Sunday, March 26, 2017

on 6 comments

My UV Patch by La Roche-Posay

I recently got a chance to try out the La Roche-Posay My My UV Patch, and of course I had to create some matching nail art.

First my nails, I used a check stamping image from Messy Mansion, and then I mixed my teal polish with white polish to get various shades of teal. I then coloured in many of the white gaps so that the pattern was similar to that of the patch. I hindsight, I wish I done a feature nail as a decal, so I could then cut out a heart shape so one nail could have been the teal heart on the white background.

The UV Patch is a round sticker, about the size of a 50c piece, that you apply to your skin. It's ultra thin like those invisible band-aids, so you hardly even notice your wearing it. Except that every second person asks you what the sticker is. 

There is also a mobile app that you use to scan the patch (which changes colour in the sun). The app monitors your local UV index and combines that with the exposure reading on the patch.  When I explained it to people, they were intrigued and thought it sounded pretty cool. So, even if the only outcome of wearing the patch was to raise awareness for UV exposure, it seemed to do the trick.



I wore My UV Patch for a full two weeks, but it was starting to lift by about 1mm around the edges so I decided to remove it tonight.  The main reason I kept it on for so long was my hope to really test it out. But as per Murphy's Law, of the 14 days I had this on, I had three day's of sunshine.  It really has been a very wet start to Autumn this year on the east coast of Australia.

The first day I had it one was the Canberra day long weekend, and the weather was pretty perfect. In fact we still jumped in the pool and had an afternoon swim.

You can see on this next photo that two of the squares on the UV Patch change to a purple colour in the sun.




This photo shows the patch indoors on the left and in the sun on the right.


Here are a couple of screen shots from the mobile app.  You create a personal profile on the app which is based on answering some questions about your skin type and how likely you are to burn in the sun.


So would I buy one of these patches, probably not after doing this trial, but I believe the patches will come for free with the purchase of the La Roche-Posay sunscreen (at least I read that somewhere).  Did the patch make me more aware of my exposure to the sun, absolutely!

Friday, March 17, 2017

on 3 comments

Digital Dozen redoes ART - Day 5 - The Son of Man

I made it to the end of art week. Yay me!

The artwork depicted in today's mani was actually one suggested by my husband.  I quizzed him by asking what he thought was a well known painting that was more or less achievable to for me to paint as nail art. Eg don't suggest a da Vinci, Monet or Rembrandt. He said to me, what about that painting of a man in a suit with an apple covering his face that is in the movie The Thomas Crown Affair.

Challenge accepted.

First challenge was to work out what that actual art work was called.  Of course google is just the most excellent thing, and typing "apple face art" as an image search bought the desired painting up immediately.  

The actual name of the artwork is called The Son of Man and it was painting in 1964 by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte.

I liked that the painting and a rather simple background that I could spread across my other nails. The dude in the suit was all painted free hand with polish.

Thanks for swinging by for another DD week!





Thursday, March 16, 2017

on 5 comments

Digital Dozen redoes ART - Day 4 - Pop Art

Me - I'll just do a real quick reverse stamped mani with some pop art on it for Day 4.
Me two hours later - Why is this so slow and impossible to do neatly!!

I saw my Moyou Pro Collection 10 plate and thought I'd made a really quick and easy choice for today's design, but it turned out to be very time consuming and hard to look neat. 

I also wish the Marilyn image was a bit smaller so I could actually fit her hair onto the nail. I guess I could have tried that squishy technique where you squish the stamper inwards before putting it onto the nail, but I thought if I tried that for the first time with a image of a face, she may not end up looking like Marilyn at all. Actually I wish all the images were a bit smaller so you could see Micky, the lips and the ducks in full.

The end look was pretty psychedelic across all my nails. Lots of bright colours, that is for sure and I do feel like I did ok with the Pop Art theme.






