Set to be released in July of 2012, the Minnie Mouse Collection by OPI will include four new pink polishes, including a pink "confetti" polish and blah, blah, blah, blah...blah...
blah, blah, pink, blah blah...This not a very exciting release to say the very least. The only interesting this about this line is that kick-ass display. Now, that I'd pay good money for! The way the stand spiral out like film that's spooling off of its reel. It's beautiful.
I am still trying to get myself to get on the "I Love Glitter Polish" train but I just can't seem to get on board. Nails Inc. can call this polish a 3D glitter "special effects" but that doesn't change the fact that this is still just a glitter with the same matte finish and lack of durability that usually comes with this types of polishes. Plus there was this problem...
What the FACK!!!
As you can see, the brush was crap! Shelling out $15 on a polish and then finding stray brush hairs sticking out doesn't do much to build brand loyalty. Even though my experience with this polish wasn't great, I do really like the blue & purple colour combination and it was one of the less difficult glitters in terms of removal. Since I like my nails to look more precise than how this ended up, at least this colour is going to look great on my toes in the summertime.
Language is a funny thing: take two words, swap their order and you end up with two completely different meanings. The marketers at L'Oreal could have decided to call this polish Night Owl instead of Owl's Night. One sounds like a nocturnal bird, the other like an awesome premise for a horror movie. Either way, I ended up with a dark & sparkly polish that could have easily ended up looking green but instead is a black polish with abundant gold shimmer. The formula is, however, quite thin and needs 3 coats instead of 2 in order to avoid bald spots and very obvious tip wear.
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
I used to be a night owl but long gone are the days that I could stay up for days and days and feel no ill effects. These days, I find myself crawling into my bed at 7:30 PM on a Friday night and passing out immediately! I sort of miss the days of stumbling into all night diners and donut shops to chow down for the morning and listening to the birds chirping away as the sun came up...
Glitter In My Stocking from Nicole by OPI was the nail polish that I so badly wanted to wear on Christmas Day this year but as you can observe from the photo, you can see why it didn't turn out that way. Glitter polishes are not really my thing. The look is not my favourite (I find it looks childish but that's just me) and I hate the gritty texture, so I was excited that I found a glitter polish that I loved the look of. It made me think of the decorations on my tree so what was there not to like about that? The yellow gold with the sprinkling of red and silver drew me in but I forgot what a pain in the butt wearing glitter polish without a durable topcoat actually is. After a few hours and a couple of chores, I had a huge amount of chips in the polish and no amount of reapplication would solve the problem. Bummer!...It's so sparkly!
Stila has gotten back into the nail polish game after being out of it for several years. When the Daring & Delicate nail polish sets were announced a lot of people thought that this was the first time they were offering polish but this isn't the case.
Daring
Delicate
I'm not sure why Stila stopped making polish. Maybe it wasn't profitable at the time but my sister and I had liked what we had bought enough to have hung on to them all these years.
Way back when, I picked up Rhea, a light pink sheer polish with just enough blue shimmer in it to make it a lavender colour. It's light, fresh looking and airy and it took three coats to get it to the opacity you see in the photo. Achieving bottle colour would require patience and probably 5 coats but lucky for me I like a sheer look sometimes.
Nymph is a very sheer orange with a light infusion of fine glitter. The fact that my nails are stained yellow is actually not doing this pretty polish any favours but it would make a great topcoat for another nail polish or just over nails that are not as stained as mine. One of the things that I had likes about Stila polish is the bottle shape. The handle wasn't that great but at least the bottles were really slim and stored nicely.
I'd like to give Stila polishes another try, but I'd rather be able to pick individual polishes instead of picking up a set with colours that I might not be totally interested in having. Maybe if these sets sell well enough, I have that option!
I've been seeing Sally Hansen's Pumpkin Spice on a lot of blogs in the last few weeks and I thought it looked pretty cute for a glitter polish (glitter is not my favourite). Maybe I should have read their posts as opposed to just looking at the pictures! Then I would have realized that I needed to put a black base coat in order to make this polish really look its best. That's why that despite the fact that it looks pretty terrible in this photo (that's 3 coats) I don't have anything negative to say about it's thin black base colour and orange glitter because I know that if I take that step, it will look great!
I made it through the first week of my new job in one piece and I can certainly say that for an accounting firm, it's one of the more liveliest places I've worked at in a long time. I'm hoping things keep going well! But since I'm back in an office setting, I've got a nice calm colour to show you and a not so calm colour. First up New York Color's Bryant Park, a muted gold with a nice amount of shimmer.
Now, I know what you're thinking, enough with the New York Color already but, dammit, they make a good product! If a polish allows me to apply it 1/2 an hour before I go to bed, then that's a polish I'll keep buying and using.
I wish I could say the same thing for Grape Fizz by Revlon, yet another scented polish and the second line of scented polishes that they have released this year.
Ok, I have to say it. How awful this this polish? It's not a question, it's a statement! When I saw it in the store I thought "Oh, so pretty! Like a cross between Urban Decay's Toxin & OPI's Merry Midnight." I was not expecting the watery, see through washout you see in that photo. That's three coats and it's full of bald spots thanks to its uneven application. I took twenty two photos and that's the best one I could get with this massive disappointment of a polish. It's possibly the worst polish I've bought in years and I have 436 bottles of nail polish. To say this one's the worst is saying a lot! Grape Fizz is $5 CDN that I could have flushed down the toilet! The best thing I can say about it is that it smells like grape flavour.
