Techniques Challenge: 3D

I seem to own a huge number of different caviar beads which I’ve received as gifts or as part of sets but have never actually bought for myself. As this is the type of 3D adornment I own most of I thought it would be a good choice for this day of the challenge.

I decided to combine caviar beads with rhinestones of the same colour for some fun and cute 3D nails. They were nice and easy to do, looked really fun and I loved the bright rainbow colours. Unfortunately I’m not a great fan of 3D nails from a practicality standpoint, so as much as I loved the look of these nails I didn’t wear them for very long. Still, they were a fun burst of colour in my week!

I used: Southwark – Nails Inc, Def Defying – China Glaze, Lanesborough Place – Nails Inc, Elizabeth Street – Nails Inc, Boudoir – Ciaté

Ciaté Mini Mani Month – Pepperminty and Gold Caviar Pearls

I was excited to see a beautiful mint colour behind day 11 of the Ciaté advent calendar. It has a nice but slightly thin formula and looked pretty good after 3 coats, even better with a topcoat. It reminds me of Essie’s Where’s My Chauffeur? which is one of my all time favourite polishes and I absolutely loved having this colour on my nails.

The following day I got more caviar pearls, gold this time. I wasn’t quite ready to take Pepperminty off my nails and I thought the turquoise and gold combination would be a great one, so just added caviar pearls as an accent nail. I topcoated this one so I could wear them all day long at work without worrying about the beads coming off everywhere. They lasted really well, although some colour bled when I applied the topcoat, and the manicure still looked perfect 24 hours later.

Ciaté Mini Mani Month – Main Stage and Midnight in Manhattan Caviar Pearls

Another pink polish for day 7 of the calendar – it seems strange that I’ve had almost all pinks so far – I’m sure I remember seeing a wider range of colours on the back of the box when I looked (I have the calendar up against a wall precisely so I don’t look and spoil the surprise!) Not to complain – I love pinks and this one is my favourite shade of pink so far…
I had problems with the application again – it dried so quickly that when I put a second stroke on the nail (the brush isn’t wide enough to coat my nail in one stroke) it dragged a bit. With a topcoat over two coats of polish it looked great though and I can definitely see this polish getting lots of outings.

The next day was more caviar beads which I put over Main Stage. Midnight in Manhattan is a really nice mix of pearls with black, silver and shimmery translucent pink and blue pearls. I thought they looked really good over the dark pink and this time I didn’t use a topcoat. (Not sure why the pink looks less vibrant here – they were both taken in natural sunlight and the top photo is probably a more accurate one for colour)

The first time I washed my hands I lost half the beads and my nails didn’t look so pretty anymore. 😦 So I decided to topcoat what was left on one of the nails and leave the other nail topcoat free and see what happened. The topcoated nail looked marginally less pretty but lasted the rest of the day. The topcoat free nail lost all its pearls by lunchtime.

You can see a close-up with topcoat here. Yes, it looks a little less pretty and you can see that all the beads are stuck together, but it think it’s worth it if you want to actually wear these pearls (and be a nice clean human being and wash your hands!)

Ciaté Mini Mani Month – Silver Caviar Metallic Pearls

I bought the calendar for the polish really but I knew there would also be some caviar pearls and glitter bottles in there. December 4th had the first of the caviar pearls in silver. I’m not much of an expert on caviar pearls having only used them a couple of times before but here are my thoughts on them…

I decided to try these over a black base and a white base on my thumb and accent nail to see how different they look over each. Initially I preferred them over white as the gaps between the pearls were not so noticeable at first but later on as the odd pearl started to fall off here and there I realised it was actually much more noticeable in the white where there were clear holes as apposed to the black where it didn’t look particularly strange. The black also makes the silver pearls look shinier and more contrasting.

A funnel is provided with the advent calendar but no tray to catch the excess pearls in so I used a little Tupperware box – it did take some practise to get used to using the funnel to pour the pearls over the nail but I started to get the hang of it towards the end and had less clearing up to do!

In the information leaflet which comes with the kit it says a top coat is not required. Now I have mixed feeling about this. I like the idea of caviar pearls but have never really been sure about how practical they are and using a topcoat makes me feel like they might just last long enough to get you through a party/event/day etc. Without a topcoat I feel you are doomed to have pearls falling off all day long until you have bare pit-marked nails.

The picture you see here has no topcoat but I did topcoat them after taking the photo just to see what would happen. A few pearls seemed to dissolve and left weird silver pits in the base polish but the rest looked fine and with these silver pearls I would definitely use a topcoat if you plan on wearing these for any length of time. I have used coloured Ciaté caviar pearls before which lost their colour after being top coated – I’ll report more on that once the next lot of caviar pearls come out of the calendar (presuming they’re coloured ones)