Eurovision!!!

Anyone that knows me would say that I have a slight Eurovision obsession. Well, they might not say slight! But anyway I love Eurovision. The ridiculous songs, the excellent commentary by the one and only Graham Norton, even the tedious voting bit at the end, I love it all. So this year I decided to get into the Eurovision spirit with a bit of nail art. I chose my 10 favourite songs, hard to pick a list that long (especially as my favourite song didn't get through the semi-finals, not that I'm bitter!), and had a go at reproducing their flags on my nails, thankfully I didn't pick any overly complicated ones (ahem, San Marino). Here are my attempts, for obvious reasons the simplest flags are on my right hand, and you can test your geography by not looking at the captions!

Left Hand

Right Hand

Poland

Switzerland

Norway

Malta

Hungary

UK

France

The Netherlands

Denmark

Austria

 It was a well-deserved win for Austria and Conchita Wurst last night. An incredible performance, and after prejudice from some parts of Europe, nice to see some tolerance. For anyone that missed it:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRUIava4WRM

Marble Cupcakes!

So this weekend it was the birthdays of two of my lovely friends in the Earth Sciences department and as usual I promised cakes. I mean, I have plenty of time to make cakes, it's not like I have exams in a few weeks, oh wait...

Given the choice of basically any cake they settled on marble cakes. I still can't work out if it was a valid choice or just an excuse for yet more geology puns, but marble cakes were provided anyway.

I just made basic chocolate and vanilla marbled cupcakes but they tasted good and were much appreciated, although slightly overshadowed by the amazing chocolate and ginger geology themed cake my friend's sister made him!

The marbling technique began to improve a little by the end!

CAKE!

Purple Stripes

So I am pretty much incapable of walking past a display of nail polishes without wanting to buy one of them. Sometimes I can resist but yesterday I was tempted by two, what can I say, they were on offer! After much deliberation I decided to try one from the Barry M Silk collection first. I got a lilac-y colour and, not really knowing what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised when I painted it on. It has a nice smooth, matte finish with a slight shimmer. It was however a bit too pale for my liking to have just that on my nails so I decided on random purple stripes to complement it. I then painted Avon's matte look topcoat over everything to match the original 'silk' finish. I've not used the topcoat before and was again pleasantly surprised. It paints on pearlescent over the glossy nail polish but after a minute has a completely matte, slightly shimmery finish. Definitely something I need to experiment with more!

The selection of colours I used