Milani ~ Totally Cool - with stamp

Milani ~ Totally Cool

Purple jelly with duochrome magenta/golden shimmer

Here’s another one of my Milani polishes. Totally cool is very different to the others I own because it’s a jelly-like polish. It’s very sheer and packed with magenta shimmers. It took four coats to reach desired opaqueness. Yes, you read it right: FOUR! And this baby has got a regular drying time, so imagine me sitting through four coats! I mean...yikes!!! It’s not going to happen again, that’s for sure!

But anyway – you need to see it. This pic is taken in the light box:

Look at all those pretty flecks!!

And here’s a shot under direct light, to show you how this polish changes character and starts glowing when lights hit it:

Amazing, isn’t it? 

I thought I would be adding glitter, but to be honest, it didn’t feel right. So I changed my plan, and went for stamping instead. I used a plate from Bundlemonster called BM-310 and a no name silver stamping polish. The top coat is my old faithful one from Poshé ♥

Here’s a pic under a lamp:

While I was applying this, I thought that the polish reminded me of something, namely Max Factor’s “Fantasy Fire”. But taking a closer look at the two bottles I see that they’re nowhere near being dupes. The colours aren’t the same, but they have definitely got some elements in common. I actually considered putting Milani’s Totally Cool in my box of shame, but now that I know this, I’ll start using it differently. I’ll try layering it over various colours to see if that works or not. Because seriously: FOUR coats??? No way, José! O_o

What’s your verdict on this, girls? Do you like it?

Opacity: 3/10
Colour, prettiness: 7/10
Durability: 7/10
Value for money: 9/10
Overall: 6.5/10
Buy again: I’m not quite sure

I won a giveaway!

I was soooo lucky to win Miss L's surprise giveaway recently. I was very excited when the prize arrived, since I had no idea of what was going to be in it. I love surprises!!

Here's the sight that met me when I opened the box: 

The cutest bear card! <3 

Here's the rest of the contents:

Shampoo, Manhattan lipliner and MUA lipgloss:

Nail art stuff: dried flowers and little gems:

MUA eyeliner, NYX jumbo pencil in milky white, and ELF Eyelid primer:

NYX eyeshadow palette: 

 Nurr chocolate - I love the wrapping. I haven't gotten around to actually eating the chocolate yet, but I'm looking forward to it :)

 And last, but not least, a necklace and a set of earrings:

Ah, it feels so nice to be a winner, when the price is something like that! :)
Thank you so much, Miss L! <3

Milani ~ Magenta Metal - with franken-holo-hearts

Milani ~ Magenta Metal

Magenta with a metallic finish

...and a blue holoshimmer frankenpolish!  

Most of you should know by now that I am not a polish snob. I don’t strive to only own expensive, exclusive or hard-to-get brands. I like what I like, cheap or expensive, mainstream or not. I like Milani as a rule. I don’t own many yet, but I like the ones I’ve got!

The formula of Magenta Metal was good, the polish applied easily and was practically opaque after the first coat. I gave it two anyway – to give it the best conditions, and also out of habit. It didn’t make very much of a difference though.

I love the shine of this polish! Here’s two coats – no top coat yet:

Then I painted little hearts on it with a blue FrankenShimmerHolopolish which I’d made that very same day. I used my dotting tool to draw the hearts with, and then I made small dots around the hearts. One layer of Catrice Quick Dry & High Shine top coat, and here’s my final mani:

I didn’t have access to sunshine, but here’s a pic shot under a light bulb, so you can see that there actually is holographic effect in this frankenpolish:

And here’s a before and after-picture of the franken. I used Rimmel’s “Azure” as my base, and added Spectraflair and shimmerpowder in it until I was satisfied with the result. Oh, and I added four shaker-balls to it as well, to be able to shake it up properly! :D

Before and after the frankening

This mani came right out of the blue – I swear I didn’t know where it would end when I started it. But I like it! Do you? :)

Opacity: 8/10
Colour, prettiness: 7/10
Durability: 7/10
Value for money: 8/10
Overall: 7.5/10
Buy again: Yes

Accessorize ~ Sapphire with OPI ~ Servin’ up Sparkle

Accessorize ~ Sapphire

Metallic dark grey with a blue tone

&

OPI ~ Servin’ up Sparkle

Clear base with silver glitter and holographic hexagons

When everything else fails, use glitter. If things still don’t work, you’re obviously just not using enough glitter!

