Happy Halloween!

This is not my current NOTD, because I’m at work all day until late evening and don’t have time to change my polish. Nevertheless, I think this is a fitting Halloween homage.

This is Sunblinded, and You cannot buy this polish anywhere. It was frankened for me by a net friend in Sweden, Moonshadow. She doesn’t have her own blog, but participates in a Swedish Beauty network, http://www.pret-ty.se/.

The colour is a fantastic, orange neon infused with gold shimmer. As all neon colours, it is really impossible to capture it in a picture, but notice how the bottle kind of light up my hand in one of the pictures.

Happy Halloween everybody, and be safe out there tonight! :)

Maybelline Two Timer

Good Evening Ladies!

Tonight is dreary dark and chilly and I’m tired.
So I decided to try to perk myself up with a look in my archive. I found this sheer but festive polish, slightly iridescent blue/turquoise Maybelline Two Timer. This is three coats, over base and with Seche Vite on top.

Uptown Girl!

This is the manicure of the week.

One picture is taken in the dying daylight with aid of the camera flash, one is taken in artificial lightning (halogen) with flash. Since it is dark when I leave for work and dark when I return home, if I don’t get a professional “light box”, this is how my photos are going to look during the winter. You (and myself) might just as well get used to it.

In this case, I think I got the polish look spot on. In some light, it looks fairly light rose, and when I first saw it in the bottle, I thought that this must be the most boring colour ever. But, not so!
This lovely Essie polish changes faces with light, and what is soft rose one minute is sophisticated beige the next. Besides that, the polish is a charm to apply. Almost opaque in one coat, two thin coat was truly great and is what I show here, with one coat of base and CG FF on top.

I never had so many “slink moments” with a beige polish as with Uptown Taupe. This makes me feel very sophisticated and uptown indeed! J

Guest Star: PolishPiglet

Time for the second appearance of my lovely hand model Harriet. She really likes my Hello Kitty polishes, so today, we just went on with the same winning concept as last week but with the red polish. It is dark red in the bottle, but with one coat it appeared lighter and closer to the “candy cane” look I had in mind.

A word about these polishes. They are sold at H&M and the two I have tried so far seems to be very good quality for your money. Opaque in one coat, easy to apply. Converted to USD, they are about $3.50 each, and that is seriously cheap in a country that charges about $23 for a regular OPI and up to $40 for a OPI DS.

So, those of you who have a H&M Store nearby, run and stock up. The third HK colour is a lovely, shimmery, dark purple, and Harriet already advised on a design that she would like, involving the purple polish and a gold striper. Gulp!! ;-)

Saturday Night Bling

I hauled a couple of polishes from BarryM recently, and they were waiting in my mail box last night. One of them looked so tempting in the bottle I had to try it immediately. This is one quick coat of Hologram Hexagrams over my one week old, scuffed mani with Love’em Leave’em. Blingtastic!

Love’Em Leave’Em

It is true, I have polish on my nails this week too. I'm just a little slow telling about it. I did not pick any polish from the weekend's polish spree, but stuck to my earlier decision. I present to You: Color Club's Love’Em Leave’Em!

Beautiful polish with just enough holo effect to make it really interesting. However, my bottle was a PITA to apply. Thick and messy, I thinned it since and now it seems to be going on the nail a little better, but if I compare it to my favourite OPI DS Design this is really a case of Love’Em Leave’Em!

Three coats + top coat here.

Picture This

Well, something went wrong with my last post and no picture showed up. Here it comes!

Under the Influence..

Apologies for not updating my blog during the last week.

I've been exposed to intoxicating substances, I have proof of it in the picture above. This was late Saturday night when I just digged in to my most promising box after dinner (I left some wine as a prop - Don’t worry, I drank it all eventually :-D

Introducing Guest Star: PolishPiglet!!

Bonus posting!

This afternoon my very beloved six year old daughter was invited to a birthday party. She wanted to wear one of my new Hello Kitty polishes, but I was hesitant. The colours were blood red, dark purple and black. Not perfectly suited for a six year old girl in my world so I did not make any promises. I tried to distract her by asking me to help unpack a recent order from a on-line-store.

My bad! One of the things she found was a nail art polish in white. With absolutely no coaching from my side, she said: Mommy, if you use this to make cool stripes, I can wear the black Kitty polish without it being too grown up, can’t I?

Well, there is probably always a time when you have to bite the bullit and realize that your offspring is way smarter than yourself. I didn’t think it would happen in the polish field with a girl in pre-school, but there it is!

I bring you now my first guest model, Harriet, 6 years old. The less than perfect nail art is all my fault. This is my first attempt at nail art, and my model was a wonderful, but not always perfectly still 6 year old daughter. Enjoy!

A Craving for Sugar Sugar!

Preparing for a new week, that means a new almost not there polish. This is my only polish from the Misa Sugar Sugar collection. It is Honeybunch.
I bought it after a fellow blogger, Misa Polish, had expressed her happiness with it, using it during final exams when she really did not have the time for a manicure. It’s been sitting quietly in my Helmer ever since, awaiting my attention. This is two coats over a base, CG Fast Forward as top coat.
This polish was a really nice surprise. It’s not fantastic looking in the bottle, and it’s hard to take a photo that really shows it to its advantage. As you can see, it is a sheer whitish shimmer, doesn’t look very noticeable in dim light. But if it catches the sun, you’ve got Bling City on your nails!
I surely got cravings for more Sugar Sugar after trying Honeybunch. The rest of the collection is now firmly secured on my lemming list.

One for the Prince!

Well there it is, I fell in love again!
China Glace No Tan Lines is from a summer collection called Bali Bliss. I’m not sure when it was launched, but it was before 2005. So this is not free of any chemical, and the odour is quite strong. The application was flawless however, a wonderful full but not moppy brush made the polish almost opaque in just one coat. In the pictures are two thin coats over base, with CG Fast Forward on top.

Now, let me tell you about this polish. It is not easy to capture in pictures, especially today as the weather is cloudy, with rain hanging in the air.

That is why, after the first picture in natural light (last of the pictures here), I went to a dark corner of my house and took the rest of the photos using the camera flash. In natural daylight, No Tan Lines looks like a pale gold, with a very subtle iridescence, making the colour deeper at the sides of the nails. Almost like a deep red shimmer can look black at the sides, but of course much lighter and more subtle. Maybe you can pick some of it up in the first picture, otherwise, you’ll just have to take my word for it ;-)

In artificial light, this polish transforms itself like Cinderella making ready for the ball. Suddenly, there is a world of shiny, gold sparkle in the shimmer, and it turns from a light and washed out gold to pure 24 k! And if you look up close, you will find a fine holo glitter throwing little sparks in all the colours of the rainbow! That’s when the polish really stuns you. More on the close up view later.
No wonder I’m in love. I have a spare of this colour, and I was going to put it on my exchange list, but I rapidly changed my mind. This is for keeps, I need a back up!

It might not be the most work appropriate polish in the world, it looked much more subtle in the bottle. But now that I’ve seen the beauty of it, no way I’m taking it off. No Tan Lines stays on, and I guess I’ll just show my beautifully manicured third finger to anyone who complains about it (naw, just kidding.. ;-D )

Word of advice ladies: If you plan on spending the day under crystal chandeliers, gracefully holding out your hand to have it kissed by a multitude of Prince Charmings...

– Wear No Tan Lines, and you will stun them all!