CND Shellac - Limited Edition Christmas 2012 Colours

Without flash

With flash

Well it wouldn't be Christmas without showing you some swatches of CND's Limited Edition Holiday 2012 colours. Do you remember this post from the Autumn when I told you about the exciting new release? Well, you know me, I got my hands on a set as soon as I possibly could and this Christmas I've lost count of the number of manicures I've done using the festive shades.

Ruby Ritz is essentially a red glitter and Tinsel Toast is a gold glitter. The top two photos show off the colours with and without flash. The lovely Tyra wearing Ruby Ritz with Tinsel Toast as an accent nail.

I ended up doing a lot of glitter manicures this season, and I found that it was best to layer two coats of Ruby Ritz over one coat of Red Baroness to get a more intense, solid, glittery look. Tinsel Toast is hard to intensify by layering over another colour as there are none quite the same shade of gold, so instead I used three coats to make sure there was a full coat of gold glitter.

I felt a little sorry for Tinsel Toast as it was neglected in favour of the red by most people, so that's what I opted for as my own Christmas manicure - pictured below.

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and here's to a very Happy New Year :)

Disclaimer - Stock photo of limited edition colours is not my own, it is courtesy of the Sweet Squared Facebook page here. All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #4 Iridescent Ice Queen

Iridescent Ice Queen  - glitzy enough for both Christmas and New Year. These are Maddie's, you haven't seen her since here as she is usually favouring the classic French, but for this Winter she wanted to glam it up a little more.

We opted for one of her favourite colours - Moonlight and Roses, but to make it stand out a little more we used some Studio White underneath. If I remember correctly it was one coat of Studio White then two of Moonlight and Roses (curing for 120 seconds after each). I then mixed up a glitter pastes of Mother of Pearl, Gosh Nail Glitter in Silver, some white iridescent nail glitter and CND Additive in Spectrum Shimmer. I placed a piece of striping tape diagonally across each nail - to get a nice crisp line - and painted the glitter paste on the cuticle side of the diagonal. I carefully removed the striping tape and then cured before adding top coat and curing one last time (probably for 180 seconds due to the number of layers).

Apologies for the grow out in these photos, I forgot to take one when I first did them and didn't see Maddie for another week or so after, so these are actually about a week and a half old - still shiny and chip free!!

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #3 Blue Glitter Fade & Snowflakes

Blue glitter and Cream Puff can only mean one thing... more snowflakes! Here's another Christmas nail art design for you, in Shellac of course. As modelled by the one and only Stacey (duh??!).

Stacey wanted something much more festive for Christmas but would also carry her through to New Year. So naturally we went straight for the glitters. Now the layers to this are quite complex, so bear with me :)

Firstly I painted a coat of Studio White as a base colour, cured, then added a coat of a glitter paste (made up of Moonlight and Roses mixed with an iridescent white glitter) over the top and cured again.

I then mixed up a different glitter paste of Zillionaire, Gosh Nail glitters in Silver and Blue Sapphire, CND Glitter Additives in Blue and Silver Holographic in my palette. I painted the blue glitter paste in a glitter fade from the cuticles down, so that the white at the tip looked almost like a snowy landscape along the nail, and cured.

Finally, I used a small detailer brush and my Cream Puff to create star like snowflakes and a dotting tool to add the snow. I cured the white, added top coat, cured for one last time (180 seconds though this time due to all the layers) and voila!

Glittery blue Christmas/New Year nails, done.

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #2 Red, Green & White

With flash

Finally, a little break today so I can get posting these Christmas manicures! Here's the second one of the season, in Shellac again of course, but this time it's Gemma. You've yet to see Gemma on here but I have some of her ideas to post about soon, she likes to push the boat out with nail art, almost as much as Stacey!

She ummed and ahhhed over different ideas, and as she couldn't decide on just one, we decided to mix it up with something different on each nail. Gemma was set on red, green and white so we then took a little while to decide on what arrangement of colours we'd do the designs in. After much deliberation we came up with red and green as a base and then green and white for nail art detail. 

As you can see below, the first, middle and little fingers got the Wildfire treatment - the perfect Christmas red. The thumb and the ring finger got a glittery Christmas green glitter paste. Now Shellac don't do a classic 'green' so we improvised - in a palette I mixed a couple of drops of Pretty Poison with a couple of drops of Hotski to Tchotchke and added some Gosh Nail glitter in Jade Green - it made the perfect Christmas Tree Shade.

