*COMPETITION CLOSED* FLASH GIVEAWAY! Touch Of Silver haircare sets!

Fastest fingers first, everyone! I've got a pair of Pro:voke Professional Touch Of Silver haircare sets up for grabs but you'll need to be quick: the giveaway will be closing at midnight (GMT) tonight.

Now, as the name suggests, Touch Of Silver is formulated for grey and white hair but what you might not know is that it's uh-mayzing for blonde locks, too. The violet pigment neutralises brassy tones and revitalises dull highlights, while optical brighteners and sunflower seed extract boost shine and help prevent colour fade. And with individual products clocking in around the €3 and €4 Eurobux mark, it's a colour-care range that punches well above its price bracket.

This giveaway is open to Ireland only and will be closing in mere hours so get your name in the hat online raffle widget right this minute - and best of luck x

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NOTD: Snowmen and (more) snowflakes

After my snowman nail art tutorial for Beaut.ie the other day, I decided to keep him on my ring finger and just do the rest of my nails to coordinate.

{indoors, daylight}

The camera had a hard time capturing the true glitziness of the glitter topcoats, which is a real shame because they sparkle and twinkle beautifully against the white polish even in low light.

{indoors, artificial light making my skin look weirdly pink}

Products used:
Sally Hansen Complete Care 4-in-1 Treatment as base coat
Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On
China Glaze Luxe And Lush
L.A. Colors Sassy Sparkle
O.P.I. In My Back Pocket
Nubar Noir
Dotting tools (ballpoint pens) and detailer (cocktail stick)
Black nail art pen (brand unknown)

NOTD: Christmas snowflakes

It's time to break out the Christmas-themed nail art! Here's a look at my first festive mani of the season: random snowflakes doodled on Essie Escapades. The combination of a classic colour and a subtle design mean it's Christmassy but eminently wearable - try white polka dots on red if snowflakes seem too much like hard work.

Products used
Sally Hansen Complete Care 4-in-1 Treatment as base coat
Essie Escapades
White nail art pen (brand unknown)
Seche Vite top coat

If that's altogether too understated for your tastes, how about some snowman nails?

I've put together a how to on DIYing them for Beaut.ie today; you can check it out here.

*COMPETITION CLOSED* WIN! Sally Hansen goody bags - international giveaway!

Continuing with the blogiversary giveaways, today I've teamed up with the fabulous Sally Hansen who have organised mouth-wateringly excellent goody bags for FIVE lucky readers. 

This one's open worldwide, and the winners will each receive: 
- A Sally Hansen Complete Care 4-in-1 Treatment (my base coat of choice right now);
- A Sally Hansen Gem Crush polish (so. amazingly. blingy!);
- A Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure polish (the brush on these is fab, wide and rounded at the tip); and
- A pack of Sally Hansen Salon Effects Nail Polish Strips (the very best on the market, IMHO)

Follow the steps below to get your name in the hat - and best of luck x

a Rafflecopter giveaway

*COMPETITION CLOSED* WIN! Broadway imPRESS Press-On nail goodies!

It's been a while since I last posted, I know - would a little freebie help ease the pain of my absence? To celebrate my seventh (!) blogiversary, the nice people at Broadway imPRESS nails have some fab nail goodies to give away to my readers. 

Two of you lovelies will win a Press-On manicure and a pedicure nail art set, while two more will win a Press-On manicure set apiece.

These Broadway imPRESS nails are ridiculously easy to use. Simply peel off the backing on each one to expose the pre-applied adhesive tab, press on, et voilà - fancy new nails in an instant! Perfect for a last minute pre-party fix, and so foolproof you could apply them blindfold in the back of a cab. (Probably.)

This giveaway is open to Ireland only but don't fret if you're an international reader - there'll be something coming up for you tomorrow ;)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

NOTD: Long and buck naked

I'm working on some custom orders for nail sets for my Etsy shop :) as well as a nail art tutorial for Beaut.ie today, so I've whipped off my own nail polish (with that amaze-o Bourjois remover) and thought I'd show you this rare photo of my nails in the nip.

(Fingers crossed that this is the most naked I'll ever be on the Internet.)

My natural nails are very long right now - longer than I like them, really - but they're not in wonderful order, mostly because I've been ignoring all the great advice I dole out to other people about wearing gloves when its cold and using plenty of oil and not treating your nails like they're attachments on a Swiss Army knife.

You can see the crack on the right of the nail on my index finger, and the beginnings of a peeling flake on the middle nail.

Shameful stuff. I'm reaching for the CND Solar Oil as I type!

Mani Monday: Love / Hate

I've done a number of freehand lettered designs on nude nails in the past but have never managed to take to take photos of them until now.

These ones are inspired by "love/hate" knuckle tattoos and are as close to getting inked as I'm ever likely to get. I added a heart and a sugar skull on the thumbs to try and cute things up a bit.

Hate's a dangerous, ugly emotion and a very strong sentiment to wear, which was something I didn't really think about before painting these nails. I felt uncomfortable in them several times - especially when I found myself just flashing the right "hate" hand while, say, putting my PIN number into a keypad at a till. Not a good look, so I ended up self-consciously making sure both hands were always on display in the hope of providing some sort of context.

