watermelon

Last night, I had wanted to get a mani in before bed, but I kind of fell asleep after my base coat. (That sounded funny even as I typed it LOL)

Then this morning, I woke up a little later than I intended to, and I was rushing. BUT I COULDN'T LEAVE THE HOUSE WITH BARE NAILS. AGHH. So I opened my cabinet and grabbed the first pink I saw: Essie's Watermelon. I got this a while ago and hadn't tried it. So I did.

AND IT WAS, ONCE AGAIN, A ONE-COATER.

(What is with me and this lucky streak of one-coaters?)

It went on smooth like silk. A bright, poppy pink that had a touch of neon in it, because the camera couldn't pick up the brightness of the pink. I used one coat, put on a necklace, slipped on my Converse shoes, and put on a coat of Seche Vite. It was literally a 5 minute mani!

Thank you for brightening my day, Watermelon. You're juicy and silky and dry to a high-gloss creme and you bring a little color back into a much needed fresh new week. :D

raven

Sometimes, only black will do.

starry starry night

Every morning when I open my polish cabinet, I'm greeted with rows of pretty colors. One particular polish stands out -- it is not the loudest color, nor the flashiest color. But it is always the first one I set my eyes on. Behold the most prized gem of gems in my polish collection, the queen bee of my polish hive, the apple of my polish eye in my little polish cabinet: Essie's Starry Starry Night.

I won't lie: I spent the fortune of an extremely small island to obtain this. If you ask me, I'll tell you it's absolutely worth it. Everyone has their vices and things they will go great lengths for. I have several of those and one of them is nail polish. But hey, I'll let the pictures do the talking:

^ I started with my nails bare. Look at that label! It's old school Essie! :D

^ Look at that gorgeous sparkle peeking through. This was 8am this morning.

^ On the side of the bottle is this beautiful glob of silver glitter. It looks like the MILKY WAY!!

^Here it is after 1 thin coat. I LOVE jellies, and this navy is SO blue.

^ The sun wanted to say hello through my window. After 1 coat. And then:

^ Here it is. After 2 coats. Done. _insert dreeeeeaaaamy sigh_

^ If it was ever possible to capture the night sky into a bottle, this would probably be it.

^ The night sky. In the sun. :D

^ After 1 top coat of Seche Vite on top.

^ Starry Starry Night on my nails, and IN MY RING! An ingenious creation by Tracey from GingerKittyDesigns. I got myself one of Tracey's fabulous rings when I first found out about Starry Starry Night, thinking to myself that I would never be able to personally own a bottle myself. Now I don't have to keep looking at Starry Starry Night captured in my ring... it's on my nails too! :D

^ Starry Starry Night in 11am sun.

^ Just putting on this color can magically make it a good day for me.

Starry Starry Night was a very smooth jelly to apply and I only used 2 coats. I really enjoyed "building up"the night sky effect with the jelly base. It was everything I had dreamed of and heard of!

Again, don't give up if there is something you long for and want really, really, really bad. You just have to keep looking relentlessly. In the meantime, to satisfy your craving, you can get one of Tracey's fabulous Starry Starry Night rings here.

NARS fall limited edition skinny!

Here they are, here they are! It's true, IT'S TRUE!! I got this directly from NARS in my inbox this morning. How can I resist!! Exhibit A:

OMG OMG OMG. BREATHE. BRRREEEEEEATHE.

NARS, I love you. Dreams do come true. Thank you for showing me that if you dream about something long and hard enough, it WILL come true... cue MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, ZULU, FULL METAL JACKET!

What a beautiful Friday it is.

hard rock party

The other day, I was walking around Seibu and I came across a little nook that sold JESSICA nail polishes. There was a whole wall lined with Jessica polishes, all the pretty colors of the rainbow. Yaaay! Jessica in Hong Kong! But no, I didn't walk away with any. Instead, another nail polish caught my eye, by the name of a brand called YMCK professional. I have never heard of YMCK before, and they were a small boutique line from France, apparently.... and they only had about 45 colors. I adore their brand name, being the geek that I am... and this really pretty, light teal color caught my eye. I flipped the bottle over and the name of it was "Hard Rock Party." Pretty cute! So I bought it, along with another color, a dusty inky blue called Marine. (It was around US $10 per bottle... so that makes it a boutique polish, I think.)

Anyway, I tried out Hard Rock Party tonight:



Ooooh, you must be thinking. Pretty, right? What if... what if I told you that this was, again, a one-coat wonder? An absolute glossy creme dream?

Cuz it is. :D


^Not to mention the cute little clear swirly applique sticker on the bottle top!


