Sonnetarium - Cucumber Salad

Hello there! I have an indie polish I want to show you today, which I got as a treat for myself when I found out I'd got my university place for September this year :)

This is the lovely Cucumber Salad by Sonnetarium:

Cucumber Salad is a lovely mint green (looks a little greener than these photos show) with white and dark green glitters plus tiny white glitters throughout. I saw the swatches by Chalkboard Nails and fell in love with this one - it's pretty unique with a glitter combination I've not seen anywhere else.

Application was fine and this is two coats plus topcoat. There's some VNL in these photos but you couldn't see it in the flesh; unfortunately I'd long since removed this by the time I noticed! It lasted a good 3-4 days before tipwear got noticeable.

Here's a close-up of that funky glitter:

Really cool, eh?

I was really impressed with this polish and I know I'll be buying more from Sonnetarium in the future. You can find the Fresh collection for Spring 2013 on their website, with the option of 9ml minis or 15ml fullsize bottles!

What do you think of this polish? Do you like unusual glitter combos? Tweet me @ExperimentNails or leave me a comment if you have any favourites!

Easter nailart!

Happy Easter everyone! I knew I'd be busy eating Easter eggs today so I had a go at some Easter nailart yesterday, and I'm really proud of it!

We have my attempt at a bunny, what's meant to be a partially unwrapped Easter egg, a daffodil and a little chicky hatching out of its egg. I actually sketched out rough plans for these beforehand because I suck at improvising, especially if it involves art! Picked the wrong type of brush and couldn't work with it, and I'm scared of striping brushes (really do need to get the hang of them) so most of it was done with a dotting tool in the end.

The little chick was my favourite! I've seen it on lots of easter nails but it's so adorable I couldn't resist!

This manicure took 15 different polishes to pull off which is easily a new record for me! The only sad point was having left it an hour before topcoating and the black still smudging on the bunny *shakes fist at topcoat*

Colours used:

Thumb - 3 coats of BarryM Matt White (would have been 2 but I knocked it on a cup of tea!) for the base, with polka dots in BarryM Strawberry Icecream, Peach Melba, Lemon Icecream and Blueberry Icecream, NYC Mint Macaroon and Model's Own Grape Juice
Index - 2 coats of Model's Own Grape Juice for the base, then BarryM Matt White, Maybelline Forever Strong Nude Rose and Wet N Wild Ebony Hates Chris for the bunny
Middle - 2 coats of Next own brand in Tan, with BarryM Lilac Foil for the foil (funnily enough)
Ring - 2 coats of BarryM Blueberry Icecream, then BarryM Lemon Icecream and Tangerine with OPI Deutsch You Want Me Baby? and Sinful Colors Envy to create the daffodil
Pinky - 2 coats of BarryM Matt White with Maybelline Color Show Fierce N Tangy, OPI Deutsch You Want Me Baby? and Wet N Wild Ebony Hates Chris for the chick

I'll be really sad to take this manicure off! Did you do some Easter nails? Tweet me @ExperimentNails, I'd love to see. Have a lovely chocolate-munching day!

March haul post

Hello there! Hope you're all having a good Easter break. I thought I'd show you my March polish haul before we officially hit April.

L-R: Maybelline Color Show Nabline, NYC Expert Last Mint Macaroon and Rimmel 60 Seconds Grey Matter. I was inspired by this colour scheme and didn't have a pastel mint green yet.

OPI Polka.com is one of the cutest glitters I've seen and so many people picked this at our charity nailbar for Comic Relief (post on that coming tomorrow!).

Illamasqua Pink Raindrops. I was so excited to get a bottle of this! Swatches of this and Raindrops will be up this month.

L-R: Nails Inc New Burlington Place, Wardour Mews, Clifford Street and New King's Road, got in their 75% off sale for £11 TOTAL. There's a dupes post incoming for Wardour Mews...

Model's Own Grape Juice, with scentedness!

It really does smell of fruity things on the nail, though I'm not sure it's strictly grape-scented. Not quite the purple-leaning lilac I thought it would be but more on that later.

