Lush Lacquer - Neon Lights

The 80s called.....they want their fabulous nails back! Today's post takes a closer look at another bobby dazzler from Lush Lacquer, Neon Lights. I heart this polish sooooooooooooooooo much. Ok stop reading and go look at the pictures. 

Neon Lights is a white jelly base with a mix of neon glitters.  There are pink, yellow, green and orange hexagons in 3 different sizes. The glitter sits in the suspension base perfectly which meant I didn't need to dig for glitter, I just applied it like I would a normal polish. The formula was patchy with one coat but evened up with 2. It smoothes down nicely with topcoat. This is 2 coats, no undies with topcoat.

The hearts are sequins which I stuck on using a dotting tool and some base coat, then I applied 2 coats of Seche Vite over the top to flatten them. You can get the heart sequins here.

Really I can't express in words how amazing this polish is, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. If you love brights on your nails but want something a little less in your face then this polish is perfect for you. You know you need it in your collection. Off you go...off to Lush Lacquer and yes they ship to Australia...winning!!

Confessions of a glequin addict

Yeah, yeah, so I used glequins again...I promise though, there was a plan behind it all. With my last few designs I have been curious to see just how many different ways you can use them to mimic painted nail art techniques. Also I get so many questions about 2 things, how to apply glequins and what is striping tape. So today's experiment was put all those nail art elements together in an attempt to show how I use both glequins and striping tape and also to see if glequins could;

1. Do a gradient
2. Be used as polka dots
3. Lastly be used with striping tape to make lines or cut out sections.

Well I'm not entirely sold on the gradient, it looks kinda messy and chunky and doesn't have the nice fade effect so I probably need to work on that and tweak it a bit. The polka dots look cool, will definitely be using glequins for that look again. And the striping tape...hmm well, the jury is out on this one. This is the first time I have tried something like this so it was bound to have its imperfections.  I do think there is something there though, just the placement of the stripes and the sections covered needs to be reworked. I think its important to show your nail failures as much as your successes as we learn from others and also ourselves and there are many times when I do a design just for the practice then take it off straight away.

The tools I use when working with glequins. A small dotting tool to pick up each sequin, a piece of tin foil to put a little dab of base coat on. I dip into the little dot to make the end of my dotting tool sticky so it can pick up things. I normally apply base coat directly on my nails where I want to apply sequins, working with small areas at a time so that it doesn't dry on me. If I have gaps to fill I will use the dotting tool to put a tiny dot of base coat in the hole then stick the sequin over it. You can get the glequins here.

To do the stripes on my middle finger I used striping tape. Striping tape is very thin tape that can be used to make straight lines or as a straight line feature over the top of polish. It comes in many colours but there are two main kinds, holographic pretty tape and plain matte rubbery tape. The rubbery kind is best for geometric designs likes lasers or the Rubiks Cube nails that I did. Whilst the fancy holographic  looks really nice as a feature. It does still make clean lines its just a bit more finicky. You can get striping tape here.

I applied the tape, then painted base coat in-between, like in rows, then applied the glequins. Normally I would advise to pull the striping tape off as soon as you are finished painting that area, it gives cleaner lines. However as I was working with something chunky that I didn't want to move until it was set I left the tape on until I was finished the whole nail.

The base colour I used was OPI Skull & Glossbones, a putty grey creme, my go to grey as it is opaque in two coats and the colour is just so fab and chic. This polish is from the Pirates of the Caribbean collection. I hope you guys had a few of your questions answered with this post. Please comment below if there is anything else you would like to know.

Glequin Zip Zags

You know I love a glequin at the best of times, but combine them with one of my other favourite designs zig zags, and you've got a winning combo. Don't even ask me how long they took, it was at least 2 vodkas! The nude colour is OPI Don't Pretzel My Buttons. 

1. Start by painting all your nails with your contrast colour, or in my case I was going for a more muted background to tone down the explosion of colour of my accent nails.

2. Use a nail art pen or striper to roughly sketch out a zig zag line across the middle of your accent nails to get the general shape you want to follow when applying the glequins.

3. Use glue or base/top coat to apply glequins. I painted a bit of basecoat to one side of my zig zag (don't do the whole line because it will dry before you get to the other side) then put a dab of base coat on a bit of paper. I used a small dotting tool, dipped it in the tiny dot of base coat I had on the paper just to make the dotting tool a little sticky to enable me to pick up each glequin and precisely place it.

4. Move row by row working first down from the middle where you drew your line to the cuticle, then again from the middle up to the tip of your nail. Fill in any areas at the cuticle and tip with extra glequins to fill spaces if necessary.

4. Wait a few minutes for the glequins to set and dry.

5. Apply top coat making sure to re-stroke over any places where you see bubbles forming. It can happen, you have an uneven surface so bubbles may form near joins etc

6. Apply a 2nd coat of top coat to give a super flat glossy finish.

You could definately do all your nails with this design, it would look spectacular but realistically you are looking at 3 hours plus to do something like that.

These hexagons glequins are available now from Drama Queen Nails

Daring Digits Before Color

Always a sucker for Indie polishes, especially one with large black round glequins mixed into smaller white hex glitters, I was most excited to get my paws on Daring Digits Before Color. After using a few other Daring Digits polishes I had high hopes for this polish, unfortunately it fell very short of my expectations.

I layered Before Color over Zoya Kristi, a bright fire engine red with a blue base. 

The application of Before Color was HORRENDOUS! It may be the worst polish in my collection application wise. Trying to use the brush was just pointless, no large black dots would come out unless I dug for them. Even after storing the bottle upside down for 10 minutes it was still so difficult to get the large black dots out. So I resorted to using a toothpick to pick out the black dots then apply them individually. As for the white hexagon glitters....arrrgh! They came out fine using the brush however they were often stacked one on top of each other so on application when I tried to spread them out they wouldn't come apart as the base had kind of glued them together, you can see in the picture how the white hexagons are close together on the nail... that's why. When I did try to pull them apart it dug into the red polish and smeared it, fail!

I love the concept of this polish, the colours...right up my alley but when you have to spend half an hour individually placing the glitters you may as well just use free glitter and glue them on with top coat. Sad Panda...I wanted this polish to be great.

Neon Heart

Sometimes a girl has limited time for nail art...life gets in the way. The solution? Sequins! Neon sequins even! This mani took about 10 minutes all up. The base colour is OPI Nein Nein Nein OK Fine, a dark charcoal grey creme. It looks black in this sunlight picture however in the bottle picture you can see its grey. I got these sequins from dollarnailart.com. You can buy individual colours for $1 each or a 10 pack of different colours for $7.99. I placed each heart using a small dotting tool then applied 2 coats of Seche Vite over the top to flatten and seal in the sequins. They were a little raised above the nail which gave them this cool 3D effect. Expect lots of sequins, I've got so many to try XD