^Go on. ENLARGE. Sigh with me... yeah, that's right.


^I did a little digging, and here is the collection where Hard Rock Party is from. This was a 2009 Spring Collection called Punk Rock. From the top, Let It Rock, Street Dance, Punk Up, and Hard Rock Party. Names are a bit boring, but the colors look gorgeous!

Application: it was SO smooth. For a polish that I've never heard of before, I was really surprised... and utterly giddy about the smooth application. I felt like I just ate a whole box of Turkish Delight all by myself. Aaaahhhh. OH. Also. All of their polishes are 4-FREE. (No formuladehide resin, toluene, dibutylphtalate and camphor.)

I'll be going back and looking at their other colors... I'm now a fan! Expect to see more YMCK polishes on here. :D

Sorry...did I mention THIS WAS A ONE-COATER? (This was a one-coater.)

jelly apple

There are few things that are as satisfying as a nail polish whose application is so buttery smooth, soo creamy, sooo effortless that it feels like liquid second skin on your nails.

And then, imagine all of the above - but in 1 coat.

One single coat only.

Collective dreamy sigh.

Essie's Jelly Apple is one such beauty. I can't even describe it. Observe:


^ONE coat.


^You heard me.

Did you see that? Go on, click on it. ENLARGE. It is a SINGLE COAT JELLY that is dripping with good.

Then, I got in this sparkly kind of mood. I'm usually not a sparkle girl. But I was tonight. So I put on a coat of Essie's Silver Bullions. Exhibit B:



Yeah, I heard you sigh.

Only, the full name of this should really be Silver "Candy Man" Bullions. Remember that Candy Man song, that goes -

Who can take a sunrise
Sprinkle it with dew [...]
The Candy Man can
cuz' he mixes it with love
and makes the world taste good

Yeah. That's how I felt about Silver Bullions.

The same can also be said about China Glaze's Ruby Pumps, which is then painted over the Silver Bullions>Jelly Apple:



Who can take a rainbow
Wrap it in a sigh
The...

...Ruby Pumps can.

Excuse me while I go take a nap on a fluffy pink candy cloud with red and silver glitter and all that amazing shit...

jade in five ways

...because you can never get enough of this color.

Here it is in five different photos this week as my mani.

^Jade and an Oreo.

^Jade and my wallet.

^Jade and my favorite M&Ms: seasonal mint crunchy shell!

^Even my two kittehs, Snowy and Toto, can't resist Jade.

^Jade and my lip balm.

Now that I have so many colors to play with, I seldom go for the same color for more than 2 days. But it is now day four, and I'm still loving Jade.

It doesn't get old. Mad love! Happy sigh.

PAM, this post is for you. :D

chanel jade

Once in a while, you'll come across a particular color that is so special, so pretty, that you can't help but oogle and marvel and stare at it giggling like a crazy all day.

If love could come in the form of a mailed package, this would be it.

Chanel's Jade.

The shimmer. Oy, the shimmer. You can probably call it micro-shimmer or micro-sheen. It's bright green and pink and happy and, sigh, I can't continue.

I hope my bottle never runs out. This is now one of my favorite colors. I could wear this all summer long, and wear it in the fall AND winter, and I will never get tired of it.

I believe every girl should have a bottle of this. It is that pretty.

It really IS that gorgeous.

And I consider myself extremely lucky to have this in my collection. :D

spontaneous julieanne ruffian!

Whee... tried my first ruffian manicure, it was pretty easy, just adding a thin coat of another color onto my current mani.

Violet creme is China Glaze Spontaneous from yesterday, dark glittery purple is Zoya's Julieanne.

Did I mention I love my nails short? Short short short.

spontaneous!

Lord, what I said about orange in my previous post could easily apply to purple as well.

You see, growing up, purple was everyone's favorite color but mine. My mom's, my aunt's, my friend's, I mean, even those gosh darn Sweet Valley twins and their stupid (BUT AWESOME) Unicorn Club had to wear something purple everyday.

Everyone, but me.

WELL, MOVE ALONG, EEYORE, because I'm totally loving purple right now.

China Glaze Spontaneous, I have you to thank.

This is such a muddy, pretty creme purple. I debated between Grape Pop and this one, and I picked this one. (Um, I ended up getting Grape Pop later, too. TOUGH DECISION FAIL.)

This color makes my nails look effortless and full of bright, happy purple awesomesauce.

I've finally made friends with purple.

if orange juice were a nail polish...

...this is what it would look like.

Seriously, it doesn't get any cheerier than this color. This is Zoya's Jancyn, and I need a little sunshine in my life at the moment, because the verdict is out: I have BRONCHITIS! This explains the chronic coughing! That stayed on for weeks!

