Next 'New In' Event at the Soho Hotel!

Last week was a super fun (if a tad busy) blogging week with a couple of events going on that I was lucky enough to attend! First up was the Next 'New In' event in London on Wednesday! I always love a trip to London for the Next events, the team are so so fun, lovely and welcoming and they really know how to spoil us bloggers! I arrived at the gorge Soho Hotel just off Oxford Street and headed up to the top floor to the most beautiful suite which Next had taken over for the day! I was immediately met with smiles, a delicious platter of food & mocktails, and surrounded by rails of pretty clothes and leopard statues, you can't ask for much better start than that!  

After tucking into some delicious lunch and chatting with lots of lovely bloggers, myself and Em ventured into the beauty room to get our nails done. I had never unfortunately met Em before, even though we were up for the same Cosmo Blog award in 2012, so it was so great to finally meet her - she really is as lovely as she is on her blog and Youtube! In the Beauty Room you could get your hair done in some beauts styles by 'Blow Ltd' and the ladies from 'I Made it Myself' were painting nails and creative nail art inspired by the new Summer Prints for the new collection. Pretty nifty, huh? I opted for a baby pastel pink and some 'statement' nail art in purple and white. The lady who did my nails was so talented and did it all free hand like it was nothing, I can't even paint my left hand well, let alone create flowers! Em had a bit more of a tropical style created for her with a nude base and bright floral detail.

After taking a few fun bathroom selfies of Becca, Em, Steph and Olivia on Instagram (I don't think that Bathtub could've been any bigger!) I checked out all the clothes and got in the summer mood! My favourite pieces were all from the Pastel rails which had an array of cute pinks, mints, pale blues and cream pieces that were right up my street. I fell just a little bit in love with the pinky pleated dress! The accessories and shoes were also pretty lustworthy too with some amazing box clutches, sunnies, espadrilles & sandals to team your pastel look with. Thank goodness it's not too long to wait to get your hands on these beauties as they're due to launch in May! 

I'd planned on trying to get a sneaky visit to Oxford Street for a bit of shopping before I had to head back to Cheltenham, but I had such a fab, relaxing time I ended up whittling away the whole day there spending a couple more hours browsing, chatting and enjoying tasty afternoon tea. (Queue my bank account sighing with relief) so a big thank you again to the lovelies at Next!

 

Monochrome Stripe Nail Wraps: WooWooNails Review

Hola Mixbagers! Today's post is the next product up in my new beauty favourites; my Monochrome Nail Wraps from WooWooNails.com. I was kindly given a voucher to spend on their site for Xmas and manged to order about 6 different kind of wraps from it! They have loads of different styles and designs to order and you can even upload your own design to be printed onto wraps if you want to add your own uniqueness and personality! Pretty nifty huh?! From my bunch, I decided to try out these black and white stripey ones first as I've been loving all the Monochrome Stripes coming into trend lately.

Day 1

Day 3

For those of you who haven't used nail wraps before they are pretty simple to apply. All you need to do is prepare your nail by shaping and buffing it and then essentially, as the nail wraps are a glorified sticker, you just choose the individual wrap that's of closest fit to the width of your nail and smooth it on. Once it's stuck on and bubble free, you just file off the excess end with your normal nail file, pop a bit of clear top coat varnish on and you're done! Now as easy as that sounds in all fairness it did take me a while to apply them, probably because I got a tad obsessed with making sure there were no bubbles in them. I think with a bit more applying practise they will have a few less notches!

From my experience with nail wraps, for some reason I may have slightly wider than average nails so the largest width of these like many others didn't quite fit to the entirety of my thumb nail, but the overall look was there so I was happy with the results! So far they've managed to withhold a couple of days of working hands on in my retail job with just a slight bit of damage to the wrap edge. Hopefully they'll keep lasting me into next week as I really love the look and it's so different to the varnishes I usually use!

What do you all think of stripey nails? Have any of you tried WooWoo nails before?