I’ve become really fond of Accessorize’s nail polishes. This one is another one from the Metalized series of one coaters. The formula is so nice and so easy to work with, and I always love me a nice one coater. The colours aren’t extraordinary, but they’re really nice base colours for something else. So, here’s a pic of one coat of Sapphire:

The polish dries quite fast, which is another lovely feature. On this pic you get to see it from a different angle:

I was in the mood for something simple (yeah, I know you’re thinking ‘WTF’, right?) and yet shiny and sparkly. So I dug out an OPI polish from the Serena Williams’ Glam Slam collection from spring 2011, namely “Servin’ up Sparkle”. It’s a lovely glitter that can sparkle up pretty much any mani! I applied one coat, and waited like forever for it to dry, then applied one coat of Catrice Quick Dry & High Shine top coat, and Boo-ya! My mani was done:

Here’s the mandatory blurred picture, so you can see the holo glitter :D

This may be simple, but I love it. What do you think?

Opacity: 10/10
Colour, prettiness: 7/10
Durability: 7/10
Value for money: 8/10
Overall: 8/10
Buy again: Yes

China Glaze ~ Bizarre Blurple with smudged stamp...

China Glaze ~ Bizarre Blurple

Blue/purple

Bizarre Blurple is from China Glaze’s Wicked Halloween collection from 2012.

It was a collection which there was a huge fuss about, because it turned out that the artwork used in marketing the collection was actually stolen. The artist that China Glaze hired to make some pretty artwork, actually (and very cheekily) took some of Abigail Larson’s artwork and made it his own instead. That’s just too naughty, in my book – it’s actually called ‘Plagiarism’, you know. The incident was resolved though... China Glaze went after the hired artist, and then offered Abigail both compensation and a job. So justice was served. Check out the original artwork vs. the stolen product at the end of this post. Abigail is good, and no doubt China Glaze’s hired hand appreciated that, and sadly had nothing original in his own head to offer. 

OK. The formula is typical for China Glaze, which works fine for me. It took two coats to reach desired opaqueness, and I must say that Bizzare Blurple fits its name perfectly. It isn’t really blue and it isn’t really purple, but it sure is pretty!

Here’s an attempt of catching it’s beauty:

I had stamping in mind for this baby, but that was a mistake. I chose Cheeky stamping plate CH07, and stamped with Essie’s Nothing Else Metals, which is a lovely silvery lilac metallic polish, that’s perfect for stamping. But not today! I don’t know what went wrong, but all my stamps smeared and got to look extremely ugly. I don’t know if the design may be etched a little too deep on the plate, or what the problem was, but fact is, that I’m not going to use that stamp again, that’s for sure.

Here’s how it looked:

There’s a coat of Poshé top coat over it – but just for the record: It was smeared before the top coat was involved.

And here’s the promised picture of the artwork there was such a fuss about last autumn.

Opacity: 8/10
Colour, prettiness: 10/10
Durability: 8/10
Value for money: 10/10
Overall: 9/10
Buy again: Yes

Sally Hansen ~ Save the Date, with striped glitter gradient

Sally Hansen Diamond Strength ~ Save the Date

Deep burgundy with a beautiful shimmer

My local drugstore had a 2 for 1 Sally Hansen offer recently, and since they only had one cuticle cream left, I decided that the other thing should be this pretty nail polish. I swear that this vampy polish winked at me and tricked me into buying her!

So – the formula was good, and the polish glided on effortlessly. It took two coats to make it look really pretty. Drying time was pretty average, but I was watching a movie while I did my nails, so I didn’t mind. I watched “Jack and the Beanstalk – the real story”, in case anyone’s interested!

Here’s a pic of it in my lightbox: 

And there’s a bonus pic for you today, because the sun was actually out! And behold! This polish looks amazing in the sun:

I’m seriously impressed! I guess that’s why it took me a little while to figure out what to do with it. I ended up deciding for a glitter gradient over striping tape. I’ve done that before, and I really like the way it looks, so I thought why not!

I placed striping tape on my nails, three on each, except for on the ring finger, which got four. And then I made my glitter gradient with a WIP polish from Urban Outfitters called “Tinkerbell”. It’s a pink glitter with a dash of green and yellow glitter in it. I finished my mani with a layer of Catrice Quick Dry & High Shine top coat. 

