Hundreds & Thousands of fish eggs

Here is my attempt at a manicure using fish eggs / nail art beads.  I quite like how it looks, although it's definitely more Hundreds & Thousands than fish eggs due to the colours

I found this manicure really simple to do, just paint a layer of polish on and then press on some of the little beads I bought from eBay - details in this post

Then wait for the beads to dry and you're all done.

Which is fine, until you try and do anything, the minute I moved around or used my hands at all the little beads started to escape.

Which is a shame becasue while they lasted they were really quite cute and unusual!

I'd definitely consider doing this type of manicure again for a night out or a special event, although I'd be prepared for losing balls everywhere over the course of the night.

But unfortunately for every day wear, where you might want to do things like wash your hands, it just wasn't practical.

Particularly for someone who is as picky as I am, an hour of watching TV and I had pretty much removed 50% of the beads without even trying to, another 5 minutes of trying and they were all gone.  Which left my nails looking like this:

So, a cute idea and something I would consider doing for a party maybe but just not wearable for me on a practical level.

Why I'll never buy Ciate Caviar Kits.

Ciate have recently launched their Caviar Manicure sets, I mentioned them here, they retail at £18 for a bottle of polish and a bottle of the beads.  In my previous post I wrote that I had bought some of the little fish egg style beads on eBay and was going to try out the manicure for myself for a fraction of the cost of Ciate's kit.

While researching other similar manicures I came across this post on Pretty Digits blog, Ciate have been in touch with a number of bloggers to tell them not to use the term 'Caviar Manicure' or 'Caviar Nails' as it's in the process of being trademarked.  Nice move Ciate, now you not only look like you're massively overcharging your customers for a product which is readily avaliable elswehere to anyone who bothers to look you're also keen to build up a load of bad publicity by contacting any blogger who uses a term you don't even have copyright for yet? 

Even if you ignore the fact that these types of manicures have been about for a while before Ciate's kit came on the market it just doesn't seem to make sense to contact bloggers, surely it's obvious it's only going to generate negative publicity for the company?

So, in short, rather than be ripped off by a company who are not very nice to bloggers - who are also their customers - I'll stick with my cheapo eBay alternative for a fraction of the cost. For anyone considering trying this look I would urge you not to give Ciate your hard earned cash, just use a bottle of your regular polish and some beads from eBay, I got mine here.  They arrived fast, well packaged and in a great selection of colours, for £1.20.

Ciate Caviar Manicure Alternative

There has been a lot of talk online about Ciate's new Caviar manicure kits. While I think the idea and look is interesting I was not anywhere near interested enough to pay £18 for the privilege of trying it out.

So, I headed to eBay to buy myself some supplies to try and create the look myself, and here is what I came up with:





There are 12 post full of tiny little pearls, form what I can tell pretty much identical to the ones in Ciate's set:





I'm looking forward to giving it a go, with 12 different colours to choose from there should be plenty of different looks possible and all for under £2 from eBay!