I picked up Good as Gold & Penny Talk from Essie's Mirror Metallics collection last week on one of the rare days that I decided "Damn it! I'm not going to work through lunch! Not today!" and shambled down to Toronto Beauty & Barber Supply on Orfus Road. I was really feeling the blue and/or purple colours and I have more than enough silver polish but I am totally jazzed with the two that I did end up buying.
Good as Gold is a light gold metallic that is like a neutral but has just enough flash to it to keep it from being a little pedestrian. Penny Talk is just gorgeous to me, I am completely in love with this colour. Bronze polishes, as much as I like them, can be kind of unimaginative but I really dig its light tone. It does resemble a brand new penny but is just a little bit lighter than an actual one cent.
The formula was very good with these polishes. I've often found that this types of finishes can get terribly sticky very quickly so I'm glad to see that it didn't happen. Application was smooth and fairly quick drying. But as it is with matte polishes, you need to buff your nail for a nice smooth surface or every flaw on your nail is going to show through. Other than that, I think these were awesome!
I've got almost enough nail polish right now I can almost wear a
different colour everyday for 2 years. And with that being said, here's
some polish spam action...
The magnetic nail polish trend is still hanging in their and yet I still don't have the hang of it. This one is Gold Nugget from Layla. It's nice but I'm not seeing the colour gold in here. I still have to practice tons more to master this trend before it's all over!
I so badly wanted Essie's Sexy Divide to be totally awesome but instead it ended up being totally awful. Three coats couldn't stop the the bald spots and the thin formula lead to chips within less than 12 of wear. beautiful in the bottle, disastrous on my nails.
I don't wear a lot of pink polish but when I do, Maybelline's Timely Rose is my go to polish. It's not childish or bubble gummy in any way. It's positively lady like!
It's pretty obvious by now that grey nail polish is never going to go away. Good! The more funky neutral colours the better and Essie's School of Hard Rocks is a pretty good one with a thick and even formula that went on with ease and had staying power and a strong shine.
I haven't even worn To Buy or Not to Buy from Essie yet so I had to rely on my sister to model this lavender shimmer for me. It looks so much nicer on the nail than in the bottle doesn't it?
Someday, I'll pick up a bottle of gun metal nail polish and say that I've really bought enough of these types of colours and place it back on the display. Since I didn't have that voice in my head telling me to "just put the polish down and back away" I bought L'oreal's VIP Status. You can see a bit of balding at the top of my index finger but that's mainly the fault of an unbuffed nail base and not the polish.
Hey! Did I hear someone say they wanted to see a picture of Tom Hiddleston, Michael Sheen and Queen Elizabeth? No? Well too bad...here it is anyways:
Her Royal Highness Must Have Thought He Was Tony Blair!
Yes, I know it's long overdue and many of us have moved onto brand new collections but I'm still going to put in my two cents on the remaining Hunger Games polishes from China Glaze I picked up a while ago.
Fast Track is a light gold shimmer that became a favourite of mine pretty much after I applied the second coat. If you're looking for a subtle and simple hue with a good amount of shine that you can sport just about anywhere, then FT is a great choice. It may need a third of fourth coat if you want to achieve bottle colour but I like it with just two. I didn't experience any application problems and it dried quickly as well.
When summertime comes around, I cannot resist a good metallic polish, particularly a really nice bronze like this one. When I looked at Harvest Moon in the bottle, I felt very sure that I was going to be having some serious streaking problems but fortunately, none of that happened. This red toned bronze went on smoothly and I got about 4 days of wear out of it before my tips started peeking out.
Smoke & Ashes was extremely difficult to photograph. The blue/green/black shimmer was a super thick polish that took extra time to dry and was surprisingly difficult to remove. Some of the shimmer particular didn't come off without buffing and even after that I still have a few stubborn pieces that I don't think will disappear until the nail grows out. I like how it looks but I don't like the hassle...
Blurred So You Can see the Shine!
Since I found that Smoke & Ashes was such a pain to remove, I don't know what I was thinking when I layered the Luxe & Lush flakie top coat over it. I'm always going to buy a flakie polish when I see one. They are in surprisingly short supply in the GTA and I much prefer them to glitter polish. So as much as I like its broken glass look, I had to use nail glue remover to get it off...Yuck!!!
Now about the movie...
I went to see the Hunger Games not out of a burning desire to see it but more out of a feeling of obligation. I've spent too many years complaining about the lack of female action heroines (well, just a lack of good female characters period) and it would have been hypocritical of me not to go see it. Plus I had a rare amount of spare time during a weekday afternoon, so why not take in a $7 movie?
While it's not one of the best movies I've ever seen, it's far from the worst too and frankly, if I was 12 years old, I would've that it was the very best movie ever made (until The Avengers came out) because Katniss is a smart, compassionate & noble ass-kicker who despite having two love interests, she pays more attention to the fact that people's lives are at stake. I never got the feeling that she has deep feelings for Peeta, she's just not the kind of person who would leave some weakling in a hole to die all alone. At least it's the anti-Twilight. If I had a tween daughter, I'd sleep better at night if she was into this as opposed to that sparkle vampire/ugly werewolf claptrap. At least she might be more understanding of the fact that, guess what? Life is hard and most of the time it's a huge struggle!