On this pic, you can see some of the green glitter I mentioned before on my accent nail.

And here are the two pretties posing for the camera:

I’m so glad that the Sally Hansen is as pretty on the nails as it is in the bottle, and I still think that all the work with the striping tape is worth the effort.

What do you think of glitter gradients made over striping tape? Have you tried it yourself?

Opacity: 8/10
Colour, prettiness: 8/10
Durability: 7/10
Value for money: 7/10
Overall: 7.5/10
Buy again: Yes, probably

Accessorize ~ Mineral Violet - Taped!

Accessorize ~ Mineral Violet  

Purple/brown duochrome

&

Bourjois ~ Bleu Moonlight

Dark blue shimmer

Accessorize seems to be my to-go tapi mani polish :D I used “Mineral Violet” as my base colour. The formula is really nice and easy to apply, and it takes two coats for it to be opaque. Unfortunately the colour isn’t really me, despite the fact that it’s a duochrome. I am not really so crazy about the brown tone that it flashes.

Here’s a pic of two coats; no top coat:

The pictures aren’t as good as I’d like them to be. I couldn’t get that polish to show its true colours in my light box, so these pics are all taken in the bathroom :D After having tried taking pictures in all the usually good spots, I found that the bathroom was the best place!

Then it was time for some tape! I taped my nails, and painted one coat of “Bleu Moonlight”, and removed the tape right away. Bleu Moonlight is a fantastic blue shimmer that covers perfectly in one easy coat. It says “1 seconde” on the bottle; I’m not quite sure what that 1 second implies, but it’s certainly not the drying time. It actually took longer for this to dry than I imagined. Perhaps it’s the “silicone texture”-label on the bottle that tricked me into thinking it wasn’t quite dry – but hey, what do I know? :D

Anyway, here’s that step:

I wanted something more though. I browsed through my stash for a nice glitter, but ended up with a blue flakie instead. It’s from Sephora and is called “Twinkle Twinkle”. I thought that the blue would be dark enough to let the flakies show themselves.

So, without any further yapping from yours truly, here’s the final result:

I hope you like it :)

OPI Liquid Sand ~ Stay the Night

OPI Liquid Sand ~ Stay the Night

Black base with pink glitters

Behold: Here’s a mani without nail art on it!! *gasp*

I have been so curious about the liquid sand polishes from OPI’s Mariah Carey collection, so I knew I had to get my hands on a couple of them. Stay the Night is the first one I try on.

I used two thin coats for this mani. The formula was good; I didn’t have any problems with getting an even amount of glitter all over the nails. Drying time is a killer, though. I’m not the first nail blogger who states this fact, and I’m probably not going to be the last either.

But. I managed to sit through the drying time without denting or making any other damages, or indeed going off my head :D

I obviously didn’t apply a top coat. I wanted to feel how it was to wear the polish the way it’s meant to be worn. For once ;)

That is also why there isn’t any nail art on this. It doesn’t happen very often that I wear a polish all by itself, so this is a very special day!

The glitter in the polish makes this very special in low light. It makes my nails look all velvety with a deep pink glitter to it. Prettay!! :D

So – my verdict is that the liquid sand polishes are a good buy, even though they are OPI polishes (I’m not an OPI fan). They are fun and easy to apply, but please note, dear reader – they are dreadfully slow dryers.

Have you tried any of them? If yes – did you like them? If no – why not? What’s keeping you? I’m curious to know, so please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments below!

Fireflies ~ Was: Mermaids

Fireflies!

Accessorize ~ Morning Dew & Wet n Wild ~ Happy Holidaze

This is a mani that suddenly took a turn other than that which I had planned!

I actually started out with another polish from Accessorize. This time it was “Morning Dew” which is a Seablue foil. Y’know...I’ve become quite fond of Accessorize’s polishes. They’re really well pigmented: They really mean it when they write “one coat” on the bottle. I love that. The formula is also great, and the drying time is good. All a girl can ask for in a polish.

Enough with the talking already: Here’s one coat of Morning Dew:  

I had mermaids in mind when I started this mani, so I added a new glitter I’ve got from overseas: Wet n Wild’s “Happy Holidaze”. It’s a blue/green/iridescent glitter in a green jelly. We can actually buy some Wet n Wild’s Fast Dry series here in sunny Denmark, but not glitters like this one, which is from a Christmas collection last year.

