Ruffle Nail Manicure.

Hello!

   Now that I have my dotting tools I'm far more adept at doing nail art, however I don't claim to be an expert by far! I first saw the ruffle manicure on Chalkboard Nails. All of her manicures are so amazing and her nails are perfect, she must have really steady hands!

I first started by picking out my nail colours: 

L-R: Apple Pie, Blue Moon, Berry Ice cream, Strawberry Ice Cream, Peach Melba and Lemon Ice Cream.

As you can see I'm the biggest pastel freak ever, I love these colours and thought they would all work well together, plus I thought that if the lines weren't straight it's less detectable with light colours.

For this manicure you will need the following:

Nail polish remover, some tissue, some cotton pads, your nail varnish selection and your set of dotting tools, also a strip of cardboard would be useful depending on how you use your dotting tools!


I started with a base coat of Lemon Ice Cream, mostly because it's my least favourite colour:

Next you need to dab your dotting tool in the first nail varnish you want to use. Personally I pour a teeny bit onto some cardboard and dab it on from there. Although in this picture I have picked up the white dotting tool I cannot stress enough that using the biggest dotting tool you have is the best option, if you have the same set as me the biggest dotter is green!

You need to start with the polish you want to use, start from the bottom of the nail but leave a gap to show the yellow. You dot in a line with the dots touching, then using the next colour start another line of dotting, you need to slightly overlap the first line so it looks like a ruffle.

The picture above is three rows in, you could leave it with a band of the base colour on either side of the ruffles, it still looks cute!

This is the finished product, I think the colours are cute, they remind me of Easter eggs! They're not perfect but since this was my first try I think they turned out pretty good, I would definitely try it again!

What have you been doing to your nails this week?

x

Hotel Chocolat Cocoa Juvenate Eau De Parfum.

Hello!

 So, I don't ever need an excuse to go to Hotel Chocolat but I usually don't because their chocolate is on the pricey side. However this week I went in to get a present for someone, as well as picking up a little 6 pack of gin truffles for me!

 When I went to the till the lovely lady there gave me two little perfume samples, I actually didn't hear exactly what she said until I had a look when I got home! I didn't even know that Hotel Chocolat did fragrance, but apparently there is a whole range of spa things which you can find on their website. The two samples I received were called Repose and the other Revive.

L-R Repose and Revive.

The tester come in cute little cardboard containers, one is bronze and black and the other is silver and white.

It has a little tab at the top inviting you to pull, once you do the packaging puffs out, giving it enough room to be squeezed for a spray of perfume.

Here you can see it puffed out, sorry for the blur. You can also see my toadstool manicure which I will do a review on when I have mastered it!

Revive.

On the website the description of the fragrance is a little thin on the ground, it doesn't have what each one is supposed to smell like. I guess that isn't so much of a problem but I do think it makes it more difficult to decide what to buy.

The back of the packet has a little description, it says ' An invigorating scent inspired by freshly cut cocoa pods with an uplifting, enlivening fusion of bergamot, green tea and citrus notes, blended seamlessly with the rich aromas of jasmine, neroli and rose, resting on a base of warm sandalwood and sensual musk.' Phew what a mouthful! It sounds like a complex fragrance, I love bergamot so this sounds lovely to me.

The little sample has 0.01 fl oz so it is literally a teeny amount of product, but obviously for a free sample that is fine! It also has an ingredients list and says it can be kept for 12 months. I believe this product is made in St Lucia.

When sprayed this immediately smells like a female perfume, it actually has a hint of lime which I really love. It smells quite soapy which I'm not surprised at because bergamot does have a soapy smell to it, the rose also comes through slightly. I haven't been wearing it long enough to really gauge if it smells musky but I think the citrus may stop that happening.

I don't think I would buy this one, not because I don't like it but because I have quite a few citrus perfumes and I don't think it would get used. It is really unusual though and I can't stop sniffing it!

Repose.

I really like the colour scheme on repose, the scent itself is a lot deeper than Revive so I feel like they got the colour scheme really accurate in regards to this.

The back of Repose says 'A warm, intriguing scent inspired by the richness of roasted cocoa, luxuriously blending a heady and sensual, exotic bouquet of spiced white florals with a base of must, sandalwood and leather.' Now as we know I don't ever pay much mind to product descriptions in regards to scent, however I have to say this one is bang on!

