Make up favourites of 2011

I don't really do reviews on the site much less make up but I have a few items I use daily and really love that I thought I would share with you.

1. Bourjois Detox foundation in 51 (the lightest shade) is a highly pigmented contains no silicones and gives quite high coverage without being a mask. It doesn't need powder on top (my skin is quite oily). If my skin is good I mix it with Garnier BB Cream for a more glowing look in the summer when it is a bit drier. I have used Clinique superfit, Clinique even better, Lancome Teinte Idol Ultra, Lancome Teinte Idol Silky Matt, and Chanel ProLumiere. Only superfit and prolumiere did not oxidise on my skin. Superfit I would continue to use if I hadn't found this Detox and ProLumiere is too dark for my skin even in the lightest shade. I have great difficulty in finding a foundation that does not turn orange after 10-15 minutes on my skin (oxidization) and that does not contain silicones (brings me out in giant cystic spots). Neither look is attractive.

2. Chanel Les 4 Ombres in 19 Enigma

As you can see this quad has a pink shade, 2 taupes and one purple. I have used this palette 80% of the time over the last year. I adore it.

At first the shadows were hard to use and I didn't get much colour payoff (as seen in the faint swatch on my hand) however the more I have used them the better the colour payoff (bottom swatch) I believe this is because they are baked. I have read that you can get better pigmentation scratching them when you first get them. I didn't do that I used Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer which helped and I continue to use as it helps with longevity. The pink is a great pink, most pinks make me look like I have been crying but this is a perfect light pink which acts as a good base of the other colours. I just looked this up for price and it is £37. I just noticed this was part of the Fall 2010 collection so I feel like I should get a back up quickly in case they stop making them!

3. Clinique Redness Solutions Instant Relief Mineral Powder £25 for 25g.

I use this when my skin is bad and very red. You warm a little powder in your hands and rub it on your face. I found it to be very effective and quicker than using a brush. I really reduces the urge to use a lot of foundation when you skin is red, spotty and generally annoyed. It's a lightweight product which does what it is supposed to. I bought this on a whim and I am so glad I did. I have used Clinique loose powders before and they all have a great lightweight texture just like this one. 


4. Love, Chloe Eau de Parfum 

I got a 30ml bottle for my birthday in September 2010 and bought the gift set in January 2011 Sales - the picture shows the 50ml bottle from the giftset and the 30ml box so you can see the packaging. I love this perfume. It smells AMAZING. I could wear it everyday. I have a few others I wear but none that I love as much. I can't describe perfume properly but I like this because it has a powdery quality and is not sweet. Other perfumes I like are Chanel Allure, Chanel No 5, Dior J'dore and Gucci Flora. I also love the original Chloe but that doesn't have the same moreish powderyness that I love about Love, Chloe. 

5. L'oreal Lash Architech 4D - Love this I don't have any pics but it is amazing. I have good length, thick and naturally curled lashes so everyone always asks what mascara I use and before I tried this it was Lancome hypnose but sorry Lancome L'oreal have beaten you hands down now.  I bought 2 Lancome Doll Eyes mascara with some christmas money as they were £13 each with a mini eyeliner and eye make up remover but I kind of regret it now. L'oreal is better especially for the price (about £10)


So there you have my favourite non-nail products of 2011. I bought each and every one with my own go to work get paid money and I would happily buy them all again. In fact I did I bought Detox foundation again today from Boots and got a free mascara too. 


Hope you all have a great new year. I think 2012 is going to be an exciting and fantastic year. I will be starting my own business as a nail technician so hopefully I will have lots of customers nail art to show you, more than there has been lately. 

I love my puppy but she sure eats into my nail painting time :D, she is growing fast though and I will miss those days soon. I love the picture of her above because she is so tiny and because the brown mark on her side looks like a bone to me :D She still has the mark but it's not quite such a good bone shape anymore :D
Thanks for visiting my blog and if you would like to win the scrapbook software you will probably win as no one has entered yet!!

I wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year! 
Love Stacie xoxox

Striped Gradient

You may remember for Halloween that Michelle from Sonoma Nail Art did a spooky candle gradient during her 30 day challenge (if you don't remember, you can see it here). I thought it turned out totally awesome and used it as inspiration for these nails! Instead of doing a normal faded gradient, I used curved stripes to give the look of gradient nails. I loved these because from afar they look like normal gradient nails but up close they have awesome detail! After painting these I realized that they looked like the sky, so after a few days of wear I ended up painting some flowers coming out of my cuticles. This ended up being a mistake: they looked weird and it took away from the simplistic awesomeness they already had.

Have a wonderful new years celebration tonight! I will be posting my favorite nails of the year tomorrow, so make sure to check back to see some old designs!