Base colour - before nail art

I then painted the various patterns on top of the base colours pictured above. Gemma decided on the following:

First finger - snowflake and snow design in Cream Puff painted with a detailer brush
Middle finger - present ribbon design using the green glitter paste from before, painted with a detailer brush
Ring finger and thumb - left as the green glitter base
Little finger - candy cane stripes, thick and thin, in Cream Puff painted with a detailer brush

Without flash

These were nowhere near as time consuming as I thought they might be; it gave me the idea to try out more of the mix'n'match WAH nails designs I see on Instagram. What do you think?

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Christmas Nail Art - #1 Snowflakes

Merry Christmas! Now that the hectic period is mostly over, I can finally get around to posting some of the Christmas manicures that I've done over the past fortnight. First up is Kate, remember her from here, here and here? She really wanted some snowflake nails so I adopted a design from Cheryl - a nail technician that I know.

I picked out Midnight Swim, one of the new Winter Wonderland 2012 colours, for the perfect night sky background. It is a glorious dark navy blue with a slight hint of shimmer. To paint on the snowflakes I used my small detailer brush and Cream Puff to get a nice crisp white finish. I made sure the snowflakes overlapped the edge of the nails to make them appear as though they were falling from the sky. I finished off the look by adding some drops of snow with a dotting tool.

Very simple yet extremely effective, although exceedingly time consuming - three hours to be exact! Painting the snowflakes was painstaking!

What do you think? I'm quietly very proud of these :)

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

New CND Shellac Colours for Spring 2013!

STOP PRESS!! I have one simple word for you, that will shock, amaze and excite you all at once....


....PASTEL.

Yep, you read correct, pastel. More specifically CND have decided to launch 5 new Shellac colours in Spring 2013 and they are all pastel shades! Hallelujah!

Don't believe me? Check out their press release here, but if you can't wait for the link to load, check out the Sweet Dreams Collection of pretty pastels below:

CND Shellac Grapefruit Sparkle

CND Shellac Cake Pop

CND Shellac Lilac Longing

CND Shellac Azure Wish

CND Shellac Limeade

I would like to choose my favourite but I know full well that following their release in March 2013, I will be adding all 5 to my shopping basket.

So what do you think of CND's Spring offerings? This Sweet Dreams collection has to be the most exciting CND Shellac launch for me yet! Eeek, I can't wait!

 Disclaimer - Photos are not my own, they are courtesy of the CND Press Release here.

CND Shellac Nail Art - Super Chevrons

Following my first trial with striping tape and Shellac - here - I was keen to try it out again with other designs. So of course in steps Stacey, offering me a blank canvas for a little experimentation - we called this one "Super Chevrons"...

Inspiration came from Jane at nailside.blogspot.co.uk - her designs are always so neat and striking and especially brilliant to recreate in Shellac. In particular we liked the look of her South Africa? post but changed the colours up a little bit.

I started of with two white coats (cured between each) of Cream Puff as a base colour. I then added a vertical strip of the beautiful blood-red Decadence to the left half of each nail. After curing the red, I added two strips of thin striping tape to each nail, in a chevron style, near the tip. I mixed some Gosh Nail Glitter in Gold with some Shellac Mother of Pearl to make a glitter paste and painted it into the chevron 'V' area. I removed the striping tape and cured the glitter tip. To create the blue accent, I mixed some of my Cerulean Blue Additive with Cream Puff and painted a border along the 'V' edge of the chevrons, with a small detailer brush, and cured. I sealed it all in with top coat and then Stacey decided to add some studs to her ring fingers as a little extra. So I pressed those into the tacky layer of the top coat and added another coat, before curing for the last time.

And there you have it, Super Chevron nails, 'super' because there's just something very superhero about them don't you think?

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Nail Art - Additives and WAH inspiration

Now this is my best friend Fung-ling (twitter: @fungling_y), you've yet to be introduced to her so here you go - blog readers meet Fudge! My gorgeous and oh so fashion forward friend has been the only person that I have known CND Shellac to last 4 or even 5 weeks on! But, yes, the grow out is a little extreme :)

She used to have acrylic extensions, overlays and 3D nail art but has recently been testing my nail art capabilities with Shellac. This is the first real nail art I did with her and she'd picked out a classic design by WAH nails (wah-nails.com, twitter: @wahnails, instagram: @wahnails) - the basketcase and candy stripe manicure.