When first sprayed, it smells like cut stalks of cocoa and immediately begins to settle into a slightly smoky warm fragrance. It has spicy undertones with a musky feel, it smells masculine but sweet too, I think men could actually get away with this, I reckon if it were sprayed on a man it would pick up the masculine smell. It's absolutely lovely.

I would definitely buy Repose, however it costs £47 for 50ml....which I really cannot justify!But it is beautiful and would've made a lovely Valentines present for a lady (if I had got my review out on time!)


Would you buy these perfumes? Have you ever bought anything from Hotel Chocolat?

x

Birthday Wish List.

Hello!

   It's my birthday in a couple of weeks (March 4th to be exact!)  From my parents I have asked if it is possible for my bedroom to be redecorated. I have had some issues with a leak in my ceiling/wall and it has caused the wallpaper to peel off. I also had issues with wasps and my dad thought it would be a good idea to tape something sticky to my wallpaper and when he took it off it ripped off the wallpaper! So suffice to say I think I am due a new look bedroom ;)

At the moment my walls are grey and the accent colours are teal and some other blue tones. This was a vast change from before that as my room used to be black and purple during my goth phase! I now want the room to be coral and mint green, it is going to look super cute I hope!

Anyway back on point! I don't really expect any of these to be bought for me, I will probably treat myself to a couple of them and just keep the rest as a point of reference for the future, but I find it's always fun to think about what you would like!

DVDs:

I went to see this film with my mum when it first came out and I loved the storyline, its such a sweet film and Merida is awesome!

I don't know why this picture turned out so blurry,but its Monsters University which carries on the story of Mike and Sully....I loved the first one and the second one was really funny, I was pleasantly surprised if I am honest!

This is a film I really really neeeed to see. I have the first one and it is one of my favourite films ever, even if I need to have lots of snacks when I'm watching it as it makes me super hungry! This is definitely high on my wishlist!

This is the 'Garden of Eden' eyeshadow palette by Sleek. I love the colours of this, I keep going to the website and almost purchasing it but something always pulls me back! The dusky pinks really call out to me and the bottom right colour looks beautiful! At £7 it isn't that expensive either, I think it may be because the postage takes it up to over £10 that it's putting me off.

I am a lady who loves her gin, loved it for years and am so grateful it has had a revival of late! My surname is Hendrick so obviously Hendrick's gin is my favourite.....it's personalised just for me!

Sometimes I go on ebay and type in random stuff like 'fox bag' and this beauty popped up! I broke my other bag which is similar to this and I really really want it! I bought my sister a birthday present last week (we are twins) and this little rascal popped into my basket, but I took it out at the last minute!

Oh my glob! I cannot explain how much I love Lumpy Space Princess, she is my spirit animal! A lovely lady on Etsy has a shop called KitschBitchJewellery her stuff is amazing and I want it all, but this especially is beautiful!

I think that's it for now! I do have other things I would love to own but a lot of that is for my new room!

Do you have anything on your wishlist? Is your birthday coming up soon?

x

Balloons In The Grass.

Hello!

It has been a bit of a washout weather wise in the South of the UK this week, so I thought I would do a summery manicure today using some lovely new nail polishes that I have aquired!


    I read a couple of other peoples blogs and a lovely lady called Mali over at MaliberryMakeup did a review about a nail polish that I knew I had to have as soon as I saw it! I am talking about an indie nail polish called Balloon House.

Balloon House.

 Balloon house is made by Indy's Indies and she has a shop over on Etsy: IndysIndies. She makes fabulous glitter nail polishes. It arrived in a little black string bag with a business card.

She has a cute little dog silhouette as her emblem, it's very cute and looks like a little pug!

Her business card has all of her links on it, it also states that her polishes are cruelty free, always a good thing.

It has a cute label on the bottle, I love the fact it has the writing in rainbow colours, I think the little details that custom sellers take the time to do really makes the products awesome.

Balloon house is modeled on the Disney film UP and has glitter that looks like the balloons! I love the film UP so much so being able to paint my nails with 'balloons' is just too cute to pass up.

SO PRETTY!

As you can see Balloon House is made up of large circular discs of glitter in a range of different colours! It looks like a jar of sweets and I couldn't wait to get it on my nails. The bottle I got is 5ml, it costs £4.00 which sounds like a lot, however for a custom polish it is definitely worth the price tag.

