Rio Professional Nail Artist Collection review

today I am reviewing the Rio professional nail artist collection*. I have tried the nail art pens and magnetic nail polish before and if you've read any of my nail art posts before you'll know they're pretty much all I use as they're perfect for doing nail art with! The professional nail artist collection is basically all the nail accessories you'll ever need all together in one set. I usually buy my dotting tools/brushes etc off of eBay and they usually come from China on economy delivery meaning it can take up to a month to arrive- not really ideal (even if they are only around 99p). The Rio set is great as it has everything all together in one box. It is perfect for if you're just starting out with nail art and wanted to have everything avaliable to try out hundreds of different designs. It will take me a while to properly give everything a go so I am posting the overall review now as I've tried a few bits (I'm posting a tutorial for the nails at the bottom of this post soon so look out for that coming up) and I will be doing lots more posts in the future using different products from the set to create different manicures.

the polishes that you receive in the kit are a black nail art pen, adhesive for the nail foils, 2-in-1 varnish (top and base coat) red, white, silver and a green polish. Obviously you can use any colours you have already to create your design but it was nice that some were included! So far I've only used the red and white polishes and the adhesive which I have got on with well. I've previously tried the nail art pens and as I said earlier I love them!

you also get a selection of glitters in these tiny pots. Okay these are adorable- they remind me of little pixi dust pots or something that the tooth fairy would have- they're so cute! They are however quite fiddly to use as you have to paint your nail with the base colour and whilst it's still wet pour the glitter over the nail to stick to it which as you can imagine means it goes everywhere- hello glittery floor! They're a nice idea though but I don't really see myself using them all that much.

these pots of glitter are much more useful than the tiny jars. They hold quite a lot of glitter and the white and green ones are perfect for doing this glequin type manicure which Sam is famous for doing! The tiny beads are perfect for doing caviar nails or you can also use them as tiny studs to make your nails 3D

these fruit shapes and rhinestones are a great addition to a simple manicure. I have some similar fruit shapes already but had never tried having rhinestone nails before. To try them out I painted my nails a dark blue and used the round light blue ones to be like small polkadots- they looked really cute! You stick them on with a small dot of clear nail polish and I would recommend putting a few layers of top coat on top of the nails once they're finished though as they are likely to come off easily.

nail foils and striping tape are both something I hadn't tried before. For the foils you have to paint your nails with the adhesive I mentioned earlier (it's pretty much just PVA glue I think) and leave it until it's almost dry- 8-10 minutes. Cut a section of the nail foil to fit your nail, place it on top and rub it down making sure it gets into the corners and slowly peel off. It leaves an effect which is pretty much impossible to achieve with polish and is bound to get people asking about them! The striping tape is used to easily get straight lines when you're trying to do something precise. The base colour must be completely dry, cut the piece of tape to size and carefully position it on your nail. Once it's positioned paint over it with a different colour then peel the tape off. The area under the tape will remail the base colour and the rest of the nail will be the second colour,. They make your nails so much neater than doing it freehand and give a really striking effect!

I don't tend to use brushes apart from striper brushes usually so I'm excited to properly give these a go to see what effects I can get with them! I like how the second one in from the left is angled which makes painting easier as you can see what you're doing better! I hopefully will be able to create some interesting designs with the large fan brush on the right so I'm looking forward to trying them all out.

I think the finger stand it a quite cool but a quite unnecessary addition to the set. I guess it's kind of useful when doing somebody else's nails but to be honest you don't really need it! The sponges are for doing gradient/ombre nails. As you can see I haven't tried these ones yet as I've failed miserably several times when attempting ombre previously. I'll give these sponges a go and keep you updated though!

a nail art stamping plate is something I've bought previously off of ebay to try but I couldn't get it to work properly and gave up on it so I'm glad this kit came with two to try so I could give it another go. I gave these a quick try on mum's nails and they turned out better than my previous attempts with the eBay stamping plate. I know not all of you won't know what you're to do with these so I'm definitely doing a separate post on them soon to show you how you use them!

sorry for the overload of photos and information- this kit just has so much in it and I didn't want to miss out anything!

The Rio Professional Nail Artist Collection retails for £29.99 and is currently only available on Argos but I think it may be available on the Rio website soon! 

I've added a photo below of how my nails turned out when I tried out different things from the set. I've taken full step by step photos showing you how to use lots of things in the Rio professional nail art set and that post will be going up soon so look out for that being posted! (The base colour I used was 'awol' by topshop)