Anyone who knows me well, know that Wonder Woman is one of my favourite things and frankly I think that DC Comics reboot of the classic character is the best that series has been since it's relaunch in the 1980's but I'm not here to talk about that...L'Oreal's Amazon's Flash is one of the dumbest polish names I've heard in a while. When I read the name out loud, somehow it sounded like a microscopic fingernail was scraping across a chalkboard deep in the classroom of my brain. I wasn't wild about the polish either. Not that I had any issues regarding application or formula: it's a perfectly acceptable polish but it's just not really anything special. Yeah, it's a shiny, shimmering gold that would work better as a top coat than as a stand alone polish but I think the fact that I couldn't be bothered to try to get a better photo than the one I've posted here really demonstrates my my complete and total apathy towards it. It's like it's the nail polish equivalent of my feelings towards the new Spiderman movie:
On Second Thought, No...This Guy's Ass is So Much More Underwhelming!
Actually, I hate that guy's ass a lot. I vomit a little bit in my mouth every time I look at this picture. I like Essie's As Gold As it Gets a lot more than Amazon's Flash, probably because it wasn't pretending to be anything else but a top coat.
As Gold As It Gets Over Maybelline's Natural Beauty
I intentionally chose a warm toned neutral colour as a way to judge just how sparkly is. I felt that if I applied it over a red or a black polish it would stand out anyways, just based on the unavoidable contrast that would naturally occur and that wouldn't be the best way to judge it. I really like this combination quite a bit as I liked seeing a little bit of extra flash to an extremely neutral polish colour but if you want more flash, you'll have to apply a second coat. It also dried much faster than AM so if you find yourself in a pharmacy with AM in one hand and AGAIG in the other, pick up the Essie polish. It's just the more versatile choice.
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!
At first I thought that maybe Time to Shine from the Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Fall 2011 collection would be too flashy for work. As it turns out, despite the high amount of shine, this was actually a very workable polish colour. Falling in between a champagne and a light gold, it's just the right tone to make it somewhat more of an everyday polish than if had been a more yellow gold. Pictured here is two coats of polish but I think that it could use an application of three coats to really bring out the shimmer, especially when you can see some very nice red reflection in there. A good choice for a small price.
I have had a rough couple of weeks at work and was feeling exhausted and deserving of a reward for all of my efforts so I took a quick trip to my home town of Montreal and when I got back I decided to treat myself to my very first Chanel polish: Peridot. I have to admit that I tried very hard to disguise the sense of dismay I felt when the salesgirl announced that the single bottle of polish I was buying would set me back about $30 CDN but I began to relax a bit when I got home and took it out of the bottle I could see this gold & green/blue douchrome is so damn sweet! The gold tone puts me in mind of old tarnished door keys and the green is like the little touch of corrosion that occurs on copper that's been exposed to the elements. Unlike a lot of douchrome polishes, this one photographed really well.
It's Green!
In terms of application, the formula is top notch. I had very little streaking on my left hand (but a little bit of streaks occurred on my right hand), it dried extremely quickly and got full nail coverage (no bald spots) in just two coats. But the best part is the fact that I wore it for three days and there were no chips, cracks or tip wear at all! Peridot pretty much looked I like I had just applied it and probably could have went up to five days of wear.
No, It's Gold!
I may have cringed at the price tag initially but I'm so glad I didn't waste my money on something sub par, especially after after the disappointment that was OPI's Color to Diner For. I will definitely try Chanel polish again.
I'm burning through some of my older shots using my now returned defective camera, so today I have a lovely but not very sharp photo of OPI's Bling Dynasty from their Hong Kong collection a couple of years back. The lack of a macro function doesn't seem to affect someone from noticing how sparkly and shiny this polish is. A meeting ground between yellow gold and antique gold, it goes extremely well with my skin tone (I suppose that's why I keep gravitating towards gold makeup) and I had no application issues with it. In fact, it dried it bit faster that I had expected to and that's always a plus. I guess I'm not the only person who liked this colour as it is now part of their core line.
Knotty from China Glaze's Anchor's Away collection is a very shimmery, light gold/champagne coloured polish (purchased at the Toronto Beauty & Barber Supply) that even after 3 coats, I could still see my nail line through it. That's fine by me, I often like a light polish but if you don't like VNL, this one's not for you. One of the things I like about light, shimmery polishes like this is that if you get a chip or two but don't have time to tend to your nails, it's a good chance that the chips will go unnoticed. Bonus is the fact that there was no lint in the polish, a problem that I often see in China Glaze polish. I'm wondering what kind of layering results I could get out of this polish, perhaps a coat or two over black might yield some interesting results!
