Mellow Yellow

Holiday time starts to feel in the air, and I'm still painting my nails with the pastel shades. But what can I do if I have the undying love for pastels :) Besides, yellow is good at any time of the year, even winter. So, the hero of today's post is piCture pOlish Mellow Yellow:

Mellow Yellow is a pale pastel yellow creme, which I have shown in my blog once already. You can compare the swatches of "now" and "then", hehe. What I feel is that the formula became a bit goopy with time, and so I needed 3 coats to cover all bold spots.

The shade is very pretty though and the application is way better than in case of similar whitened pastels. And it dries very fast, so I didn't bother to put on any top coat. 

Actually I did use a top coat, but later on, when I decided to cover the polish with loose gold glitter - holiday time is in the air, I'm telling you :) That was not a rocket sience: working with one nail at a time, I was applying a top coat and immediately sowing the glitter on top of the nail with a fan brush. Then dabbing slightly and letting dry a bit. 

So, are you in the Xmas/holiday mood already or it didn't reach you yet? :) 

Lime Yellow

*planned post; me having the most romantic moments in life on Santorini*

Let's talk about... limes! My opinion is still undefined: I like gazing at the other people's swatches of lime polishes, but myself... I wear them like once per year. Do you like lime shades? Do you have many lime polishes in your stash? I have... one, and I got it as an extra in my swap with Akuma Kanji, so I didn't even buy it myself lol. Here I'm talking about Yes Love Y74!

Yes Love Y74 is a... hard to describe shade, not yet a green lime, but already not a yellow lemon. Yelime lol. Bright and in-your-face shade. The texture is creme, no shimmer attached.

Unfortunately, I have to mention the formula, which was a... disaster :{ I barely managed to fight it in 3 coats, the polish is streaky as hell, I didn't even expect such a challenging application. Oh, and forget about self-evening: without a top coat it looks like hilly terrain. Hard times I had while applying it, that's the truth. 

The sun suits this polish a lot, I felt like my nails were illuminated. I also got some reactions from other people saying: "oh, what a brightie!!" :)  

I have to admit that this colour is damn unique in my stash, and that I'm glad that I have it. If my swap buddy, Akuma Kanji, didn't put it in the package, I would never buy such a shade myself - AND I would lose a lot of fun!! So thank you, D.!! : ) 

If I wear lime, it means that I'm in the mood to do so. Yes, I do believe that such shades require a suitable mood, only then you feel them harmonic on your nails :) Right? Or you don't need any special courage to wear a bright lime polish? :) 

Yellow Mess

It all started with a simple desire to wear yellow. See, I don't have a lot of yellow shades in my stash, so choosing did not take a lot of time - I opted for Essence My Yellow Fellow. After enjoying it for a day, I decided to add up some stamping, and here I was pondering a lot. I ended up with a random lines stamping... and I called this manicure "a yellow mess" : ) 

The stamping was not any complicated: I used a BM-316 plate and triple-stamped the lines using Konad white polish, China Glaze 2030 and Orly Hook Up. I was just placing the stamper in a random order, so that the lines are not stamped one over the other. As simple as that.

And now I'll do something I've never done before in this blog - I'm posting a pic of my full hand! So that you can laugh at my curvy and bony fingers : )

I hope you enjoyed the yellow mess, because I actually did. And the people in the public transport did as well : ) 

Lemon Sugar & Water Flowers

Seems like forever since I last used any type of nail decals! I don't even have a reasonable explanation to that, I was just into other stuff like stamping, layering, flocks, thermo polishes and what not.. Well, it's time to show the decals now, especially such lovely ones! 

As a base I was using Avon Lemon Sugar (sent to me by Antallex), which deserves its own story. The polish is a pastel yellow creme with quite smooth application qualities for such a texture: opaque in 2 medium coats already.

My camera TOTALLY freaked out while I was trying to shoot swatches of Lemon Sugar, so I had to resort to my NotePhone :) I'm still not sure if I managed to catch the colour correctly.. So if you see any green there - it's not, the polish is a plain pale pastel. 

