Day Six - My Favourite Skincare Product

My favourite skincare product at the moment is the Nutrimetics Nutri - Rich Oil with Apricot Kernel Oil.

This is an oil balm that is one of those all in one products, you can use it as a lip balm, a cuticle cream, first aid cream, great for burns, a night cream and so much more.

I have been using it as a night cream for the past two months and I love it! When first applied it feels quite greasy on the skin which I thought I would hate since I already have oily skin but the product eventually starts to absorb and when I wake up in the morning my skin feels so soft.

This product also helps with my pimples, I find that since using this product as a night cream my pimples heal a lot faster and unlike most spot treatments it doesn't dry out my pimples leaving me with flaky red sores that are impossible to cover.

The only time you should not use this product is if you are going out in the sun, because it is an oil it will make your skin burn much faster.

You can buy this in 25 ml or 60 ml jars. I have the 25 ml jar which I have been using for the past two months and it will probably last me another month. I use a very generous amount every night as a night cream, so if you were only using this as a first aid cream or cuticle balm it would last you a lot longer. The packaging is quite heavy and for the size of the jar the area that holds the product is quite small, if that makes sense. They could have had much smaller packaging with the same amount of product, although the jar does look quite fancy and high end on your vanity.

If you are interested in purchasing I have linked the Nutrimetics website above, just click on the size you are interested in. It does mention on the website that this product is not for oily skin but I have very oily skin and still love this product I find that my skin is less oily in the morning when I use this product than when I use other products.

Final thing I forgot to mention is the smell, this product smells delicious. Like I want to eat my face when I am wearing it. I'm not quite sure what the smell is but it is sweet and wonderful.

Day Five - Shaaanxo inspired nails

Here are a set of nails I did on a client for her 21st birthday. She brought in a photo of Shaaanxo's nails and I did my best to recreate the look although the colours are slightly different to what shaaanxo had.

I'm not going to go into detail on how I achieved this design but I can do a tutorial in a future post if anyone wants me too. I used four gel polish colours and some gold craft glitter. All lines were done freehand.

Day Four - Waikato University Lake

Yesterday I went for an evening bike ride to the Waikato University Lake. I took a few pictures and thought I would share them. These photos were all taken around 7.45pm. If you are in the Hillcrest area I definitely recommend a wander around the Waikato University lake.

That's a little snippet of my day yesterday.

Day Three - Favourite YouTube Channels

This post is a little different to what I normally post about but if I posted about the same thing for 28 days straight I know that I would get bored. Here are some of my favourite YouTube channels that I like to watch. I am currently subscribed to 101 channels, so these aren't all of my favourites but just a few that I thought I would share.

Favourite Daily Vloggers - This is a tough category to win because there are quite a few daily vlogs that I watch religiously. I think my favourite is the first one that I started to watch and the one that introduced me to other daily vlogging channels, itsJudysLife. I also like to watch SACCONEJOLYs, theschuermanshow and more recently AprilJustinTV and the SHAYTARDS.

Favourite Beauty Channels - There is no clear winner in this category because as a beauty junkie I like to watch a lot of beauty videos. Some of the most informative channels are pixiwoo and Lisa Eldridge. I also really enjoy watching Shaaanxo, it is relaxing for me to just tune out and watch her videos and she seems like a very genuine person in her videos, there are a lot of channels I don't like because they are too perfect and intimidating. I like the channels that are afraid to show that they don't get their videos perfect every time.

Favourite Comedy Channel - I don't watch a lot of comedy videos since my time is pretty much filled up with beauty videos and daily vlogs but one channel that always makes me laugh is Jim Chapman.

There are a few of my favourite channels, I haven't really gone into much detail as to what each channel is about, but they are all quite well known channels. I have linked each channel mentioned so if you are interested you can click through.

That is all for Day Three.

Day Two - Technically I already failed

My first post was actually posted at 12:04 am on February the 2nd, so my plan for a post every day has already gone out the window. Lets just pretend that didn't happen, it was still the 1st in parts of the world......

Anyway onto today's post.

I am already struggling to think of ideas for posts, I dread to think what I'll be writing at the end of the month. Today I'm going to stick with something I know, a nail post.

These are a set of nails I did on myself using gel nail polish and fine craft glitter. I'm not going to go into too much detail on how to do these, but if you have any questions just ask. :)

I started by doing a basic french manicure with gel nail polish on all fingers except for the ring finger (i'll explain that one in a minute) and adding the gel topcoat, then I lightly buffed the shine from the topcoat so my glitter wouldn't slip around to much. I then drew a line in a gel nail polish colour similar to the glitter colour I wanted to use. Before setting the green line I sprinkled fine glitter over the wet polish and then cleaned up the lines with a brush. If you have a lot of excess glitter where you don't want it, gently blow on your nails. Once I was happy with the lines I set the nails in my UV light. Once set I brushed off any loose glitter with a nail brush, the kind you use to clean under your fingernails. Then I sealed the whole design with a gel topcoat. If the glitter was still a little ruff I again buffed the topcoat and glitter area until it felt more smooth and applied another layer of topcoat.

Now for the ring finger, I applied my base coat, set in lamp, then one coat of colour, set in lamp, then another coat of colour, before setting I sprinkled the green glitter over top until the whole nail was covered in glitter. I then set the nail in the UV lamp. Next I brush off any excess glitter and applied gel topcoat. I buff the surface smooth paying extra attention to the free edge. Then I painted on the lace design with white gel polish. If you would like a step by step let me know. If you're not confident with hand painting you can also do this with Konad stamping if you have the right plate. 

That's all for today, hopefully there will be more from me tomorrow.

February Fun! Day One

Who thinks I can do one blog post every day for the month of February? Not me, but I'm going to give it a go. I mean February has the least number of days, so if I'm going to do any month it may as well be February.

Now I am not promising 28 extremely detailed posts but I will try to post something everyday. This is going to be difficult because there are a few days that I will be away from home and a computer. Hopefully I can schedule some posts for those days, otherwise there may be a few little posts from my phone or tablet.

Wish me luck, and if anyone out there wants to join me in this attempt feel free to link to your blog in the comments section.

Mint and White Heart French Manicure

Long time, no blog. Feels like I start every post with something along those lines and a promise to post more frequently from now on. No such promise this time, I will do the best I can to post more often but I will most likely fail to do so. 

The upside to being absent for so long, I have plenty of photos of nail designs that I can now share with you. Instead of lumping them all together in one post, as I have done previously, I thought I would give more detailed explanations of each design in their own separate posts.

This first design is using three polishes, a white (Orly White Out), a minty green (Orly Gumdrop, is slightly more minty in person) and an optional glitter polish I used Wasabi. I can't remember the brand name of the glitter polish, but if anyone needs to know I can search it out for you.

I start with basecoat as always then apply a few coats of Orly Gumdrop, you can use any colour you prefer. Then using the white polish draw to semi circle shapes at the tip of the nail overlapping in the centre, creating the heart or lip french. This shape of french is very easy to do because the brush does most of the work for you. You may need to do two coats of the white if the colour underneath is showing through. You could stop here if you want to, but I chose to continue and using a dotting tool and the same white polish I added a few white dots along the line of the heart tip.

You may see in the photo I added a few rhinestones, which you may like to do also, although I prefer the design with out. At the time of this manicure I had on some very grown out acrylics which I was being lazy about removing so I added the rhinestones to disguise the acrylic nail which was most obvious on my ring finger.

I know that was a very rambly explanation, so if you have any questions do not hesitate to ask.