Barielle Ready to Party and L.A. Girls Dazzling Pink

Hi everyone!

I've got a quick couple of swatches for you. One is layered over the other so it was only fair I showed them both to you at the same time.

The first is Barielle Ready to Party. It's a nice salmon-y pink. Good formula. I wore it here in two coats.

I then layered a coat of L.A. Girls Dazzling Pink over it. I loved all of the polishes in that collection and got every one of them but the orange. I couldn't find that one.

I absolutely adored this mani! Thought it was great.

That's all for today!

200th Post! China Glaze Reggae to Riches

Yay! 200th post!!!Compared to a lot of other nail bloggers, for the amount of time I've been blogging, that's not a lot of posts. But still, for something that I expected to drop off in a year or two, I'm glad I've kept it limping along. Maybe one day, I'll be posting more frequently. But for now, you guys get to see me very very occasionally.

In order to celebrate my 200th post, I wanted to post a special polish. Special because of the color (easily top ten for me) and also because of when I wore it. This is the polish I wore to the newborn photo session for my seven month old son. (Now you know how backlogged my pictures are too.) 

This polish is China Glaze Reggae to Riches. It's an amazing bright pink color with a very apparent purple shimmer that was fantastic to look at in the sun. 

The contrasting shimmer polishes always seem to be begging for a matte top coat so I did that after a few days. I wasn't disappointed!!

I've added a couple of pictures from that photo shoot where my nails are really visible. Isn't he the cutest little peanut?

Stash Swatch: Barielle Gelt Me To The Party and Out-grey-geous

Hi everybody! I've got a few minutes to show you a couple more swatches. Barielle polishes again. 

This first one is Barielle Gelt me to the Party. Looking at this color now, it really makes me wonder how close it is to Essie Leggy Legend from this year's fall collection. I'm not sure how I feel about this color against my skin so I don't know if I'll ever own Leggy Legend to compare. It's very interesting though and so I don't think I'll let go of it just yet. It has to be one of the most unique polishes in my collection. 

This next color is a very interesting one as well. This is Barielle Out-grey-geous. At a quick glance, it very much looks like I took a graphite pencil and colored all over my nails like I used to do in middle school when I got really bored in class. Except, you know, topcoated. It amused me, it was interesting. I'm sure I'd get bored with it somewhat quickly. Grey is not so much my thing...even though I have several shades of it. This one is a little more unique because of all those little gold sparkles in it. 

Ok, see you next time. I just realized it will be my 200th post!! Gotta make it a good one. I need to think about it. 

Stash Swatch - a few Barielle polishes

Hi everybody.

The month of August pushed me around and knocked me down a bit. It started off great with my son celebrating his 2nd birthday (already?) in the first week of the month. But then....it's like he knew he had turned two and the tantrums just took off! He'd had his moments before but they've really intensified to the point where they've brought me to tears a couple of times. Then, there's all the getting sick. It's been one thing after another for all the members of the family recently. Needless to say, I've been not quite able to keep up with the blog as much as I would have liked. 

This post has been sitting in draft mode for a long time and I can't stand to have it lingering any more. Nothing exciting, just a couple of swatches of polishes I've already shown you in manicures before. The first is Barielle Snow Day. I've shown this to you before with a layer of holographic sparkles over the top. 

The second polish is Barielle Belly Dance. I showed this to you previously here with an accent of Barry M Rose Quartz Glitter. It's a really really nice pinky nude polish and I love it.

That's it! See you guys next time.

China Glaze Strawberry Fields with Born Pretty water decal

Hi everybody!
I actually have a nail art manicure to show you with this post! Whoo! I loved this one so so much! I loved the polish, I loved the accent art, I loved the water decal from the Born Pretty Store that I used. After my first experience with water transfer decals, I was much more confident going in with this one and it turned out great!

The polish I used for this is China Glaze Strawberry Fields. I adore this pink. On it's own, the base is probably a pretty hot pink but the generous amount of gold shimmer (not hidden) in this polish actually seems to warm it up and tone it down at the same time. You can't see it in my pictures but when I hold my hand at an angle and look at my nails with a sort of tangential view, the pink becomes brighter. I love shades that do that!

On my middle finger, I did a gradient from the tip with Sally Hansen X-treme Wear Golden-I over a quatrefoil stencil from Twinkled T. This was my first time using a stencil and my stencil work could have been a little bit better.

