Shellac and other hybrid gel nails give long-lasting nail colour that can be soaked off with acetone. You simply paint your nails using special gel polishes, then “cure” each layer under UV light. What’s in those special polishes, and how does the UV light change that? Plastic – it’s fantastic To understand gel nails, first we need to understand plastic! …
Firstly: I have my own domain now, yay! Update your links to labmuffin.com… or not, since everything redirects there anyway 😛 Now, all you Northern Hemisphere girls are posting your pretty pastel spring manis, but it’s autumn here! To me, autumn means vampy shades, jewel colours and duochromes, so in that spirit, I just ordered $50 of duochromes which I …
I’m not going to lie – I got lazy this week 😛 I was going to have something different on each nail, but my ideas just didn’t come together. This is ulta3 Lily White sponged over ulta3 Metal using clingwrap (saran wrap, clingfilm, etc.). It’s a new technique for me, so there’s something! It’s very easy, and the result was …
Q: Can Shellac (and other soak-off hybrid gels) damage your nails? A: Yes. Hybrid soak-off gels (e.g. Shellac, Gelish, Axxium) are less damaging than the old style long-lasting treatments which needed to be filed off for removal (often taking a chunk of your natural nail with it), but a recent study found that they still caused significant weakness, thinning and …
For Easter, I decided to freehand some chicks peeping out of their shells… I’m not sure if it looks right! I was going to do some silver and gold dots and stripes over the shells but I somehow forgot. I’m getting old 🙁 Base: w7 Neon YellowShells: Maybelline Keep Mauvin’, ulta3 Lagoon, Little Boy Blue (old) and Sweet VioletChick faces: …
Tipwear and regrowth annoy me so much, especially when I’m wearing a polish I don’t have much of! Nailside’s rightly famous cloud mani is stylish and covers up the tips, but I want a bit of variety, so you’re going to be seeing a lot of my experiments! Garrick St is in the artsy, theatre Covent Garden area of London, …
The refined yet sexy black-lace-on-nude look that Kate Moss etc. popularised a couple of years ago inspired these nails. The base is OPI Malaysian Mist, which I hate when sheer but love with 3+ coats, and might be my long sought after HG nude! It’s one of the polishes that got me into nails in the first place. The stamp …
This Wednesday’s theme is inspired by a movie. I decided to use A Clockwork Orange, one of my favourite books and movies! In the movie, the main character, Alex, wears a bowler hat and heavier eyeliner under his right eye. Bart Simpson dressed up as him one Halloween 🙂 I used Sally Hansen Sun Kissed for the orange base, and …