Here are some fun things I found on the web lately. As always, there is a little bit of everything for everyone and please enjoy.

 This is a video that I love a lot. It is a short video documentary with everyday images of Mexico City. You can see that the place where I live is very beautiful and totally busy. No donkeys, no sarapes, no guns, no fear and no stereotypes. The video is by AZOTEA POST.

I have two other videos, these are slightly creepy but if I could watch them, then you can watch them too.

That was creepy right?

To finish this post off, here are some few lovely links:

• Swatches from the China Glaze Hunger Games collection. I totally need some of these polishes, specially since I got confirmation that the collection will be available in Mexico by March.
• Andy from StyleScrapbook just showed us her new StyleScrapbook for Kipling camera bag collection and I totally love it! I can’t wait until it hit stores and hopefully, I will be able to buy the one that I want here :D.
• This 15 year old from Brazil makes the best thematic nail art I have ever seen!
• If you are looking for web friendly fonts to use in your website, try using Google Web Fonts. There are over 400 free fonts and the setup is super easy! Don’t over do it though :/.
• Krissy has one of the most beautiful blogs, Shimmer Like Gold, I’ve ever seen and she just opened a second blog called k. I can’t wait to see what she does with it.
• Apart from doing #febphotoaday, I’m also doing #febphotoskill. I hope I can finish both challenges, here’s the image in case you want to do it too.

For more info & photo credit, go to instafa.me.

Have a nice weekend!

I promised myself that I wouldn’t do another nail post until I finished the nail treatment that I was using. Then my nail polish fell out and I got mad and did this manicure instead. It is very simple but I love its delicate, girly and frosty look.

I’m really proud with my nails and fingers. Until very recently, I used to bite not only my nails, but my fingers as well. There would always be some kind of lesion on my fingers and they would bleed a lot. My nails are very thin, weak and they also peel. It is the most annoying thing ever.

To stop myself from biting, I got into nail art. After all, why would I spend so much time doing my nails only to bite everything off later? That is the reason why I started all those nail posts a while ago. I started using Orly’s Tough Cookie as a base and my nails are stronger than ever. I also started using cuticle oil that I got like a thousand years ago and more hand cream :). As you can see, my nails are looking really nice.

Here’s what I used to do this, it is so simple that you will laugh:

1. Orly Tough Cookie as a base
2. 1 coat of L.A. Colors Blossom
3. 1 coat of Kleancolor Aurora
4. 1 coat of Top Cosmetics Super Matte Coat

I love the look of mattified glitter polishes. I think that the glitter has a bigger opportunity to shine, instead of trying to compete with the usual glossy finish. I’m going to stock up on this matte top coat, since there is little to no chance of China Glaze’s Matte Magic to ever get to Mexico.

I hate that we miss out on pretty much every cool beauty product!

Kisses!

Enter #febphotoaday! #febphotoaday is a photography challenge that I found through Sarah-Rose’s instagram feed. There is a challenge for each day of the month and I think that it is a marvelous idea for everyone who wants to take more pictures but, like me, doesn’t get too many ideas for it.

Here’s the complete list of challenges in case you want to try it as well:

I will be posting mine every Sunday as part of my LOMO project series :D.

Kisses!

The other day, my dear business partner showed me an incredible food blog (she’s the one who got me into baking) and besides it having a gorgeous design, it loaded extremely fast despite it having really big, high quality pictures.

I immediately did what I always do and decided to check out the source code to see if I could find out how her images had that nice fade in effect. Enter the jQuery Lazy Load plugin!

When you have a web page, all the images load at the same time when you open it. If you have big images, high quality ones or just images that have big file sizes, then the loading time can take a loooong while. Most of the users don’t like that and they will say that your website is too slow and things like that, that you sure don’t want to hear and might not know how to fix without compromising the quality of your images or your beautiful blog design.

I did a little diagram to explain how this little piece of code works.

As I said before, usually the web page will load every single image that it can find, even if you can’t really see it at first glance. In reality, when you open a website you can only see whatever it fits inside your browser window. This area of visibility is called a view port.

