Nubar Reclaim

Hey everyone! I went missing again but I have enough swatches saved up now to get through to my days off now, so that's good. Today I will show you Nubar Reclaim. This is a lovely green holo with a really great formula, I'm not sure why Nubar hasn't made this in every colour!

I can't remember whether it was two or three coats for the life of me though, sorry!

I just love that linear holographic goodness!! So awesome! 

KBShimmer Get Clover It

Hi there! Sorry I've fallen off the wagon a little bit with my regular posts, I need to have a good swatch session so I have some stuff to show you! I do however have a polish I wore a few weeks ago, KBShimmer Get Clover It from the new Spring collection.

I used two coats over OPI Jade is the New black. It's a good match for the green creme, and I found the glitter to be easy to place where I wanted it!

Green, jelly, circle glitter... This polish is definitely awesome!

OPI Jade is the New Black Swatch- February Untried

Hey! So today is the very last February Untried! I have to say though, I did NOT get through all my untrieds! Ooops! I think I'll have to keep the challenge going next month, maybe one day all my polishes will have been shown some love.

Today I have a classic OPI shade, Jade is the New Black. This green creme is beautiful, I find that it's slightly softer and more blue-toned than the Joe Fresh green I showed last week. Formula was good and I used three coats. My bottle came to me used, however, and it did seem fairly thin compared to my other OPI cremes.

Did I use my commas right in that last sentence? Seriously, let me know if I didn't. For real.

ANYWAY picture time!

Ring finger bump is once again from old glitter, not the polish.

And my skin is so dark because I used self tanner haha gotta get my bronze on!

All in all I really love this green, you'll definitely be seeing more of it! *hint hint, nudge nudge*

As always, go see what Amanda Squared have for today!

Glitter Gradient with KBShimmer

 Hi! So I've been a terrible blogger this week, oops! I finally got some new swatches so this week will be better. I originally put on my base polish to photograph it for the Untrieds challenge, but then decided I wanted to do a glitter gradient with my new KBShimmer polish!

Starting with my base, I put on two coats of Joe Fresh Moss. Like the name describes, this is a great dark, slightly murky green. It makes me think of vegetation and foliage, the murkiness makes it a very "natural" green. Then I added KBShimmer We Three Blings in a glitter gradient concentrated around the cuticle. We Three Blings is actually a glitter from the Christmas collection, but I waited to get it until just recently. I think Harlow and Co still has it for sale!

I can definitely say I love both these polishes! The green is really cool and edgy, and I think the gold glitter is going to be usable year round and not just for Christmas time!

Cult Nails Coveted- February Untrieds

I'm posting this polish as part of the February Untrieds Challenge along with Amanda and Amanda!

Man oh man is this ever an awesome polish!! I have definitely joined the Cult. Coveted came out as part of the recent Behind Closed Doors collection, and as soon as I saw swatches I knew I would be ordering it.

Coveted is a beautiful emerald green jelly with shimmer and green flakes. The flakes don't have a colour shift but they add a beautiful depth to the polish. Because it is a jelly it takes three coats to reach opacity but the formula is great and so easy to control. With Emerald having been declared the Pantone 2013 colour of the year, I'm sure to be getting some use out of this baby!

I did notice some texture from the flakes even after I topped it with Wicked Fast (also my new favorite topcoat) so if you have something like Gelous I would use that overtop to smooth it out. Any stray flakies that are poking off the end of the nail can be filed smooth, and I just pushed any that were poking out by my cuticule further into the polish while it was wet so I could get a nice smooth line.

So pretty! I love green nail polish, do you?

China Glaze Re-Fresh Mint

Hi there! How's everything going today? Watching the Superbowl? I don't really follow sports and I don't have cable, so I spent the day housecleaning and swatching. Yay for lazy Sundays! 

This is a colour I wanted for a long time, I totally have a thing for pastels and ESPECIALLY pastel aqua/mint shades. Mmmmm. I seriously have so many colours in this family and I always catch myself picking up more. 

Re-Fresh Mint was part of the 2011Spring collection Up & Away. I have most of the shades from this collection, they're so great! This is a very pale shade of mint green, with heavy blue undertones. I was afraid it would be close to For Audrey, but it's much, much paler and a little more blue (to my eyes anyway). Formula was a little bit difficult, there was some streakiness on the first coat but I used a thicker second coat and it self levelled pretty well with topcoat.

 
Colours like this make me so excited for spring! Are you ready for spring manis or still rocking the winter shades?