Gel Polish nails

Hello All
I recently got a red carpet manicure system from ulta - and i love love love it!!!! Super durable on nails, i also got few gelish polishes that work perfectly with RCM base and top.
Here are my most recent nails:

Lotus

When I started painting these, I was trying to mirror my engagement ring which has a long oval in the middle and two side-ways ovals framing it. The design turned out looking more like abstract lotus flowers to me, which is awesome! This was one of those really simple designs that I ended up loving! Plus it was super simple to do. I have a feeling I'll be doing this design again!

NEW YEARS NAILS! 2012

An icy winter wonderland! These are my last Christmas Nails of 2011. I had so much fun doing Christmas nails. I hope you enjoyed my pictures. It's time to start a new year. New Years nails! I hope 2012 brings some fabulous new nail art!This is a picture of the nails I did when I made my instructional videos that you can find on this blog. Love this glitter! #139 from sparklesnailproducts.com This is a warning: If you are my client and you let me do whatever I want on your nails you are pretty much guaranteed to get zebra print of some kind and purpleI am loving how the pinkies have just the solid animal print! New Years Party Time Nails! I just absolutely love this client. She is my most creative client. One day the time will be right and she will get her nail license and I will start taking classes from her! My signature one nail different nails lol!

Brown Gradient

I was trying to go for a brown autumn-y gradient. But instead my nails just look dirty. I used holographic nail polishes to add some sparkle to this design, but it just ended up looking weird.

Don't forget to check out Leslie's blog Polish Art Addiction to see my newest Peculiar Polish blog, which is about Avatar: The Last Airbender. (There's even a tutorial!)

Thanksgiving

Edit later. Sorry 

Fruit

Ran out of time to do a write up. Will edit ASAP

Boxes

I love how these nails turned out! I was trying to get more depth in them, so that it looked like you were looking into a room, but I think they look better like this. If my nails were longer I may have been able to get that extra depth. 

3D SNOWMAN ACRYLIC NAIL ART

On these nails I used acrylic from young nails block party collection in pool and from sparklesnailproducts.com I used Ocean Mist #63.
To create the snowman I used INM northern lights to create the body. For the eyes I used barbara trombley art glitter in nebula, for the carrot nose I used duck tail and for the arms I used a martha stewart brand glitter in brownstone.

HAND PAINTED SNOWFLAKE NAIL ART

On this set of nails I did a fade with acrylic from Young Nails block party collection in pool, and from sparklesnailproducts.com in ocean mist #63. I used a migi nail art pen from miginailart.com to paint the snowflake.

Home Improvement

First of all: Merry Christmas!

You may remember a little show called Home Improvement staring Tim Allen, Patrica Richardson,  Zachary Ty Bryan and the heartthrob of many a young girl: JTT. Every year, the defunct Tim Taylor (Tim Allen) would hang Christmas lights and end up hanging upside down himself! Those were some of my favorite Christmas specials when I was a kid.

For these nails I painted Wilson, the Taylor's next door neighbor whose face is never seen. He is the sage of the show and Tim often went to him for advice. I painted him exactly how he's always seen: behind a fence. I also painted a tool box on my index finger, and the logo for Home Improvement on my thumb.

Merry Christmas MyMemories Giveaway

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a great day and father Christmas brings you what you want :D

I have been given a copy of MyMemories Suite (worth $39.95) to try for free and also a copy to give away to one lucky reader. I have tried the software and it is a very easy to use interface with a good selection of papers, textures and embellishments included. Here's the site if you would like to have a look MyMemories . There is the option to buy additional paper and embellishment packs. I have made my mum 2 scrapbooks to date and she loves them. I am currently scanning and the family photos to make into a photobook so we have a good duplicate and the photos don't get lost or spoilt over time. 

The software has some photo editing parts, you can add effects such as sepia and add drop shadows. It is really easy to drag and drop the ribbons and buttons around the page and create interesting titles and text boxes. I don't think I have scratched the surface with this software, I know it will be great for whipping up a lovely personalised birthday card - handy when you can't get to the shops create and print instead!! You can see the main features of the website here

Here are a couple of the layouts I have done of my Florrie and Bluebell. To make them you click create album, chose a theme, chose the number of pages and pick your photos it does the rest so is great for novices. You can also do individual pages from scratch if you want to get more creative.

If you would like to win this software you must:

Either follow me on GFC or Twitter

You get one entry for each and also additional entries if you blog, tweet, tumble or have me on your blog roll

You must comment below with your:
GFC name
email address
twitter name
links to the posts or tweets. 

This is open internationally :D
edited to add I forgot to put a closing date!! Entries must be submitted by 10th January 2012 and the winner will be announced on 13th January 2012.

