Love & Beauty - Forever 21 Polishes - Gorgeous glitters!

Long time no blog. :(  I have been a busy bee! This is going to be a short one too.  Pics mostly.  

I picked these up at Forever 21 a month or so ago.  I love that they have affordable and totally trendy polishes for a super thrifty price.  These remind me of something Deborah Lippmann would put out and then Revlon would knock off..  ;) I've never had an issue with coverage or application and I just built these puppies up with about 3-4 coats and then topped with SV.  The only complaint I have about Love & Beauty polishes are their boring generic names.  Yaaaawn!

Here they are:

Have you tried Love & Beauty polishes?

Until next time  ☺

Urban Outfitters NP Chilly & Mystic

I have a couple of polishes to show you today that I picked up a few weeks ago at my local Urban Outfitters store.  They really had some great colors on display and in abundance.  UO has bulked up their cosmetics, BIG TIME.  If you go to their UO online store they have even more cosmetic options than they have in their stores, including an extensive collection of Anna Sui polishes that I really haven't seen anywhere else as well as ELF brand makeup.  I did end up ordering an Anna Sui polish as a treat along with a fantastic coat and a pair of wedge sneakers for a bargain basement prices - the AS polish was not so much of a bargain, but still very pretty.  I'll post about that one later.  So, these lovelies were purchased in person and totaled $8.72 with our super high 9.10% sales tax included.  I believe these are $5 each or 2 for $8.

I was very impressed with these UO polishes.  They were inexpensive, they looked fabulous (I don't own a polish that looks like either of these) but did not behave like a cheap polish.  The formula for both was good with Chilly being thicker than Mystic, as expected, since it was all full o' glitter.  I used my usual Orly Bonder  base coat for both manicures, but I layered Chilly over 2 complete coats of Essence Oh My Glitter which is a lovely lavender shimmer polish.  Both built up well in 4 coats.  I topped both off with a nice thick coat of SV.  Chilly was a slight top coat eater, so I put a second coat of SV on it for good measure.

Here's Chilly:

 Next is Mystic.  Mystic was a little hard to capture because it is inky indigo inky blue.  Aaaand best of all, it's a FLAKEY! ::swoon:: Now who doesn't like a flakey?
I tried to post the most accurate shots of it, color wise, that I took, so excuse the strange brightness of my hands.

Pretty cool, huh.  I realize that Mystic reminds me a little bit of Cult Nails Clairvoyant, but definitely isn't a dupe or anything.  *Edit - Duh!  I just realized that Mystic may just very well be a dupe for Deborah Lippman's Ray of Light.  Sadly, I do not own Ray of Light, so I'm unable to do a comparison, but in in reviewing swatches of ROL online, looks like it might be a ringer!*

Next on my lemming list for UO are their holo polishes. They have a couple stunners that I NEED to have, but we'll wait til next paycheck for those.

So what do you think?  Have you ever given UO polishes a chance?  Will you now?

Until next time  ☺

Butter London - Scouse!

Oh my!  I do believe that my butter London nail polish collection is growing and growing!  They just seem to be coming up with color after color that I looove.

For this post I layered Scouse, which butter London describes as "Sheer, royal blue and indigo duochrome nail lacquer with pink, purple, and blue microglitter.", over Nina Ultra Pro's Cobalt.

The definition of Scouse is a "Brit slang referring to a person from Liverpool"

Cobalt is such a stunning color, and is HOT HOT HOT this season, but it is so hard to photograph, as blues usually are.  I did have to fiddle around with my camera and settings in order to get to capture it's "in real life" color, so please forgive the brightness of some of the shots. 

For this manicure I started with the usual Orly Bonder base followed by 3 coats of Cobalt and topped with a coat of SV to render it super shine-tastic.   I had to include a partial shot of the ring I wore with this mani, which is a sterling silver setting with a chunk of a Ming vase in it.  What can I say?  It matched perfectly. 

After I grew bored of Cobalt all on it's own I layered on 2 coats of Scouse to my mani and topped again with SV.  That's quite a few layers of nail polish, but it all held up very well. 

Scouse is an exclusive color that can be found only at Dillard's stores or via the butter London website and sell for $14.00 each.  Cobalt can be found at Sally's online store  for $4.19 with their beauty club card.  I picked mine up in person and believe it was actually priced at under $4.00 in store with my Sally's card.

Will you be jumping on the Cobalt band wagon this season?  Please do!

Until next time...

☺ 

Essence - New Colors! Chic Reloaded, Gorgeous Bling Bling, Grey-t To Be Here, Walk on the Wild Side

I picked up a few new Essence polishes at Ulta the week before last.  Essence has revamped their bottle - which is a great improvement as it is a little bigger and much more aesthetically pleasing (curvy!) and they have also updated their brush for the better.  Now the brush is very much like the Sally Hansen Complete Manicure brushes vs stick straight and hard to load.  Along with the 4 that I'm going to show you, I also bought Date in the Moonlight, which was a really pretty shimmery navy blue, but was a big BUST.  It was all weird and linty for some reason when I applied it, even though my nails were perfectly clean, so I didn't take any pictures of it.  Plus, it BUBBLED. Ew.  I'm going to try it again in the future, maybe add some polish thinner to it, but not anytime soon :o/

All these polishes applied very nicely and were all 3 coats with a base coat of Orly Bonder.  I only used a top coat on Walk on the Wild Side.  I should also mention they are a buck 99 a piece.  Nice!

First up:  Gorgeous Bling Bling.  I'm on the fence about this one.  It's really pretty, but I don't know if i really liked it with my skin color or maybe it was the color itself..  I don't know.  It's like a Cognac-y color with flecks of gold mixed in, which is nice, but maybe not so much for a nail polish color.  Maybe I would have liked it more if it was a smidge darker or richer.  Oh and what's with the name??!!

Next is Grey-t to be Here.  A grey with iridescent pink shimmer.  Gorgeous!!

Chic Reloaded.  All I can say is Duo-chrome awesome-ness for $1.99.  Go buy it.

And finally Walk on the Wild Side.  Veeeery pretty.  Even better with SV top coat.  Green shimmery goodness.  This first pic below is the truest to its actual color.  I apologize for the variation in color and blame it on my camera. ☺  

 What do you think of these?  Gonna buy???  Have you tried Essence before?

Until next time!  ☻