This layering kick of mine

Hello~ As you may have noticed, I've been really into layering and I can't seem to stop! I love discovering all these new combinations and seeing how the sheerer polishes add a new dimension to an otherwise plain manicure.

This is one coat of Sinful Colors Vela, a beautifully opaque raspberry crème polish. I layered one coat of OPI Teenage dream over it and voilà, another beauty was born :P.

Teenage dream isn't as sheer as Last friday night but I think it's still a nice layering polish.

Check out my Thank you-Sorry giveaway :) here!
~Sharon

Water marbling

Hello~^^  This is part 2 of the water marbling post. As you can see from my previous post, I had pretty high expectations of my nails turning out beautifully. Unfortunately, I forgot to take into account that my nails are in no way as long and well...my white polish decided to play up and do weird things :S.

I thought I'd share this water marble since I would have totally loved the outcome anyway - if only my white polish didn't hate me so much :(. Maybe I should have added a coat of glitter to hide the imperfection.

And the polishes used:

Sinful Colors Vela

Essie Sew psyched

Ulta3 lily white

I applied one coat of lily white as the base colour and then water marbled with all three polishes. The colour combination reminds me of Christmas - oops, I'm a bit late on that theme haha.

Ick, just look at the mess! :( I quite like the way my index finger came out though.

~Sharon

Water marbling when done correctly

Hey everyone~! This will be a quick post since I need to run soon - just some water marbling which came out really well when I was trialling on a fake nail. Too bad it didn't turn out so well on my actual nails :(.

Anyway, here it is. Colette over at My Simple Little Pleasures is such a great inspiration!

Please ignore the dings on the nail, I'm obviously quite clumsy when it comes to handling small objects like fake nails. I'll have a post later up today or tomorrow with the water marbling on my nails, I just need to get around to editing the photos!

~Sharon

Valentine's Day Mani

Hallo ladies,

Today I have a Valentine's Day mani for ya :D

I'm not use to having so many different pinks on my nails (I felt so girly) LOL first of all it toke me forever to find pink polishes in my stash (Damn what does that tell me?)

I love the way this mani came out, after I got over from having pink overload on my nails :D





For this mani I used

U.M.A Mr.Perfect all in one base coat.
Maybelline Wet Shine Diamonds Luminous Lilac 2 coats.
Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Racey Rouge for the love image on the and lighter pink lips.
SinfulColors Sugar sugar for the darker lips
Seche Vite Dry fast top coat.






So what do you think?

Thanks for looking
Kesha

Sinful Colors San Francisco/ NYX Girls Enchanted Forest

Hello ladies,

I hope you had a good weekend, it's been raining here and does not seem like it's going to let up anytime soon :(

I have (what are for me) nubbies :( last week I went on a cleaning spree and attacked my livingroom in the process of doing that I broke 3 nails on my right hand :( so with a heavy heart I had to file my nails down.







What I used for this mani.

Sinful San Francisco 2 coats I could of done 3 as 2 coats was still abit sheer.
NYX Girls 163 Enchanted Forest 2 coats (This glitter has loads of different shapes and sizes) also this polish stinks :( I only had in on for afew hours as I could not stand the smell!!

Do all NYX Polishes smell bad?

Thanks for looking.

Sinful Colors - Vela

I've been trying to venture into the world of red and pink polishes, and I believe there is no better place to start than with this gorgeous polish - Sinful Colors' Vela. This is my first Sinful polish and I cannot be more blown away. What a magnificent shade! It's a mixture of red and pink and the result is a dusky raspberry colour. Brilliant!

Shown is two coats of Vela and a topcoat. What a winner.

Thanks for dropping by.
~shazzii

A day filled with hauls!

I went out shopping without the intention of buying any polishes, but as always I ended up with a few bottles back home :P.

First off, I discovered Sinful Color polishes in The Reject Shop for only 50 cents a bottle!! Of course I had to buy some, even though the colour range was pretty small. It's my first time spotting Sinful Color polishes here in Australia and so I just had to purchase some despite the fact that they were all reds and pinks (and quite a few sheers too).

