Orly Royal Velvet

Last night was pretty exciting for Singapore, most of us were glued to the tv because of our 7th President election results! Even though I am still considered a minor and not allowed to vote, I was very interested in this whole thing. Dr Tony Tan emerged as our President by winning 35% of the votes. I’m kinda eternally voting for Dr Tan Cheng Bok who had 34% of the votes! Such a close fight!!

Also, it was raining the whole day yesterday so it was pretty chilly. Even switching on the fan sent me shivers, lol!

Anyway enough of the presidency talk, let’s get down to nail business!

Orly Royal Velvet is a dark plum with a light blue duochrome. This is an oddball from the Precious collection 2011. My sole intention in getting the whole collection was for this lovely shade. I love how the light blue particles is showing up against the dark base colour!

I had no issues or problems with the formula, this was an exception from the rest of the collection. (the others from the collection was really horrible!)

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China Glaze Life Preserver

Hey guys!!!! So I am supposed to revise now but I just finished doing a law paper so I was like ‘Oh heck, I’m done with revising!’ and decided to change my mani because my previous notd does not seem to go well on what I’m going to wear tonight! As usual I hope you’re not surprised that I change my nail colour as fast as how I would change my clothes hahaha!

I’ve not used this one ever since I got it a few months back but I think this colour is so appropriate for Summer! It should have been in the Island Escape collection instead of Electric Pineapple. (yeah, you heard me. I don’t like Electric Pineapple, lol. More on that when I post the swatch up!) Life Preserver is like a dark, muted burnt orange. A very unique shade and this kinda reminds me of smoked salmon. I’m not a fan of salmon, but I like this colour on me! 😉

Anyway, the formula was so thick!!! I find that the entire collection of Anchors Away was thicker than usual… its like the brush took up way too much polish and when I tried to smoothen it out, it drags the polish away which results in balding. I did 1 medium and 1 thick coat because I simply cannot get away with a thin one! I guess I have to thin this one out too.

Illamasqua Spring/Summer 2011: Purity and Bacterium Swatches & Review

Good evening!! I just completed 2 tutorials and revised abit for my test so I guess I need a break so here I am!! 😉

Today I have for you 2 polishes from Illamasqua Toxic Nature collection for Spring/Summer 2011! I managed to buy these because of a spree held by 2 wonderful people, Jo and Hydaia from Miss-Jo Spree! Furthermore, there was a 20% discount on all items which was a great deal because I saved quite abit on money! I picked up the nail polish duo because they’re much cheaper compared to buying them individually and I was simply lured to Bacterium and got the duo which had Purity in it too. (£21.00 for 2 polishes in the duo compared to £13.50 individually)

Bacterium is a taupe brown frost with blue silvery iridescent shimmer, 2 coats. I am not in love with the frost finish because frost doesn’t really work on my nails!It’s an ugly pretty colour… I still can’t decide which catergory I’m gonna place this in!

Indoors

Under sunlight

Purity is a type of peach that isn’t a pastel and not under brights, it’s something in between, 2 coats. It is leaning slightly more to pink. This brings out the tan in my hands which I really like!

The application on these were not too bad, in fact they are marvelous! Purity was opaque in 1 coat, I gotta say I am very impressed! Bacterium was on the thin side and slightly watery. I think I might do a third coat if I do wear Bacterium out the next time.

Deborah Lippmann Spring 2011: Swatches & Review

Hey guys! I have another spring collection that I’m gonna showcase today! Deborah Lippmann has slowly becoming one of my favourite luxury brand nail polishes! I love that her chunky glitters can be removed effortlessly and also the quality of the polishes. I own about 12 of them and I love every single one of them!

Naked is a beige-y tone nude leaning slightly dark, almost matching my skin tone. It doesn’t really stand out which is great for working ladies or for those who wants to achieve mannequin hands. Personally, I don’t feel Naked is worth the price because it isn’t that unique! There are other nude polishes from other brands at cheaper prices. But if you’re going for quality, then this is the one to pick!

Glitter In The Air… is a pink and blue hexagon glitter with silver smaller pieces suspended in a sheer baby blue polish. I shall quote Alizarine Claws that it looks like contaminated milk. I agree with this one. So interesting and different but yet weird.  It has more blue hexagon glitter than pink from my swatches and the only thing that I do not like about chunky glitters is that some of my nails have concentrated glitters at one area. I have to admit that I bought this polish because of how it looks in its bottle. So magical and it looks like fairy dust! There is still visible nail line when I did 3 coats so maybe a nude polish or a white underneath would make it look better.

