China Glaze ~ Rodeo Fanatic

China Glaze ~ Rodeo Fanatic

Shimmery multichrome: Blue, teal, purple

Rodeo Fanatic is part of the Rodeo Diva Collection from 2008. I only bought it recently, so it’s not a problem to get your hands on this polish if you’re interested. I chose it because I thought it was a lovely blue, and was quite surprised to see it flash both teal and purple in the bottle.

The formula was fine, I had no problems with application at all, and it covered perfectly in two coats. I twisted and turned my fingers and was quite pleased with the multichrome effect. The purple isn’t quite as prominent on the nails as it appears in the bottle, but it’s definitely there.

Here it’s flashing its teal side:

And here’s the purple prettiness:

Then I stamped on it. I used a plate called M71. This was actually the very first stamping plate I bought, and this is the first time I’ve used it! Can you believe that? I bought it because of the Hello Kitty motif, but I haven’t been in the mood for it until now. I used a no name white stamping polish.

Here’s how that ended out:

And then I wanted to try another one of Catrice’s Million Styles top coats, namely “Return of the space cowboys”. Catrice’s own website states that “it guarantees a sparkling appearance”, which is true.

I applied one coat over the stamps, here’s how sparkling it ended up:

The topper pulled a bit on the design, so next time I use it over a stamp I’ll apply a regular top coat first, to seal up the design. But the smudging doesn’t really show that much in real life, so I’m happy with this.

Are you a Hello Kitty fan?

Rodeo Fanatic: 
Opacity: 9/10
Colour, prettiness: 8/10
Durability: 9/10
Value for money: 8/10
Overall: 8.5/10
Buy again: Yes

Summer Challenge Day 24: Inspired by a book

Summer Challenge Day 24: Inspired by a book

Those of us who can’t freehand designs ourselves have to think differently when it comes to challenges. I find it hard to make my manicures be inspired by books, but I actually had a really cool idea to defeat this challenge. I wanted to make little note book pages on my nails. But after two attempts I just had to accept the fact: I just can’t (even) draw straight lines with striper brushes! Argh!

So I had to rethink this mani. I googled a lot, but nothing interesting or usable came up. I ended up standing by my bookcases, gazing at all the books, looking for some inspiration. And suddenly I found it – my inspiration. It’s a book I bought from the library. They sometimes sell some of their book to clear the shelves for some new ones. So this book about strawberries found it’s way to me: 

Jordbær means "strawberries" in Danish

 I have the perfect polish for a strawberry mani. But first it needs some underwear, and I chose to use an Essence polish, “Fateful Desire”, which is a nice red crème. I used one coat only, because it is only underwear. Here’s a sunshine pic of that beauty: 

Essence: Faithful Desire

Now for the new polish. It’s a polish from Sation, and it’s called “Miss Popular”. It’s from their “Class of Sation” collection, and it’s a clear base packed with two sizes of red glitter, and holographic hexagons and bar glitters.

I added one coat over the Essence, and here’s how it shines in the sun without topcoat: 

And here’s an indoor pic:

I really like this. You should of course know that I love glitter by now :D
But now for the final touch, the green stalk. I used Sinful Colors “San Fransisco”, which is a dark, very shimmery green. I painted the stalk on one of the strawberries with a striper brush.

I didn’t want stalks on all the strawberries, so I only did the ring finger.

 Please tell me what you think of this. Isn’t “Miss Popular” the perfect polish for the strawberry look?

There are other Danish girls who also did a “inspired by a book” mani today. I can’t wait to see what they came up with, so let’s check their blogs out:

• Neglelir
• Se min kjole
• Mette
• Life is a fairy tale
• Vicki's Polish

Stay tuned the day after tomorrow - same bat time, same bat channel – for nails inspired by fashion!

Nubar ~ Reclaim

Nubar ~ Reclaim

Green linear holographic

Reclaim is a polish that I’ve had on my wish list for a while. It’s such a pretty holo, so I was happy to finally enrol it into my stash, when Kristen from The Manicured Monkey sent it to me in a swap. And the sun was out so it was the perfect time to try it on, really!

I applied two very easy coats and I had full coverage. I actually think I could have done with one if I had applied slightly thicker coats. But two is good, I’m satisfied with that.

I won’t do much talking today. I’ll just let the pictures tell the story…

Look at that holo! Isn't it just gorgeous?!

I'm totally in love with this polish!