Fudge was really keen on having a pastel toned base, so I played around by mixing Cream Puff with my Cerulean Blue Additive pigment to create the pale, baby blue colour. I mixed the white and blue in a ceramic mixing palette and applied two coats, curing between each. It applied a little grainy, but once topcoat was applied later, you would never know. To create the vertical candy stripes and the basketcase pattern, I used a small striper brush and Rosebud.

I absolutely LOVE the colour combination and the design was a little painstaking but very effective once complete. Check out @wahnails on instagram for loads of exciting and inspiring designs from their Dalston and Topshop salons in London.

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Nail Art - Additives and Animal Print

Well we haven't seen Nat on here for a little while now, so thought I better post one of my CND additives experiments that she let me try out on her. This is actually a manicure I did for her back in September... oops, I am getting very behind aren't I??!

I had just received my starter kit of CND Additives, and it included this gorgeous bronze pigment called Antique Bronze. Nat had her eye on a design by the talented Bedizzle (twitter: @bbedizzle, instagram: bedizzle) - you can check out her fab nail art blog here bedizzlenails.blogspot.co.uk - so we decided it was a match made in heaven that had to be trialled. And I think it turned out pretty well!

You can check out Bedizzle's design that we got out inspiration from here on web.stagram and she also posted a tutorial here.

To create the look above with CND Shellac, we used Cream Puff as a base on all of Nat's nails and Blackpool on the ring fingers.

On the Cream Puff nails I created a gradient effect with additives and animal print. I used one of the brushes from the CND Additives kit to stipple on the Antique Bronze in a gradient up each of the nails. With a small detailer brush, I then painted a leopard print design over the top, using a gradient of Blackpool then a mixture of Blackpool and Iced Cappuccino and then just Iced Cappuccino. If you look carefully, the leopard print gradient goes diagonally across the nail from bottom right near the nail tip to the top left near the cuticle.

I topped it all off with CND Shellac Top Coat and voila! What do you think?

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Nail Art - Beau Glitter Fade & Diamanté Flowers

Oh look, Stacey again :)

This is one of her Summer manicures that I've been meaning to show you for a while now. She wanted something natural on the base so that regrowth wouldn't be as obvious, so Beau was a natural choice. But Stacey being Stacey couldn't settle there, she needed more!

After browsing my liked photos on instagram, we came across one by Kiki (@kiki_nailcandi is her instagram account) seen here through web.stagram - a web viewer for instagram.

We changed it up a little, Shellac style of course! Beau was used for the base as I mentioned earlier, then I made a glitter paste with Mother of Pearl and some Gosh Nail Glitter in Rose Quartz and painted on a glitter fade. Then using a dotting tool I created the flowers in three different colours - Tutti Frutti, Hot Chilis and Gotcha - and placed a diamanté in the centre of each.

Very girly indeed :)

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Nail Art - Gradient Dots

This is one of my all time favourite manicures I've done on a friend. Do you remember the moons mani that I did for my friend Jene here back in May? Well, this is her again and as always, she likes to be the first to try out a new design.

These were inspired by the amazing Sarah (twitter: @chalkboardnails, instagram: @chalkboardnails) at Chalkboard Nails - the exact post is here - I'm more than a little bit in love with her nail art and the great thing is that they are so good to replicate with Shellac for a longer lasting design on your talons.

For the above look I used CND Shellac Cocoa as the base colour, then using a dotting tool I applied dots in Rock Royalty, Tropix and Gotcha. To create the gradient effect - use the large end of the dotting tool at the tip of the nail and then use the smaller end towards the cuticle. Actually, Sarah does a great tutorial on her blog - link - much better than my description!

Very simple, yet very effective. I love it!

 Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Nail Art - Gotcha & Silver Glitter Chevrons

Ah, here's another one from the archives.... this was an experiment I tried out on myself after I was bored of the silver glitter tips and I think it turned out really well.

I'd just ordered a couple of new Shellac colours and decided to try out the Gotcha. I was trawling through my instagram 'likes' to find some inspiration when I came across one of Michelles Poena's designs I thought I'd try (find Michelle's blog here - http://michelleinwonderland-michelle.blogspot.co.uk/ and on instagram - @michellepoena).