A macro shot of Glitter In The Air

All swatches are 3 coats with 1 coat of Seche Vite. Application was fab, no bald spots and no streaking! I know lots of people have issues with Glitter In The Air and other similar glitters from Deborah Lippman but I have no problems with that. I only waited for about a minute or so before applying the next coat. I think doing thin layers is much better for glitters as it dry faster and thus reduce the possibility of dragging the polish!

Overall, I’m biased towards Glitter In The Air just because it looks great in the bottle. Its either you hate it or you love it. I think it will look good with short nails because personally I don’t like seeing my visible nail line but its impossible to get a opaque shade for this. I’d probably layer Glitter In The Air over blue or pink so that the glitters in the polish will stand out.

Side tracking a little, I’ve no idea how why my codes doesn’t show up correctly on my sidebar. I used the text widget to try and add in Google Friend Connect so its easier for people to follow my blog but my codes ended up jumbled and the image doesn’t show! 😦 I tried following the steps here: http://www.expand2web.com/blog/friend-connect-wordpress/ but it still doesn’t work. Is my current theme the problem?

MAC Quite Cute Spring 2011 Collection: Nail Lacquers Swatches, Comparisons & Review

I wasn’t even expecting MAC’s Spring 2011 collection at my local MAC counter so early! 3 days ago, I popped by Tangs Plaza and was surprised that the whole collection was on display. So as usual, I got sucked into buying all the nail polishes. Pastels are one of my weakness in nail polishes and since these are limited edition, it was a perfect excuse to buy them!

From left: Ice Cream Cake, Little Girl Type, Mischievous Mint

I was kinda disappointed because this is a Quite Cute collection but the packaging wasn’t cute. I’d treasure my polishes even more if the packaging was even more ‘loud’ like maybe a pastel graffiti design! Anyway… let’s get on to the swatches!

Ice Cream Cake is a blue-based pastel pink, my favourite! Very pretty, reminds me of Barbie and cotton candy! The shade is not that unique but I couldn’t find a similar shade in my stash. It is kinda like a cross between OPI Sparrow Me The Drama and OPI Shorts Story.

Little Girl Type is a blue-based pale pastel lavender. I’m not sure what I am going to associate this colour with but… the name of this polish is W.E.I.R.D. Little Girl Type?? What does that even mean? It’ll be creepy if men started saying ‘little girls are my type’ hahaha! OPI Rumples Wigglin’ is pretty similar except that it has a slightly darker tone.
(sorry, typo in the swatch picture!!)

Mischievous Mint is a pale pastel mint. Again, I can’t think of anything that is cute and minty at the same time… maybe a mint ice cream?? A polish similar to this would be China Glaze Re-fresh Mint but the latter seems to be much lighter in comparison! Mischievous Mint is leaning more to jade green than a minty colour as compared to Re-fresh Mint!

Overall, these shades aren’t that unique but I think Ice Cream Cake deserves the attention in this collection because there is no close dupes! The brushes really suck in all of these, hence the messy swatches! I deeply apologise for that but the brush bristles were at fault too! Some of the bristles are sprayed out in different directions so it was kinda hard to do a decent swatch. The formula of these were alright, very thick, creamy and pigmented. All of my swatches are two coats, no top coat.

I hope this was helpful! 🙂

(I need to get more polish remover, I’m running out of them yikes!)

Silver Shatter Swatches & Review

Hello everyone! Today I’ll be doing a part 2 of OPI Pirates of the Caribbean collection with Silver Shatter. For those of you who have not checked out the swatches and review of that collection, click here. I did not use Planks A Lot because its a great stainer and I don’t want to mess up my cuticles when removing!

So here’s the polishes that I used from the POTC collection!

With Silver Shatter over it:

Honestly, it looks meh with bright pastel colours because the hot silver totally covered everything up! I suggest using Silver Shatter with darker, vampy colours so that the Silver Shatter and the colour underneath stands out. It doesn’t crack as much as Black Shatter, maybe because of the shimmers. My index finger has the thinnest layer of Silver Shatter so it cracks fairly well into smaller pieces. The rest of my fingers I used a thick coat and it resulted in only one or two big cracks. Mermaid’s Tears have only one crack at the side which was a major fail. (Sorry my pictures weren’t that clear because the sun is quite strong today!)

But the good thing about Silver Shatter is that you don’t really have to use a top coat because it looks really shiny. Also it doesn’t peel off unlike Black Shatter w/o the top coat. And, the polish doesn’t really get clogged up on the neck of the bottle because its more diluted compared to Black Shatter.