Left to right: Deepest Ruby, Vela, Noelle


And then too my delight, I also stumbled upon some L.A. Colors polish in a dollar shop! Again, it's my first time seeing these polishes in Australia, so I pretty excited. It was definitely my lucky day today :D.

Left to right: Star light, Metallic purple, Jungle Fever, Sparkling Diamonds

Since I was in full polish buying mode by then, I swung by another dollar shop and bought some rhinestones for future nail art designs :).

Definitely can't wait to try these out!

To my surprise, I received a note in the mail when I arrived home telling me to go down to the post office to collect a package. Since I've only ordered one thing recently, I already had a hunch of what was awaiting me at the post office...and I was right! My free blogger package from Viva la Nails had arrived! Can I just say that I'm totally over the moon at the quick shipping?! The package was shipped exactly a week ago, so this only took five business days to arrive!

I do have a tiny complaint with the packaging though - it appeared that one of the blue glitter packets had not been closed properly and as a result there was glitter spilling everywhere, even out of the sealed packaging. I tried to save what I could and tipped it all into the orange glitter pack. It was quite disappointing and more than a little frustrating to clean all the glitter away - there's still quite a bit in my handbag where I had temporarily stored the package, not to mention my table where I had opened it.

The top row shows the nail stickers and the bottom the water decals. I can't wait to try out the decals, they look so pretty! A review of the products will be coming along in the near future.

Thanks for dropping by.
~shazzii

Update, Milani, Sinful & other issues of global importance

I was staring down at my bright shiny new manicure earlier today and it occurred to me what a very long time it's been since I updated here! Oops.

So to bring you up to date, here are some colors I've worn since we last met:


This is a pretty, old formula OPI.




Oooooh.

Here's Milani Hot Metal. Milani has really been knocking it out of the park lately.



You know, if you're into SUPER PRETTY THINGS.


Which I am!

Here's another Milani that ladies on MUA have been going bugshit for: Dress Maker. It's from a new collection featuring names with fashion connections. This is the only one I bought myself from this grouping.


The reason for the frenzy is that it's widely reputed to be an exact dupe of Chanel Jade. I don't have Jade, so I can't compare for you, but having seen the comparison on MUA I can say that it's very convincing. I'd want to see it in person just out of curiosity, but suffice to say if you want a very close duplicate, perhaps this will do the trick for you.


It is very pretty. And in case you're wondering, Claire's Dream Catcher is also quite close. In the bottle the shades appear to differ slightly. I'd like to put them on my nails side by side to see exactly how they stack up, but I haven't had time.

Last month I went to New York to attend a wedding. I had some time to kill before I could check into my hotel, so I perused a few dollar stores and drugstores just on the off chance that I might find something wonderful. And I did!


Brucci Black Emerald! I know this is conveniently available to many of you, but Brucci isn't common around here and Black Emerald is slightly HTF. I had resisted buying it on eBay for $15 until now and I'm glad I did, because these were $2.79 each. Here's a close-up of Black Emerald:


Check out the sweet duochromey goodness. I can't say if it shows up on the nail, as I haven't tried it yet, but boy oh boy it looks pretty in the bottle. That's right I said BOY OH BOY.

And now the portion of the program where we discuss Issues Of The Day.

First, I got all excited when I saw this in a Rite Aid not long ago:


Now given Sinful's history of putting up what I like to call "fauxllections," which involve new displays featuring the same old colors, I didn't immediately pay any attention to this. But out of curiosity I began turning the bottles over and, lo and behlold, these sounded new. So I bought one, Bamboo.


But I was fooled. Although this is a color I didn't already own, and I'm not sure what already-existing color it dupes, these are in fact just re-named Sinfuls. Boo! I get that for $1.99 we're not exactly talking about the cream of the cosmetic crop here, but is it too much to ask for some honesty? I mean I've paid less than a dollar for Wet'n'Wild polishes before, and they put out new colors and seasonal collections, too. Let's have some fun, Sinful! It's just nail polish.

Although this post is getting ridiculously long, I did want to pose a question: Does anyone ever tease you about your nail polish habit? I get a lot of remarks from people about how I "must have a lot of time" to do things like polish my nails. I've also had similar comments recently about knitting. To me, these are hobbies and things I enjoy, so I make time for them. And doing my nails takes so little time that I don't even think about it.