The ring finger decal is the other star of the show! This is a nail art product I received from the Born Pretty Store for review and I was not disappointed. The decal was really easy to apply. I just cut out the part of the design that I wanted on my nail, took the plastic film off, dipped it in water, slid the design off the paper backing and did away with the excess with a combination of cutting and using a brush with acetone. I covered it with a layer of Seche Vite and it held up for a whole week!

I still have enough of the sheet left for probably another four accent nails, which would be one or two more manicures for me. Let's take a look at the mani one more time.

You can grab this water decal pattern or others or any of the huge variety of nail art items from their website. If you use my code "PRK31" you can get 10% off your purchase. Right now, it looks like there's a sale going on for water decals too!

Thanks for visiting!!

Stash Swatch - 2true Glitterati Shade 3 and a comparison

Here is the last of my 2true polishes, a shade from the Glitterati collection, Shade 3. When I first got it, I couldn't figure out why it looked so familiar until with a sinking feeling I wondered if I had inadvertently bought a dupe for Deborah Lippman Across the Universe. This would be especially bad since I already had Icing Hey Sailor Boy, another ATU look-a-like. When I finally got a chance to swatch the 2true polish, I decided to do some comparisons, which you can see below.

I wore Shade 3 (what a boring name) with three coats. It's very jelly like so even with four coats, you can see some nail line. In the future, I'll have to layer it over something. Revlon Royal maybe?

Even just looking at the bottles, I could tell immediately that they were not dupes. The 2true polish is a much lighter blue and more sheer.

I only wore Icing Hey Sailor Boy and DL Across the Universe next to each other because the differences between those and the 2true polish were large enough that I didn't need side by side comparisons. These two on the other hand....

Well, no dupes here either. Even at one coat, you can see that the DL polish has a darker base. The glitter ratio and type seem to be about the same, though. 

At three coats, you can still tell they are different, although you probably don't need both. If I had to purge, I would probably get rid of the Icing polish since it seems to straddle a line between the other two in terms of the color of blue and sheerness. Lucky for me, I don't feel the urge to purge just yet!

Stash Swatch - 2true Shade 10

Hi all!

I have a second 2true shade for you today, Shade 10 (aka St. Tropez?). This is the second of the 2true polishes I picked up on a trip to the UK in 2012. This one is also a foil, much like Shade 9, more brown than coppery however. I really really loved this one. The cooler tone of this shade seems to compliment my skin tone better and I think it's even more interesting than Shade 9. You can see these bits of blue and red foil flecks in there that really add a lovely bit of complexity to this polish!

The above two pictures were taken in my lightbox. The below two were taken in my bathroom. Something about the combination of lights in there shows a different side to a lot of my polishes and you guys will be seeing more bathroom pics in the future! I really liked the way this one looked in my bathroom. Those blue and red flecks really sparkle here. Look at my blurred out index finger!

These polishes have really opened my eyes up to complex neutral foils. I really wish I had been paying attention when Sephora Formula X Alchemy was out. What are some of your favorite neutral foils?

Stash Swatch - 2True Shade 9

Hi everybody!

The polish I'm going to show you today has one of my favorite finishes ever. Foil! Yes, these polishes are highly annoying when you're removing them because those little bits get everywhere but I think it's worth it. I love how sparkly these polishes are without the topcoat eating behavior of glitters. Not that I don't love glitters, but they do take some extra work. 

This is 2True Shade 9. I looked really hard on the bottle to find another name for this polish but Shade 9 is all I found. A little internet digging shows that it could also be called Rio. Either way, it's a coppery foil that took me three coats to achieve opacity. I have a very prominent nail line and it seems to take me more coats to get rid of it than most others. The consistency was great! Another annoying aspect of foils is the clean up. With Shade 9, I had barely any clean up to do. There appear to be some tiny pink and gold flecks in this polish, which gives it a nice complexity. 

 I don't really have much else to say about this polish. I have a couple of others from this brand that I'll show you in a future post, another foil and a glitter. All of them were bought by me in London at a Superdrug.

Stash Swatch - Zoya Savita

The one color I probably have the most of in my stash is purple. I can't get sick of it. I have so many different iterations of this color and yet every time I find a new purple, I have to have it. So, with all the purple polishes I have, I still find this one to be pretty special. This is Zoya Savita from the Matte Velvet collection.

