My First Experience with Nail Stamping

When it comes to doing my nails, I tend to prefer plain nails and have never really been into nail art. However, I always see people on Instagram with amazing designs on their nails, and I always admire how beautiful and precise they are! I first learned about nail stamping from Nova of Super Nova Beauty, and the whole concept seriously fascinated me! I mean, how do you transfer a design from a plate onto your nails? I also always thought that almost all nail art was done free-hand, so the idea of just being able to stamp it on seemed like such a unique ideas. Nova’s nails are always on point, and all of the videos I’ve seen of nail stamping made the process look so easy. After watching video after video of other people doing it, I was really curious about whether or not I could be successful at it myself. Read on to see what my first nail stamping experience was like!

Review: ILNP Sweet Pea Nail Polish

As much as I love vampy shades in the winter, I’ve been getting tired of wearing dark nail colours and have been trying to incorporate pinks and neutrals into my nail routine. Today I wanted to share with you a recent favourite lately – ILNP’s Sweet Pea.

To give you some background on the company first, ILNP (I Love Nail Polish) is an indie polish brand from the US, and their nail polishes mainly consist of less common finishes such as holographic, chrome, and ultra metallic – I actually don’t think they have released any crème polishes! There are numerous ways for Canadians to get their hands on ILNP, but the most affordable places I know of are Nail Polish Canada and Harlow & Co. I purchased mine from Harlow & Co. for $14.99 each at 12mL a bottle, and shipping was free because my order was over $25. The ILNP official website is also an option, although the prices are shown in USD, standard shipping is $10.50 and is only free for Canadians if you spend over $100 ($50 for USA and $200 for international); most ILNP polishes are $10 USD on the official website, which means you would have to buy 10 polishes to receive free shipping.

The ILNP headquarters are located in Las Vegas, and the polishes themselves are made in the USA. All ILNP polishes are 3 Free, which means they don’t contain formaldehyde, toluene, or dibutyl phthalate, chemicals that are said to be harmful to the body. ILNP is also a cruelty-free company, which means they don’t test on animals or get their materials from suppliers who test on animals.

I’ve wanted to try this brand for a really long time ever since I saw it on Instagram. Holographic polishes are not impossible to find, but they’re rare amongst brands that can be readily found in stores, so I wasn’t opposed to turning to online shopping.

Nail Polish Canada What’s Up Halloween Nail Vinyl Giveaway

Hi everyone!

Today I want to share something awesome with you. Two weeks ago, Nail Polish Canada (NPC) contacted me about an opportunity to partner with them and share some free What’s Up Nails Halloween nail vinyls with readers of my blog. I wanted to give NPC a HUGE thank you! This is such a wonderful offer and I thought my readers would really enjoy the vinyls for Halloween. They were also nice enough to send me a set to try, so I wanted to share how they fared for me.

The Halloween vinyls are a graveyard design. This is what they’ll look like when they come to you:

Review: What’s Up Nail Vinyls

Today’s post features nail vinyls from What’s Up Nails, which Nail Polish Canada (NPC) kindly sent to me. Thank you so much for the opportunity to try these out! First off, I have to acknowledge that this post is long overdue – specifically, 4 months overdue. The vinyls arrived at my house in May, while I was on my blogging break and wasn’t even painting my nails. For my wedding, I had gotten Shellac done on my nails, and wanted the Shellac to grow out naturally after the wedding. This meant I wasn’t able to test out the vinyls until the Shellac had completely grown out. By the time our honeymoon rolled around (two months after the wedding), the shellac STILL hadn’t grown out fully! I ended up getting fed up and removing them myself right before we left for the honeymoon (please don’t try this at home) because the regrowth bothered me so much. After returning from our trip, I FINALLY had a chance to sit down to use these. Regardless of why it took me so long to get this post up, I do have to apologize for not testing these out sooner.

Nail Polish Canada not only to let me pick out one set of vinyls, but 3! I chose the regular chevron design, the mermaid scales, and the X-pattern design, which retail for $5.95 each on the website. The mermaid scales and X-pattern vinyls come in 12 squares, while the regular chevron comes in 90 strips. Since this blog post was going to be my first time attempting to use the vinyls, I wasn’t sure how adept I would be at them. I decided to first try the one that looked the most simple to use for my first attempt, which was the regular chevron.