Thoughts?

Today's Color

This is Sinful Colors, Show Me The Way. The crumbum picture doesn't do much for the color, it's much more glittery than it seems here. I am warming up to this color, it's a little ho-hum after just taking another green off my nails, but that will change when I change it to For Audrey.

This polish went on okay -- three coats shown here -- but it's not as shiny as I'd like and it has the unfortunate effect of looking kind of bumpy (although it is very smooth). Anyway, I'd wear it again.

Where Do We Go From Here

I'm still wearing this god damned OPI Green-wich Village on my nails and I kid you not when I say it still looks exactly like this. Not a chip, nothing. Maybe it's the new top coat? Which I will have you know I got free at Ulta. Anyway, normally this would be a good thing but now it's bumming me out because I usually like to wait for one manicure to give up the ghost before I start the next one. Yeah, first-world probs.

So, for the next one I'm going to use the Sinful Colors Show Me The Way that was selected last time. But I'm going to go ahead and put up a poll because whee, time-wasting! The poll is in the sidebar deal there to your right.

For now I'm linking to these colors because my photos do a crap job of really capturing these colors. I use a fixed focal length lens on my camera and it's hard to get close-up shots with it, plus I am usually too lazy to put the zoom on, so...for the time being, please enjoy the pictures taken by other, more industrious people.

UPDATE: Never mind, the stupid poll widget gadget thingo won't let me include a link (which, really -- GENIUS, Blogger.com), so I'm just including the list here. Sigh. Leave opinions in the comments.

China Glaze, For Audrey
China Glaze, Purple Panic
Milani, Key Lime Shine

Big Daddy

Wow, creepy.


(Spotting and photograph courtesy of Suzanna)

Is anybody surprised that "Big Daddy" comes from the same company that brought us "Under 18"?

Not only does this name really give me the heebie-jeebies, but it also seems like a blatant color mismatch. This hideous bright orange is neither particularly manly (as befitting a Big Daddy) nor is it stereotypically little-girly (as befitting his doting daughter).

In fact, I can think of only two reasons for "Big Daddy" to be this shade:

1) You are trying to get your Big Daddy to "discipline" you for choosing such a horrible nail polish.

2) You are hoping to use your nails as hazard signals to flag down the car behind you and beg them to release you from your plaited-kneesock manacles before your body turns up in a ditch clad in a plaid skirt and pigtail ribbons.

If the former, good luck! You have earned it.

If the latter, I recommend bringing along some nail polish remover along in a hollow tooth. You're going to need it to take off your nail polish when the cops pull Big Daddy over for yelling obscene propositions at that school bus. Otherwise they might just decide anyone with such bad taste in polish deserves what she gets.

Under 18

From the manufacturers of Pearl Harbor, I bring you...an ode to statutory rape:



Really, guys? "Under 18"? This is kind of creepy. (Being the color of drying blood doesn't help. Was she beaten and left for dead before Chris Hansen got there?) Also, it doesn't seem designed to increase sales. People under eighteen are perpetually obsessed with being able to pass for over twenty-one, so they can sneak into bars and get drinks, and I don't think people over eighteen have a burning desire to be confused with jailbait.

But maybe I'm being uncharitable. Under 18 could refer to lots of other things:

--The amount of days this nail polish will remain on sale before they yank it from the shelves.

--How attractive this color is on a scale from 1 to 100.

--The number of satisfied purchasers.

--The IQ of the person who brainstormed this name.

Pearl Harbor

As my Valentine's Day present to you, here it is. The motherlode.



Remember when the Japanese navy sank virtually the entire American fleet without a declaration of war? Thousands were killed and more were wounded, before they even knew they had an enemy to face. Pain and death rained from the sky, unforeseen and undeserved. The nation was outraged; we swore the date would live in infamy. I just didn't think we would commemorate it like this.

What MONSTER would name a nail polish after this maelstrom of hate? The brand name is Sinful Colors? You're not kidding me! Who thinks that Pearl Harbor is a charming color to put on her nails? Eva Braun?

I just hope they come out with some other colors for this brand. Spring Fling is coming up and I think some sparkly September 11th would really set off my dress.