Chanel SS12 Nails

I was excited to see the photos from the Chanel SS12 show a couple of weeks back and an idea for some nails came to me when I saw this pic:

Mmm pearls and pretty pastels and golds on those jewels. It had to be done. Here's my Chanel SS12 manicure:

To do this manicure I first painted two coats of Revlon's "Coconut Crush" before water-marbling pastel colour polishes (see below for list). Next I applied pink and white pearls on the half moons of my nails and then added a gold Chanel decal onto the center of each nail before sealing the whole design with some Seche Vite.

Gold: NARS "Kismet"
Purple: Barry M Boots Limited Edition
Teal: China Glaze "For Audrey"
Blue: Barry M "Blueberry Ice Cream:
Pink: Barry M 119
Decals: eBay
Pearls: Poundland

I quite like these nails although I was going for a more subtle, not quite so bright look. I think my favourite nail is my left thumbnail (last photo) and I wish that all of them had come out more like that but water-marbling is so unpredictable (hard if you're a control freak like me!)

I also really enjoyed the Louis Vuitton SS12 collection so watch out for those nails coming up!

Mary Katrantzou SS11

When I first started to think of what prints I'd like to use on my nails for this blog I instantly thought of Mary Kantrantzou's amazing print dresses. I would seriously love to own one of these babies:

For my birthday I unfortunately didn't get the Serendipity dress but I did get some printer decal paper and some acrylic spray so that I could make my own nail decals!

I printed out a large version of Mary's Serendipity dress (thank you Net-A-Porter for providing hugeass images for me to use) onto my printer decal paper so I could then use sections of the dress on my nails. I did think about small versions of the dress on my nails but 1) I don't have a super amazing printer (although it has served me very well) and 2) I couldn't be bothered to try and resize them to fit my tinyass nails.

The whole thing was rather straightforward save for the part where you put the decal into water and leave it for x amount of time until the backing paper comes off. Being a bit of an idiot (I don't like to read instructions, I'm far too impatient to waste my time doing that!) it took me about four or five goes before I realised that around 15 seconds was enough time for the backing paper to come off and any longer meant the whole thing would just fall to pieces.

I also rather stupidly thought that it would be just like the water decals I used to get free with Mizz when I was 14. Nope. This (and I used the white kind fyi) was more like a sticker that you had to put in water to "activate" the stickiness. And ultimately that's what it was rather than what I would think of as a decal.

Yerp. So as you can see I thought it might be clear (I had no idea since my present giver had no idea either) and painted my nails white just in case. I think I'd quite like to try out the clear kind and see what difference it makes, if any. Also, since I had thought that the decals would be quite thin (like the kind free with Mizz), I thought I could just whack them on my nail and then use a cotton bud with nail polish remove to clean it all up. No such luck. I had to use nail clippers (no idea where my crappy nail scissors have vanished to) to try and curve the what-was-rectangular decal to a sort of nail shape and as you can see it resulted in a totally uncool "rough around the edges" look.

To finish I filed off the excess with a cheap emery board from Poundland in the same way that you would with a nail wrap.

Essentially this is my homemade version of some nail wraps only more fiddly and a lot more wet.

Worth the effort? I'm not quite sure yet... Whilst I love the idea of creating my own nail stickers with whatever images I want, ultimately I still think that I prefer polish. And honestly I can't see that changing any time soon.