Angelica Sapphire

Angelica is a relatively new to me brand of polish I first started hearing of it last summer and my little sister bought me some for my birthday in August, so they've definitely been around that long. I only remember seeing mentions to this brand on Irish blogs and a quick google shows the same, although they have a co.uk website with a UK address but sem to only reference stockists in Ireland.  So it looks like if you live outside Ireland you're not going to be able to get you hands on this brand.  In Ireland, this was first stocked in Penneys (the Irish version of Primark) but I've recently started to see it pop up in chemists too.  


The bottles are very like the old H&M bottles except the cap is white not black and contains 10 ml. They retail for €2.75 and there's a pretty wide range for a new brand, there are crackles, glitters, glitters which glow under UV light and I think they are called Jewel polishes, like today's polish.  Angelica are not 3 free, the first ingredient on the list is Toulene and Formaldehyde shows up on the list too, as does camphor, it's not as smelly as I thought it might be though.

Sapphire is dark royal blue polish with silver micro glitter ( only visible in the bottle not on the nail)  and  there seems to be a purple shimmer in the bottle.   The purple shimmer reminds me of OPI Russian Navy, in that it's visible in the bottle but not when applied, and this polish is like a not so dark and more royal blue version of Russian Navy.  On the nail, it has that lovely lit from within look to  it. 

Photo with flash. 

Natural light - No bottle because my mother took one look at it on my nails and demanded to borrow it -  she hasn't returned it yet!

In application, I found the polish a bit gloopy it could probably could have done with a couple of drops of thinner. The brush wasn't as stiff as I would of liked and  it didn't fan on the nail, but application was pretty easy. The wear was quite good on this, I took it off after about 5 days due to tipwear.


Have you tried Angelica polishes or is the fact they are not 3-Free off putting to you?

Cloud Mani - My first attempt

Earlier today, I was catching up on my Google Reader blog posts, when I read this post which linked to Nailside's Cloud Mani Tutorial and then I lost about 2 hours of my life reading loads of posts on this blog! (Silly internet time vortex!) 


Fast forward a couple of hours and I'm sitting in front of the telly, trying to avoid thesis writing (my avoidance and procrastination skills are, alas, too good!) and I started playing with some polishes and ended up with my first attempt at a cloud mani. It had seemed easy enough, even I could do it.....


I hadn't planned on doing this and was just messing around with some polishes, so there's no undies (undercoat) under my  'clouds'.  I'm usually rubbish as nail art but I was quite impressed with the way it turned out, so wanted to post it!

Natural light.

Flash

The teal colour is No 7 Totally teal and the orange is NYC Spring St and I topped it with a coat of Seche Vite. I think the teal looks most true to life in the natural light photo and the orange is more true to life in the flash photo.  I'll do proper posts on both of these soon. I had a little bit of drag with the topcoat on my  ring finger. I'll also point out the colour choice was a bit random as I just chose from the polishes on the table in front of me and it's not intentionally in the colours of the Irish flag. But I guess this could make an appearance during the Euros with a white base and a proper green.