And here comes the fun part: water decals from KKCenterHk! As I said, I haven't used decals for ages, and water decals for... never! So yes, it's my first experience. In theory, I always knew how they work, but I didn't think that the application process is much easier than it looks on a tutorial video. Remove the protection film, put them to soak for 30 seconds, place them wherever you plan and bam! you have cool nails : ) And top coat. Fini.

I should also say I was very happy with the quality: the decals don't tear, the pattern doesn't smudge when you apply top coat, they stay forever AND - I was fearing this the most - they are easy to remove! 

My poor friends thought I actually drew all this flowers and patterns myself with a brush.. Hehe!

And the last thing: I really recommend you to have a look at KKCenterHk online store. They have lots of things for nail art and decoration, as well as make up stuff, eyelashes, eyeshadows, wigs etc etc. Aaaaand you can get 10% discount if you enter "ritterbraten" at the check-out : )

*The water decals were kindly provided by KKCenterHk PR team for my consideration. In this post I expressed my honest and unbiased opinion about the product.

Hellenic Duo

Soo I'm back from holidays again, this time from Greece :) Amazing country with amazing landscape, delicious food if not swimming in olive oil and nice maybe a bit too loud people.. I wish could go there again and again!

Knowing that I'll have no time for stamping, sponging, dotting and even proper manicure routine, I decided to go into duo colour manis, because I still wanted something more special than just plain polish. So I did: version 1: yellow and lilac Essence polishes flom Blossoms LE. 

And version 2: pink and fuchsia baby Alessandros, here you can see the bottles and the pink one alone.

Excuse me the quality of manis and photos: my personal photographer has a lot of space to improve his art skills :)
What can I say? I loved doing duo manicures! Silly me not to try it earlier :)

What about you? Do you like duos?

piCture pOlish Blog Fest: Mellow Yellow

Today I was honoured to take part in piCture pOlish Blog Fest - a worldwide flash mob organized by lovely Australian girls, the founders of piCture pOlish brand. The colours for review were allocated randomly, but I was really lucky to get a trendy pale yellow creme - piCture pOlish Mellow Yellow:

The application was flawless, we all know that the cremes are sometimes hard to handle, but this was not the case. I applied 2 coats and it was enough for opaque even coverage; on the photos I was using neither BC nor TC, I wanted to be fair and to show the polish as it is. And it is awesome: both the shade, and the formula. Not that I'm a frantic yellow addict, but if it is to wear yellow, then definitely this one - pale and subtle pastel looks nice on nails of any length I guess.

That day I got compliments 2 times from random people, including a seller in a Kiko shop : ) She said it's a pity they don't have a similar shade hehe ^^ And of course I couldn't miss the opportunity to stamp over such a pretty base! 

In conclusion: uf, long post with a tonne of pictures, but it was worth it. Mellow Yellow is definitely a lovely pastel shade and a user-friendly polish that left only positive impressions... And Australians ladies are lucky, as I heard, to be able to buy it from a vending machine! Otherwise you can order the polishes from the official site of piCture pOlish, they ship worldwide. 

Thanks to those who made it till the end and I'm very curious to see other shades reviewed today!

*The polishes were kindly provided by piCture pOlish for review, however, this didn't influence my opinion in any way.

Banana Kitty

Again and again I'm being convinced that the name for my blog was chosen so accurately. More than half of my posts could start with the words "for the first time in my life...", and so can this one. Yes, yellow. Yes, never before. The only one in my collection so far, but what a pretty one!  

You remember the "Hello Kitty plate" promotion of Born Pretty Store that other bloggers and me were writing about? Well, I finally got it a couple of days ago and decided to try it out: 

Regarding the polish: it's Essence My Yellow Fellow from LE Blossoms etc... I couldn't help buying the whole collection, because these are my favourite creme pastels. So far I don't regret, but I must confess that at least this yellow is kinda capricious in application: all the swatchers said "2 coats", but I needed 3. And then  after the night I had scratches and linen traces (you can see on pic above) or however they are called. But I still like it, maybe because it's unique in my stash :)