To further justify Silver Shatter… I used darker colours as my base! (my index fingernail broke at the side, hence its looking really weird!!)

Look how awesome it is over darker colours! ❤ I'm lovin' it *plays MacDonald’s song*

(shade)

So… don’t waste your time putting Silver Shatter over light pastel shades cause it doesn’t really show the full potential of the shatter. I’m loving this purple/blue combination with Silver Shatter so I did a full manicure!

I hope this entry helps if you’re deciding whether or not to purchase Silver Shatter!

China Glaze Pelican Grey

Its Monday again… but I’m kinda looking forward to this week because I’m going for a short vacation with my parents and boyfriend to Genting, Malaysia this Thursday! 😉 For me, I love going there just for the cool breeze (because it is so damn hot in Singapore!!!) and also for the fresh seafood and the theme park! My parents just love the casinos there, so typical of adults lol!

Anyway, today’s feature is China Glaze Pelican Grey from the Anchors Away Spring 2011 collection! The grey is slightly blue-ish, and there’s specks of silver shimmer which I love! I love the pigmentation on this one, so creamy and flows on my nail like butter. 1 coat was actually sufficient but I did 2 anyway.

P.S. Sorry, I know I promised to put up swatches of Silver Shatter on the POTC collection but I was working the whole day yesterday and I couldn’t do swatches and catch the sunlight. I promise I’ll do them asap! 😉

OPI Pirates of the Caribbean Collection Spring 2011 Brights: Swatches & Review

Happy April’s Fool! The only joke that I heard this week was that Jackie Chan died of a heart attack. I myself almost died of a heart attack too upon hearing this from my friends. But its all a joke! How mean! Anyway back to today’s topic… I am so thrilled when I first saw press releases of this collection on many nail blogs! Even though I don’t keep up with Pirates of the Caribbean, I love listening to the soundtrack (and admiring Johnny Depp!). Its so full of mystery and suspense so I was quite surprised when the colours from this collection were bright pastels! I was expecting like a shimmery blue or vampy colours but there wasn’t any blue in this collection! I wish they did do a murky pastel blue though.

From left: Mermaid’s Tears, Skulls & Glossbones, Strangers Tides, Silver Shatter

From right: Sparrow Me The Drama, Planks A Lot, Steady As She Rose, Silver Shatter

I would describe the polishes in this collection as muddy, cloudy and dirty in a good way. I will try my best in describing these polishes as close as possible but I’m bad at depicting colours! This collection consists of 6 pastel cremes and a special shatter polish, Silver Shatter! I’m pretty sick of Black Shatter so its cool that OPI did thought of doing it in another colour! There’s white, red, turquoise, navy and blue shatter coming up that I can’t wait! 😉

Sparrow Me The Drama is a muted rosy pink. It is not too in-your-face pink, but soft and wearable.

Planks A Lot is a blurple, well… blue-ish purple. It looks very similar to OPI A Grape Fit! but the latter has a darker blue undertone. This is the only one that doesn’t match up to the colour in the bottle… weird. On my nails, it looked 2 shades darker. This is my least favourite of the collection because it stained my nails, leaving behind a moss-green colour yuck!

Steady As She Rose is a musky pale lavender pink. It is unique but what a funny name this is. This should be a rose colour (as the name suggests). My pictures looks really off for this colour! It has a much pinker tone than a purple!

Stranger Tides is my second favourite from this collection. It is a toned-down green with yellow undertone. It reminds me off stale seaweed, moss and fungi mixed together with sand, haha! I know it sounds pretty gross but this colour is gorgeous!

Skulls & Glossbones is a beige-y grey with a slight green in it. When I look at this colour, I think of dust. Yes, just dust. Those that hang around ancient ships and treasure chests

Mermaid’s Tears is a muddy jade green… so magical. I love this, the ultimate star of the collection and my favourite of the lot! Is OPI trying to convey that mermaid’s tears are green? I doubt so, but to me this colour looks like the scales of a mermaid’s tail. I wish this polish was reflective or a duochrome cuz that would be perfect.

I love the quirky names for all the polishes, OPI always comes up with the most interesting names. My top picks for this collection would have to be Mermaid’s Tears, Stranger Tides and Sparrow Me The Drama. I didn’t really like Sparrow Me The Drama at first because I thought it was such a common colour like Planks A Lot but I ended up loving this. It looks great on my skin tone which is a big bonus.

