New Year's Eve NOTD - Love & Beauty's Rust

Blogfest carries on tonight with a NOTD <--click that I am wearing as I type this.  A lot of gals may not be aware of this, but Forever 21 has a fierce line of nail polish called Love & Beauty.  Not only do they have great colors and endless choices, but they are cheap cheap cheap cheap CHEAP! $2.80 cheap. In addition, you can find their vast collection on their website Forever 21.  On my last spree at Forever 21, thanks to a b-day gift card from my super intelligent friend, Tanya, I scored a couple of beauties and Rust was one of them.

In this NOTD I used Love & Beauty’s Charcoal as a base (which also has tiny blue micro glitter in it) and then layered 2 coats of Rust over it and the result was sparkly, glittery madness, perfect for New Year’s Eve! I don’t know about you, but I have not seen a glitter polish in this color before. It is so special and different. I love hexagonal glitter and this one sure does deliver.

Well I hope you enjoyed my NOTD and hope that you have super sparkly nails for the New Year too!

Until next time… or next year…

SpaRitual 2011 Wilde Collection, Mini Version - Plus Illuminati - Swatched

Blogapalooza 2011 continues…
So here’s a brand not many people know of that puts out consistently beautiful colors, SpaRitual. I bought some minis on Aveyou.com in an attempt to be thrifty and picked the ones I liked best based on other blogs and reviews. The minis are $5.00 each and the full size are $10.00. Check them out!

Illuminati - Now this was not part of the Wilde Collection, but I thought it looked cool enough to buy, so I did. I layered this lovely over Sally Hansen’s Xtreme Wear in Celeb City to reduce my chances of VNL <--click.   I love the holo speckles of this one, thus the out of focus shot below.

Running With Wolves - Looks so much better in person. My camera just couldn’t capture how stunning this one is. Silly camera.  It's actually more yellowy golden and fiery than these picture would have you think.  In these pics I feel it comes off as a little dull.  Please excuse the tip wear, folks.

Sacred Ground - Now, do I really have to say anything? This color is ah-mah-zing! So unusual - at least in my eyes it is.

Spirit Child - Gorgeous! Fiery! Love! Enough said.

Hope you will check this brand out next time you are in the mood for some new colors!

Until next time...

The Muppets Collection by OPI! Swatches inside!

The Blogoswatchathon continues! The Muppets Collection by OPI was much anticipated by myself and many other polish addicts and they did not disappoint. In this blog, these are what I thought were the nicest and the best value for the bunch. Now, you must know I pay for all my polishes and OPI polishes are not cheap, so I bought a mini-4pack and 2 individual full size colors in order to get the most bang for my buck. I was really happy with all of them and a couple that I didn’t think were going to be that great (Designer…DeBetter and Wocka! Wocka!) turned out to be quite stunning.
I used my typical 3 coat application with a top coat of SV on all. This is especially important for the glitters like Rainbow Connection and Excuse Moi!. Most of my swatches are done after 1 day of wear, so you will see on a couple of them there is slight wear in the tips, like in the Warm and Fozzy swatches.
Here we go!

Wocka! Wocka! - This was, like I said, a pleasant surprise. It is a beautiful pinkish red that was worked so well with my skin tone. It’s simple, but beautiful and the application was smoooooth.

Excuse Moi is more of a jelly polish with multi colored “party” glitter floating in a vibrant pink base. This was lovely, playful and fun to wear.  Excuse the thumb chip.  :(

Designer…De Better. I thought this was going to be bo-ring! But I was really quite surprised at what a pretty delicate color this is. It is so shimmer and has the smallest micro specks of a peachy-copperish color. Love it.

Warm and Fozzie - what a stunner. Obviously, I liked it so much I couldn’t narrow down my swatches because I felt like each captures a little more of it’s beauty. While the base is Fozzie fur brown, there is also flecks of gold, green and even some pink! Preeetty!

Rainbow Connection - How fun is this? I layered Rainbow Connection over China Glaze Millenium, which I think worked out very well. I do have to say it is very much like all the other rainbow glitters I’ve seen that have come out in the past year or too by various companies from the frugal to the expensive, but I was happy to add it to my collection because….because… I do not own Deborah Lippman’s Happy Birthday! Sniffle, Sniffle. L

Meep Meep Meep is another one of those tough to shoot colors. The camera can’t figure it out, but I sure as hell tried to capture it as best as I could. I think the nicest thing about this one is the flakies that are floating around. It makes this one more interesting than you would expect when you really take a good look at it. Is is flakie shimmery goodness in a bottle. This one also went very nicely with my skin tone.

Thank you, OPI!

Until next time...
 

Wet N Wild Behind Closed Doors - Swatched!

Here’s a little bit of Wet N’ Wild for you. I love Wet N’ Wild because, they are constantly putting out new and exciting polishes and are always very inexpensive in comparison to other brands - usually @ around as little as $1.99 a pop to, on the high side, $3.99-$4.99 each. Not bad on the wallet, eh?
This precious polish, called Behind Closed Doors, I picked up after searching many, many, MANY Walgreen’s for it. And now, it is MINE! :::Maniacal Laugh, Maniacal Laugh, Maniacal Laugh:::
This polish can be built up on it’s own and has more of a jelly-like consistency. It has a smoky blackish base with hexagonal red glitter and teeny tiny round red glitter. Application wasn’t too bad, usually these kind of polishes require finessing and arranging of the glitter as you layer. I used several coats for this manicure with a SV top coat, as usual. I think Behind Closed Doors works better as a layering polish over red or black, although I admit I didn‘t try it on its own. In these swatches, I layered Behind Closed Doors over Butter London’s Knees Up. All in all, I think the manicure turned out quite nice. What do you think?

American Apparel Goodness! Cameo Blue, Lopez Canyon, African Violet Swatches

So, I had promised myself I would get finish uploading all my Fall 2011 swatches to my blog and I sorely disappointed myself.  In a mad dash, last ditch effort, I’m going to make up for lost time and churn out the blogs with the speed of Superman. They may not be wordy, but it will happen.
On this edition of speed blogging, we have American Apparel polishes that were new for Fall 2011 - Cameo Blue, Lopez Canyon and African Violet. Most folks don’t think of nail polish when they think of American Apparel, but hopefully this will make a few folks check out their collection next time their in an America Apparel store and also hopefully, those folks will be as pleasantly surprised as I was when I first tried them out last year with Mouse, Factory Grey and Peacock (which are some really sweet colors too).
Here is Cameo Blue. Blues and red and greens are hard to photo, but I think these pics are as close to how it appears in person as I could get it.  Same goes for Lopez Canyon as it is a burnt orange color.  All of these swatches were 3 coats with a top coat of SV and all 3 are shiny as all hell, as you will see, aaaa-and application was “like buttah” with these guys.  Thank you, American Apparel, for putting out such nice economical polishes.  Right now these bad boys are 3/$15 on their website and they have added some glitters and metallics that I need to peruse for possible future purchasing.  American Apparel



Please excuse the index finger dent :(