Hello lovelies,

Remember the cool Bundle Monster Festival Box I've showed you few weeks back? Well, I promised you a review of the Cali Dreamin' gel polish collection so here it is! But first, here's the description of the collection that brings summer to your heart just by reading it!

"High desert backdrops, Springtime music festivals, and the lifestyles of these concert goers were the inspiration for our Cali Dreamin' Collection of cream colored gel nail lacquers. These 6 colors will personify your inner music loving-road warrior that's rollin' with the top down on your '69 VW bug and just feeling new and fresh: Acoustic Asana (G097) is a salmon pink fitting of beautiful Cali sunsets, Mojave Mixer (G098) is a lime green inspired by lush green grass of the Mojave Performance Stage, Indigo Indio (G099) is a gorgeous dusty, navy lavender blue inspired by some of the art of the desert in Indio, California, Papaya Whip (G100) is a soft orange befitting of the pueblo colored high desert mountains. Lightweaver (G101) is a stunning lilac purple at will warm your inner flower child, and Escape Velocity (G102) was inspired by the brilliant turquoise blue skies of a warm Spring day cruising down the I-10 leaving LA to fresh, desert air."

This was my first experience with Bundle Monster gel polish and I didn't have many expectations. I thought it will probably be poorly pigmented and maybe with some curing issues. But luckily, I was pleasantly surprised so I'm happy to share it with you.

The gel polishes come in black bottle and cap with white writing and a colour label at the top of the cap. Each bottle holds 13ml. I've also swatched these on swatch sticks to see the formula and opacity and I was happy with both. The polishes are creamy and smooth, they applied lovely and were opaque in two coats. They look a bit brighter over white base.

I've decided to do a marble drag design with all of the colours because they look amazing together! I've used the following BM gel polishes: Mojave Mixer, Acoustic Asana, Lightweaver, Indigo Indio, Escape Velocity, Papaya Whip.

The marble came out perfect and I love how some of the shades seep into each other in some areas. It is such a fun and summery design!

I've prepared a step by step tutorial for you, you can recreate this design with any other gel polish brand.

How to get this look

Step 1 - apply a coat of base coat, cure.

Step 2 - apply a coat or two of white gel polish, cure. This is so that we can apply just one layer of colours and they will be fully opaque and bright. Cure.

Step 3 - Use a small nail art brush or striping brush and apply a stripe of each gel colour on the nail. Paint the strips next to each other with different widths and cover the white underneath completely, do not cure yet.

Step 4 - use a pin/very thin brush to drag through the colours. Drag in one direction (from cuticle to the tip) and leave a bit of space in between the lines, do not cure yet.

Step 5 - drag through the colours again in the opposite direction. Drag in one direction again (from tip to the cuticle) in between the existing lines, cure.

Step 6 - Apply gel polish top coat, cure. Remove the inhibition (sticky) layer.

Not that difficult to do this, right? What do you think?

Cali Dreamin' gel polish collection is available at Bundle Monster website for $31.99 or here at $6.50 each.

Have a lovely day! Lucie x

*PR samples

As you can see, there are so many gorgeous new products in this collection! All of them seem to be sold separately so you can pick and choose which ones you want.

The first item is the California Dreaming Gel polish set. It consists of 6 creme gel polishes in summer shades. I will be doing review and some cool nail art with this collection later in a separate post.

Next, there is a set of water transfer decals with different sets of images ranging from palm trees and leaves, star signs and constellations to chevron stripes and more! These are thin and easy to use so I'll definitely be showing you some nail art manicures with them later as well.

Then there is a pot full of Natural Semi Precious Pebble Stones. These are different colours, shapes and sizes and I would probably use this with gels or gel polishes rather than with nail polish. I can see amethyst, coral, turquoise and other types of stones.

Another new release are Holographic Nail Art Stickers, I have the Cosmic Array set. These can be cut into any shape and adhered to the nail/nail polish and then sealed with top coat. They look very beautiful but I find them to be little bit thicker than I'd like. That's because my nails are very curved and stickers either crease or lift off at the edges.

But my absolute favourite from this box is the new set of Festival stamping plates! The images are so versatile and fun and there are several themes like geometric, hippie, festival, star constellations, hipster animals etc. Here are all the plates photographed for you:

They are so beautiful - am I right or am I right? :D They all seem to be etched properly and I haven't spotted any mistakes. So far I have tested 4 out of the 10 plates and haven't had any problems with the images. I've also seen countless of awesome manicures with these plates from bloggers like Very Emily and Glitterfingersss and you should definitely check them out!

The plates come with the regular protective backing and blue foil (don't forget to remove it!). There is 10 of them in the set and they can be purchased for $14.99 or separately for $2.49 at Bundle Monster website or on Amazon.

And now, let's have a look at the second part of this post - the nail art challenge manicure. I am part of a group called Paint All The Nails and besides chatting about nails we also do a monthly nail art challenge. This month's theme is Pastel Geometric and I've decided to use the Bundle Monster Festival plates to create this manicure.

For this look I have used two techniques - stamping decals and kind of an acetone wash with stamping. First I've created stamping decals with a geometric design from BM-S307 plate and applied them to naked nail, creating a negative space around the decal. I've used Zoya Cole, Dot, Lillian and Blu, all light and pastel colours.

I've painted the remaining nails with one coat of white nail polish (Color Club French Tip). Then I've mixed little bit of nail polish in one of the four pastel colours with acetone and painted the mixture over the white polish. This helped me get a watercolour look and overlap the pastel shades. Finally, I've stamped over the watercolour look with white geometric stamping from Bundle Monster BM-S303 plate.

I really like the soft look of the watercolour nails and the contrasting boldness of the geometric stamping decals. I think that despite decals being a lot of work they are totally worth it :)

*Post contains PR samples