It’s that time again, the
time to be inspired by something I watched! This time it’s the Korean period
drama Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo which is about political intrigues in the
10th Century Goreyo Kingdom sprinkled with romance, action
scenes, a lot of beautiful people[so many princes!], amazing locations and
fantastic costumes. I’m not going to go into too much detail on the plot, but I’ve
attached a promo video that could spark your interest better than writing about
it would.
The costume that inspired
me today is one that the 4th prince, Wang So, wears in two of my favourite
scenes as well as on some of the promo pictures. It’s a hanbok (traditional Korean
costume) made from a black shot with burgundy fabric that has a red motif and
is worn with a sash. Here it is on the actor Lee Joon Gi who is doing an
amazing job of fleshing out this character. Scarlet Heart is worth watching if
for no other reason than for his acting.
One of the few shots where you can see the burgundy fire of the fabric
The costume & a sample of the amazing locations I mentioned
The base colour is
SPAritual Body, the stamp and red lines is A-England Perceval and the tips are
done with Mavala 246 Black Cherry. I was so glas I had Black Cherry available
as it is shot through with the same quality of burgundy colour, one that’s not easy to make out unless you see it
under intense light. The stamp is form Born Pretty's L007 plate.
I
shall leave you with a photo of the princes in modern clothing cause this post
hasn't got enough princes in it!
XxX
Elysse
PS- Drama photos source: SBS, Modern clothing photo source: Cosmopolitan Korea
I saw this “How I did my make up in school”
challenge that’s been making the rounds on youtube and really wanted to do a
similar thing for nails, though I’m going to stretch the time-frame a bit. I
even tried to do it using the same tools and methods I used back in the day
(late 90s-early 00s) and it proved to be so much fun. I can tell it’s going to
be a chattier entry than usual so I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane
with me.
First of all I was a really late bloomer with regards to make up and polish. In
fact I used to hate both and if you knew me then, you wouldn't believe my love
for them now. Though I always had long nails, usually square or squoval as that
was the fashion back then, I never wore any polish and avoided beauty shops
like the plague. Pearly polishes, pinks and corals were just not my thing and
vampy colours were too scary for young me.
That all changed in my last year of high school when iridescent polish became
very popular. Anything iridescent catches my eye and the allure of iridescent
nails was too strong. I went to a beauty store to find iridescent polish and *boom*
that was it. I fell in love with all the new unusual colours that were out back
then and while I started with what we’d now call an iridescent top coat I soon
moved on to the sparkly dark blues, the purples, the blacks and glitters. I
think I ended up having more than 25 polishes at a time when it was unusual to
have more than 5. It was true love and I wish I hadn’t thrown away those
bottles years ago. I’m going to talk about each style individually, though the
order is not chronological. I think Hole's Violet is an appropriate song to listen to whilst reading since I loved it in HS, it's sufficiently angsty and both Courtney Love and Melissa Auf Der Maur are two of the many uber cool, wonderful and complicated artists of that time.
Thumb: The Distressed nail(A-England
Camelot & OPI Kyoto Pearl)
I really didn't like pearly polish, but my godmother had bought me two. I had
to find a way to use them and the distressed nail was born. I wiped off as much
polish as I could and then brushed it over. I haven’t done this in
years and with the wide OPI brush I couldn’t do the half-butterfly shapes
I could with the much thinner brush. Plus, the OPI polish is too smooth, the ones I had had a more obvious pearl in. Yes, I am complaining that a polish is too smooth.
Index Finger: Kitty Cats (an ancient Revlon
& A-England Camelot)
I love cats, so putting kitty paws and cat shapes on my nails was a very
logical step. I used to do a cat on one nail and kitty paw trails on the
others. It was done with toothpicks or old pens, I didn't even know things like dotting
tools existed as there were no tutorials back in the Pleistocene. The base
colour is similar to one of my favourite nail colours ever, Bourjois Bleu/Or, a colour I talked about on my very first post on this blog. This Revlon is a similar colour, but
has none of the iridescence & none of the magic unfortunately.
Middle Finger: Scotch Tape(OPI Moon Over Mumbai & a disappointing Shu Uemura one)
Scotch tape was my favourite thing to use. I did all sorts of shapes with it.
The base colour has the blue iridescence that I liked. The
dark purple has a little bit of glitter in, but the ones I had and loved had
loads more. They were like Essie’s vintage Starry Starry Night in different dark colours and I loved
them so! I also had a glitter polish with star shaped particles and would place
a couple here and there. I have nothing like that now, so I drew a star
instead.
Ring Finger: Using
glitter gel pens(Korres Spring Lilac)
This was a bit after high school, but I could not exclude it. My flatmate from
uni that knew my love for stationary gave me a set of glitter gel pens as a
birthday present and we soon discovered that you could use them to draw on your
nails and the ink kept its shape, it didn't pool in seconds and it didn't
spread when you put a top coat on it. We went squiggle crazy for the rest of
the year. It was our ‘thing’ and it was fun! I couldn’t
find any pens now that I could do that with so I used a cd-marker and nail
polish.
Pinky: Pure Black(A-England Camelot)
I was intimidated by plain black for the longest of times. I would wear sparkly
black, and dark purple, but not black. And then I randomly bought a black
polish, wore it and could not look away. There was nothing to disguise the
absoluteness of this colour. It even looked cool when it chipped. I wore black non-stop for years after that and it coincided with the time I stopped doing nail art up till the time I
discovered nail stamps many years later, but that’s a different story.
I wore this ring all the time during the last year of HS
Remembering and reminiscing about all this was fun, I don't get nostalgic very often. However, I can't believe I haven't used some of these techniques in so many years. I need to incorporate bits of all of them to my current routine!
I've been meaning to repeat my opalescence mani for a while now, this time with a darker base to look more like a black opal. This time I had a second flaky top coat to add a bit of blue. Flaky top coates are by far mt favourite type of shiny top coat. I tried my best to capture its beauty, but it is even better in real life.
Base- Sixteen 864 darkest slate grey
Flaky topcoat 1 - Seventeen 104 the blue-purple flaky
Flaky topcoat 2 -Nubar 2010 the green-gold-red flaky
I also tried it with a matte top coat, but I found it underwhelming. I didn't much like the white cast the top coat left so they went back to shiny after I took the pictures.
