I received a surprise treat in the post from my fabulous fairy friend Jenna the other day. She sent me a lovely card and a nail art brush, with a note saying she thought it might help for my beauty blog posts. Such a lovely surprise and a reminder of what amazing friends I have, and it put a smile on my face for days. So I’ve finally taken a few minutes to sit down and try it out for the first time to see what fantastic nail art designs I could recreate, and my first attempt was pink confetti:
I painted my nails all over with a pale pink polish (with a little glitter in, of course!) and I picked out a few coordinating shades of pink, red and white polish. I dipped the ‘blobby’ end of the nail brush into each polish in turn and dotted it over my nails in a random pattern, cleaning the end of the brush before each colour change. I found it pretty tricky to get neat dots on my right hand but soon got used to using the blobby end, and found that the dots were neater when I loaded more of the polish onto the brush. I finished with a clear top coat and love the end result. I’m sure I’ll get better with practice, but I thought I hadn’t done to bad for a first attempt and I’ll try out using the brush end next time, eek!
Much like fashion, beauty trends change from season to season. This spring, expect to see a variety of makeup options. At the Spring 2013 Fashion Week, makeup artists used bright hues in blues and greens while lip colours in tones of brilliant reds and crimson dominated the runways. Beauty experts also emphasized the “barely there” makeup look with neutral-coloured lips and glowing skin. Plus dramatic extreme lashes and heavy eyebrows coupled with softly smudged eyeliner were a major fixture on some catwalks.
Although there seems to be a clash between the bold trends in eye and lip wear (hint: don’t wear all the trends at once!), the combination of eye-catching colours and subtle, simple shades allow you to emphasize the features you want to draw attention to. By adding a bit of colour or sparkle while keeping the rest of your look basic, you’re sure to look both fresh and on-trend this spring and summer.
Seeing Red
Although pale or glossy lips are still everywhere, this season expect to see more girls in red. During the spring fashion week, models donned shades of scarlet, magenta, and maroon. Red lips look good on just about anyone, including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift above, however, those with small, thin lips get a boost with brighter lip hues. You can even make your teeth look whiter, just by choosing the right shade of red lipstick for your skintone (hint: choose a blue-based red). Lips appear larger and fuller in brazen colours, and outlining the lips in red pencil accentuates the shape of the mouth and makes sure that your lippy stays put. The rouge lip colours of the season run from brighter pinks to powerful, deep reds and dark cherry. Proving that red rules this spring.
Focus on the Eyes
Since the cat-eye trend became a beauty hit, dark, smoldering eye makeup has been dominating the scene, as seen on Adele at the Oscars, with dark eyeliner being a fixture in most women’s makeup bags. Some of the trends include the retro flicked-up effect, a look called the modern rim that features a tight, outline with light smudging, and dark liner with a dash of platinum or pale gold across the lids, making it easy to transform a day look into a sexier look for the evening. Some girls prefer not to wear eyeliner because it often causes bits to clump up in the inner corners of their eyes, or, for those who wear contact lenses from Acuvue (like me!), it gets into their eyes and scratches or irritates their lenses. However, many makeup companies manufacture eyeliner and mascara that is waterproof and smudge resistant, so every eyeliner lover can get her fix without worrying about any eye makeup dilemmas. Its taken me ages to find the right waterproof mascara, but now that I have, there’s no stopping me! If you still aren’t a fan of eyeliner, thick prominent eyebrows are also making waves in the beauty world – just like model Cara Delevingne wears below - and beefing up your brows will draw attention to your eyes regardless of whether or not you’re wearing eye makeup.
Keep It Clean
There’s nothing more beautiful than a clear, clean face, and this spring and summer you’ll be seeing a lot of women sporting the barely-there look. Neutral colours and pale lips were oddly popular at fashion week earlier this year. Runways were full of models with plain faces and shining skin – if only my skin looked that good! Play up this minimalist look with a light brush of blush and intense, striking eyelashes. Finish it off with natural, neutral-coloured lips and you’re ready for the spring and summer. This is the look I’ll be following this year, and letting my paleness shine through!
Let me know what you think of these trends for Spring/Summer 2013 and tell me which you’ll be wearing or have you already been sporting these looks? Leave me a comment below and tweet me @cassiefairytutu
It’s St Patrick’s day and the whole of the UK is celebrating with a good old knees up. I’m definitely heading to the pub tonight and I certainly want to my nails to be looking suitably celebratory while clasped around a half of Guinness. So I’ve spent a bit of time creating a cute little design on my nails using permanent marker pen – please see my tutorial on marker pen nail art. I’ve tried a few different leaf designs - the normal clover, the shamrock, a lucky four-leaf clover and even a heart on my little finger.
So I’ll be showing off my special shamrock nail-art to anyone who cares to look this evening and will be sporting this home-made ring that I’ve crafted for the occasion. It’s another very simple tutorial: using ring-backs, buttons and a lot of superglue – check out my upcycling buttons tutorial blog post for instructions.
I hope you all have a lovely St Patrick’s Day, wherever you are in the world
At the weekend I went shopping for a few office supplies and amongst my basket of envelopes, parcel bags and pencils was a pack of chunky permanent marker pens. Now, I spend a lot of time on Pinterest, (I’ve just been invited to join this nail art bloggers group eek my nails are nothing compared to these!) and have seen lots of pins advertising metallic Sharpie pens for use for nail art. And my next thought was ‘why not use normal market pens then?’. Could this be the cheapest nail art yet? I got a pack of 4 pens in different colours for 99p! So I thought I’d try out the marker-pen method with my fresh new pens and see how easy it was, how long it lasted and whether it stained my nails eek! And here are the results:
I found that the application process was super-easy because basically you’re just drawing on your nails. As long as you’ve got a steady hand, you’ll be fine drawing on stripes, a pattern or this season’s bright french manicure. Obviously, I found it a lot more fiddly with the hand I don’t normally use, so maybe get a pal to help, or only use an easy pattern such as the spots. I found that the marker pen gave different colour results depending on the base polish, and the blue pen had a purply-sheen (like you sometimes get from writing with biros). I liked how this looked with my turquoise Missguided polish in ‘Misstique’ (always use a base coat with this dark polish – it does stain!).
A bonus is that the pattern dries almost instantly and stays put – I washed and rubbed my nails straight away after drawing the patterns and they didn’t budge. BUT you can’t use a clear top-coat: if you sweep the brush of clear polish over your pattern you’ll find that the brush picks up some of the pen ink and smudges it around - not good. So the nail art will only last as long as the polish you use as your main colour would usually last. It would be very irresponsible of me to recommend permanent market pens to you without checking how well it can be removed from your nails, so I’ve just whipped off my nail art with normal nail polish remover and it hasn’t stained my nails at all. Obviously, I can only vouch for my particular pack of pens, so if you give this a go, I’d recommend that you paint one nail, leave it for a bit and then take it off to see if has any negative effect on your nails underneath. I’d used 2 pretty thick layers of polish, so the pen ink was actually pretty far away from my nails! The Sharpie idea has been promoted all over the internet, so I guess they are pretty safe too, and you can get loads more colours – but I’m going for the thrifty method and using my pack-of-four-for-a-pound bargains to get this funky nail art look.