Wednesday, March 15, 2017

on 8 comments

Digital Dozen redoes ART - Day 3 - Expressionism - The Scream

There are some art styles and art works that are absolutely iconic, and I think today's is one of them. Hopefully it's obvious enough that I attempted The Scream, a well known painting by Edvard Munch in the late 1800's

Freehand nail art is so hard.  This took me ages, and even still it feels and looks like a bit of a half arsed attempt. Oh well, we only get better with practice don't we. This was all painted with nail polish, not acrylic paint.  In fact I don't know why I keep going back to polish instead of acrylic paint when I'm attempting things like this.  I've already proven to myself that it is actually way easier to paint with acrylic than with polish. Maybe it's cause I only have a handful of acrylic colours, where as my selection of nail polish colours is nearly endless.






Tuesday, March 14, 2017

on 8 comments

Digital Dozen redoes ART - Day 2 - De Stijl

Welcome to day 2 of Digital Dozen redoes Art.  Today I've gone with a classic art design that translates very easily to nail art. Most nail artists call this sort of design colour blocking, but this specific colour combination and style style is called De Stijl, also know and neoplasticism, and was a Dutch artistic movement founded in about 1917. 

All the imagery you see of De Stijl shows strong black lines with blocks in royal blue, red, yello and white, as well as a little bi of grey.

I could have done a neater job with this had I used striping tape, but instead I just did the lines freehand.  I think it's important to practice free hand lines every now and then. 







Monday, March 13, 2017

on 4 comments

Digital Dozen redoes ART - Day 1 - Enligthen Canberra birds

Welcome to the start of another Digital Dozen nail art week. I've actually managed to get my act together for this week and have already prepared all my manis.  Which really is quite impressive considering I've been back at work for the last week and a half and have been pretty exhausted every night when I got home from work.  I'm pretty lucky it was a long weekend here in Canberra so I had an extra day to do me things.

The public holiday is for Canberra Day, and in the 10 days leading up to Canberra Day the city has showcased the Enlighten Festival.  The festival is an night time light art exhibition with lots of outdoor light exhibits. Things such as light projections onto many of the main national building like the National Science and Technology Center, the National Art Gallery, Old Parliament House, The National Portrait Gallery etc. They also have a night noodle market and other stand alone interactive light installations.

My nail art for day one is inspired by one of the lighting installations called The Birds.  It was a long series of sticks into the ground with colour changing LED bird lights. Sometimes the birds were all the same colour, other times they were a rainbow.






Here are some other pictures we took from the night we visited.  This is the National Science and Technology Centre.  That building is four stories tall.


Here is the national portriat gallery. This one was very fun this year, where you could get your photo taken and then is would move along the wall on an animated slide show with gears and sound effects to add to the whole experience.  Both my kids had their photo taken, can you guess which ones they are?


This exhibit was called the Cloud and it was made with recycled round incandescent light bulbs. On the inside was hundreds of lights that could all be turned on and off by the strings that look like rain hanging below the cloud. Very interactive and my kids have never had so much fun turning lights on and off.



Sunday, March 5, 2017

on 2 comments

Different Dimension Family with Butterfly Wings

Well where did that last week go?  I'll tell you where, it went back to work.  I've been off on personal leave since I had my surgery in December for my shattered foot.  The bones seemed to be healing well, but my surgery wound split open, and as such I was under doctors orders to keep off my foot and keep it elevated until the split wound healed. My wound finally healed over and I was given the ok to return to work after 12 weeks off.  

Returning to work after such a long time was weird. I felt like the new girl again.  Much of my first day was spent being a social butterfly and filling my colleagues in on what had happened to me.  I'm still being briefed about what has happened at work in that time.  It's odd because it seems like everything has changed, new people in new jobs etc, yet nothing has changed at all.

So with the return to work I've really not got to the polish table much. I actually had the same mani on for the full week last week! I sure hope I'm able to do some new nail art in the next day or two.

This nail art is old. This is actually the mani I wore for my birthday last year!  It's been sitting there waiting for me to post for three months.

I've got another Digital Dozen next week, so I'm really going to have to get my act together and prepare my five manis for that.





About Me

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I live in Canberra, Australia with my husband, Mr Ten and Miss Eight. My blog is all about nail polish, and a few other bits in between. You can contact me at morenailpolish@iinet.net.au