This polish is an amazing dark purple matte that is almost a one coater with careful application but I did two out of habit. I need more practice polishing with matte polishes because they dry so fast. My application was less than perfect in these swatches.

Still, I love it!! This polish actually makes me drool. Adding a topcoat really brings this shade to life. Look at the shimmer in the sun!!

Aaahh, how amazing is that? Is that little pink and blue shimmer in there? I don't know but whatever that shimmer is, it gives the polish more character than it might otherwise have had.

Well, I'm going to keep it short and leave you guys with that. My son has a bad viral illness of some sort and he is just so sick :-( A cold, diarrhea, fatigue. He's got to be feeling awful. Until next time guys!!

Review post - Lady Queen Nail Wraps

Hi everyone!

This post is coming a lot later than I wanted. Over the last week my entire household has been one by one falling like dominoes to the cold and trying to deal with that while being back at work has been...challenging. I finally had a little breather today so let me show you a quick review. Today I'm showing you one of the oldest polishes I have, Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Reflection Frost, with one of the newest nail art items I got, Lady Queen Nail Wraps.

I was contacted by the company, Lady Queen Beauty, to review a couple of nail art items for them. I had never heard of them before but after browsing their website, they seem very much like Born Pretty Store. One of the items I selected was this set of nail wraps.

I had been resisting using nail wraps for the longest time. I was always under the impression that they would be fussy, complicated. What it they didn't fit my nails very well? What if they peeled away too early? What if they were too hard to take off? Boy, was I wrong! When I saw this cute set of wraps on the Lady Queen website, I decided to go ahead and try them. What could I lose?

It was never my intention to wear these as a full set. I've seen others use nail wraps as quick accent nails and I wanted to do the same thing. The thing about these wraps is, those larger ones towards the left side of the pack, they are large enough to cover two nails when cut in half and laid on the side. So, I used ONE of the nails wraps, and got accents for two nails. My left hand, which you see here, had the I Heart NY portion of the sticker and my right hand had the picture of the government building. It too bad my right hand never looks as good as I'd like, otherwise you could see the other half of the nail sticker adorning my other hand.

I'm happy to report that the sticker lasted beautifully for the entire 6 days that I wore this manicure. The actual placement of the sticker was easy as pie. I cut the sticker in half, rounded the edges a bit to fit my nail, followed the instructions for placement and didn't have any trouble. I used a coat of Seche Vite on top to maintain the longevity of the sticker. I don't think you could really use it without some sort of topcoat on top.

The polish I used for this mani is Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Reflection Frost, a polish that I think I bought when I was in high school, which was...a while ago. This was two very easy coats. It's a faintly duochrome-y greyed out lilac taupe color. I'm not the greatest describer of colors so I hope that makes sense. Anyway, I've put plenty of pictures up so you guys can see for yourself what an interesting color this. It seemed to go well with the particular nail sticker I picked for this mani. If this post instills a burning desire in anyone to possess this polish, I think you can still find it on Ebay for a VERY reasonable price.

This last picture is something I hope to show you with most of my posts. I have realized that pictures taken in my car look very nice but also give you a flavor of what the mani looks like "in real life". So, here's the real life picture of this mani from my car! :-)

Thanks for sticking with me through this whole post. Again, check out the nail art items on the Lady Queen website. I have one other item that I need to review soon. Standard shipping took a few weeks so I wouldn't choose that if you're in a hurry to get anything. The specific nail art wraps can be found here. If you do decide to get anything, you can use the code "AQLC15" to get 15% off your items. Thanks for looking!!

Stash swatch - Andrea Fulerton Kylie

Hello everyone!

We are back to swatches from my stash and I just adore the polish I am going to be showing you guys today. I never thought I would have strong feelings about a white polish. I never imagined I would wear white on it's own. It's always been a nothing sort of a color to me. Something that works as a base for other polishes or to be used in nail art but nothing that deserved recognition of its own. Until this one, Andrea Fulerton Kylie.

This white is almost jelly like with fine microshimmer particles of lilac and silver, giving it a bit of a duochrome quality. It's very shimmery. It took me three coats for opacity.

Can you see the lilac glints in the pictures above? Isn't it divine? I'm such a huge fan of this polish and I'm really glad I picked it up! What do you guys think of white manicures? Boring or amazing?