On the brush it can be difficult to scoop out the discs of glitter, I found that when I first used it only a couple of pieces were coming out, but if I swirled the brush around in the bottle it got easier to extract them. However you do have to have patience with this polish, it requires dotting on the glitter and you do have to be careful not to have big globs of the varnish left the dry on your nail. But the results are worth this slight hassle!

Apologies for the slight blur but I hope you can see how super awesome this nail polish is!I love the way it pops against the greeny blue on my nails. I would love to do a slightly darker blue polish, clump the balloons at the top of the nail and use my Barry M pen to create string, perhaps for my birthday in a few weeks!

My nail polish base was one of the new Models Own HyperGel polishes in Turquoise Gloss with Balloon house over two of my nails. It's a cute little manicure and I cannot recommend looking for unique nail polishes enough.

What are you wearing on your nails this weekend?

x

Waikiki Melon Yankee Tart.

Hello!

   Following on from my essay on Yankee Tarts yesterday I thought I would review one that I have since melted and give a quick run down on how to use a tart burner.

This is my tart burner, its a cylinder shape with a space at the bottom to put a tea light. It has gaps to stop the burner from becoming too hot and at the top it has white polka dots. I quite like it although it doesn't go with my room colour scheme at all!

Here you can see where the tea light fits underneath the burner. Although I don't burn anything whilst the cats are in my bedroom I do feel like this is slightly safer than a candle. They can't stick their heads into the flame like they can with a candle, this has occurred on a couple of occasions as my cats are very curious!

Waikiki Melon is an orange coloured tart, it has a strong melon scent but also has citrus tones too.

Here is the tart burner at work! I used half a tart and crumbled it so that it fit in the top. I'm not sure if my burner is just smaller than others but you couldn't fit a whole tart in the top. In fact when I burnt this one down there was too much wax and it spilt over the sides. Luckily I put my burner on a coaster so it didn't ruin the surface of the cabinet.

This is what it looks like mid melt, as you can see the top of the burner is an inverted dome meaning it catches all of the wax, it melts very quickly, taking only a few minutes to turn completely liquid.

When the tea light isn't lit and the tart is left to re solidify this is what it looks like. It is molded to fit the shape of the burner. When completely solid the wax tart can be popped out fairly easily, I use tweezers to ease mine out. It means you can swap scents and you can keep the burnt one in a sealed bag until you want to use it again. Yankee says that each tart has 8 hours of burning time. I find you can burn them for twice as long and still have a strong scent, also because I only use half these can last for ages! Really worth their money.

This is the tart during remelting, again it only takes a few minutes to turn from solid to liquid and it still smells as strong.

Getting onto the smell of Waikiki.....I really wanted to love this, I love the smell of melon and although this had a melon scent, it was overshadowed by a burnt citrus smell, it also had an overwhelming vanilla scent which hung around for a long time after. I was expecting this to be a lot more fruity but it didn't quite live up to what I wanted!

But this is why I bought a selection so I could decide exactly which ones I would buy again, trial and error!

x

Yankee Candle Tarts.

Hello!

This post is going to be a long one,so settle in! 

    I am a bit obsessive with having nice smells in my bedroom/house. When I was a teenager my room used to be an absolute tip at all times, but when I went off to uni I caught the cleaning bug and now my room is very tidy about 90% of the time! So for me, burning something that smells lovely is the icing on the cake!
 
 I came across theonestopyankeeshop whilst looking for Yankee Tarts on Ebay, they do some amazing deals, I got 10 tarts for £10.95. Given that on the Yankee Candle website they retail at £1.25 each you are getting a good deal, plus it's free postage!

I ordered these on a Wednesday morning and they arrived on Thursday which I thought was amazing!

It arrived in a standard jiffy bag, no markings to tell you who it was from! At first I didn't think it was the Tarts but the smell coming off the bag was unmistakeable!

I had a little peek inside.....

I got a little bit too excited about them! I was happy that none of them had broken because the postman had shoved them through the letter box and not left the parcels in the normal place!

From left to right starting with the top row we have Mango Peach Salsa, Salted Caramel,Midnight Oasis,Lake Sunset, Fresh Cut Roses. On the bottom row is Waikiki Melon, Sweet Strawberry, Garden Sweet Pea, Pink Sands and Summer Scoop.

