Finger Paints glitter and flakie - which one is your drug?

Heya people! This is going to be rather short, I'm afraid, I'm losing daylight and I really want to go for a walk before I start to study. It's a beautiful warm-but-not-hot day and I want to savour it before it's study time. This has to be my favourite time of the year, when it comes to weather. I'm not hot or sweating just by standing and breathing, the autumn colours of trees are gorgeous, the woods smell divine ... and yes, tea! I went to La Palais Des Thés today for the first time and that shop is seriously amazing. I fell in love with tea they had for try and I had to buy it, it's called Thé du Hammam and the name itself brings so many lovely memories, I simply had to have it. I just drunk a cup of it and it's fantastic. Although Le Palais des Thés is a bit pricey comparing to Cha (my regular source of teas), I love what I saw and the aromas of teas I smelled ... so yummy! Although I am a giant coffee drinker, because I love the taste and everything, I drink almost the same amount of tea when the Summer ends and Autumn comes, and naturally during Winter.  With my regular 2 l of water per day I can only say I drink a lot of fluids on daily basis. o.O

Nail polish, what say you? I have two beauties today that don't get enough attention from me, they are gorgeous. Plus when I saw them together in FP folder I got curious: which one is your greatest drug in nail polish world? Glitters? Flakies? Holos? Something else? I must say, glitter and flakies are pretty darn close for me. Close second, mind you, first two are still glassflecks and duochromes. Some might argue glassflecks are actually glitter polish, so perhaps glitter is a tad bit closer? But I adore flakies, so go figure. If I  might add, I absolutely love cremes to. So basically, Ulmiel, shut the frak up and give us pictures, right?

 To show you the sparkles, this one is really insanely sparkly!

 This is called All You Need Is Color, it came out in Finger Paints Peace and Love Collection for Summer 2011. The collection didn't get a lot of love, but I actually like most of the colours in the collection. All You Need Is Colour has to be my favourite, it's such a gorgeous, gorgeous teal glitter, made from tiny green, teal, blue specks of glitter, I love it. It needed four coats on my nails and two coats of TC for the rough finish. But I'm one of those that believe the final result is well worth the extra layers. I wore this mani for a long time. Oh, the lovely flowers are Depend stickers, I think I've shown them before. I like them, I like flower patterns. :)

Ah, yes, flakies. Man, it's a really close call for me, I LOVE flakies!! Finger Paints Asylum has to be one of my favourite flakie polishes ever, the colours are insane in this one, I loved this mani. I think I actually wore it for a special occasion, I just am not sure which one. Perhaps my birthday? Dunno. Anyway. My nails were beautiful here. *dreamy sigh* Two coats of Catrice Back To Black and two coats of Asylum over it. Asylum was a part of Finger Paints Special Effects Flake Glitter Topcoat collection that came out in the beginning of 2012, was quickly sold out and so I need to once more thank the best swap buddy in the universe for getting it for me. Oooh, flakies are a vein of glitter then? Glitter all around then, ladies! 

Well, not such a short post after all. 

Thank you for reading!

Depend 313

Hello people! I have to show you this colour ASAP. I put it on like half an hour ago and thanks to my newest discovery in TC department (Essence Studio Nails fast drying topcoat - yes, I'm late to the party with this one) I already did the pictures and well ... you know how you sometimes love a colour on swatches but when you have it on your nails the awesomeness it contains blows you away? That's what is happening here. I love this so much I can't stop looking at my nails. 313 has to be the most gorgeous Depend I've ever worn and I never thought I'll see 170 beaten! 

Sorry for the gloomy pictures. I went back to blogging, of course the summer days got all grey and dead, what did you expect? ;) I'm kidding, I don't mind being a tad bit cooler for a change. But pictures are the way they are, lightbox killed the blurple base colour. 

Isn't 313 simply gorgeous? Blurple with green glass flecks, hell yeah Depend, way to go! Three coats for moi, I don't like bald spots plus I think the third coat gives much more depth to the polish. Gosh, I love this one! 

You can get in Slovenia now too. I am a very inpatient person, so I asked Kaneli to get them for me from Finland earlier, thank you, dear! :) Hopefully the other colours from Summer 2012 will get here too, as it seems only this one came so far. Our distributors are weird like that. Anyway. Get it if you can! 

Thank you for reading!

The many faces of Nubar Wildlife

Heya people! How about I show you today one of the Going Green Nubars? I've worn them all now and all I can say is, they are exactly what I expected or even more. Today I'll show you Wildlife with some Depend stickers I've bought a while ago. If you thought layering is the lazy way to do nail art, I discovered nail art stickers bring that laziness to a new level. :) But they are fun and I think they make a good accent nail mani.

Anyway. A few pictures, i wanted to capture as many colours this baby has as I could. 

 The stickers. I wanted to bring some wild life to the Wildlife polish, haha.

 The usual look of the colour.

 But wait! There's more!

 *.*

And the stickers, if you're curious about them. I find them cute, because they're not overdone (like most nail stickers are). Just silver, simple things. Plus I like flowers.