Application was a breeze to all, except Skulls & Glossbones. It was on the thick side as you can see from my swatches! There was no streaking or bald spots so yay! But the only problem is staining… … Planks A Lot is a great stainer and so does Mermaid’s Tears. (Dear Planks A Lot, thanks a lot for staining my nails!!!!!) I used Sally Hensen’s Hard as Nails as basecoat so I’m wondering whether the problem lies in my basecoat or the polish itself. All swatches are 2 coats of polish with no top coat!

I’ll do another post to feature Silver Shatter on all of the polishes from the POTC collection because I don’t want an overwhelming of photos in one post. I hope I can get that post up by Sunday so stay tuned!

For my readers who always ask where I get my OPI polishes: I got these polishes from Tammy, she’s so great in my polish orders and I love her for that! I’ve been buying from her ever since my polish obsession started, way back in 2009! 😉

I hope you guys have a lovely Friday, time to gear up for the weekends!

CND The Look Spring/Summer 2011: Perfectly Bare & Perfectly Bare Shimmer Swatches and Review

Phew… what a long title this is! So I got my Transdesign package in the mail from Hazel which I purchased a couple of the OPI Designer Series, a big bottle of Seche Restore, Seche Rose and of cause, CND The Look for Spring/Summer 2011! The sad thing is…. one of my OPI Designer series got broken in the mail!!!! Goodbye OPI DS Classic 😦 Look at the hot mess, booooooo

CND The Look for Spring/Summer 2011 features 2 nail lacquers in nude pearly shades. ‘S-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-. It may all be a dream. Hues are fragile, with a delicate sheen to match. Wear them like a whisper as the summer shadows grow long’. Alot of nail polish companies are featuring light nude shades for Spring 2011 , it seems like mannequin hands are the rage right now! Deborah Lippmann (Naked), OPI (San-tan-tonio) and Misa (9 to 5 collection) did include nudes in their collections too.

Perfectly Bare is a flesh toned nude leaning slightly towards pink.

Perfectly Bare Shimmer is a nude pearl peachy shade with specks of silver glitter. It has a slight duochrome too, which flashes pink.

Obviously the colours is not standing out because this is an effect polish. Lol, don’t comment on my yellow nails please >;(

I love Perfectly Bare on my skintone. Its a perfect sandy nude pink colour, perfect for working ladies! (Hehe I’m wearing this to work today!)

I honestly thought that Perfectly Bare Shimmer  was going to make the overall mani worst but  I think I’m 50/50 on this one. I don’t love it, I don’t hate it. It does make a teeny weeny bit of difference but not much. I prefer this in creme, not shimmer. I did one coat of Perfectly Bare Shimmer over Perfectly Bare.

I honestly think CND is a little bit overpriced. It cost about USD5 for a CND polish and USD5.75 for an OPI polish. Even though OPI is more expensive, the quantity in the bottle is so much more, 15ml for OPI and only 9.8ml for CND. Anyway, overall I really love Perfectly Bare but just not its counterpart; Perfectly Bare Shimmer. But you can’t get one or the other without buying the set… … … (I think!)

MAC Jeanius: Biker Blue Nail Lacquer Swatches and Review

I bought MAC Biker Blue two days ago, the same day which I bought OPI Shim-merry Chic. I finally saw it retailing at the MAC counter because weeks before, Frayed to Order was always there and I didn’t want it at all. Frayed to Order is a white matte with soft pink duochrome pearl. I didn’t want another pearl shade and matte definitely isn’t my favourite finish. (maybe I’ll pick that one out just because I want to complete the collection! I’m a weirdo) Polishes from this collection retail for $22 because they’re limited edition. I managed to get the last bottle of Biker Blue at Orchard Tangs, lucky me!

MAC Biker Blue is said to be a black base with purple and blue pearl and a frost finish. WHAAAT??? I definitely didn’t see any purple pearl or shimmer in the polish and neither does it have a frost finish. Here’s my take on this polish: this is definitely a blue shimmer in a black base. THAT’S IT. NO PURPLE PEARL OR FROST FINISH. In my opinion, this polish does stand out because of the crazy blue shimmer but not unique at all. I wish it did have purple in it. It’s like in the same family as China Glaze Ruby Pumps only that its blue.

With flash (under sunlight):

Direct Sunlight:

The sun wasn’t that strong today so I apologise for the bad pictures! They can’t seem to capture the beauty of the blue shimmers too. 😦 Application was great, formula was abit runny. I did three coats of Biker Blue and one coat of Seche Vite. Since the formula was runny, I can’t seem to cover my nail tips.