had fun celebrating. For the occasion, I thought it would be appropriate to do some sort of jubilee themed manicure, so here it is:

Colours used:
OPI Ogre-the-Top Blue, Models Own Juicy Jules,
OPI Get Your GLAMOUR On
and Models Own/WAH Nail Art Pen in White.

What do you think? I thought it was pretty cute myself, and not a bad attempt at some nail art. Doing an accent nail using the union jack was stressful/tricky enough, so I didn't manage to do all my fingers - my hand isn't THAT steady lol. I chose to do red and white polka dots on my other fingers. Then I decided that I wanted to bring some blue back in so I did a glitter gradient on the thumb with it... well, it was supposed to be a gradient but I still haven't fully got the hang of the technique yet :P


That's all for now, if anyone has bothered to read this then thank you! I hope to see you back on my blog soon.