The green is a little bit boring when it’s not in the sun, so I decided to add a bit of design to it. Seen in the rear view mirror I shouldn’t have, but never mind that now.

Here’s stripes and dots with Color Club “Wild at Heart”.

Holos are just fantastic. I love them! What's your favourite holo, if you have one?

Opacity: 9/10
Colour, prettiness: 10/10
Durability: 9/10
Value for money: 10/10
Overall: 9.5/10
Buy again: Yes

Summer Challenge Day 23: Inspired by a movie

Summer Challenge Day 23: Inspired by a movie

I absolutely love movies. I watch a lot of them, and I always have. There are lots of movies that I’d love to be inspired by, but since I totally suck at freehand drawing, I felt as if I had to rely on stamping.

I googled and looked at hundreds of movie posters before I picked which one I’d go for. I ended up letting myself be inspired by “Black Swan”, which is an American psychological thriller from 2010.

I used Flormar’s white crème as my base. It’s called 400 and I used two coats for desired opaqueness. It was easy to work with like all the other Flormar polishes I’ve got. I stamped with Wet n Wild’s “Black Crème”, and I used Bundle Monster stamping plate #214.

Here’s the result:

I was quite pleased with it, but kept feeling that something was missing. I added a coat of Daring Digits’ “Silver Dragon”, which the creator herself describes as a silver “flakie” topper. The silver glitters doesn’t show much in real life, but you can see them here on this pic of the finished mani:

I didn’t add a top coat because “Silver Dragon” dried up completely smooth and shiny. 

Here's the Black Swan trailer in case anyone's interested :) 

 

There are other Danish girls who also did a “inspired by a movie” mani today. I’m very curious about which movies they chose, so let’s check their blogs out:

• Neglelir
• Se min kjole
• Mette
• Life is a fairy tale
• Vicki's Polish

Stay tuned the day after tomorrow - same bat time, same bat channel – for nails inspired by a book!

Nail Mail

Hi girls,

I've had quite a lot of nail mail recently, so this post is to show you a little bit of what I received: 

First one up is from a swap with Kaki from Glitterobsession.com. You gotta love a girl that has a blog with a name like that, right? :D 

Anyway, I received four cool polishes from her: 

Maybelline: Amethyst Ablaze, Purple Icon, Purple Possibilies.
Color Club: Starry Temptress Topcoat

Amathyst Ablaze is a really pretty metallic polish, which I intend to use for stamping. Purple Icon is a reddish purple which is going to look fab on my toe nails, and Purple Possibilities was surprisingly enough a crackle. I was like: "I wonder what shredded means..." then I tried it on, and was "Oh, it means crackle!" LOL 

The Starry Temptress topcoat has been on my wish list in like forever, so I am very pleased to find room for that amongst my other Color Club polishes!

Thank you Kaki, for providing me with these pretties! 

Next swap up was with Kristin from The Manicured Monkey.

Like Kaki, she also sent me really cool polishes. 

Essie: Shine of the times, China Glaze peppermint cuticle oil, Milano Jewel FX: Fuchsia

A flakie and a glitter! And cuticle oil that I've been looking at for a long time, but have hesitated to buy. It smells fantastic and it feels great, so this bottle will be used up for sure.
 

Zoya: Reva and Julieanne

These are my first Zoyas and I'm thrilled. If they look just anywhere near as good on the nails as in the bottle, then they are definitely not going to be my last ones.

Nubar: Reclaim, Gem and Indigo Illusion

Nubars! I love that brand. Reclaim has been on my wish list for a very long time now. And glitters and multichromes are always welcome in my stash.

Let's take a closer look at Reclaim and Gem, but this time in the sun:

Nubar: Reclaim and Gem

Now it's more obvious why Reclaim has been a lemming, right? It's a gorgeous holo. And Gem turned out to be full of holo glitter. Nice!!

Kristin also added extras for me: 

Sally Hansen: Salon Effects

Nail polish strips with glitter. These are my very first nail polish strips, so that'll be fun to try.

She was also kind enough to add hand lotions and nail foil:

Goodies!

And she added one polish more. I can't show you that one though, because I've got secret plans with that. ;)

Big thanks to Kristin for sending such pretty polishes my way!

I also shopped a bit myself. I bought some Sation polishes: 

Sation: Prettiest Player, Summer Night Sparkle, Most Hue-nique, Miss Popular

I am very impressed with Sation's new polish line. There are so many cool polishes that I'd like to buy. But I only bought these four glitters for now! 

