DIY leopard print nails

hey ladies, today i'm coming to you with a tutorial, to create these awsome leopard print style nails!

once you've decided on your colour scheme, (im using pink and blue but mot colour combinations would work!) the first step is to paint your base coat and base colour. i didn't actually do a base coat because i've got acrylics at the moment, but if you're doing this look on your natural nails, a base coat will help it last longer and be smoother. i'm using Barry M's Blue Moon as my base colour.

after you've got your base colour down, you need to get a contrasting colour (i'm using Barry M's Pink flamingo) and get your splodge on! try not to dab straight down as this will leave little drops and bumps, its better to do a little stroke of the brush. don't worry about being neat, different sizes and shapes are good!

having done your contrasting splodges, you need to get your hands on a back liquid eyeliner. i'm using liquid eyeliner rather than black polish for a few reasons; 1, its much easier to fix if you make a mistake and you don't have to start again with polish remover. 2, i find it's much more opaque than the black polish i have and 3, the fine brush makes it easier to apply than a polish brush.

the eyeliner i'm using is Sleek's dip it eyeliner in black. it has a 'felt tip' style brush, which i much prefer to the floppier bristle brush ones. you need to draw broken lines around each dot, two or three for each one. if you have any bare patches on your nail, you can also draw on some little 'c' shapes to fill them in.

lastly you need to seal in your design with a topcoat. i'm using Seche vite fast dry topcoat.

it helps to look at a picture of a leopard to see how the 'rosettes' look (which is what we're trying to recreate). i'm lucky enough to have a little leopard living at my parents house, so i took my inspiration from him :)

hope you liked this tutorial lovelies!

let me know your ideas for other colour combinations, i want to try them out!

Love, Lucy xxx

Thinking of getting gel nails?

hey lovlies, today i come to you with something of a rant.

a few weeks ago now, while i was off blogging because i was settling into uni, one of my first wednesday adventrues with my flatmate danni was to go and get our nails done before going shopping at the new westfield stratford city.

we found a nail bar near to westfield (not naming any names here)and went in to look at their treatment list. i had already decided i wanted to get gels, bacause i'd had acrylics in the past and they had ruined my nails. gels have a reputation for being less damaging and slightly more versatile.

when i entered the salon it seemed fine, offering mainly nail treatments but also waxing and massage in a slightly dodgy looking back room. as i was there for my nails though, i wasn't too bothered. i asked for gels (which were listed in their treatments, and were about £7 more than acrylics) and she whipped out a pot of powder. straight away i smelled a rat, gels should surely be a GEL right? i said 'isnt that acrylic?' and she replied in her limited english that it was a new thing, 'powdered gel'. i have never had gels before so i went along with it. how was i to know that it wasnt a new thing? she also got out a glass dappen dish and filled it with familliar looking purple liquid. after some drilling (!) she stuck on some nail tips and then she applied the substance (as i will be calling it from now) with apparent expertise, and when she had finished she instructed me to hold my hand in front of a mini fan mounted on the desk to dry it. this is when i started to get more suspicious. i texted danni who was sitting next to me that i was SURE she was applying acrylics to my nails, but i really wasn't sure what i could do about it now that i was in the chair with the stuff already on me!

the reason i was so suspicious was because there was no UV light used to cure the 'gel', and it smelled exactly like the acrylics i have had in the past. when she had finished i paid my money and left, unsure what else i could do. when i got home i did some googling, and found out that lots of people have been conned by this sort of thing, and i did indeed get acrylics. i was and am so angry about this, and it has put me off ever getting treatments done again.

the fact that she used a nail drill which will have done untold damage to my natural nails and was pysically painful at the time; she wasnt very carful with where she was putting it, and caught my skin several times. and also that i'm not going to have to go to another salon to get them removed ( i would do it myself but she told me they were file off; i dont believe her but i dont want to damage my nails any further by soaking in acetone unnescesarily).

i dont really know what the purpose of this rant was other than to warn people. if you go to get gels, make sure you look up the salon beforehand and if you think it's not what ou asked for, get up and leave!!

the offending talons (re-shaped and re-painted by me with 17 Magnetized nail polish, 'the green one')