10 polishes is a good month I think. I didn't go over my budget, even when sorely tempted, but still picked up some beauties. Hopefully April will carry on the fiscally responsible trend!

What have you picked up this month? Any special polishes that broke your wallet?

Barry M Gelly - Greenberry

Nearly the end of the week - hang in there! Earlier this week I showed you Barry M Gelly Nail Effects in Lychee, and today I'd like to show you Greenberry.

Greenberry is a bright turquoise-greeny-aqua colour that I can't really describe any better than that! I wasn't sure how I felt about this colour. Probably prefer this in nail art rather than as a plain manicure.

There were similar application issues to the ones I had with Lychee - the second coat dragged and then I needed a third. Apparently I learnt nothing from swatching Lychee! Pictures are without topcoat because these Gelly polishes dry to a high shine on their own.
(Excuse the tiny watermark, adding those is still a learning curve for me...)

Overall I liked this polish but might have preferred to swap Greenberry for a different Gelly shade, in hindsight. Ah well!

Do you have a favourite Barry M Gelly polish? Is there a shade that you think I should buy?

Barry M Gelly - Lychee

Hello there! This week I have two polishes to show you from the Barry M Gelly Nail Effects collection. Four spring colours were released in February and I picked up Lychee and Greenberry.

Here's Lychee:

It's a warm, creamy beige nude that would be great as a base for nail art. It gave me lobster hands, which is unusual for me, but I think that's my camera struggling with a pale shade.

Shown here without topcoat because it really does dry to a high shine! This is three coats because I had some issues with application - it has quite a thick formula so my second coat dragged in places, and it needed a third to level it out. As long as you're careful with application you should be able to get away with two.

All in all, I think there are similar beigey nudes out there that might be easier to apply, but Lychee is a lovely colour and a bargain buy for those on a budget.

Next up I'll be showing you Greenberry. Do you have any of the Barry M Gelly polishes? How have you found them? Are you impressed with the high shine too?

The Ultimate Glitterbomb - Cirque XX

Good evening! Hope you all had a relaxing Sunday. I've been really low on motivation in all areas of life for a few weeks now, and this poor blog is in danger of fizzling out before it begins. Not any more though! There are already two more posts scheduled for next week. Do I get a medal?

Onto today's post. I have found the ultimate glitterbomb. The. Ultimate.
Cirque XX is part of the Objet D'art collection and it's "A rainbow glitter polish made with over 20 different types of holographic particles" (from the official website). Take a look for yourselves:

Isn't it a beauty? This post will be picture heavy so I've put the rest after the jump!

Spring Dots

Hello and welcome to The First Post on my new blog! For my first manicure I wanted to go outside my comfort zone and try something with an element of nail art - can't call a blog Experimental Nails and never try anything new. Pastels are going to be big this spring/summer so I pulled some untrieds out of my Helmer and came up with this:

A springtime pastels skittle manicure with polka dots - it was so cheerful!

The pink is Estee Lauder Lilac Leather from their Heavy Petals Spring 2013 collection, and was a present from my mum. It was a little uneven but applied well, I've used three coats here.

The yellow is Barry M Lemon Ice Cream, and looked a lot more like a pastel in my office - I think I need to keep tweaking my lighting setup. Ok to apply, this is three coats.

Another Barry M, the blue is Blue Moon. In the sunshine the day after I realised it has a very subtle blue shimmer running through it which makes it even prettier. This took four coats to become opaque though.

For the base of the dotted nails I used my new OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls, which I've seen touted everywhere as a perfect off-white base for nail art. It doesn't disappoint! Opaque in two easy coats.

My only disappointment came from my topcoat. I used Seche Vite here and as it sometimes does for me, it shrank as it dried, which you can see most on my index finger and thumb. Next time I'll be sticking to a non-fast dry topcoat, and the Seche Vite can be kept back for glitterbomb manicures. Which reminds me, I still need to pick up a bottle of Gelous and try that out...

So there you have it, my first manicure for this blog. It's also my first skittles manicure and my first using a dotting tool so I'm really proud of this one. I hope you liked it!

What have you been wearing on your nails now that spring is just around the corner?