Revlon Rock

For Christmas, I got 2 lovely Revlon polishes from little sis and bro, called Rock and Star.   Rock is a purple cream and Star is a topcoat with silver and blue micro glitter and holographic hex glitter.  They picked these up in TK Maxx and I hadn't heard of them before, so a little google showed them up on some blogs in Summer 2010, possibly a US only release?.


Today I'll talk about Rock and update on Star tomorrow.  Rock is perfection in a polish, it applies very easily. The pictures show two coats. My camera didn't want to pick up the purple goodness of this polish but these pictures are pretty colour accurate. The bottom picture is maybe a bit dark but it shows the dustiness in the colour of the polish.

Application was fine, the polish was very pigmented and the pictures show 2 coats with a coat of seche vite on top. Also the wear was good on this. I'm really starting to like Revlon polishes and they weren't really on my radar before Facets of Fuchsia.  

Have you tried this polish? Are there any other Revlon polishes I need to check out?

H&M Miss Stone Heart

Today I have for you a H&M polish called Miss Stone Heart, I totes love this name and it's a medium grey kinda stoney coloured creme polish with a hint of lavender. It's a little more grey and dark than China Glaze Agent Lavender, and a little bit darker and more lavender than Orly Mirror Mirror.  

Application is good on this, if a little streaky and it dries a bit matte so you definitely need a top coat with this.  I don't love this new H&M bottle (I'm sure I've said this before!), the large cap is awkward to hold when painting the nails and it never closes flush with the bottle (just like the ELF bottles, which drives me a little bit crazy!)  At time of writing, I've been wearing this polish for 4 days and wear is fine, I'm starting to get a little tip wear but that's about it. 

Chanel Peridot

Happy new year! I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and for those of you back to work today (like me!), the bang back to earth isn't too harsh! 


Today's NOTD is Chanel Peridot, I'm sure you've seen this a million times already. This is my first Chanel polish I bought this more for the name than anything else, as an August baby peridot is my birthstone and I really don't like it in jewellery so why not in a polish. I bought this way back in August and by the time I got around to writing the post, every second post in my reader was peridot related, so I held off posting (for much longer then I planned!). 


 Peridot is a pretty unique polish, but I'm sure dupes will appear sooner or later, a duochrome foil which flashes between gold and green. I've tried my best to capture both  colours in the picture and I think they are pretty colour accurate. 

I thought this was quite work appropriate but I was chatting to my boss this morning and he commented on it, he usually only comments when I wear blue nail varnish. (He always comments on Blue, so much I try not to wear it around him!) I wonder if the duochrome-ness means that it's more eye-catching than you'd expect. Anyway, I love it and that's all that matters. I find the green flash shows better in low light, but the gold is definitely the predominant colour.

The application was pretty ok (better than all those Chanel horror stories lead me to believe anyway!) although I found the long skinny brush a little unwieldy. Foil polishes, usually show up every lump and bump on your nail and this is no different, however the brush strokes aren't as visible as I was expecting, in fact they are pretty non-existent.


The wear on this was actually amazing,  I know Chanel polishes are known for being chippy, but I wore this until it chipped. I was pretty fed up of it by the time I got the chips, it was day 10. I applied over a coat of CND Stickey and then popped a coat of Seche Vite over it.  


There you have it the story of my first chanel, not as bad as I thought it would be!   Do you have it? Love it? Hate it?  

It's begining to look a lot like Christmas.... part 1

With the festive season, galloping closer and closer (seriously time seems to be flying by) my mind turned to present buying and I thought I put together some kind of gift guide.  I thought I'd be obvious and start with a bit of  nail theme and thanks to a tweet from Stephanie from Imperfectly Painted, I have the craziest nail related gift I've seen to show you.


For the polish lover:


The nail brand Julep, started a monthly box scheme in the US, similar to those offered from Birchbox, Glossy Box et al. Every month, you get a selection of their products and they call their subscribers mavens.  So on to the gift, and forgive me if it's out of most of your price ranges (it's totally out of mine!!) , Julep are offering the chance to become a lifetime maven with boxes every month for life, for the bargin price of $10,000.  The full deets are here. If you are interested go with the quickness as there are only 10 of these available. (If my loved ones are reading and have had a recent windfall I know nothing about, this is not what I want for Christmas! - Just so we are clear!) 



Nail polish lovers will be happy with anything that's a little bit different or unusual, that could be a new polish brand or an unusual finish particularly a holographic or flaky polish (that doesn't sound that nice really nobody wants a polish which flakes they want one with flakes in it á la nubar 2010 - see here and here ) 

Cult Nails Iconic - one of my favourite polishes

Here I was going to suggest Cult Nails Clairvoyant, this was originally released as a limited edition called Unicorn Puke (see here for the swatchaholic's amazing photos) but it's sold out, but they still have loads of amazing polishes left and a Black Friday - Cyber Monday offer on, which ends on Monday.  Polishes are retailing for $7.75 instead of $10 and the base coat and top coat are $6 instead of $8, shipping usually costs $8 to Ireland.  Also beware of import duties etc, so don't order too much that you get caught for them (anything less than €22 is ok in Ireland). 


