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 :)

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 :)

OPI and Nicole by OPI in TK Maxx

Morning/afternoon everyone,

My post today is going to be a little bit different to the usual swatches/nail art. Everyone knows how much I love OPI Nail Lacquer, and what's even better is getting it at a bargain price!

Nail Polish in TK Maxx (OPI 3 shelves up from the bottom)
(No idea why the bottom of this photo has gone yellow... sorry!)

For those of you who don't know (where have you been?!), TK Maxx is a chain of stores in the UK that offer designer labels at lower prices. OPI usually costs £11 per bottle, but in TK Maxx you can pick 2 up for £9.99 or 3 for £14.99. Nicole by OPI comes in sets of 3 which will cost you £12.99.

These are all of the colours that I have bought in the store.

Colours from left to right: It's My Year, Silver Shatter, Sea You in Hollywood (Exclusive to QVC), Your Royal-Shine-ness, Play The Peonies, White Shatter, Meep-Meep-Meep, In My Back Pocket, Designer... De Better!, Crown Me Already!, Animalistic, Clubbing Til Sunrise, Bullish on OPI, Stranger Tides, Pepe's Purple Passion.
Denim to Earth, First Crush Blush, Count On Me, One Time Lime, Me + Blue, My Lifesaver.

Below you can see what each set looks like, so you know what you're looking for:

The majority of my local stores have had at least one set in at some point since August. I would say it's worth multiple visits because I often find if they don't have any one time, by the next time I go they will have had a new delivery of it.

The main downside is that lots of the colours are repeated, so sometimes you can be staring at 5 of the exact same set. Below I have listed all the other shades that I've seen but didn't buy due to my sister or I already having them or similar colours already (or we just generally didn't like them haha):
- Superbass Shatter
- Shatter The Scales
- Navy Shatter
- Black Shatter
- Chop-Sticking To My Story
- Big Hair... Big Nails
- I Want To Be A Lone Star
- Planks A Lot
- Skull & Glossbones
- Who The Shrek Are You?
- Fiercely Fiona
- Ogre-The-Top Blue
- All of the Serena Williams Glam Slam duo sets
- Congeniality Is My Middle Name
- From Me To Q (another QVC exclusive!)

I'll edit this list if I see/get any more, but in the meantime... happy shopping bloggers!

Let me know in the comments below if any of you have managed to pick up any shades and which ones they are :)