Super shiny nails at the teeniest price!

Our favourite nail polishes are without doubt, The Complete Salon Manicure from Sally Hansen. You can see our review of their gorgeous Calypso Blue here. Containing a base coat, strengthener, growth treatment, colour and top coat in one, you only need to apply two coats for a really opaque, high shine finish. Despite all the typing we do, they always last for at least a week without chipping, which means they’re our go to polishes of the moment!

We thought it was about time to add to our collection, and as you can see we picked up eight new shades recently. The colours are really bright and cover fantastically well. Plus, they finish to such a high shine you can almost see your reflection in them! They translate really well from the bottle to your nail, so you can see exactly what they’ll come out like, just by looking at the colour in the bottle. 

Shades L-R: Pat on the Black, Gray by Gray, Shiny Penny, Madame

Shades L-R: Pat on the Black, Shiny Penny, Gray by Gray, Madame

Our favourite shades are Gray by Gray, a pale green/grey shade; Madame, a coral pink; Oxide, a black and silver glitter mix and Navy Baby, a deep shiny navy shade. 

Now we’ll let you into the biggest secret………We picked up these beauties in Poundland! Yes, we were shocked too, but we’re not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth. So we filled our basket and raced to the checkout before they decided they’d made a mistake!

From what our facebook and twitter followers have told us, not all Poundland stores stock Sally Hansen, so if you’re not lucky enough to have one near you, we’d suggest FragranceDirect.co.uk who have a large selection of shades priced at 99p plus delivery. 

Shades L-R: Anenome of Mine, Courtesan, Navy Baby, Oxide

Shades L-R: Anenome of Mine, Courtesan, Navy Baby, Oxide

Otherwise, Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure retail at around £6.99 each – and if we hadn’t picked up these great bargains, we’d be very happy to pay this for the great quality! 

Have you managed to pick up any bargains? Which is your favourite Sally Hansen shade?

#NailTrend: Our Nails Put Their Hats On To MUA!

We were really excited when MUA released their Fur-Effect Nails last month. Being massive lovers of textured nails and big fans of the Ciate Velvet Nails, we couldn’t wait to try this much more affordable take on the trend. 

We thought we’d do something a bit different, so rather than coat the whole nail in the Fur-Effect, we decided to do just the tips – we think it looks like our nails have little fur hats on! This look is really simple to do; firstly, we painted our nails with two coats of Sally Hansen Complete Manicure in Gray by Gray. Once they were completely dry, we then applied another coat just to the tips. 

The Fur-Effect nails are very easy to use. We found the best way was to completely remove the sifter tray and dip the tip of our nails in one by one. You then just need to gently press, to ensure the fur has stuck fast and you can then move on to the next nail. To make sure you get an even line, use a damp cotton bud to tidy up the edges where necessary. 

The nails will dry very quickly and it’s fine to wash your hands etc, you won’t lose your fur! There have been lots of comments on whether these are a dupe of the Ciate Velvet Nails, and whilst they are a similar principle, the MUA version do seem to be made from longer, fluffier particles, which really does give more of a furry effect as opposed to the crushed velvet with Ciate. 

Our nail hats go on to MUA (get it, get it!?) another great idea at a great price! Fur-Effect Nails are £3 per pot from muastore.co.uk or Superdrug. We used the shade “Fluffy Bobbin” but there are five shades to pick from.

Look what’s coming from OPI…..!

The Impossible

Stay the Night

Pink Yet Lavender

Those clever people at OPI have done it again with their latest collaboration with Mariah Carey! We’ve said it before, we’re not massive fans of celeb ranges, nor are we huge fans of Mariah herself for that matter, but we are lovers of OPI and we really can’t wait to get our mitts on these gorgeous new polishes for Spring 2013.

There are eight new shades in the range, four “studio” colours and four “stage” colours. The stage colours are part of OPI’s new Liquid Sand range, which is what it says on the bottle – glitter polish with a texture like sand. We said that textured nails would be even bigger this year, and it looks like we weren’t wrong!

These beauties are launching on ASOS.com in the first week of February, so keep your eyes peeled.

(Pssst, ASOS have a great deal on their ASOS Premier package – for £9.95 you can get free next day delivery, free collections on any returns, a monthly ASOS mag and early access to the sales and new arrivals – for a whole year! There’s no minimum order value either – we think this is going to be dangerous for our lunchtime shopping habits!)

Sprung

A Butterfly Moment

Get Your Number

#NailTrends – NAILEDIT UK

Rock That Baroque

In A Galaxy Far Far Away

To Me T-Woo

We love what we do, we get to find out about so many amazing people and their great ideas! One we’ve discovered recently is NailedIt UK. Founded by Lucy Gronner in September 2012, NailedIt UK brings the most amazing nail art to the tips of your fingers. Lucy has created some amazing designs which she paints onto sets of falsies and sends straight to you!

You can choose from two different widths of nails and you can use nail glue or nail tabs to apply them. If you can’t find a design you like (which is unlikely we think) Lucy will even design your own custom set for you.

You can see more of the range at http://www.nailedituk.com

#NailTrends Velvet Nails – Love or Loathe?

We’re a bit late jumping on the velvet nails bandwagon as Ciate released their Velvet Manicure sets a few weeks back now. We love both colours in the range; Blue Suede and Berry Poncho. We’ve gone with the berry shade first, because we thought it would fit well with the Christmas season – we weren’t disappointed!

The kit comes with a full size paint pot in Cabaret, a deep purple shade, a pot of crushed velvet and a little brush. All you do is apply one coat of polish and allow it to dry, then apply the second coat one nail at a time. Whilst the nail is still wet, you just apply the crushed velvet. You are supposed to just shake the pot over the nail, but we found not a lot of product actually dispenses and as you need quite a lot to ensure even coverage it was easier to take the lid off and pour it over. You need to apply quite a lot so that the nail is completely covered with a thick layer of velvet, then use the little brush to remove any excess. If you do this over a tray, you can pour any excess back into the pot to avoid wastage. 

We have to say, we actually adore this look. The matt finish looks luxurious and it really does look and feel like you have pieces of velvet on your nails. So no good if you’re one of those people who cringe when touching velvet, but great if not! On a practical level these are much easier to wear than the Caviar pearls; you can get them wet, they just return to the original finish once they’ve dried.We wouldn’t recommend getting moisturisers or oil on them as it does ruin the effect, so they’re not something we could wear all the time. Another thing to note is that as you’ve actually turned your nails to fabric, they do tend to attract fluff and lint. So if you have a cat like we do, you may find yourself having to remove hairs that seem to be magnetically drawn to them!

We’ll be sporting these over Christmas can’t wait to show them off! You can buy the Velvet Manicure kits for £14 from ASOS.

#XmasNailTrend – Red & Gold

This look is the second of our H&M polish posts today, check out our GoldFinger post from this morning to find out more about the gold polish used on our accent nail. Everything we said about the packaging not being appealing is the same, but thankfully, so is everything about the great quality of their polishes. This sparkling red is called Je T’aime and was the bank-breaking price of £1.50! 

The red is slightly darker than it appears in the photo and the underlying sparkle is made up of tiny metallic gold particles. It applies smoothly to a high shine and it lasts very well. It’s ideal for any Christmas nail looks you want to rock this season. 

Again, another great polish from H&M. We can’t wait to try some more of their cosmetics range now!