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 started a new job this week and along with the usual nerves one gets when going into an all new situation, meeting new people and facing brand new challenges, one of the things that I worry about is the all important first impression. You only get one chance to make one and as it often is in a business setting, you have to play it safe until you know when you can let your more funky side come out. So I thought I'd take a few spins with some polish colours that that make a statement but not a super loud statement!
Mindful Mocha by Sally Hansen is a deep chocolate brown creme. I can imagine that this colour is not for everyone and would probably suit those with a deeper skin tone. As I am some one with darker skin, I love how this looks. It's a like a little upward boost from a nude or neutral (and I love those kind of shades). This is two coats and although there was a minor chip early on in wear, it wasn't a huge chip so it wasn't really an issue for me.
Curry Up Don't Be Late by OPI was one of my favourite colours from their India Collection and now that I come to think of it, it was the only colour I bought from the collection. A pale sheer gold, my photo fails to capture the really lovely, reflective shimmer in this polish. That's three coats and it's still quite sheer but it's subtle and is a great choice for summer wear. Just an aside, something is wrong with my camera and it is failing to snap a sharp picture lately. I have to figure it out because it's really bugging me!
NYC's Lincoln Square Lavender reminds me a bit of OPI's Sparrow Me the Drama and although they aren't dupes by any means, I might choose to wear LSL or SMD if drying time was an issue. NYC is always good value for my money, as I usually spend around $2 CDN for one of their polishes and that's always a win in my book!
This one is from my sister's stash and if it wasn't for the fact that we share stuff, I would have rushed out and bought my own bottle. Desert Rose by Rimmel is a dusty orange creme that exudes mutability to me. I know I'm using fancy $3 words to describe it but so many orange polishes are such in your face colours, it takes something calmer like DR to stand out from the rest. Of course it didn't last "Up to 10 days" like the bottle says but it lasted for 3 and that's good enough for me. Rimmel is a brand that, for some reason, keeps slipping my mind when I'm shopping or looking for something new. That's odd since I don't dislike the products from them that I do own. Maybe something is missing the mark for me by way of marketing but the brand doesn't stick out for me.
So there's some tasteful shades for you and I have to admit that I'm going to be slightly frustrated with having to wait until the weekend to wear a blue or green polish. Hey! How about some 1980's cheesy goodness with Canadian rockers Loverboy?
I thought I wasn't going to be able to find Zoya's Faye in stores. I kept haunting my local retailers asking for it and getting a lot of shrugs in response. I've heard that OPI's Grand Slam, the second release in Serena William's polish line is very similar to Faye but since I'm not cuckoo for the crackle craze, I'm glad I didn't have to pay extra for a polish I didn't want to get one that I did. As far as polishes go, Faye is one of the more unique colours I've seen in a while. With its gold glimmer packed into a light purple based, it has so much depth to it that I find that I can't stop looking at it. It's a real beauty! Although it's good in 2 coats, you might want to go for 3 if you don't like seeing your nail line peeking through the polish.
Faye with Flash
On a sad note, one of my canaries, Sherbert, passed away :( Poor Little thing...we loved her so..
I was going to give the Little Teasers Collection to my sister for Christmas but when we were shopping, she made a move to buy them and I couldn't think of a good way to talk her out of it, so she got this gift early!
She's already worn Rising Star & The Show Must Go On from the set and even though these polishes are super sparkly and eye catching, there were some big problems for her in terms of application and wear. First up is Rising Star:
It might be a bit hard to tell with all the sparkle but with just two coats, Rising Star bubbled so much, my sister said "My nails look like they have a rash!". I was surprised at the bubbling, that's something I expect to happen during summertime, not when it's cold outside and there's no humidity. I hope that's it's just a fluke because that is a really gorgeous holiday gold!
Second up was The Show Must Go On. It's a flashy pink that reflects orange in a certain light. We really liked looking at this polish and the orange sort of makes your nails look like they have little flames in them:
But this polish had a application problem too. It chipped in a major way on the second day of wear. Check it out:
Yikes! This is definitely not what I've come to expect from OPI in terms of quality because I usually remove OPI polish before it chips and not the other way around. Also, I didn't have any problems with Tease - y Does It from the same collection so I find it odd that these two polishes didn't measure up. And now and just because, here is my sister's Cher Barbie Collection...
I recently picked up212 Sephora and it's described on the Sephora website as an "opaque smoky black with iridescent, gold and copper chunky glitter". Well, they're not selling themselves short on the description of the glitter, because there is a lot more colour going on in it besides gold and copper.
That's a lot of colour going on in there! You can see the flakies pretty well at the bottom of the bottle and the glitter is fairly dense too. I took a picture that was deliberately out of focus so that you can see the colours more specifically:
It's Like Christmas Lights in the Dark!
I really like all of the different colours that are reflected in the polish. One of the odd things I like to do is to look at the lights on a Christmas tree and squint so the lights get blurry! This polish reminds me of that. since there's so much glitter up in here, it sort of dulled the shine of the polish and was really bumpy, so I put a coat of Seche Vite just to smooth my nails out a bit and to give it it's shine back. It's a sparkly change from plain old black polish, not that there's anything wrong with basic black!
