Trind Perfect System Set
So, as you could see in the previous post, I bought the Trind Perfect System Set as well. Lately, my nails have been breaking and splitting like crazy, even to the point where the top layer of the nail is literally peeling off. Also, my cuticles are really dried out, even tearing in some places. The Trind Perfect System set is an all in one set to give yourself a complete manicure with all sorts of helpful products that should get your nails in perfect condition again.
You start off doing your cuticles. You apply the Cuticle Remover first, let it soak into your cuticles for a few minutes to make them softer, and then use the blunt and sharp ends of the manicure stick to push the cuticle back and remove any excess bits. You then wash away the remnants of product and apply the Cuticle Balsam, massaging it into your cuticles.
Next, you take the 3-way nail file, and use the black, then white, then the grey side on your nail... so not on the edge of your nails as you normally would, but actually all over the top -- to polish and smooth them. Then you wipe away the nail dust and apply the Nail Balsam, massaging it into your nails. This helps to rehydrate them. Once your nails are completely dry, you apply a coat of the Nail Repair nail polish. Finish off with a bit of the Hand Repair hand moisturiser and you're all set.
You do the full manicure once, and then every day for the next two weeks, you... well, see, the little instruction booklet is actually a bit conflicting, here. In the step by step guide, it just says to remove the old coat of Nail Repair with an acetone free polish remover, apply a new coat of Nail Repair, and that's it. However, there's also a table in the back listing how often you should use each product, and it says once every four weeks for the cuticle remover and buffer file, and daily for the cuticle and nail balsam as well as the nail repair polish. So, I think that's what I'll do, just to make sure: remove the old coat of polish, apply some of both balsams and wait for them to dry, then apply a new coat of repair polish.
And then, once the two weeks are over, you should have strong, healthy nails again! For maintenance, you should continue to apply the balsam and repair polish at least once a week, and do a full mani including removing excess cuticles and using the buffer file once every four weeks, if I'm understanding the little overview in the back of the booklet correctly. For now, I've just done the full mani once, and here's the before and afters:
Before. I almost feel a bit embarrassed showing you this! I mean, come on, it actually looks kinda gross up close like this. As you can see the top layers are peeling back, cuticles are torn, etc.
After. Keep in mind that this is just the first application out of fourteen, so it's not a complete miracle cure that instantly makes everything perfect. But the file has helped to smooth out the peeled back edges, and my cuticles are actually instantly looking better. I'll show you the definitive results in two weeks!
Look, shiny things!
Over the past week I ordered stuff from three different online shops, and all of my packages arrived today! There was a clothing order from ASOS; a sundress by Liquorish (not pictured because I put it on rightaway, and therefore was wearing it when I took this picture), a pair of skinny jeans by Vero Moda (also not pictured because I sent them back right away; they were advertised as a UK12/EU40, but fit me like barely a UK8/EU36, maybe even EU34 O.o I couldn't even get them up to my hips!), and these gorgeous high heel stilettos by FEUD London. The RRP for them was £ 120, but they were on sale for only £ 18! 85% off! They're genuine leather and surprisingly comfy considering the 5.5" heel -- I can actually walk in them more easily than in my black 3" pumps!
Anyway, enough about the ASOS stuff. I also ordered the Trind complete Perfect System Set of nail repair stuff; my nails have been breaking and splitting like crazy lately, so I'm hoping this will help. But more on that later as I'll do a separate post about it. I want to move on to my Nfu Oh pretties!
Nfu Oh is a Korean brand of nail polish that does lots of really awesome unique colours. I didn't have any of their polishes yet, nor did I have any flakies in general, so I figured it was about time! Then I discovered the Dutch web shop NailXL through MissLipgloss.nl yesterday and decided to order a few shades right away. They're all flaky polishes because I didn't own any yet. I ended up getting #49, #51, #54 and #56 -- #56 wasn't available yet and will be sent to me soon. Also, this came in super quickly -- I ordered them yesterday and they arrived this evening!
Of course I had to try it immediately! This is two coats of Nfu Oh #54 over one coat of China Glaze Midnight Ride. Please ignore my short stubby nails and dried out cuticles -- there's a reason I bought the Trind set. :P
I think the bottle is also super pretty. The cap is a bodice and the bottle an embroidered skirt; together they look like a Victorian dress! Isn't this colour gorgeous? It's greenish turquoise to purplish deep blue duochrome flakies in a clear base. They really pop over a black base!
They're called flakes for a reason. It's completely different from regular glitter; like pieces of brightly coloured foil floating around in the base colour (in this case, clear). With every coat of polish that you apply you add more flakies to your base coat.
Here's a close-up of the other two colours, #49 and #51. #49 is a mostly clear base with red to gold duochrome flakes, and #51 is a purplish base with violet to coral pink flakes. From the look of it, anyway, because I haven't swatched them yet. Once I do I'll be sure to post the pictures!
Nail art: water marbling tutorial
I originally posted this as a series of pictures on my Twitter/Mobypicture account, so if you came to my blog via a tweet of mine, you probably have seen this before. But, I figured I'd post the whole thing as a single tutorial up here. As this is going to be quite picture-heavy, you can continue reading after the break :)
FOTD: Warm brown tones for Father’s Day
Not that it is a reference to Father's Day in any way -- it just happened to be what I wore when I had dinner with my dad. Pictures after the break:
Long time no see! You’re not surprised, are you?