	This is the code to save $10 mentioned in the banner STMMMS10117 please check it has worked before you pay and if it doesn't work please let me know BEFORE you pay. I might be able to get different codes but I CANNOT refund money as I do not work for the company.

Sweetheart

These are some unfinished sweetheart nails. I don't remember why I only photographed them at this stage and not at the end! I think next time I tried this design I won't let the points be as dramatic. 

Bad Galaxies

I went a *little* over board on sponging on more colors with these galaxies and they turned out a little crazy looking. Oh well, lesson learned. Stop while you're ahead!

Today I'm wedding dress shopping for the very first time!!!

Metal Gods

Don't forget to check out my guest post at Polish Art Addiction today! I did some Tank Girl nails!

Two days ago, on Tuesday, I took the last exam of my undergraduate degree. Because it was my last semester I decided to take a couple of fun classes. You may recall from my Godzilla nails that I took a film class about Godzilla movies, well my other class was a class about the history of heavy metal! I've been listening to metal for 15 years now, so I figured that their couldn't be a more perfect class for me! One of our assignments was that we had to go see the band Judas Priest perform live at a concert. I know... What an awful assignment! Haha! The best part of the assignment was that I would have gone to the show anyways, but since I was part of the class we got discount tickets!

I painted my nails for the concert, like I usually do, but I only had about ten minutes to paint them! I have a really really really awesome Judas Priest nail art idea, but it'll have to wait until I have more time! For now, all I've got is this logo!

Spinal Tap 11/11/11

These go to 11! For 11/11/11, I wore This Is Spinal Tap nails! An infamous scene in the movie This Is Spinal Tap has  Nigel Tufnel (played by Christopher Guest) explaining that his amp can go one louder because it goes to 11 (where typically amps only go up to 10). On my thumb is the dial turned all the way up to 11 and the rest of my fingers have the Spinal Tap logo.

A lot of others wore Spinal Tap nails for 11/11/11 but my absolute FAVORITE are Michelle from Sonoma's Nail Art which can be seen here. Michelle is a rockin' nail artist... I mean, really rockin'. And for her Spinal Tap nails, she actually did a portrait of Nigel! 

Peppermint Stripes

I was going to do a gift wrap design this week, but decided to go all strip-y instead. I really should clean out my nail polish drawer too, considering how long it took me to find my white striper bottle, but that's beside the point, eh?

Very simple colors for this one - China Glaze "White Out" and "Red Pearl" and then two art polishes with long, thin striper brushes. The red striper was provided to me by SparklyNails sometime *last* year, and the formula is still very nice to work with. Impressive, for a striper polish!

I decided to alternate colors, so I started with Seche Vite base coat, followed by two coats of red & white on alternating nails.

Then I striped the red nails with white...

And then the white with red (painfully simple, eh?). 

A couple coats of Seche Vite top coat, cuticle clean-up, and voila! Guaranteed to make everyone's eyes go buggy.  ;-) 

Next year, I need to make my cuticles more of a priority, I think. They're horrible, poor things, and I should take better care of them. 

Also, I'm curious, so if you have a minute to leave a comment, please help me decide where to take this blog in 2012. Would you like to see: 

- Don't change anything

- More video

- Less tutorials (I get a lot of complaints about how messy my process is - would you rather just see the finished product?)

- More color swatching

- Anything else you'd like to suggest (politely, please!)

Until next week, have a Merry Christmas/Happy Holiday!

Basketweave

Previously, I did a really complicated basketweave pattern which can be seen here that I'm really proud of, but it took forever! This time I wanted to do something simple and fast. From far away, I think the two designs looks pretty similar! I don't have a lot to say about these, so I'll tell you about my plans for the next week.

I'm leaving town tomorrow for about a week to go to sunny California! Because of this, I will be queuing up a bunch of posts, so don't worry, there will be lots of nail art over the next week! I also want to remind you that this Thursday, and every Thursday, I'll be guest posting over at Polish Art Addiction. In the mean time, as long as you're checking out my blog, why not pop over there as well?

The only unfortunate part about me going out of town is that I'll largely be MIA when it comes to responding to comments or requests. I'll hop on my computer a few times while I'm gone, and I promise that as soon as I'm home I'll catch up!

Another exciting thing that will be happening in the first week of the new year is that I'll be starting nail tech school! I know, super exciting! I'll be blogging about my progress and what I hate/love about it.

Here's the first thing I expect to hate:
They give you a break down of the hours that you do each thing so I found out that I will be learning about foot fungus for 8 hours and  nail art for ONLY 4 HOURS! What?!!! Crazy. 

kathy smith fitness

Rp. 50.000.-

denise austin workout

Rp.50.000.-