MUA Nail Constellation Review

I was really excited to pick up a bottle of this as the colours they have are so lovely! I’m surprised that no other cosmetic companies have tried their own version of the famed ‘Fish Egg’ manicure.

Price wise it’s very reasonable at only £3 per bottle (particularly when you compare that with Ciate’s Caviar manicure at a whooping £18 per bottle). You don’t get the polish included as you do with Ciate but MUA do a range of small polishes at £1 per bottle so the total price is only £4. I’d imagine that each bottle will do quite a few sets. The base colour I used is MUA Plum Noir.

Nail Constellation comes in 5 different colours and I picked up ‘Leo’ but they are all very pretty – it was a difficult decision! Application was easy and you can see the MUA YouTube ‘how to’ video here… The video states that you can finish the nail with a top coat, however I tried initally with Sally Hansen ‘Hard as Wraps’ but it really ruined the colour and made it look a bit dull. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has tried this with a different top coat and what success they had?

I’ve got some ‘fish-egg’ beads from ebay from Goldleaf craft supplies which were good quality and a similar price when you include postage. You get about twice the amount of beads as well. The one thing that I have preferred about MUA’s version is that the beads are much smaller – maybe even half the size, which makes the manicure look a lot ‘tidier’ in my opinion.

How does it wear? As I couldn't use top coat I found that the beads started coming loose pretty quickly. I only wore this for about half a day in the end and I’d lost quite a few. Again, if you can find a topcoat that will wear well with this product then you may have better luck!

Overall I’m happy with the result and I think it looks great, however I’d definitely recommend wearing it for a special occasion rather than expecting to get several days of wear out of it.

Silver with Black Print Nails

I decided to do a silver and black manicure, I think that the contrast looks great and the overall look of this combination is quite classy…

The silver is No.7 ‘Disco Nights’ and the black effect is done using nail foils again. This particular foil I found really easy to apply and the pattern came on really easy without any gaps.

The top coat I used was Sally Hansen ‘Hard as Wraps’ (as Seche Vite is said to ‘shrink’ the foil underneath – one day I will try this and let you know!)

I’m happy with the overall effect – what do you think?

Models Own Sale Haul

In case you didn't spot it, Models Own had a sale last week (apologies if you did miss it as it’s now over!) 50% off so an absolute bargain! I managed to order 10 bottles of polish for just £25 so you can imagine my excitement when they arrived today!

Here are some pics of the newest members of my stash:

From left to right: ‘Magenta Divine’,'Disco Heaven’, ‘Disco Mix’, ‘Silver Fox’, ‘Ibiza Mix’

From left to right: ‘Purple Blue’, ‘Mushroom’, ‘Copper Pot’, ‘Thunder & Lightening’, ‘Purple Haze’.

Expect to see a lot of Models Own nails soon!

Matte Purple and Pink Gem Nails

Good morning! Today I'm wearing a purple matte manicure, embedded with pink square jewels.

I love this colour and it’s already the second time it’s appeared on my blog – it’s Revlon ‘Violet’, topped with Rimmel Pro Matte Finish top coat. I'm really loving matte nails at the moment!

I’m really not 100% where I got the stones from. I think they were a free gift when I bought some nail foils but other than the fact that they were a freebee, I really am not sure! I think they are really pretty, the only problem is that they are all slightly different sizes, which you can tell when you look closely. I put a little too much top coat on the ring finger as well, so it looks a bit excessive where they have sunk in…

x

Glittery Pink and Mint Nail Art

I love the combination of mint green and a pretty baby pink so I decided to try putting them together to create something a bit spangle-y!

The green colour used is Barry M’s ‘Mint Green’. The sequins are from Born Pretty Store which is great source for nail-related products (and pretty cheap!) I actually got 12 different sequin colours for a few pounds….

I don’t think the pictures do it justice – there’s too much glare from the sequins, but at least it shows how shiny it is!

Butterfly and Flower Nail Art Using Foils…

Today I’ve done some blue foil print nails. They aren’t the nail sticker type foils, they are actual strips of plastic covered with a patter that you can get if you’ve not seem them. Using adhesive you can transfer the design from the pattern onto the nail.

The base coat I used is a recently picked up bottle of Sally Hansen ‘Rose Wine’. I presume this is being discontinued or re-packaged as I managed to get a couple of bottles last week from Pound Land! I really like it – it’s lovely and smooth to apply and dries fast…

The foils used are purchased from ebay. Here is the link to the collection – I used ‘Midnight Blue Foil’. I’ve purchased these from this seller twice now and I’ll happily recommend them (I have no affiliation here at all, and even if I did, I would never recommend anything I wouldn’t purchase again). When you buy the foils it doesn’t look like you get a lot, but I’d imagine you would get 3 manicures (at least) from each design supplied. I also get a good few days wear out of them.

You need to use special nail foil glue to stick them on and it needs leaving for around 6-8 minutes to allow it to get tacky enough. I’ve never tried it but apparently you can’t use Seche Vite over the nail foils as it makes them shrivel up. I did use a Sally Hansen ‘Hard as Wraps’ top coat instead, and then after it had dried I used a coat of Seche Vite to give it the ultra-shiny coat.

I do love the effect from the foils, although sometimes you do get gaps. It’s not completely apparent in the picture, but the sides of some of my nails are a bit too high.

Pink and Black Zebra Print Nail Art

Today I’ve done a very bright mani – pink zebra print and black…

I'm really impressed with the results, but I couldn't really get a picture which does it justice (I’m still very much practising with different settings etc).

The pink used is Rimmel's ‘Funtime Fuchsia’ and The plate is BM-223. I used Mua ‘Black’ for the stamping and the black sides. To achieve the look, I used the pink and stamping first then I applied some top coat to make sure that I didn’t pull the stamping off when I used sellotape to tape off the black section.

The black stones were from Ebay and I finished off with a couple of coats of Seche Vite.