My other suggestion is A-England, they are an English nail polish brand, who have some lovely polishes and some of them are holographic!  They retail at £9 each and have free worldwide shipping. 




For the polish novice:


First up, do your non-nail polish wearing friends a favour, you know the ones who say they never have time to paint their nails and comment that you must have loads of free time on your hands to be able to paint you nails, introduce them to fast drying topcoat and maybe base coat too!

Picture from Seche.com

My personal favourite is Seche Vite  and you can find it on beautyemporium.ie for €9.55 delivered here. (This is one of the new bunch of Irish beauty sites that have popped up lately, I've ordered from them and the service was excellent, my order arrived super quick.)  Other fast dry top coats people recommend are the Red Sally Hansen one, Essence, Poshe and Cult nails. 


Even better, you can put together a mani  kit (well you could buy one but one you put together will be better )  you could pick up a couple of polishes, maybe Essence, Catrice and Elf are all cheap but generally very good (see here, here and here for inspiration).  Add in a nail file, I know glass is best but I could never find one I was happy with, top and base coat as above and there you have it.  You could also add, your favourite hand cream, cuticle remover or oil, toe seperators (although I always use a rolled up tissue), orange sticks, I'm sure there's some things I forgot.   


If you feel that neither of the above ideas will sway them to enjoy your love of all things nail polish, what about a voucher for a mani/pedi.  There are caveats associated with this, never ever give a voucher for somewhere you wouldn't be happy to receive a voucher for yourself and this might just be my friends but I know that some of my friends would consider a pedi as some kind of torture, since they hate people touching their feet and one doesn't even like strangers touching their hand.  


If you think none of the above will win over your friend you better catch the next non- nail related part of the gift guide.  


Is there anything I left out? Let me know! 

I'm still here.....

I've written this post in my head a hundred times but haven't been able to find the right way to do it, so I thought I better write something.  Long story short, my life (mostly work) went a bit mad for the last couple of months and when it finally calmed down I got sick.  So, finally I'm getting back to normal  and I'm going to try and get back to posting on the blog.  I've not had time to paint my nails properly in ages but have still been buying so have a long backlog of things to share. 


Talk to you soon xx

Revlon Facets of Fuchsia

Today's NOTD is Revlon Facets of Fuchsia, a dark purple glitter polish with microglitter and larger hexagonal glitter in an almost black jelly base.  I have to say I picked this up about 4 different times before I bought it, I'd seen the pictures everywhere, I knew that it was dupish to Deborah Lippman Bad Romance (There's a comparison here on Bright Lights Big Color, the base colour of Bad Romance is slightly darker) and everyone loved it but I wasn't sure I even liked it.  Finally, it ended up following me home from Boots one day and I thought I better try it, well consider me surprised, I loved it.  In fact it reminded me of one of my favourite polishes of the last year, China Glaze Mummy May I, except this contains additional hexagonal glitter.

The glitter gives the polish a lit from within type of finish and mean it catches the light all the time but it's still subtle enough for work. The pictures show 2 coats with a coat of seche vite on top, the seche vite more or less removed the glitter bumpiness from the finish but you might need two coats if you wished to eliminate it completely. After the first day of wear I had two tiny chips on the tip of my baby finger and index fingers but the never got any worse and weren't joined my any friends in the five days I wore this polish. 


When I bough this it was on special offer it Boots for €6 but I think the usual price is nearer €8, but this gets a giant thumbs up from me, go get it! 


Edited to add: Dollyrouge's comment below reminded me, I forgot to mention removal. It was a giant PITA! It seriously was the hardest polish I've ever found to remove, I have a small bit of L'onglex with acetone remover left (which I can't find anywhere to buy a replacement) and I save it for hard jobs like this and normally it removes glitter polish with ease. Not this one, it was glued on!  


Have you tried this? What do you think?

Essence Choose Me

Today's NOTD is Essence Choose Me. This is a beautiful Blue-y green duochrome glitter polish that reminds me of the sea. It flashes from blue as shown in the below photo, to a sea green (which I couldn't capture at all!) . It's very much in the same vein as Zoya Charla, OPI Catch Me in Your Net and Orly Hayley's Comet, while I don't have those other polishes I believe this a dupe for them.  

And really close up

Application of this was perfect, although I always this the brush is a little stubby on the these colour and go polishes, but it's perfectly fine to work with and it's just me nitpicking, for less than €2  I can live with it!  The pictures show 2 coats topped with a coat of seche vite. Wear was good I got  about 5 days out of this before minor chippage started appearing. 


I have to say this was a grower on me, I loved it in the bottle and was slightly dissapointed when I first put this on first but the more I wore it, the more I loved it particularly the duochromeness of it! 


Have you tried this or one of it's many dupes? What did you think?