Nail of the Week: Essie’s The It-Factor

Today’s post is on the nail polish I’ve been wearing for the past week. I was due for a nail polish post because I haven’t done one in a quite a while, and this is also a polish that’s new to my collection and will appear in my April low-buy post at the end of the month. Until now, I actually had left my nails bare for the past 3 weeks, which is SO unlike me! My nails had been peeling a lot, so I wanted to give them a break.

While I would usually wear a pastel shade on my nails over Easter, I was in Las Vegas over the weekend with a girlfriend, and I cannot help but want to have bright nails every time I’m in Vegas. I realized right before our trip that during my nail polish decluttering, I had thrown away the nail polish I had in mind because it had become all gloppy and I just didn’t love it anymore, so I actually ended up buying another nail polish. A trip is a perfect excuse to own a new nail polish, am I right?

Nail of the Week – H&M Cinnamon Spark

Today’s post is on a polish I wore last week, Cinnamon Spark from H&M’s Beauty range. I bought this back in May on our Toronto trip, and have worn it several times since. H&M’s polishes retail for $6.99 for 0.22 fluid ounces in Canada.

Cinnamon Spark is a predominantly orange-pink polish with a strong blue shift. It actually reminds me of MAC’s Blue Brown pigment because of the reddish tones in Blue Brown, although Cinnamon Spark is less brown compared to the pigment. The different facets of this shade were really difficult to catch on camera – it’s much prettier in real life, and the blue shift is stronger! It’s quite a unique colour, and I got a lot of compliments at work the first time I wore it.

Nail of the Week: Formula X Neutral Nails

Today I wanted to share the latest nail colour that I’ve been sporting. This is a Sephora Formula X polish in the shade Spiked, which Sephora calls “mink bisque”. Basically, it’s a medium brownish-taupe shade in a creme finish. This particular polish came from a Sephora holiday set of mini polishes, which was gifted to me by a friend during Christmas last year.

I’ve been wearing a lot of neutral crème polishes in the last year (due to a job change), and I’ve been getting really sick of it. However, one of my coworkers said this shade looked very “sophisticated”, haha. Spiked needed 3 layers for full opacity. The first layer was super streaky, which is likely due partly to the nature of neutral crème polish formulas, and also partly to the size of the brush. The second layer was generally good, although there were still a few nails that I felt needed one extra coat.

Nail of the Week – H&M Beauty Intergalactic

Today’s post is a review of the nail polish colour Intergalactic from the H&M Beauty range, which I purchased on our Toronto trip back in May. I wore this shade last week (Sept 2-Sept 9) – we were only a week into September and I had already pulled out all of my dark polishes! It’s one of the things I look forward to the most in terms of changing up my beauty routine from summer to fall.

In the bottle, Intergalactic looks like a deep purple base with a blue and copper shift. The name Intergalactic is very fitting as all of the colours together make it look like a galaxy.

Review: Essie Gel Couture Nail Polish

I’ve had my eye on the Essie Gel Couture polishes for the past month, and I finally purchased one at the beginning of August. The shade I chose was Sew Me, which Essie describes as a cream caramel rose. I also bought the top coat to see how the nail polish would last when paired with the top coat it was meant to go with. The Gel Couture line claims to give “14 days of luxurious wear and instant gel-like shine”, without needing a UV lamp. I was hesitant to try wearing this for 14 days as I do my nails every weekend without fail, and didn’t know how long my resolve would last before I crumbled and took the polish off. However, on Day 7, I decided to stick it out for another week for testing purposes.

Engagement Shoot Makeup Look

I have mostly either been doing makeup posts or wedding posts, but today’s post is both of these topics combined! We just had our engagement shoot this past Sunday. Since we got engaged by the water, we wanted to reflect that and decided to do the shoot at a lake in the Rocky Mountains.

A few months ago, our wedding photographer asked us if we were okay doing the shoot at 6 in the morning on a Sunday, since apparently the period shortly after sunrise or before sunset is considered “golden hour” for photography. Without thinking, we said, “Yeah, sure, whatever makes the photos look the most flattering!” We are both morning people, but when it actually came down to it the morning of, it was a little tough. Since we had to be at the lake by 6 am and the drive out there is roughly an hour and a half, I couldn’t get my hair and makeup done that morning since no one would be available to do for me at 3:00am (lol). With hair, I needed serious help as I am completely useless with doing my own hair. I got my hair done Saturday afternoon and basically tried to not sleep on it that night.