I painted all my nails (bar the ring finger) with Gotcha then mixed up a silver glitter paste with Mother of Pearl and some Gosh nail glitter in silver, and I painted that on as an accent nail. The first coat was cured for 120 seconds and then I added a second, curing for 120 seconds, on all nails. I used some striping tape to tape off the triangular area on my Gotcha nails and then used the glitter paste to fill in the chevrons. After curing the glitter detail for 120 seconds, I added the small diamantés to the tips of the triangles and topped it off with top coat to seal it all in.

A little barbie-ish but I like it all the same :) What do you think?

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Nail Art - Negligee with Silver Glitter Tips

Well hello, I am back in the blogosphere, after what seems like an age! I didn't quite anticipate how wrapped up in school I'd get these last two months and woah what a half term it's been. I am very pleased to welcome the half term break next week and have so much to show you guys in terms of nail art and general all round shellac-loveliness :)

Where to begin?! Well for starters, this is a little mani I did on myself back in August but never got round to posting. Introducing CND Shellac in Negligee with some accent nail stickers from Viva la Nails (product code WS02 can be purchased here):

I love this natural clear pink which just makes you nails look quite healthy. It has a slight blue hue to it in comparison to Beau which is a little more pink-y.

After a week or so, me and my heavy handed-ness meant that a little peeling and lifting was evident at the tips, so to hold it out a bit longer I added some silver glitter:

To make the silver glitter mix I used Gosh Nail Glitter in Silver with CND Shellac Mother of Pearl to make a glitter paste, then I used a kolinsky nail art brush to apply it to the tips. I coated the tips twice to get a lovely solid silver glitter effect and then topped it off with top coat.

A glam alternative to the classic boring French manicure don't you think?

Disclaimer - this post is not sponsored by www.vivalanails.co.uk but the nail art products in this review were given to me, by them, free for my consideration. My reviews are 100% honest, as always and I welcome any more freebies to decorate my nails with...if you're offering??!

CND Shellac Nail Art - Leopard Print in Cocoa and Fedora

A slightly different colour palette this time for the classic leopard print manicure. Previously I had always used a gold glitter base - here and here - but Stacey (my lovely hand model and regular Shellac addict!) wanted something a little more neutral.

So we went for Cocoa as the base colour, Fedora for the leopard print detail (painted with a nail art detailer brush) and then I added some Iced Cappuccino with a dotting tool as a little metallic accent to the design.

For a design that looks like it takes ages, I love how simple and quick leopard print is - if you haven't tried it, you really should, it evens works great with regular nail polish too!

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Nail Art - French Manicure with Rosebud Bow Detail

Well Hello there... it seems I may have been a little absent once again! Bad beauty blogger! Well I have got a small mountain of nail art posts forming in my drafts folder so whilst wallowing in cold and flu today I thought I'd better get my arse in gear and post a few of them for you lovely people to see.

If you have liked my facebook page you will have seen sneak previews of the posts to come... and if you haven't? Get your butt over there and 'like' it so you will never miss out on another Shellac delight again!

https://www.facebook.com/brushupandmakeup

Any who, onto the marvellous manicure above. This is Kate, who wanted something classic but a little different for a wedding. So we decided on a French manicure design by Jazzy at @califorNAILS (twitter, instagram, tumblr) -  French with a little bow nail art detail on the ring finger and thumb. For the French manicure I used Beau and Cream Puff and to create the lace-like pink line along the tip I used a dotting tool and Rosebud. I painted the bow on the ring finger and thumb using Rosebud and my detailer brush. To add the darker detail on the bow, I mixed the Rosebud with some Blackpool to create a slightly greyer-pink.

What do you think?

Disclaimer - design idea from Jazzy at @califorNAILS. All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)

CND Shellac Nail Art - Cocoa With French Tips

A different take on French today, with a double tip in gold and white. OK, well it wasn't exactly today, but a few weeks ago. My cousin Nat wanted a bit of nail art but something that would go with a few different outfits for some weddings she had coming up, so we explored the nude route with Shellac.

For this manicure I used Cocoa as a base colour, then painted a white french tip in Cream Puff followed by a slightly thinner french tip below it in Iced Cappuccino. I tweaked it though for the thumb and ring finger, and painted the Cream Puff and Iced Cappuccino in reverse.

She loved it and is already picking out other colour combinations to try this with. I love that this look was so easy to achieve and can also be recreated really easily with normal nail polish.

Classy but effective :)

Disclaimer - All products used for this manicure were bought myself, for more info about myself and CND Shellac please check out my disclaimer page here. I might not be a professional, but I sure love me some Shellac nail art :)