Monday, December 24, 2012

A-England Swatch Spam

Happy Monday! I'm currently down in Melbourne for Christmas, so I didn't have time to do some nail art for today's Aussie Nails Monday :( Instead, I have some A-England swatch spam! I will be showing you Holy Grail (original), Avalon, Princess Tears and Jane Eyre.

This is the original formula of A-England Holy Grail, now known as the limited edition. It's a very yellow-toned gold with visible particles, which makes it quite brush-strokey, but it's also nice and shimmery. This is 3 coats. I don't really like this colour that much, it's too yellow for my liking and the brush strokes put me off. But it's pretty in its own way.

Overcast

Indoors, natural light

Indoors, natural light
 A-England Avalon is a beauty. It's a vibrant purple with pink shimmer. It's like Pretty Serious Poltergeist Puddle but more red toned. The formula is great, and I only needed 2 coats.
Overcast

Indoors, natural light

Indoors, natural light
A-England Princess Tears is a greyed out lilac with a fascinating subtle green/pink duochrome flash and the signature A-England delicate holographic shimmer. I really love this one. My brush was a bit wonky but even with the tricky application it was easy to apply and smoothed out really nicely. I only used 2 coats here but in the photos I can see there a couple of bald-ish patches so next time I'll probably use 3 coats.
Overcast

Overcast


Indoors, natural light

Indoors, natural light
 A-England Jane Eyre is from the Gothic Beauties collection. It is so gorgeous in the bottle with its shimmering purple-maroon particles in an inky black base. But on the nail it's just so disappointing. The shimmer disappears and it just looks black unless viewed in direct light. On the other hand, it has a really good formula and only needs 1 or 2 coats to be opaque.

Overcast

Indoors, natural light

Indoors, natural light

I  really like A-England as a brand, their polishes are beautiful with usually perfect formulas. Some of their more recent releases have been a little bit hit and miss *cough* She Walks In Beauty *cough* but generally they are pretty good! All of the polishes in this post are available from the A-England website for £9 except for the limited edition Holy Grail, which is £5 and will probably run out of stock at some point.
Saturday, December 22, 2012

Aussie Christmas Challenge 11/13 - Gold

I've been falling a bit behind with these Aussie Christmas Challenges due to a combination of being really busy, and laziness. But mostly laziness. Isn't it amazing how little time you actually have to do anything when you're working? I went through this thought process when I finished high school - I thought, heck yeah, now that I'm just working 9-5 and don't have to do assignments I'll have heaps of time to be all productive! Yeah, right. And then I went to uni, finished a 3 year degree and went through the whole thing all over again. And here I am, sitting on the couch watching MTV and writing this post, pretending to be really busy.

I borrowed this mani idea from More Nail Polish for today's Gold theme. I used a base of Gloss n Sparkle Above Deck (review post coming soon!) with a gradient of Lynnderella Golden Rules. Unfortunately the sun wouldn't come out to play so I couldn't take a fabulous holo shot.





I really love this mani. I want to wear it on Christmas day but we're heading down to Melbourne for Christmas with my boyfriend's family. That means I can't wear glitter because I need to be able to change my polish without using litres of acetone. What manis do you do when you're travelling?
Thursday, December 20, 2012

Nubar Sapphire - Swatches and Review

I bought Nubar Sapphire in a blog sale and it confused me for a while. In swatches, it looks like a shimmery metallic base, but in the bottle it was a rather unimpressive blue jelly with sparse blue glitter. It sat in my drawer for a while before I finally decided to drag it out to get the swatch over and done with. I am so glad I did, because it is gorgeous!

Sapphire is a blue jelly with multi-sized tiny blue glitter. The jelly base has a subtle shimmer to it, but it's definitely not as shimmery as the other swatches floating around. Maybe there's different versions? The sheer base lets the multiple layers of glitter peek through and makes it more sparkly than shimmery. The formula was surprisingly good, it wasn't too watery or too thick, and evened itself out nicely. This is 2 coats.

Sun

Sun

Indoors, natural light

Monday, December 17, 2012

Gloss n Sparkle Cotinga - Swatches and Review

I received my first ever Gloss n Sparkles from my Aussie Nails Secret Santa last week! I don't have any polishes by this Aussie indie brand, so I was really excited to try them out.

The first one I tried was Cotinga, a pretty combination of blue, aqua, teal, turquoise, lavender, purple and silver hex and shredded glitter in a clear base. I really like the shredded glitter, it makes it more interesting than your average glitter bomb. I layered this over OPI DS Fantasy, and the glitter payoff was great. This is only one dabbled coat. I also found the formula to be very smooth, needing only one coat of top coat to be perfectly smooth.

Sun

Indoors, natural light

Indoors, natural light

Indoors, natural light
Here is DS Fantasy on its own:

Sun
Gloss n Sparkle polishes are available to Australian ladies from the Gloss n Sparkle etsy store, and international shipping is available currently from Shoppe Eclecticco and soon from Llarowe.

What do you think? Aussie girls have got magic nail polish making fingers haven't they? The other Gloss n Sparkle I received is Above Deck which I will hopefully be showing you soon!
Saturday, December 15, 2012

OPI Fly - Swatches and Review

OPI Fly, like Did It On 'Em, is from the Nicki Minaj collection. Fly is almost everything I wanted Butter London Slapper to be - bright, fun, super shiny teal creme! While Slapper let me down by leaning predominantly green, Fly leans blue. It's such an on trend, awesome colour. Love it!

