April 26, 2012

Putting on the Glitz

Wow! The new blogger sure is...different. Good different, but different.
Anyway, I come here to you on the eve of my last final, to bring you the last mani of school-time procrastination. I'll be off to New York tomorrow night (tonight, actually!), so I decided to turn up the glam factor. This is one of the new Sally Hansen Gem Crush polishes, Glitz Gal.

 Glitz Gal is a ton of dark gray glitter in a charcoal base with bits of large and small holographic glitter. The saga of how I came to own this polish is a frustrating one, to say the least. I had agonized for quite awhile over whether or not I wanted to get China Glaze's Some Like it Haute. I eyed it at my local Sally's for weeks, even picking it up to buy it only to decide at the last second that I did not want it. The week after, it was gone.
Of course, we all want what we can't have. I ached for that polish. I looked it up on Nail Polish Canada and saw that it was going for much more than I was willing to pay. I put it out of my mind. That is, until Sally Hansen released the Gem Crush line, shameless dupes of the Eye Candy collection.


It's super gritty in these pictures, but you'll have to excuse me -- my exam is at 9AM tomorrow and there really isn't any time to be adding any more top coat.


It's such a beauty. The only complaint I really have about it was that the brush was terrible. I usually have no complaints over Sally Hansen brushes, and I'm even completely in love with the Complete Salon brushes. But this brush was  unacceptable -- way too wide and chunky and oddly shaped. I got way too much polish on my skin, and the brush was almost too wide for the opening of the bottle, scraping precious glitter back into the bottle instead of having it on the brush to go on your nail. I recently purchased another Gem Crush and I'm really hoping that the brush on that one is not a dud.

Now for the frustration part of this saga:

After finally deciding that I wanted to buy Glitz Gal, I rushed over to Wal Mart and picked myself up a bottle for $6.99. A week later, something compelled me to go to Winners. Lo and behold, what did I find? Some Like it Haute, with its silver LE cap, staring at me from an entire row of Eye Candy polishes. The worst part? It was priced at $5.99, and looking back, it probably had a much better brush than Glitz Gal. RAGE!

In any case, I'm pleased with the colour and opacity of this polish. Makes it much easier to live with this frustration. :P

April 17, 2012

Black, White, and Purple

I think I use this blog more for late night down time after a stressful test more than anything else! I decided to do my nails again tonight after completing my exam this morning -- halfway done!

I posted awhile back about finally getting my hands on Color Club's Pucci-Licious as the perfect pedicure colour. I posted a horrendous toenail picture, which I am usually against. It was a horrible, colour-inaccurate picture and I would like to apologize now for the fact that you had to see my big toe for no reason.

This was one of the first nearly-colour accurate pictures that I've been able to capture of this colour -- a bright, almost neon blurple. It is a less blue in real life, but believe me, it usually photographs completely blue, so the fact that any purple at all showed is kind of a miracle. It dries matte like a neon as well. I actually had bigger plans for this mani, after stumbling upon some new Nubars at Winners over the weekend:




This is one coat each of Nubar Black Polka Dot and Nubar White Polka Dot. Each contains small round glitter with large hex glitter in black, and white respectively. The little white pieces are actually iridescent. You can't really tell from the pictures, but the ring finger and the index finger are lacking in bigger white polka dots. I would fix it, but...let's get real. I'm much too lazy for something like that.

I'm really hoping that these were enough to squash my lemming for Lynnderella's Connect the Dots. I've fallen off the wagon pretty hard this time around, having successfully completed my no-buy. And I'm going to be going on vacation to the US pretty soon, which is a pretty bad sign for my wallet, and my nail polish drawer. :S (or :D, depending on how you look at it) I think inventory has to be done on my collection pretty soon.

Until then, I will live in blissful ignorance and denial about my addiction, so I can finish the last of my exams and be done with this school year. Summer needs to start. NOW.

April 14, 2012

Cho-Millionaire

If you recall, from a previous "Flashback" post, I swatched a shimmery little number called Faye from Zoya. It was during one of the first weeks of the school year and I had mentioned that I got a kick out of how it shared a name with a fellow member of Team Awesome, the name that we gave our case writing team.

Well, last week I went over to Trade Secrets -- now that my ban is done -- and saw that certain polishes were 50% off. Cho was one of them. The first name of this very special person is also represented by a Zoya polish, but I don't care for the sheer-ness of that other colour so I left that one behind. The final exam for the course that Team Awesome works together for is on Monday morning, and in honour of that special occasion, I thought I would wear the final polish in my Team Awesome "Collection".

I originally thought that Cho would look terrible on me, since it leans a little bit more yellow than the neutrals that I usually go for. I would describe it as a French vanilla colour with subtle shimmer. I swear my cuticles were a lot less dry-looking in real life:


A lot better than I expected, definitely. My skin tone does not usually agree with yellow.

This is the 2nd week of final exams and I felt like I needed to spice up my life a little bit, so I tried adding some glitter.


This is one coat of LA Girl Glitter Addict Explosion. You can see how those glitter pieces are like little mirrors in that top picture. Can you guess what colour shirt I was wearing?


Beauty. I tried using a light pink glitter, a hot pink glitter, and a black glitter on top of this colour, and none of them really did it for me. But this...This is gorge!

Hopefully once exams are over I can get back to swatching more untrieds. :)

April 07, 2012

Spotted

Been pretty MIA lately, due to final exams, but here is my current mani!




From left to right, the colours I used were: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Green With Envy, Wet 'n' Wild Candy-licious, Sally Hansen Complete Salon Yellow Kitty, Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Lacey Lilac, and Nicole by OPI "Baby" Blue. The dots were done up in Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On using a medium-sized dotting tool.

I've just been thinking about life a lot recently, considering that this upcoming summer will essentially be my last summer as a student. I feel like I go into reminisce mode almost daily, if not several times a day. For instance, I haven't touched my bottle of Green With Envy since the day that I painted my nails for Phrosh Week back in 1st year, and here I am painting my nails with it on the last day of 3rd year. Feels a little bit ridiculous how fast time flew by.

It's going to be a pretty busy next couple of weeks, but I will for sure try and post at least once a week. That's going to be a challenge in itself, considering I am NOT READY for my first exam this coming Monday. Oh well. Get it done.

On a lighter note, tomorrow is EASTER SUNDAY, which will mark the end of my no-buy!

39 days down, 1 to go!

April 02, 2012

I Have a Herring Problem

After a long absence, OPI makes an appearance on NAILblog!

I actually have an "exam" tomorrow, so I really shouldn't even be here. But note that exam was in quotation marks, and that every day after 9:30 or so, I go completely crazy and lose focus, so...

This is OPI's I Have a Herring Problem from the Holland Spring 2012 collection.



I Have a Herring Problem is a dusty, medium blue with unique gold fleck-like micro-shimmer. What a mouthful! This was my first lemming from this collection, having seen pictures online, and I have to say that although this is a VERY beautiful colour, I'm a little disappointed. The pictures I saw leaned more green. I'm now under the impression that the pictures I've seen of Butter London Victoriana are also falsely green-leaning, as I've seen beautiful teal-y swatches of that, only to see it compared to this colour, and it comes pretty close.

Hrrrmmmmphhh!

Anyway, I'm not overly disappointed, as this is a very nice colour, after all. The pictures above are with 3 coats, as the formula is a little sheer. I'm almost positive that this is a dead on dupe for Zoya Skylar, which, no doubt probably has a better formula...I'm not sure why I decided to get the OPI. It was most likely the name.

Study time, again! Yay!