Last nail mail up is polishes from A England. I've been wanting some of their polishes for ages, so when they had their last promotion sale I finally gave in and bought five: 

A England: Perceval, Avalon, Lady of the Lake, Tristam, Saint George

Saint George was not a part of the promo sale, but I've been eyeing him since the first time I saw him swatched, and I just had to have him! He's absolutely fabulous! ♥

That's it for this time, girls. I hope you enjoyed the show :)
I'm having a luxury problem here: I don't know which polish to try first!

Summer Challenge Day 22: Inspired by a song

Summer Challenge Day 22: Inspired by a song

It took forever for me to figure out how to overcome this challenge. Before I actually got to it, I thought it would be easy. I mean, I love music and there are so many songs to choose between. But to actually make it match a manicure, that was so much more difficult than I ever imagined.

But after hours and hours of thinking, I picked an old song from 1986, namely Madonna’s “True Blue”. The song is from her third studio album, True Blue, and it deals with the feelings for her then-husband Sean Penn.

I used another Flormar polish for this challenge, namely number 446 which is a shimmery, yet a bit of a dusty blue. I used two layers for full opacity.

Sunshine pic: 

Indoor pic:

And since this is a love song, I added some hearts. I used an indie-polish from Daring Digits called “Love Hurts”, which is a clear base with small blue glitters and larger blue and black hearts.

There was no need to go fishing for the hearts, they were loaded on the brush each time I dipped. I did arrange them a bit on my nails though, since some of them wanted to play on my cuticles. That’s not the polish’s fault though, but mine alone :D

Here’s one coat over the Flormar, and covered with a layer of my all time favourite top coat, Poshé.  

And here’s an indoor pic.

Here’s the official True Blue video. I think it’s so funny to watch videos made in the 1980s.

So that’s my mani inspired by a song. Did you like it? Do you like Madonna?

There are other Danish girls who also did a “inspired by a song” mani today. You should definitely check their blogs out to see what they came up with.  

• Neglelir
• Se min kjole
• Mette
• Life is a fairy tale
• Vicki's Polish

Stay tuned the day after tomorrow - same bat time, same bat channel – for nails inspired by a movie! I’ve begun thinking already!

Summer Challenge Day 21: Inspired by a colour

Summer Challenge Day 21: Inspired by a colour

We’re now entering the last third of this 30 days challenge, and that means that we’ve reached the more fun and creative part of it. We’ve reached the part where it’s cool to be creative. I like that!

Inspired by a colour! I’ve thought a lot about what that really means. I mean… just slapping on one colour of nail polish is plain boring. And how can a manicure be inspired by a colour?

And then it hit me: I’ll let the colour that inspired me for this upcoming mani be: Peacock! I can hear you say that peacock isn’t a colour, but hey, peacocks are all about colour. Take a look:

I dare you to say that peacocks aren’t colours! :D

I started out by making a gradient, using Stargazer 304 and P2 “So Cool”. Stargazer is a seagreen/turquoise, very shimmery polish, and P2 is an almost metallic and very vibrant blue.

I didn’t apply a top coat, because I wasn’t done yet. But here it is, where I’m holding the Stargazer bottle: 

And here’s a pic with the P2 bottle:

I must admit that I really like this! I think I’ll actually do this again some other time. But hey – I said I wasn’t finished! :) Peacocks like to show off, so I wanted to add glitter. I chose Icing’s “Lemme see your peacock” – I mean, with that name I kinda had to, didn’t I!? It’s a very dense glitter, and I didn’t want it to take over the gradient completely, so I dabbed a bit of glitter on a sponge, and then I sponged it onto the gradient. My guess is that this glitter is opaque on its own in two easy layers!

But anyway – I sealed it all up with a layer of Poshé top coat, and here’s my mani, inspired by a colour:

And one more shot because I like it so much!

What do you think? Did you like my take on this challenge?

There are other Danish girls who also did a “inspired by colour” mani today. You should definitely check their blogs out to see what they came up with.  

• Neglelir
• Se min kjole
• Mette
• Life is a fairy tale
• Vicki's Polish

Stay tuned the day after tomorrow - same bat time, same bat channel – for nails inspired by a song! It’ll not be easy to choose a song, that’s for sure. So check in to see what I come up with!

Color Club question

Hi girls,

You've been a great help before, and now I've got another question for you. I bought a Color Club polish in a blog sale, a greyish glitter. I quite like it! 