This needed 3 coats to be completely opaque but applied very smoothly and dried quickly. I wore this as a full mani for a week and only experienced minor tipwear.

Sun
Sun
Friday, December 14, 2012

Pretty Serious Christmas Without Snow Collection - Swatches and Review

(I'm having a blog sale, check it out!)

Pretty Serious have just released their Christmas collection for 2012! Based on an Australian Christmas, it's aptly named Christmas Without Snow. All of these polishes are very different to the usual holiday collections we see released around this time of year by brand name and indie labels alike. Despite this, they have still managed to capture the essence of all the unique components of what makes an Australian Christmas truly unique!

Firstly, a mention of the packaging. Pretty Serious polishes are contained in a cute little box with their mascot, Daphne, printed on the side. Recently they have started changing the boxes a little to suit the theme of some collections. Last time they produced holographic green boxes for their Halloween collection, and this time they are holographic red with a Christmas themed print. Daphne has had a makeover too, and is now wearing an adorable Christmas outfit. I love the extra finishing touches that Pretty Serious add to their collections - it makes them seem very polished and it's obvious the amount of care and effort that goes into everything.

L-R: Santa's Sunburn, Blue Gums on Boxing Day, Twinkling Lights, Seasonal Sunset, Hot Summer Nights, Party by the Pool

Now onto the swatches!

Party by the Pool is a turquoise jelly packed with tiny green and blue glitters. It's quite sheer, I used 3 coats, although the VNL is not so visible in real life. Also keep in mind I have extremely white tips. I don't know why, but it's kind of annoying because they're really obvious in photos. As with all jellies, the formula requires a bit of patience to apply but it's nothing too difficult. I think it perfectly captures the effect of sparkling pool water, or even the ocean, because let's face it - if it's summer in Australia you're either by the pool or at the beach!

Sun
Shade
Indoors, natural light

Santa's Sunburn is a warm toned red with silver micro glitter. Let me just say... Holy One-coater, Batman! These photos are all one coat! That's right, just one, super quick drying, glossy coat! In the sun the beautiful golden glow comes out to play. One weird thing about this polish is that when I applied top coat the silver shimmer just disappeared.

Sun
Shade
Indoors, natural light

Blue Gums on Boxing Day is a perfect eucalyptus green with blue shimmer. For those who don't know, a blue gum, or gum tree, is another word for the native Australian Eucalyptus tree which is basically everywhere. The story goes that when Captain Cook first discovered Australia, he wrote it off as a colonisable country because the twisty Eucalyptus trees were absolutely useless for boat-building. And so it lay, unoccupied (well, except for the native Aborigines whose home it really was), until Britain decided they needed to offload their convicts somewhere really far away where they couldn't get into more trouble. Interestingly, these convicts who came to Australia got a pretty good deal because when they were released, they were given pieces of land which were pretty much "from here to the horizon", just because there was so much freaking land.

But I digress. Blue Gums on Boxing Day is beautiful! The blue shimmer is nice and strong, just the way I like my shimmers. The formula is very easy to work with. It could be opaque in 2 coats but I used 3 here just to be safe.


Sun
Shade
Indoors, natural light
Indoors, natural light

Hot Summer Nights... I am speechless. What a beauty! A midnight blue with blue and silver glitter suspended through it, this colour is just perfection. It's dark, but doesn't look black. The formula is a little thick but it evens out nicely, and this only needs one coat. I've used two here. It does dry a little dull and gritty so a top coat is recommended, although it also does that weird thing like Santa's Sunburn where the silver glitter disappears. On the other hand, top coat enhances the vibrancy of the blue glitter.

A quick note on the name - I actually hate summer nights here. Apart from the stifling heat which means you have to sleep with no sheets and a fan on, it also means HUGE Christmas beetles! They fly around your windows, continuously bumping into them, crawling all over your fly screens, getting in through the cracks or whenever you open the door, flying around your house, falling into your food, bowls, clothes, handbags, shoes, sink... For the last couple of nights I've had to switch off all the lights in the house and sit in the dark in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, just to avoid the insanity of it all. Then in the morning I have to deal with sweeping up their crunchy dead carcasses, because they all drop dead overnight. Charming .

Sun
Sun
Shade
Indoors, natural light


Seasonal Sunset is a vibrant russet brown with bronze, gold and red particles. The particles are really interesting, I've never seen anything like them before. They're kind of like teeny tine bar glitters. This is going to sound gross but the best way to describe them is that they remind me of the stubble hair my boyfriend leaves in the sink after he shaves. The overall effect reminds me of wood chips in Autumn.  The formula is great, I've used 3 coats here.


Sun
Sun
Shade
Indoors, natural light


Twinkling Lights is a combination of small blue glitter with bigger copper glitter in a clear base. This is definitely a glitter topper as it doesn't get opaque. The formula was a little thick, and I used dabbled coats for the best result. This is 3 coats on its own.


Sun
Indoors, natural light
Indoors, natural light

And here is one coat layered over Hot Summer Nights. Stunning!

Indoors, natural light
Sun

Another fantastic collection from Pretty Serious. My favourites are Blue Gums on Boxing Day and Hot Summer Nights. I was super excited by the preview photos of Twinkling Lights but in person it doesn't quite live up to my expectations. It's still pretty though. Which ones are your favourites?

The Christmas Without Snow collection is available on the Pretty Serious website for $9.95 each, and you get a 10% discount if you buy the whole set.

P.S. I'm trying out a new style of photographing my nails. I'm trying to pull the camera back a bit so it shows a better idea of what the polish looks like on the hand, if that makes sense. What do you think?

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...