I wore that terrible polish when I went to see Hugh Jackman In Concert last night at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. My sister & I took my Mom as a birthday present but to be honest, it was a present for me too! Hugh Jackman has been bunching up my panties for 11 years now (looking at him should be counted as one of my hobbies) and I have sat through some horrible movies (Kate & Leopold, Someone Like You) and a couple of great ones (The Prestige, The Fountain) to gawk at the man that I can officially say is the most gorgeous male I've ever seen with my own two eyes:
That's Not a Good Picture...
That's a Good Picture!
Being the big old Tony Award winning Broadway lover he is, I was expecting that the show would have a significant amount of cheese to it and don't get me wrong, I love musicals and I love cheese but I wasn't expecting Hugh Jackman to mount one of the most entertaining shows I'd seen in years. I am not babbling through a haze of lust to say that the show is fantastic and if there's anyway you could see it, you should! Jackman's energy and enthusiasm is infectious, he's a great singer, he's extremely funny and has a gift for comedic improvisation that had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe and my Mom can't stop talking about his ass shaking. Yes, Hugh Jackman shaking his ass...
......!!!!
Whoa, sorry about that, I just drifted away in my own mind there for a minute! Within the space of 2 hours Jackman sang numerous medleys of the best of Broadway (including "I Feel Pretty"), did the Readers Digest version of The Boy From Oz (his Tony winning role), told amusing family stories, turned the intro of the Music Man into a rap, chatted up audience members, even dragging up a man from his seat and making the poor guy dance while he sang "Fever" and it was all awesome. But the two real stand outs in the show made my evening for two completely different reasons. Number one is this happened:
When Leia Met Logan!
"Carrie Fisher is in the audience tonight!" Jackman announced and being the nerd girls my sister and I are, we jumped out of our seats screaming "OHMYGODWHERE!!!" Fisher is in town with her show, Wishful Drinking (that show's fun as well) so she stood up, they traded quips, hugged and giggled and probably inspired Fan Fiction. Maybe I should write "The Tale of Princess Leia & the Wolverine" myself because I had a huge nerdgasm when all of this happened. Geeks live for these moments!
Secondly, when Jackman and crew broke into Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's version of "Over the Rainbow", I cringed. I really dislike that version of the classic tune and I didn't want to hear it again regardless of who was singing it but my attitude changed when two didgeridoo players came down the aisles (I've never heard them played live before) and Jackman was joined onstage by an aboriginal woman singing along in a native aboriginal language. It was amazing, people were crying. The woman was Olive Knight, who was a co-comissioner of the Bringing Them Home Enquiry that was established by the Australian government in response to efforts made by indigenous communities concerned about the lack of awareness of the history of the forcible removal of the Stolen Generation. The work of Knight and her peers helped lead to the Australian Federal Parliament Apology in 2007. It wasn't just a performance, it was an honour to be in the presence of someone like her.
I'd like to take a moment and welcome my new follower, Christina, to my blog! I'm really glad you enjoy my prattle! Thanks so much!
I'm going to leave you with one of my favourite songs of all time, Courtesy of Wolverine!
I’ve got some Christmas inspired polishes today, mostly courtesy of Sally Hansen!First up is SH’s Insta – Dri in Jumpin’ Jade.Although not part of a holiday collection, this deep shimmery green made me think of Christmas when I first wore it, it reminded me of a Blue Spruce pine tree.So much so, that I resigned only to wear it during the months of December!
See what a blue green that is?As per all of the Insta – Dri line, the brush is super wide and flat which makes for much quicker application than a standard brush does and the wear was good, no chips or nicks for the few daysI wore it.
Second up is Emerald City, one of the permanent colours from SH’s Xtreme Wear line.I think that I will start a tag for every polish I come across that’s called Emerald City!It’s probably the most over used name in nail polishes and as much as I love The Wizard of Oz (I’ve got the movie playing in the background as I write this...) it’s time to retire it in the world of naming colours!
WTF! No "Wicked Witch of the West" polish?!?!
Don't Look at Us! We Don't Name Them!
But I digress, this version of Emerald City is such a crisp and pretty green that naming it after emeralds is a pretty fair comparison.It’s also well worth mentioning that my sister wore this polish all week and only got one little chip on her pinkie finger.What’s really remarkable about that is the fact that she works in shipping & receiving which means she works with her hands, all day long, moving boxes and handling product.That this polish hardly chipped is a Christmas Miracle!
Before
After
Finally, I have some layering that I really liked!I started with Maybelline’s Express Finish in Onyx Rush and topped it off with two coats of Sally Hansen’s Xtreme Wear in Red Carpet, a red jelly finish with red glitter:
Yeah, my nails are a mess but that's what happens when you have one eye on your nails and the other on "The Sing Off"
This was a really great combination for two reasons: One, it looks hot!My sister thought it looked like a glitter version of Sephora by OPI’s I’m With Brad.Two: I’ve been temping with my sister so I’ve been doing the same work with my hands that she is and this combination of polish didn’t chip either!We couldn’t ask for more in terms of wear!
