RubisRubis for piCture pOlish Blog Fest 2013

Hello ladies, good evening from Canada!

I’ve been chosen to participate in the 2013 edition of piCture pOlish’s famous blog fest. I was so impatient to let you all know! This is a great honor to me. piCture pOlish has a very unique branding and extraordinary colours, and they love to collaborate with bloggers. So we love them back very much. :3

piCture pOlish won’t be releasing any new shades during the blog fest this year. The concept for 2013 is « Year of the blogger » (isn’t that flattering?) : we were all sent three shades and were told to create our best manicure possible.

I was already envisioning lace patterns, quilted manicures, everything very femme fatale. I was surprised and a bit challenged when I learned what my colours were : a deep shimmery purple (which, by itself, would be absolutely suitable for a smoking hot mani) along with a bright candy pink creme and party glitters! Wow! So cute! So not Rubis! (No offense to PP, they’re great shades, just not my comfort zone.)

I’m a girl who has to put a bit of thematic in everything. If this couldn’t be an aphrodisiac manicure, it would be an aussie manicure. There was a technique I used on a previous manicure, for a contest on Pshiiit’s blog. The theme of the contest was countries : nail art representing the country you dream to visit. Mine has always been Australia. The fauna and flora over there is beautiful enough to make me cry. Even beautiful enough to make me endure the heat. I’m not really into figurative nail art, so instead of painting wombats and oranges, I reproduced some aboriginal australian paintings. One of them was an amazing, intense piece of art by Janet Long. I loved the result and wanted to try it again with my new piCture pOlish shades.

I started with two coats of Candy for my base :

Since I only had two solid colours to work with, I figured the glitter could be used as the « noise » (the red and yellow in the original picture). I added two coats of Mardi Gras, with is a sparse glitter. I would have used three but didn’t want to end up with a super thick mani.

Mardi Gras is composed of small hex fuchsia, turquoise and silver glitter, and turquoise and silver micro glitter. It’s very cute and girly on this light pink, but looked stunning on top of Aphrodisiac. (I made a few tests on nail wheels.) I’ll show you this in a future post!

My nail art pattern was done with a simple tiny paintbrush. I normally mix thinner in my varnish when I paint on my nails but this time I wanted a thick, oil paint look. Aphrodisiac dries fairly quickly so I needed many drops to create this nail art.

The first step is to draw a little star in the middle of your nail, in teardrop shaped brush strokes. It’s really easy, you just need to apply more pressure with the brush at the start, and release it as you « pull » the polish drop behind. Try it a few times on glass (that’s what I use as my paint palette when I do nail art) or a nail wheel and you’ll get the hang of it.

Add five more brush strokes, in the middle of the previous ones :

And then, going in circles, add some more tiny strokes. One trick : each time you add one, look at the middle of your pattern and aim for the border of your nail so your strokes are always in the good angle.

I added one glitter right in the centre of each nail, because one just happened to be there on my middle finger, and I liked it. Topped with two coats of top coat, et voilà!

I think it looks better from afar. I really love the ring finger on this last picture : the blurriness makes the glitter pop out and it’s far enough that you’re struck by the global look of the nail rather than every single detail.

The two coats of glitter top coat and two coats of fast drying top coat shrunk the pink base a bit and, when this normally would infuriate me, I actually kind of like the minuscule gradient showing some free edge. It feels like it adds some claw-ish quality to this aboriginal design.

I’m really happy with my mani, and I can’t wait to show you the full glory of Aphrodisiac.

piCture pOlish is 3-free, not tested on animals, and each one of the thirteen shades I own have perfect formula. They are very easy to apply, wear like iron and, when they’re not glitter bombs, are also easy to remove.

They can be purchased directly from piCture pOlish’s website, or any of their networkers.

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*Pour mes lectrices francophones : étant donné les délais pour cet article, je n’ai pas trouvé le temps de le traduire en français. Toutefois, mon vocabulaire anglais de canadienne française est plutôt limité et je crois que Google translate fera un travail acceptable en attendant que je trouve le temps de m’en occuper. Bisoux!*