Monday, May 17, 2010

And the winner is....

Lovely Miss Ariana! Thank you to all of my lovely subscribers. I will be contacting the winner via email :]

Friday, May 14, 2010

Ulta Professional Glam Goth Set

As I was at the checkout counter at Ulta, I spied, with my little eyes..a set of 5 beautiful mini polishes for $9.95. Eagerly, I snatched up one of the sets and set it down on the counter in front of a the sales associate who was already staring at me like I was completely crazy. Happy with my purchases, I wandered home to swatch myself these 5 beautiful treasures I had just acquired.


For Bitten...magenta/orange duochromatic microglitter in a black base. Absolutely beautiful to me and as far as I know, unique.
Underground..blue microglitter in a black base. Not horribly unique, but still pretty. It's more blue in person, but my camera refused to cooperate.
After hours..shimmery deep purple polish. This one bores me slightly..it doesn't glow at all..and didn't seem to get super shiny for me even after a coat of top coat. It's less blue than this in person.
Black Lace..deep grey cream. You may notice some shimmer on my nails if you click for the ful sized pic..but that's just from tainted top coat filled with the shimmer from other polishes.

Speaking of tainted things...here is Tainted Love, the winner of the collection. This one looked a little meh for me in the bottle, but I instantly fell in love with this one when I applied it. It's a beautiful green with gold sprinkled throughout. Pictures don't do this one justice.

Application on all of these was easy. The brush on these is decently wide and quickly covers the nail smoothly. All of these were 3 thin coats of polish, which dried down fully very quickly. I'm very pleased with this set and highly recommend it. I believe that the set is Limited Edition, so if these appeal to you...run out to your local Ulta and snag yourself a set or two.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

OPI Shrek Forever After Collection

I started taking Kendo on Tuesday and unfortunately, quickly realized that long nails were not going to work out with the sport (and it suddenly made sense to me as to why I spent many years in high school and college not polishing my nails...long nails didn't make sense...and I preferred painting them when they were longer). So last night, I cut them down to nubbins..but not before swatching up a bunch of colors. (I ended up skipping Kendo tonight due to illness anyways..so now I'm wishing I had waited until the weekend) I actually swatched the OPI Shrek Collection the same day as the Milani Liquid Metals though...so the coloring's not too perfect on a couple of these as I'm still figuring out the best way to get pictures under the OTTlite. All of these were fairly easy to apply and had a nice self leveling bit to them, so unevenness was not an issue. I may not have let the polish dry enough between layers, which may have resulted in more coats than necessary on a few of these, but I found these fairly easy to work with.

Funky Dunkey; a rich purple cream that's not quite as blue as it appears on my monitor screen. This one was 3 thin coats, no topcoat.

Ogre the Top Blue; This one should be a bit bluer, more vibrant than what shows up here. It was also an easy 3 coats. It doesn't strike me as a particularly unique color, but it's still cute.
What's With The Cattitude? Pastel Blue Cream...nothing too exciting. This one took 4 thin coats. I'm not sure pastel blue goes with this name, but whatever.
Rumple's Wiggin'. Pastel purple cream..there's been a lot of of these popping up this season. This was also 4 thin coats, with topcoat
Fiercely Fiona. I've been really into yellows this year and I'm glad OPI came out with a unique one like this. It's got a slight green tinge to it. This is also 4 coats with topcoat.
Who The Shrek Are You? is a bright light green color similar to that of Shrek's skintone.
This was also 4 thin coats.

Overall, the collection's okay, though not stellar. I'm just a bit bored with creams, since there's been so many released this year. I'm ready for something more fun now. I will give OPI a thumbs up for not adding a pink or red to this collection though.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Just a Small Giveaway

It's caught my attention that I have somehow ended up with 102 followers. Since I've been telling myself that I'd run a small giveaway when I reached 100 subscribers, I would run a giveaway, here is my rather lazy giveaway. I'm kind of taking the easy way out on this one..but I am giving away a 21 pc. Bundle Monster Nail Plate set from Amazon.com. I just got mine in the mail today and the patterns are pretty darned cute. Since they offer free shipping to the US, it seems like an easy option to do (though don't worry, I'm opening this to subscribers from Europe, Asia, and Canada as well since they will ship to these areas as well. If you live outside these areas, sorry, but you're out of luck.)

To enter:
1. You must be a subscriber
2. You must leave a comment (Spam comments will not be considered..i.e. ones that include random links) including a way for me to contact you
3. Entries must be submitted by midnight Saturday, May 15.

On the off chance this goes out of stock by then I will work with the winner to give them something else

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Milani Liquid Metals

I know I haven't posted in a while...and the polish stash posts have been on pause since I keep acquiring new polishes that I want to photograph and add to the pictures I've currently taken...I just haven't found the time to do so yet. On the plus side, I did end up getting an OTTlite on clearance at Michaels. It isn't really quite what I was expecting, but it's bright enough to take pictures under for the most part. It definitely doesn't mimic natural light though.

I stopped by CVS yesterday to grab a couple of things I needed and found a new display of Milanis..the Liquid Metals collection. I'm not really sure how many colors there are...but I saw 4 colors in the display; a metallic white, a metallic black, metallic silver, and a metallic purple. I picked up 3 of the 4.

Starting with my favorite, Dot Com is a warm metallic purple with gold sparkle. This is 3 coats...it applied pretty easily.
Next up is 2.0, a metallic black. Out of the three I bought, this one is thicker, less runny. I'm not in love with it, but it's nice in it's own way. I'm pretty sure I have similar colors to this, but none are quite so metallic looking.

Last is Just Browsing, a metallic white. This one is 4 coats, and still sure. I'm not fond of this one at all, but I'm not a fan of sheer colors anyways.