So to cheer myself up I put this on, to make myself feel productive and useful - in the nail-painting department, that is. I've given up motivation and joy to do anything else other than sleep, eat (but a few mouse bites,) work on my translations and paint my nails. It's been very therapeutic but I feel so digustingly groggy that it leaves me little to no attention span to do much else.

Here it is, then: a bright, cheery color, just like orange juice. A year ago, I would have looked at this color with DISDAIN and said to myself, oh hellnaw. There is no way I'm going to wear that color on me nails. I just can't pull it off. Now, I can't stop experimenting with new colors such as this one.

This was creamy smooth and 2 thin coats did the trick, topped with Seche Vite.

an ode to Seche Vite

Dear Seche Vite,

I just wanted to write this entire post about you. You see, I love you. That's how simple it is.

I have two rabbits that chomp on hay like it's going out of style, and when I feed them hay after my manicure, I am astonished that my nails come out of the hay bin completely dent-free and perfectly shiny - keeping well in mind that I had only done my manicure 15 minutes prior.

Happy sigh. Seche Vite, you're truly a nail girl's BFF.

Love, Me.

^ My cat Toto agrees with the atrocity of the hay's hardness, which normally would equal instant manicure death; (just LOOK at those stalks!!) PeeWee and The Joker, my little bundles of fluff.

heli-yum

Instead of "Heli-Yum", an obvious play on the word helium related to balloons from China Glaze's Up and Away collection, this poppy neon pink should really be called HELLA YUM, because that's how I felt when I put this on.

So... I'm still sick. I had to go to the hospital where they have a 24hr out-patient department, to get this fever out of my damn body. I also have not stopped coughing. It's week 4. This is just annoying now. Don't you hate it when you can't do anything about your body besides let the virus run its course!

But the color of this creme makes me happy. This was an amazing ONE coat. It's so smooth and richly pigmented, it was opaque in one coat! I love how bright is, it's a darkly neon pink that just screams at you. I love it.

In other polish-related news, I have amazingly managed to acquire a bottle of Chanel's Jade. It's making its pretty way to me at the moment, and will be here in a week or so! Words can't describe the excitement. :D

schiap

What a lovely color this is! It's Schiap by NARS. The first time I saw this color I fell in love. It's such a pretty, powerful pink. Here's a fun fact about the name, in an interview with Francois Nars:

"What's the story with your Schiap lipstick and nail polish shade? Why do you think it's so iconic for your brand?

NARS: It's named after Elsa Schiaparelli, the designer who's also the grandmother of Marisa Berenson. She invented the shocking pink in the 30s, which propelled her to fame. "Schiap" was her nickname. We worked hard to make it as close as possible. It's a bright bright bright pink--not Barbie pink, nor Pepto Bismol pink."

Aww. With a fun fact like that, what's not to love? Here I am with Schiap, in 2 thin coats:

Such a happy, gorgeous color! :D

NARS (*(#*&($*@&(#*!#!) AAAGGGHH

NARS is re-releasing these beauties! I literally SQUEALED when I saw this. AGH!! From left: Mash, King Kong, Midnight Express, Zulu, Full Metal Jacket.

The apple of my eye in this group is MIDNIGHT EXPRESS. It's on my List. Go on, click on it, you know you want to. The little tab on the top of my page.. my list of wants. Midnight Express is on there.

I can't even contain myself. This is too much. This fabulousness comes out in the fall. Happy, happy sigh!!!!! :D

Source: Sweet Life

first buff!

Happy, happy sigh. I can't believe it took me this long to do this, but I did it: I buffed my nails! :D

I cannot believe how much I LOVE having them buffed. They feel so smooth to the touch, no ridges, and by the time I got to the shine, oh wow. I mean, it looks like I have a coat of clear polish on. Um, what? How did I miss out on the wonderful fabulousness of buffed nails before?!

This all happened when I picked up an OPI buffer out of pure curiosity last week.

^ So... this is what my nails look like bare, pre-buffed. RIDGES GALORE, yikes.

^ The buffer I got was a file-like semi-soft board of 3 sides: the black was the 1st surface that smoothed out my ridges, followed by using the white side. The grey side was the 3rd and final side, that polished the buffed nails to a shine.

^ LOOK AT THAT SHINE. I... I have no words.

This is how I felt the entire time I was looking at my nails:

I'm a believer of buffed nails now! Of course, I am aware of all that Other Stuff: don't smooth out the ridges too deep, only do it once a month, la la la. The results are amazing and I love my buffed nails au natural.