The Tanya Burr Nail Polishes

For me, personally, YouTube has nearly completely replaced TV for quite a long time now. However, I like to think that it’s a rather recent phenomenon that some YouTubers’ popularities seem to have absolutely gone through the roof. Nowadays, especially some specific British YouTubers appear like real filmstars when you hear how whole crowds go crazy once they have spotted one of them somewhere (seriously though, the screaming can be quite mental).

It’s also kind of become a habit for Internet stars to bring out their own merch like books, clothing, posters or similar stuff. I certainly don’t mind that at all, but most of these things just don’t really manage to catch my interest … maybe with only one exception to the rule: cosmetics!

What intrigues me most about beauty products brought out by YouTubers is how good the actual quality of these items is. Hitherto, my assumption has been that most of the budget would be spent on cute packaging as well as clever marketing and less on decent ingredients, nice formulas et cetera. Nonetheless, I was definitely willing to adjust my opinion, in case a product that I’ve tested out myself could actually persuade me!

It’s usually quite hard to get hold of most of these beauty items here in Germany, but when I spotted something from the Tanya Burr cosmetics range in TK Maxx I just had to get it – especially because it’s a set of nail polish that I’m talking about (not that I actually own nearly every colour of the rainbow, anyway).

There were different sets to chose from, each with three out of the ten polishes in total that Tanya has brought out by now. I actually managed to find one that includes all three of my favourite colours from her range! I don’t know exactly how much they originally are in the UK, but I paid about 10€ for the set which seemed like quite a good deal to me.

The shades I got are called Penguin Chick, Peaches & Cream and Little Duck.

But now, let’s see how they actually look on the nails!

1. Penguin Chick

I find this a really nice take on a grey nail polish. The slightly brown undertones in it add kind of a warm effect to the whole shade. It is a rather subtle hue which makes it the perfect colour to wear every day!

Spring Blossom

When I’m sitting at my desk procrastinating and doing my best at putting off work for as long as possible (as per usual), I’m lucky enough to have a beautiful view of our garden through my window. Especially in spring when everything’s blooming and colourful outside, this can be a serious distraction when you actually want to get some work done for once.

By chance, one of my favourite plants, which is the magnolia, actually stands right in front of my window. As its blooming period is usually very short,  I always make sure to take a picture before all of the petals have fallen down.

Somehow, this beautiful sight made me want to have some kind of floral design on my nails as well which is why I created this simple, bright and spring-appropriate nail art!

Spring Has Sprung!

As you can tell from the title of this post, even in the apparently always cold and rainy Germany spring seems to have finally sprung!

Although I love wearing pastel shades in outfits as well as on my nails basically all year round, I especially tend to combine many different pastels at once when it comes to springtime. Because of that (and maybe my weakness of decision-making) I used six different nail polishes to create this bright and colourful nail design! 

Nail Art Trio

As a self-proclaimed nail polish enthusiast you will only very rarely see me with bare nails, especially not for longer periods of time. Depending on how messy and chipped my nails have gotten in the meantime, I tend to change my nail polish at least once a week. Luckily and surprisingly, my natural nails are actually still quite healthy and intact (thank goodness!).

The reason why I don’t regularly publish a ‘Nails of the week’ post or something of that sort is that I don’t really feel like every design/ colour I try out deserves its own entire blog post. As I’m quite an annoying perfectionist, it’s admittedly rather hard to please me completely.

Anyway, I thought I’d show you a compilation of three designs that I wore lately, compacted into this single post!

Polishes used:

Main colour: wet’n’wild – Wet Cement

Copper crosses: Manhattan – Café Beauté

Silver cross: ciaté – fit for a queen

Top coat: essie – good to go

My Nail Polish Storage

One thing that you may have already noticed about me by now is that I'm quite a nail polish enthusiast. What follows is that my collection doesn't really seem to stop growing anytime soon.

It has taken me quite a long time and lots of failed attempts to figure out a way to properly store all of my polishes.

There were certain requirements that the final storage solution had to fit:

1. The polishes should be easily accessible!
2. The different colours should be displayed (or at least visible without having to take them out of a box or something)!
3. It should store over 100 polishes!
4. At best, there should be an option to enlarge the storage capacity!
5. I don't want to spend a fortune on specially made polish racks that you can buy online!

Despite the rather large number of requirements, I finally seem to have found the perfect solution for me, namely the RIBBA picture ledge from IKEA! Although it's certainly not intended to be used as a nail polish holder, it's perfectly suitable for this task.

Sugar Candy & Polka Dots

Certainly, by far one of the best investments I've ever made (okay, in this case it was my parents who made it) would have to be the Ciaté advent calendars. I was lucky enough to get them last year as well as the year before (an entire, more detailed post about them will be sure to follow!).

Considering the amount of full-sized nail polishes that I own and that I'll most certainly never empty completely before they turn old and gooey, the mini-sizes (5 ml) included in these calendars seem to be just perfect for me!

Even though the polish in this design is probably the colour that I used the most from the calenders, you can see that the filling level of it is still pretty high (which might, again, be due to the fact that I just own too many).

As far as I'm concerned, I don't mind wearing pastel shades all year round. They don't look too heavy on lighter skin (or rather deathly pale, in my case) and also create a really nice contrast with more tanned complexions.

Nevertheless, you'll probably find me wearing pastel colours most frequently during springtime which finally seems to be slowly arriving - I can see splashes of colour now instead of the overwhelming white of a snowy landscape when looking out of the window!

natural light

Twinkling Watermelon

As much as I love reading blogs from people living in many different countries, sometimes there are moments when they can slightly contribute to my fundamental frustration. There are so many great products out on the market which are likewise hard to get hold of when you live in Germany. Of course, you can get most of them online by now, but they tend to be sold at much higher prices. Also, shipping costs apply on top of that and it can sometimes take quite some time until the package finally arrives at your house (I can get reeeally impatient in that regard).

Having said that, you can probably imagine how excited I get when I travel to a foreign country and get the ability to see some of these products in real stores, not only on a mingy, flickering screen.

Luckily, I was able to experience such a moment during my last stay in Edinburgh. Considering that Edinburgh is honestly such a beautiful city, it feels even more pathetic that a Boots-store seemed to excite me more than all of the "usual" tourist sights, now that I come to think of it.

Bikinis In The Snow

When I read the name "bikini so teeny" on a nail polish bottle I would actually associate that with images of the beach, sunshine, beach balls and above all rather warm colours. 

As most polish-enthusiasts (including myself) probably know, the oh so popular Essie polish I'm talking about is neither a shade of red, orange, coral, yellow, pink nor anything in that direction. In fact, it is a vibrant baby blue colour that has some small glitter particles in it which somehow remind me of twinkling snow crystals. However, once you've applied the polish to your nails, the sparkle isn't really visible anymore (which is a shame, really).

For this nail design I combined Essie's bikini so teeny, which is available in the standard range by now, with Essie's blue rhapsody, which is from the mirror metallics range. As the name suggests, this is a very shiny metallic blue shade.

It was quite difficult to capture the true colours because they always seem to look a bit different depending on the light you're using. The following two pictures were taken in natural light.