Nubar Wildlife took three coats to be fully opaque. Mind you, for most two would be enough, it's just me being picky. The application was superb, as always with Nubar. I must admit something. Wildlife was a complete surprise for me. I didn't love it much on the photos. I liked it, but I prefered the rest of them over Wildlife. On the nails it took my breath away. I couldn't stop staring at my nails, especially outside. It's incredible. Trully incredible, you need this, if you like duochromes and/or green. I really recommend it. :) 

Do you have Wildlife? Do you like nail stickers or do you think they're a waste of time and money? 

Thank you for reading!

Comparison: A England vs. Depend vs. GOSH

Hello everyone! How have you been? I'm back on my study time. Did I ever mention how much I dislike that? Not just because I can't blog as often, but my far the most because my spare time gets incredibly limited, which means less time with my friends and boyfriend. It sucks. So I've gotten myself 3 more MAC eyeshadows and a Venomous Villains lip gloss with Cruella de Vill, as comfort make up. Does that count? It has less calories than comfort food. Sucks big on the wallet though, even if it was a total bargain. ;) 

 

I owe you this comparison post. I love bright blues and I love glass fleck, so you can imagine I have a few. I compared A England Order of the Garter with GOSH Blue Monday and Depend 252, they felt the closest to A England. I also have Moyra 89, which is much much darker, and Revlon Mint Fizz, which is closer to the base colour of Blue Monday but has much larger particles. So i didn't include them.

Photos taken in the grey light of Ljubljana, like A England pictures were. But I went out on snow without jacket for ya, so snow helped a bit. ;)

 Enlarge this one, it's pretty good.

The photos are left fairly large, so you can see the details better. All of them need three coats for full opacity, Depend too, I don't know what happened on the edges of my nail, it looked fine IRL. GOSH would need a fourth one for my taste though. Which is funny, I remember when wearing it as a full mani three were more than enough ... go figure.

Anyway. Not dupes, of course, very obviously not. Depend 252 is the brightest, GOSH Blue Monday the tealest and A England Order of the Garter the truest blue. The particles differ too, you can see that best on the first picture.

Formula wise A England has no faults, the same goes for Depend. Fantastic formula on both of them, very easy application. GOSH however went a bit diva on me. For some odd reason it gathers on the edges, making my nails look thick. This happened every time with full mani too and I really hate that effect. Plus it would need the fourth coat. It also dries the slowest. Still, i love the colour. I love all three colours, actually. Very good varnishes, I do suggest you get them. :)

Which one is your favourite? Do you have any of them, did any of you have the same problem with Blue Monday?

Thank you for reading!

Wibo 49 and 311

In one of my previous posts Elf asked me when will I show more Polish nail polish. And I thought to myself: "That's right! Where are all my Polish polish swatches??". I wore most of them already, so it's about damn time I show them to you (I did show you one after Elf asked me about it, but the superstars are yet to be shown!). Because there is not a dud in the package Sabbatha sent me. Polish polish is amazing. Yes, I do like that word play and shall use it a lot. Bear with me. ;)

Today I'm showing you two Wibos, the two I got and the two I absolutely adore. The colours are amazing, but the thing that impressed me the most is the brush. Oh. My. Gosh. The brush is perfect. Oh, you'll notice the bottles are different, so are the names. I'm guessing this is similar to Essence having multiple lines of polish, as it seems so does Wibo.

Let's start with Wibo Express Growth 49. It is the surprise part of the package and it's perfect. The colour reminds me of the perfect sea green, that I really wanted since forever. Most sea greens are too blue, this one isn't. It's gorgeous, really. And the golden specks make it even more perfect. 

The perfection aside, it's really hard to photograph. I did so many pictures and videos and in the end only two are so good I am confident enough to call them colour accurate, but they lack the details of the polish. So the first two photos are lightbox and are still a tiny bit too blue. They already capture the colour nicely, but not the best. The second two pictures are the most colour accurate, but as you can see, the details get lost a bit. The video was meant to show you how the golden specks sparkle, but I think i should unfocus it to show it properly. Oh well.

Isn't it amazing? I love this colour, I really do. Plus the formula and the brush make this seriously one of the best polishes in my stash. Polish polish is good! 

The second is Wibo Extreme Nails 311. I think I asked Sabbatha for this one in the last moment, when I saw how beautiful it is on her blog. I'm glad I did. Again, in my notes, the first thing I wrote down was: THIS BRUSH IS AWESOME! Yes, that's how awesome these brushes are. Don't think I'm crazy please, but I'm seriously surprised at the quality of these babies. And the colour is divine, bright blue with silver glass-flecks. Yummy!

I put the blue Depend crackle on Wibo later on, just because I love this colour combo.

It's a perfect summer colour, but I know I'll be wearing it during Winter too. This kind of colours always cheer me up in that dull grey winter mornings. 

What do you think of Wibo and these two? Have you ever tried the brand? I do recommend it!

Thank you for reading!

My two ultimate crackle combinations

Crackled-out, are ya? Yeah ... actually I still do a crackle mani if I think it will look good. Then again, when the crackle effect was the most popular this year I didn't really dive in as I thought I will. So perhaps that's why I still use it. 