It's been a ridiculously long time since I last blogged, but then again, that's what you've come to expect, isn't it. So what's been going on in my life lately?
I guess to start that update off properly, I should flash back to the time when I'd just finished high school and was starting college. I went to study Media Technology, which they pretended was this cool combination of multimedia design, with just enough technology/programming thrown in that you can actually create the things you've designed yourself, instead of making the design and then handing it over to a programmer to actually make something workable out of it.
Well, it was pretty much true for the first year, I'll have to admit. Then in the second year, the focus shifted more and more towards the computer science and sysadmin type classes, until there were hardly any art/design classes left at all. And I was all like "I didn't sign up to learn the innermost workings of my CPU, I just wanted to make pretty flash games and 3D movies kthxbye" and dropped out at the end of the second year.
(Oh, and let's not forget the crazy math class from hell. I took it three times during those two years and managed to fail it each time. On the first try, I threw my textbook at the wall in despair halfway through. And then when I had to draw some line graph for one of the exam questions, I ended up drawing a flower on the grid because I had no idea what the words in the question even meant.)
I briefly attempted to get into art school after that but was promptly rejected. In retrospect I'm happy about that; as much as I like art and design and creating things in general as a hobby, I'm not sure I would actually have liked to do it full-time for 4-5 years straight. It did pose the problem of not knowing what kind of subject I'd want to study next... and so I just started working.
Well, here we are, four years later, and I'm still doing just that, and thus concludes our flashback. Over the last year, it's been starting to bug me that I never actually managed to get any sort of diploma besides highschool... and so I've made the scary decision to start all over and become a college freshman as of this September.
I'm going to be studying Nutrition & Health at Wageningen University & Research centre (WUR for short). I'm by no means a health freak -- I love junk food, actually, and have in fact been borderline overweight for most of my life. But I've always been almost obsessively interested in reading about which foods are good and bad for you, which vitamins do what, and so on. I was reading the Nutrition Info labels on food packages pretty much as soon as I could read, actually. Also I've always been fascinated by medical issues, but not entirely to the point of becoming a full med student, and Biology was one of my favourite subjects in high school. For the "Health" part of N&H you actually get to take some biomedical classes as well, which seems really interesting.
All in all, Nutrition & Health seems like the "why did I never think of this before?" choice and I'm very excited about it. Also I will need to move into a dorm for the first time in my life. I've lived with my mom up to my 20th birthday (well, a few days before the actual date) and subsequently moved in with my boyfriend and lived there for the next three years. Then when we broke up a year ago, I moved back in with my mom, and now I will actually get my own place for the very first time. It's a scary yet exciting prospect.
Well, enough of all this "personal life" nonsense, let's talk art!
The main thing since I last posted is of course the launch of Running on Adrenaline. It's been eating up most of my spare time since last September. I originally started out doing two-page updates twice weekly, but admittedly the art back in those pages was of rather poor quality.
Drawing the comic nearly every day has really improved my drawing and colouring skills, and I think the more recent pages look much better than the old ones. The downside to this is that it also takes much longer to complete a page these days. Think six to eight hours per page, with some complex pages even coming in at ten hours and up. Because of this I eventually downgraded to single page twice weekly updates. I dislike the slow pace at which the story progresses at this rate, but it's still preferable to rushing through each page, I think.
I now typically divide my week into 8 time slots: Monday evening, Tuesday evening, Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evening, Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. In each of these slots I try to spend 2-2.5 hours working on the comic, to get both pages done each week. So, like I said, yeah, that's eating up most of my free time. :P Most of the time I don't mind, in fact even like drawing so much, but sometimes I get a little fed up with it and it begins to feel like work, which is why I called a little hiatus at the end of chapter four just recently. (Remember how I mentioned I was glad not to have gotten into art school in retrospect? :P)
I've also begun to experiment with actually painting, using, you know, real paint. For the comic I exclusively work digitally, from the initial sketch to the end result, every singly line is drawn either in openCanvas or Photoshop. I do occasionally draw stuff in pencil or pen, but never really use any other media. Then in October, I took out my mom's acrylic paints and brushes and actually made a few small abstract paintings (that's two separate links there). And now, with the sudden abundance of free time due to comic hiatus, I've actually sat down and created my first real painting! You can find it below.
Also, over the past year or so, I've gained a much greater interest in beauty stuff. I mean, I'm a girl, so of course I've always liked pretty clothes and make-up and such, but I never paid that much attention to it (aside from dyeing my hair every possible colour of the rainbow, I guess). As of fairly recently I've been putting more thought to applying my make-up properly, for instance, using various different eye shadow brushes to create nice looks with various shades of eye shadow, instead of just quickly slapping on a generic shade of nude-ish brown with a spongelike applicator or even my finger. Even more noticeably I've bought a ton of different shades of nail polish and have been experimenting with creating pretty nail art.
But I'll save that for a different post, because this is getting crazy long as it is.
