You may have noticed – or you may not – that I haven’t posted in a while.

Well, it’s because I’ve been away on holiday to France for a fortnight. I had a fabulous time. We stayed in a converted barn in the Charente Maritime. It’s an area we’ve been to before, and love it. The weather was beautiful; the gite fabulous.

I took about 25 polishes with me. I thought I’d packed them carefully, but I hadn’t counted on how my husband might chuck my precious nail polish bag in and out of the car, and I had one casualty. My bottle of OPI My Boyfriend Scales walls didn’t make it. I taped it up and now that it’s made it home safely again, I need to decant it into an empty bottle.

I have previously worn all of the polishes I took with me. I took a range of summery colours, and quite surprised myself that most of the ones I chose were Barry M. They do make a great range of colours, and the Gellys in particular are great. I think I took my entire Gellys collection with me in fact!

I am not going to post the manicures separately, not only because I didn’t use my SLR camera, and so the photos aren’t that great, but also because the clean up isn’t as good as I usually do, and my cuticles are a little dry too. So instead I thought I’d do a quick rundown of the manicures I wore.

Polka dots

I wore NYC Lincoln Square Lavender on its own for a few days, and then added some polka dots. This is my very first polka dots manicure. I’ve been so scared of doing dots because I thought I wouldn’t make them very uniform, but for a first go I’m pretty pleased with myself.

Striped manicure

Again, I wore a plain Barry M Mango manicure for a few days, and then spiced it up by taping off some random stripes and putting Barry M Passion Fruit over the top.

Gradient

After wearing Guava for a day or so I changed the manicure into a gradient, using white. I didn’t do a great job with this. I usually use a make up sponge for my gradients, as the holes are very small and uniform. But I hadn’t taken one with me on holiday, so I improvised and used a (clean and new) kitchen sponge. The holes in these sorts of sponges are very irregular, and it was difficult to do a perfect job. It looked good from a distance though and the colours were great.

Dotted accent

At the end of our holiday, we went out for a fabulous meal in a lovely seafood restaurant. I wore a red top, so created nails to go with it.

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All images are copyright to Kerruticles unless otherwise mentioned.
Barry M Guava and Marry M Passion Fruit were sent to me for review. All views expressed in this post are my own, honest and unbiased opinions.