When I first heard of crackle effect these two combinations were the first to hit me. My favourite colour combination in clothes department too is black and red. That's the combination. So let's see this one first. 

Elf asked me in one of my older posts when will I show any Polish nail polish. Well, since I always like when you give me an idea what to post I dug up my Polish polish swatches, and I have a lot to show you. Also lots of raving to do. These polishes are amazing. 

Virtual by Joko Lady in Red, from collection Vinyl Mania was a perfect red for the base of my red-black crackle mani. From the moment I put on the first coat I knew this will be my favourite red creme in my stash. So bright, so sexy, so bold! That's a red I can wear!! 

It's also so glossy I had troubles picking pictures that don't have half of our garden on my nails. 

The black crackle I use is p2 Black Explosion:

Lady in Red is a beautiful one coater, I did two just because. The pigmentation is amazing. Amazing, seriously amazing brush too, the application is a complete perfection, seriously, why don't I read about worshiping the brand more often? It deserves a lot of love! The colour is amazing, I wanted to have this kind of red since I can remember, sexy, awesome, bright. Love it! I put then one coat of p2 on and I didn't get bored of my mani for whole 8 days - that was also why I did this mani, in thought of my fantasy vacation, I needed it themed and cool enough for a week without any nail polish change. :) Sabbatha, thank you for this one, it's perfect go-to red!

The second combination is a crazier one. Green and purple. I needed a vicious green and China Glaze Tree Hugger seemed perfect for the job (old post on it). I redid the swatches too, so a couple of them here. 

Man, I loved this combination. I needed three coats on Tree Hugger and wasn't too happy about it, but hey, i *adore* this green. One coat of Depend 5005 over it and my poisonous combo was done. I loved it, wore if for a couple of days straight too. I have to do similar one with red crackle. This one was also inspired by Acetone and Old Lacquer, she did a similar one with two amazing polishes. But then again, her combinations are divine.

What's your perfect crackle combination? :)

Thank you for reading!

Welcome to Slovenia, Depend! *hugs the Depend counter*

It's been almost two weeks since the first notice of Depend in SLO came to me (and I'm guessing to the general nail polish population in Slovenia). There was no rumors about it, not a whisper, nothing. One day I was having coffee with Kaneli and she said she saw the counter of Depend in our local DMs. Needless to say I almost fell off the chair. Depend! In Slovenia?! Holy crap!! I love Depend so so much and now Depend came here? I can buy my bottles like 5 minute walk away from where I'm sitting right now typing this away? I must say, I'm extremely happy about it. What is more, they cost almost half the Scandinavian price, with 1.70€ for regular polish and 2.10 for crackles.  

Naturally I had to buy one, just so I can say I bought one in Slovenia, I picked the purple crackle, since I regreted not ordering it from Finland months ago. Right now the counters are pretty empty, girls are buying them in big numbers. I'm happy about that, since that also means Depend will stick. And what's not to love, anyway? The colours are awesome, brush is great, formula can be a bit tricky, but completely managable. All for 1.70 €. 

You all know my favourite source for Depend is also one of my favourite blogs evah, Alizarine Claws, but just because my colleciton of Depends isn't so small, I'm giving you some more in this post too. Three are missing, I still haven't worn them, bad Ulmiel! 221 wasn't shown on the blog yet, so there's a new one too! With crackle effect on top. 

 221. Photshooting of this beauty is a bit tricky, usually the pictures came out way too blue. It has a little bit of green in it too, this is the best I could do. The application was excellent, it needed two coats only.

Sally Hansen Crackle Overcoat called Distressed Denim. Yes, you see me doing bright-dark blue crackle combination way too often, I know. But I love it. And this crackle is awesome because when you add TC, it gets very jelly-like finish. Love! 

And now those that you've already seen, but I want to show them again. Some swatches are horrible to me now, rookie. And sometimes my nail shape is just WTF. o.o

 Blue Crackle, 5002, my favourite crackle in the world, with or without TC (below you can see the magical shimmer it contains). Upper picture with Brucci Giana's Rockin' Blue, below with Wibo 311.

 Sadly discontinued, but too beautiful not to be mentioned. 170

 209, interesting colour, horrible nail shape. 

 225. The worst formula I've met with Depend.

 19. Classic red, bit boring to me.

 204. Gorgeous one, especially on the sun. 

 228. One of my favourites.

 249. Again, one of my favourites. :)

The red crackle, 5004. Not the best combination, I know. Still, crackle is a great one. Base is Essence Forget-me-not. 

Like I said, I love Depend. The formula can be a bit tricky sometimes, but even if it is, it's completely managable and most of the time it's just fine. I've heard about some drying problems with Depend. I've never, not once, encounter them. Fast drying TC anyone? With TC Depend behaves nice, even if there is slow drying present in the formula. All in all I can only recommend Depend. 

I still have three more to show you, if you count the purple crackle. But I think you had enough. :) 

Do you have any Depend bottles, what are you experiences with them? My Slovene ladies, did you grab your bottles in the first wave or are you waiting for the second round? :)

Thank you for reading!