Yankee Tarts are 22g each, they are disc shaped with a scalloped edge, they taper so they have a slightly bigger circumference at the top.

As you can tell I don't really have a specific fragrance group that I am more fond of, i.e. flowers/food etc. I thought that if I chose some different ones then next time I did an order I could get more of the ones I really liked!

Now, as I have said before in my Marc Jacobs post, I really don't hold with website descriptions of scent and I found the Yankee Candle descriptions particularly dire! They didn't give any indication to me of what they would smell like. However I will include both their description as well as my own as I know some people like to hear what the company has to say!

Mango Peach Salsa.

Yankees description: Sweet and zesty … juicy mangoes and peaches livened with citrus, ginger flowers and pink pepper.

My description: This smells both spicy and sweet at the same time. The pepper is quite prominent and it gives it quite a masculine smell although the citrus does even it out somewhat.

Sweet Strawberry.

Yankee description: The essence of perfectly ripe strawberries sprinkled with sugar.

My description: This does smell exactly like strawberries, although it has a slightly artificial edge to it. It smells very fruity and fresh and I have heard a lot of good reviews about it.

Salted Caramel.

Yankees description: Sweet surrender is yours with our luscious gourmand confection of burnt sugar, sea salt and vanilla caramel.

My description: This smells like millionaires shortbread! It does smell exactly like caramel, although I can't smell any burnt sugar it may come through during burning. It doesn't have much of a vanilla smell but it could just be quite subtle.

Garden Sweet Pea.

Yankee description: The sweet perfume of delicate blooms accented with hints of pear, peach, freesia and rosewood.

My description: Ok so if I am honest to me this smelt like old ladies and parma violets! I really love the smell of fresh sweet peas so I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is going to smell better when its burning!

Midnight Oasis.

Yankee description: Across quiet sands, a midnight breeze mixes with island citrus and warm sandalwood.

My description: This smells so complex to me, everytime I smell it it smells different, it's definitely not a bad thing though! It has a hint of vanilla but it also smells like mens aftershave, which I think is the sandalwood. I don't get any citrus from it at all but it smells wonderful, I am really looking forward to burning this one!

Pink Sands.

Yankee description: It's an exotic escape in the beautiful mix of bright citrus, sweet florals and spicy vanilla.

My description: This smells more berry like to me, almost verging on cherry. It's another one where I can't detect any citrus, it does have a hint of vanilla though. I would say it smells a bit like fruity bubble gum, which I am quite a fan of.

Lake Sunset.

Yankee description: The serene beauty of the suns golden rays as they dip into still blue waters, calling to mind the musky descent of nightfall.

My description: This does have a sweet musky smell to it, I can't really pick out a specific scent, but it smells deep and delicate at the same time. I feel like this will completely fill a room with fragrance.

Summer Scoop.

Yankees description: Delicious memories of creamy, homemade strawberry ice cream on a hot summer day. One scoop or two?

My description: This smells divine! It smells like berries, cream and vanilla. If you were to stick your nose in ice cream this is what it would smell like. It will be a lovely one to burn in the warmer months although I feel the smell might be a bit cloying if there is too much of it.

Fresh Cut Roses.

Yankee description: An intoxicating English garden of fragrant heirloom roses.

My description: This is the one I was most looking forward to, it smells exactly like real roses. When I was younger I used to sleep under my window, we have rose bushes in our front garden and you can smell them from my room, these smell exactly the same!

I haven't done a description of the Waikiki Melon one because I have started burning it and I want to do a separate review.

I hope this has been a useful review. What are you favourite Yankee scents?

x

Chinese New Year Nails.

Gong Hey Fat Choy! (Or Happy New Year!)

It was Chinese new year on Friday, however yesterday I went out to celebrate and decided to do a quick manicure based on some colours that represent China.


 

L-R Models Own Artstix nail beads, Barry M in Bright Red, Nails Inc in Black Taxi and Models Own Top coat.

 First of all I painted my nails red. I thought the black would need less coats over red rather than the other way around!

I painted over the top with black to halfway down the nail. I also made an accent nail on my ring finger by pouring the gold nail beads over wet nail varnish. I didn't want it to be too uniform so they're more scattered.

It was easy to do but looks quite effective. It took quite a long time to dry, I think that's because of the colour layering, plus I always try and be careful to not do things until I know the nail beads are completely stuck!

Did you do anything for Chinese New Year?
x