Here’s a coat of the glitter over the Accessorize polish:

And from a different angle:

I really like this, but here at this point I changed my mind. I would have made this into a mermaid-look, but when I looked at how the iridescent glitter blinked at me, I was thinking more of the beautiful colours of a firefly.

So I stamped fireflies on it. I used a no name black stamping polish, and a stamping plate from Cheeky, CH-41. And I topped it all with a coat of Poshé top coat:

I placed the fireflies randomly on each nail, and the thumbnails had room for two of them :)

Here are the pretty polishes. They’re definitely both keepers!

I love fireflies, I think they’re both special and pretty. What about you – do you like them?

Miss Sporty ~ 030 - with Fingerpaints effect

Miss Sporty ~ 030

Duochrome that shifts between purple and blue

- with a couple of Finger Paints on top

This is an example of how a mani can change direction completely!

I started out with two coats of Miss Sporty #030. It looks like a fantastic duochrome in the bottle, and I thought it would look like that on its own. But it didn’t. It is one of those polishes that only reaches its full potential when layered over black or another dark colour. I didn’t know that though, so here’s a picture of two coats on its own:

I was totally “meh” about this. I was not in the mood to remove it all and start all over again though, so I dived into my stash and found two Finger Paint polishes, namely “Vintage Violet”, which is a lovely purple, and “Art you Wondering?”, which is a fine green glitter.

I used my fan brush to add the two polishes. I painted diagonally across my nails with my fan brush; first with the purple, then with the glitter – I did that twice.

The look didn’t get as striped as I had wish for, but I must admit that I like it anyway! :D

I sealed the mani with a layer of Catrice Speed Dry topcoat, and here’s what it ended up looking like:

And another shot:

The polishes involved:

There was quite a lot of clean up after having worked with the fan brush, and the glitter wasn’t really easy to remove around the cuticles. I am still not really good at cleaning up after manis like that; I hope to improve over time!

I think the green glitter compliments the purple quite nicely, and it definitely adds to the duochromatic effect! What do you think about this, girls? :)

OPI ~ Fly with dots and iridescent glitter

OPI ~ Fly

Teal/turquoise crème

Fly is from OPI’s Nicki Minaj collection from Spring 2012. I have bought this from eBay and it was really cheap. It’s also a fake, but more about that later.

It took two very easy coats to achieve full opaqueness, and the drying time was really good. OPI usually dry really slow on me.

Here’s what two coats look like:

After having admired this pretty polish for a little while, I decided to make some dots on it. I used Sally Hansen Insta-Dri “Blazing Blue”. I made a swirl of dots on each nail, except for the thumbs, where I made two :)

Here’s that step. There’s no top coat involved just yet:s

And from a different angle:

 Then I added some iridescent glitter. I used “Crystal Shimmer” from Accessorize. It’s not as dense as some other iridescent glitters I own, but this flashes mostly purple, blue and teal, and I really like that. I added one coat, and sealed it all up with a layer of Catrice speed dry top coat:

And here you have a pic of the polishes, I used:

So, back to the fake OPI. As some of you know, I’m definitely not a true OPI fan, nor a connoisseur. But when I took this out of its wrapping, I had a feeling something was wrong with it. The lid is different than on any of my other OPI polishes – it’s quite textured, whereas the regular ones are quite smooth by comparison. I am so lucky that I actually got another OPI Fly to compare this with; a regular shop bought one. So, the letters printed on the bottles aren’t the same - the regular lettering is as though the type is bold, where the fake lettering isn’t. The smell of the polishes are different. The colour tone isn’t quite the same. I can’t catch this colour difference on pictures, it’s quite subtle - but they’re definitely not the same. And then there’s the little printed number that’s supposed to be there at the bottom of the bottle, underneath the volume\weight info; it’s missing on the fake one. 

If you weren’t already quite familiar with the real stuff, you probably wouldn’t know the difference, to be honest. But: girls do not like to be cheated!!

I have contacted the seller, who refunded me the money for the polish. I have to be honest and tell you that I really don’t mind that this polish isn’t the real deal. Perhaps that’s why it dried so fast and looks so good on me? ;)

Opacity: 7/10
Colour, prettiness: 8/10
Durability: 7/10
Value for money: 8/10
Overall: 7.5/10
Buy again: Yes