I'll definitely be using some different vocab for my next foray into nail calligraphy!

Products used
Essence Nude Glam in Café Olé
Essie Escapades
Black and white nail art pens (brand unknown)
Seche Vite topcoat

Pinterest Secret Boards: Too little, too late.

UPDATE FOR CLIPBOARD USERS: The service has been acquired by Salesforce.com and will be discontinued from 30th June 2013. Sadface. There's a "what to do now" spiel here, which will take you through the process of preserving and exporting your clips.

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Pinterest has finally launched secret boards, a feature that allows users to create private collections of images they bookmark through the service. Previously, every board you created on Pinterest was public by default, which was a right pain in the hoop if you wanted to use it to plan, y'know, surprise things that you didn't want the world and its granny to know about before the event.

While Pinterest appeared to dither long and hard about whether they'd bother their arses to offer users the one thing they've been crying out for since its launch, I looked elsewhere for my private planning needs. I tried Evernote but missed the visual interface; I tried MikeLike and was delighted that it looked so like Pinterest but missed the mixed media note-taking options that Evernote provided, where I could save my own notes alongside bookmarked links, text, and images.

I try to keep my digital life reasonably streamlined, so although I could have used a combination of Pinterest for public/social sharing, MikeLike for private planning, and Evernote for personal bookmarking, I really wanted to find a single service that could combine the best of all three.

Clipboard, I think, is it.

{some of my Clipboard clips}

{some of my Clipboard boards}

The visual interface means that it looks very Pinterest, but the whole thing is rather more versatile: clips from the Internet can take the form of images, text, or entire pages, you can add and save your own typed notes, and while there is an option to make clips and boards public they're private by default.

I find that I'm less inclined to fall down the rabbit hole of browsing other people's bookmarks on Clipboard than on Pinterest because where Pinterest is all about the pretty, Clipboard feels more like a place to get organised and get things done. 

Anything that helps me to not procrastinate my time away is a winner in my book.

I also like that you Clipboard allows you to create additional boards on the fly by simply adding new hashtags to the clip that's being saved (Pinterest requires that you set up new boards on the site before pinning to them.)

Where Pinterest currently limits secret boards to three per user, there are no such restrictions with Clipboard. Additionally, with Clipboard you can flip-flop between clips being private and public ad infinitum; with Pinterest, it's not possible to make any of your existing boards private, and if you choose to make a secret board public and then change your mind, well, tough. There's no undo.

I'm using both services side-by-side at the moment because it would simply be way too time-consuming to go back through more than a year's worth of stuff on Pinterest and shuffle it across. Pinterest will need to do a lot more than offer three secret boards solely for images to tempt me back full-time, though, and I just wish I'd found Clipboard before I amassed almost 1,500 bookmarks on Pinterest.

PS - this is not a sponsored post, and I've received no payment or perks for writing it. I came across Clipboard while searching for Pinterest alternatives, and it's just impressed me so much that I wanted to tell you about it.

Mani Monday: Last of the Halloween paint jobs

It just occurred to me that I never showed you the Halloween nails I painted for my cousin when she stayed with us last week, so I thought I'd sneak 'em in before Bonfire Night/the 5th of November/Guy Fawkes' is over (I'm still not sure what to properly call it.) I've decided that the Halloween/autumn celebrations aren't over until then, so they're not technically late or out of season.

(What? I iz the boss around here.)

After a thorough consultation, we settled on the simple cartoonish vampire-inspired Halloween manicure you see above as a nod to her Twilight fan-ism. Before she headed home, I switched them out for some of my ever-popular nude tribal nails with neon tips which she was mad about, but like a total amateur I forgot to take a photo of them. Nail blogger fail.

Still, I'm told she's been nursing them carefully ever since to avoid chips which more than made up for it :)

Products used:
Sally Hansen Complete Care (as ridge-filling base coat)
Essie Escapades
Black and white nail art pens (brand unknown)
Seche Vite topcoat

Something for the weekend.

My final set of overlapping visitors went home yesterday so my liver, Boris and I are treating ourselves to a lazy day to recover from an enjoyable week of being very busy indeed. In between all the going we managed to find a new flat and Himself has got himself a cool new job, which is all very exciting!

After my last interiors post you might have expected that the gaff would be totally tricked out for Halloween, but in the end the sum total of my festive decorating was to put a pair of rather different pumpkins on display. 

I carved two lines of perfect chevrons into the back of this one before deciding that they were less fun than a scary face.

This mini white pumpkin, meanwhile, was just too cute in its own right to spoil it with any decoration.

In other news, the blog is seven today. Seven! I can hardly believe it. To celebrate, I'm mostly planning to try one of the new Wild Ombré hair kits from L'Oréal Paris.

Oh, and I might have a few giveaways lined up as a little thank you for reading. Keep an eye on the blog and my Twitter and Facebook pages during this coming blogiversary week to be in with a chance to win x