The Lazy 15- Water Marble

Hey everyone! So today we have my mortal enemy the challenging technique of water marbling. Now this is something I'd seen on other blogs and thought was pretty cool, while also being like "Pfffft how hard can it be really? Put some polish in a cup and stick your finger in, I could TOTALLY do that. If I wanted to." Well I am here to tell you today that it is VERY hard really, and no I totally CANNOT do that.

This mani fought me every single step of the way, and I was very close to pulling a /ragequit and going to bed (I foolishly started this project at 11:45 pm.) However I didn't want to bail out of the challenge on the third day, so I steeled my nerves and fought on. The polish wouldn't spread. It dried too fast and wouldn't make a design. I missed getting the design on my whole nail and the white base was showing. I somehow smudged and dented my other nails in the process. My one cat decided he wanted attention and was walking huffily on my desk, dangerously close to my marbling cup. My kitten decided he wanted to torment my other cat and was clambering around my feet and trying to get close to the other cat. Oh yes my friends, it was no good.

I set out from the beginning to only do an accent nail of marbling, because let's be serious. Nail art + me= no bueno. I painted my other nails with Sally Hansen Green Tea because I haven't used it aside from Wednesday's dots. I like it except for that giant paddle brush. The "marble" (term used very very loosely) was done in China Glaze For Audrey because Green Tea wasn't pigmented enough, and with Essie In Stitches. In my first and most spectacular fail, I also tried using L'Oreal Walk on the Beach but it wouldn't spread enough. So I left it out on the second go. And this is what I got! I would try and explain it, but I don't even. Just.... Wow. On the bright side, when/if I ever get passable at water marbling, I can look back and laugh. Right? Right. With that said, here we are.

I just.... give up okay? I'm so sorry. I promise the rest of my posts won't subject your poor eyeballs to this level of fug. But everyone else's marbles are going to look really really good next to mine, so really, you should be thanking me! ;) ;) Haha! Anyway it is now 1 am, I am exhausted, and I am going to pass out on my keyboard unless I get by butt to bed! Can't wait to see everyone else's posts!

Lazy 15- Dots

Hey everyone!
Just a quick post for today, I have to get headed to work shortly. I am TERRIBLE at dots. Partly because I don't have dotting tools, and mostly because I am terrible at nail art! Haha. So I painted a base of OPI Ink Suede and then slapped a row of dots across each nail with my cleanup brush using Sally Hansen Green Tea. And they're uneven, I am the worst at this!

I do like the colour combo. I want to get some dotting tools and maybe with some practice I can get better!
Be sure to check the other girls' manis for today!

Lazy 15- Gradient Mani

Phew!! So this is today's actual prompt, a gradient mani!! I've actually done a few gradient manis and they're one of my favorite things to do, but this is the first one I've photographed for the blog!

I used two colours from the older Color Club Foiled collection, Cold Metal and Perfect Mol-ten. I found they worked really great for my gradient and blended very smoothly! I started with a base of ONE (!!) coat of Cold Metal, and sponged the gradient with Perfect Mol-ten onto my tips. A quick coat of SV to smooth it out and that's all folks! Now that I've done a few gradients I find them very quick to do, especially using awesome pigmented colours like these ones!

What do you think of my gradient? It's subtle but I like it that way! See you on Wednesday for some dots!

Joe Fresh Twilight

Hi everyone! Happy Monday! I hope you're all having a happy Monday anyway. If not, maybe this beauty will cheer you up. I've posted Joe Fresh polishes before, and I have to say I'm impressed with them! They're very affordable, (3 for $10?! Heck yeah!!) good quality, and the colour range is phenomenal. I don't go to Superstore much, but I always spend some time looking at all the different polishes. This one is pretty awesome because it's a FLAKIE!!! Twilight is one polish I make sure to always slip into swap packages because I think it's just so cool, and it's only available here in Canada.

Twilight has a sheer black jelly base loaded with green to orange colour shifting flakies. It does take three coats to reach opacity, but it's soooo worth it. The flakies flash green most of the time, and it makes the polish look like a gemstone! Then at certain angles, bright orange! Man it's great. I can't believe I waited so long to try this out. Because the base is sheer, it could probably be layered, but I like the depth and flakie payoff of wearing it on its own.

You ready? Yeah, you're ready!
All pics are with Nail Tek II basecoat and SV topcoat.

I'm in love.

Then, because I've heard great things about mattified flakies, I decided to throw on my matte topcoat (also Joe Fresh, hey I love a bargain!) and find out for myself.

I still like it, but I think I prefer the glossy look! I definitely will be trying more matte manicures in the future though. So what do you think? Has this steal of a deal stolen its way into your heart? Find a Canadian friend to get it to you, it's worth it! 

A Few L'Oreals!