The jQuery Lazy Load plugin only loads the images that are localized inside this view port and as you are scrolling down, it loads the rest. It has some cool effects like fade-ins and things like that. I love how images just appear as I scroll down and it is very smooth about it.

I’ve been using this plugin for at least 2 weeks now and I don’t regret doing it. My website is much faster and I can take care of taking better quality pictures without compromising my reader’s time. I totally recommend this for blogs that are very image heavy.

Ok, I’m sold. How do I install it?

For self-hosted WordPress blogs, the only thing you have to do is install the jQuery lazy load plugin from your dashboard and activate it. I should note that if you have a LightBox plugin installed, it will not work.

For Blogger, the process is a little bit trickier since you have to edit your template file. Simply go to the Template tab on your dashboard, then click Edit HTML, say continue to the warning. Now, using Ctrl (Command) + F search for “</head>”. Above that paste this code:

<script charset='utf-8' src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='https://sites.google.com/site/addinblogger/how-to-add-in-blogger/lazyload-min.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script charset='utf-8' type='text/javascript'>
$(function() {
$(&quot;img&quot;).lazyload({placeholder : &quot;https://sites.google.com/site/addinblogger/how-to-add-in-blogger/grey.gif&quot;,threshold : 200});
});
</script>

Click save and you will be done. This code was found here.

If you try it, please let me know how it worked out for you and also tell me if you would like more posts like this one.

Kisses!

On Thursday, my mum and I went to run some errands and then we went into Sally Beauty Supply to buy some staples we were missing. We needed acetone and a new nail file, I also decided to get nail polish thinner and Orly’s Tough Cookie. I’m sure you can tell from the pictures, but my nails are really small, they are thin, they peel and for some strange reason polish won’t stick to them.

Polish not sticking to your nails is the most annoying thing, my glitter gradient just peeled off like a day and half after I finished it. The whole polish came off as if it were a false nail. It really is disappointing seeing all the hours of hard work just peel off after a day and half.

Once I was home, I took off the polish that I had put on after the glitter gradient and I started working on this pink and plum gradient. the result was really cute. I used polish that I thinned as soon as I came back home and it was amazing seeing all my colours working again. Thinned polish doesn’t work as well as normal polish, but for the purpose of this manicure it really did. I applied a silver glitter coat and Tough Cookie as a Top Coat and left to see a friend of mine.

My friend and I went to a mall that is literally a street away from her house and we just walked all around. I went to search for ADSL modems and then I saw the store that sells NYX in Mexico. I went in, they didn’t have a lot NYX but they did have matte nail polish! I couldn’t believe it. I’ve been searching for matte polish for a long time and it was there. I decided to buy the matte top coat because I would use it more. After that, we went into the store that sells Kleancolor color polishes and I got two. By now, you could see little pieces of polish falling away on the corners of my nails.

Bokeh!

I applied a little bit of the bigger polish from Kleancolor Aurora on my nails and the next day I was trying to open a jar or something for my mum and my right middle finger polish came off. It just peeled off and I have no idea why. I had applied the base coat, the top coat and even did the tip wrapping technique when painting my nails. I got so mad and then I found out that all my nail polish was coming off. I just went ahead and peeled it all off, it just came off with no harm on my nails.

I’m going to give Tough Cookie another opportunity, I’m sporting darker nails this time and way less coats of polish (only 4 in total: Tough Cookie as base, black polish, fine glitter, Tough Cookie as top coat) and I’m going to follow the Tough Cookie treatment and see how it goes.

My parents had a party yesterday and my mum asked me to do her nails. Her fingers look really dry because we got pure acetone and pure acetone is SUPER drying. She wanted something more subtle than my weird gradient experiments and I did a very simple pink gradient with a hint of glitter. She liked it a lot and her friends did too.

Close up!

I don’t know why my nails are so terrible when my mum and sister have great nails :(. I must have gotten them from my dad u_u. Well, I’m going to go back to work now. See you in a few days!

Kisses!