But it doesn't look like any of my other Color Club polishes at all. First of all there's the height of the bottle. It's the polish on the left, I'm talking about. The one on the right is "Magic Attraction".

You can see that Magic Attraction is a fraction taller than the other one, and the cap is matte, whereas the unnamed polish's cap is shiny. 

And there's something else with the cap: 

There's no flower on the left one! 

Here are the polishes seen from the back: 

Magic Attraction doesn't have any writing on the back at all. That's all in the bottom of the bottle: 

And the left bottle doesn't have any writing at the bottom at all. 

The last thing that I've noticed is that the smell of the two is different. Magic Attraction smells like any other Color Club polish I own. The other one doesn't smell like it at all. It has a glue-ish smell to it. 

Can anybody help me out here? Have I got a fake bottle of Color Club, or have I just gotten my hands on a polish that was sold as a set and therefore different than their usual line?

Summer Challenge Day 20: Water Marbled

Summer Challenge Day 20: Water Marbled

Water Marbling is the most difficult mani in this challenge imo. I’ve never tried it before. Stay tuned to found out if I’ll ever do it again ;)

I started out by painting my nails white with Models Own “Snow White", which is a plain white crème. I wanted to use it as underwear for these three polishes: 

China Glaze: Rodeo Fanatic, 108 degrees, Stella

I deliberately chose three polishes from the same brand to make sure that the polishes wouldn’t clash in the process. I used room temperature ordinary tap water added three drops of polish remover, because I read somewhere that it would be good.

And then I started putting drops of polish into the water. Pretty soon the drops stopped spreading out like they’re supposed to. I made my pattern in the water with an orange stick, and then I dipped my nails into the water, two nails at a time.

Here’s the final result: 

After a couple of minutes the polish started making little bubbles from underneath, leaving white blobs all over my nails. If any of you know the reason, I would love to hear it!

And here’s my thumb nail, that’s the one I liked the best!

All in all I don’t consider this a success, but I thought that I’d give it another go just to see if that would turn out just as badly.

This time I used these three polishes: 

Finger Paints: Vintage Violet, Sinful Colors: Folly, Essence: Style for Summernights

Same water, same temperature, same tools and same method. Drip, drip, drip, polish into the water, make a pattern with an orange stick and dip the nails. I made more drips this time to see if I could get the pattern to be more “water marble-ish”.

And here’s how it ended up looking like: 

 Another shot of it:

So, is water marbling something that I enjoyed trying? No, it’s not. I find it too time consuming and I feel that it’s a huge waste of polish.

Is it my style? No, it’s too random for me, and too difficult to make a nice pattern.

Will I try it again? Yeah, probably once or twice more, just because I can.

Have you tried water marbling? If yes, are you good at it? Please share your secret! :)

There are other Danish girls who also tried to water marble today. You should definitely check their blogs out to see what they came up with.  

• Neglelir
• Se min kjole
• Mette
• Life is a fairy tale
• Vicki's Polish

Stay tuned the day after tomorrow - same bat time, same bat channel – for nails inspired by a colour! I promise it’ll be very interesting to see how I interpret that!

Glitter Review

Hi girls,

Here are three cool glitters:

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I mixed some scoops of each of the glitters into clear polish. I wanted the glitters to be opaque on their own – I wasn’t interested in glittery toppers at this point.

Here are two coats of each swatched on a nail wheel:

And here they are on my nails – still two coats of each polish:

It doesn’t look very glittery, does it? Let me show you another picture, taken in the sun this time:

Wow, right? And here’s a blurred one to show you the holo effect:

The verdict is:

Pros:

- The glitter is quite stunning. I’m especially in love with the magenta!

- It’s easy to make an opaque polish of these glitters

- The price is reasonable for a relatively large amount of glitter

Cons:

- The glitters bleed once they’ve been mixed into a base, so it’ll only take a couple of hours before your base isn’t clear anymore (the clear base becoming more coloured and opaque), and diminishing the colour strength of the individual glitters.

- My polish chipped after less than 24 hours! And I’m talking big chips here!

- The polishes end up being very top coat hungry. I applied three coats of top coat, and they were still textured!

KKcenterHK has been so kind to offer my readers a 10% discount. 

Your unique coupon code is rainbowifyme (easy to remember, right? :D), and it’s valid until January 31st 2013!

Until tomorrow girls - let me hear your thoughts, please!