Hey everyone! How's it going today? It's my day off and I've spent the day doing errands and then working on the blog, I'm loving the new setup! Swatching is way more fun now :)
These polishes I picked up at WalMart a few weeks back, L'Oreal's newish nail polish line seems to have pretty basic colours but I've heard good things about the quality so I wanted to try them out! And I didn't have anything like these two in my stash so I figured I was filling a niche, right? ;)

First up is Walk on the Beach, which is a sandy nude creme shade just like the name describes. I found it to be a very cool neutral, leaning more to the grey side of things than to a warm orangey/peachy neutral. In the pictures it was giving me some lobster hands but in real life it was much better, and I was playing with my camera's white balance. About the formula, it did not live up to the hype. It might be my brush, but the polish kept having these "scratches" in it from the bristles and it didn't want to level out. I ended up doing three coats to try and smooth it but you can still see the lumpiness in photos. That said, it is a great colour and from a distance, you couldn't tell. It's definitely a great palette cleanser!

Next we have Safari Chic, an awesome army green. In the store and honestly right up until I was swatching this, I thought it was a straight creme as well but there's actually some fine silver shimmer in there! It's very very subtle but I thought it was kinda cool! Formula was a bit better on this one, I really only needed two coats but felt compelled to do three (better safe than sorry right?!) This green seems to have a bit more blue in it than some other khaki greens, I wouldn't say it has brown in it at all. I love that's it's faded, muted, but not "dirty" looking. I'm still undecided about the famous ugly/pretty colours and to me, this is just a pretty colour! My skin is a different colour here because I custom set my white balance, so this is perfect!

There you have it, my picks so far from the L'Oreal line! I bet these colours would look great in a nail art look together, maybe one day I'll get super adventurous and do a tape mani, but don't hold your breath haha! Thanks for looking :)

Unusual Combo!

But I think it works! I have these two polishes and I didn't know what to do with either of them. One is Lickety Split Lime, from the Sally Hansen Instra Dri line. This colour I got a couple years ago, probably on a whim. I tried it then but didn't really like it, and I remember it staining badly so I hadn't reached for it since. The other is Revlon Sparkling, which is a warm-toned pink glitter. I think it is a dupe for Deborah Lippmann Some Enchanted Evening. I couldn't decide what to layer Sparkling over, my pinks are mostly cool-toned so they clashed. Then I decided to try a more out-there colour combo, using my neglected Lickety Split Lime!

The formula on the Lime was good and it did indeed dry quickly. The brush in the Insta Dri line takes some getting used to though. I also liked the formula on Sparkling, it's not super thick and gooey like some glitters can be and I didn't have to work too hard to distribute the glitter. I did two coats of each polish, and doubled up on base coat to make sure I wouldn't have staining. Plus a topcoat and voila! What do you think of the combination?? One photo in sun and one in shade! 

OPI Gargantuan Green Grape

This colour I loved in the bottle, sadly the application process was a big fat mess. It took four coats to reach opacity, and the formula was streaky and hard to control. It also took foreverrrrr to dry, even with SV. A few nails smeared badly when I tried to do clean up so I had to repaint them. I tried using a few coats of white polish as underwear to beef up the colour payoff, but nope. Still took three coats on top of white, so that's pointless. 

That all said, the colour itself I really do love. It's a springy and fresh light green. It's too yellow to be minty, but not murky enough to be pistachio. It looks like fake pistachio, like ice cream or pudding! It's definitely a unique colour in my collection. If only the formula was better! But, I like the colour so much, I'll probably still wear it from time to time, like a sucker! Haha. 

Ick. I am so sorry about my cuticles in the pictures too. I had put on cuticle oil like 10 minutes before taking the pictures but I guess they were still thirsty :( And I have no clue what that random speck on my ring finger is. 

First two in sun, third one the sun hid behind a cloud.

HITS Mari Moon Trendy

Well the past week has been pretty eventful! I had been hoping to get a few more posts up, but between the weather, driving my mom to the airport, working like crazy, and getting sick, I didn't get around to it. I'm planning to be more consistent now, especially because two packages of pretties came for me! One from Llarowe, and one from Transdesign! Today I have a polish from Llarowe. It's called Trendy and is part of HITS Mari Moon collection of duo and mulitichromes. I really wasn't expecting to like this one as much as I did. It flashes from a yellowish green to a more grassy color and has a gorgeous metallic finish. Formula wise it seemed fine, the brush was a little thick and hard to control so my coats ended up thicker than I wanted and I have some bubbling in a few spots :( Still a beautiful color! 3 coats with topcoat.
Sorry about my short nails too, I've been having a terrible time with them breaking and peeling lately.

 You can see on my index finger where my nail peeled :(