Hello all 🙂 I have a lovely autumnal purple for you all today:

Hello all 🙂 hope you’re all doing alright?

I’ve never been a huge nude-lover (polish-wise!) largely because there’s something just a bit funny to me about the whole mannequin-hands look – like the nail bed is longer than your finger… huh? Anyway, Ciaté My Fair Lady came free in an August issue of Marie Claire. I wasn’t overly keen on it to begin with due to the aforementioned aversion to nudey nails but it was Ciaté so I wasn’t going to pass it up 😉 And I have to say it’s totally grown on me – probably because it’s so sheer that at 2 coats you can still see the nail line, and it’s slightly more pink than my natural nail colour without being a creme so it looks quite nice… here I am, waffling again. Anyway, hopefully you get my drift!

So I wore ‘My Fair Lady’ for a day and then was still feeling in the nudey nails mood, but I wanted to add just a hint of sparkle. Enter Claire’s Accessories Gold Glitter! Observe:

I absolutely love it. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (mmm tea…) but I kind of feel very sophisticated and polished with it on 😛 I sometimes get a bit tired of brights and darks and feel like my nails need something a lot paler to balance me out, and this did the trick nicely. Don’t get me wrong, My Fair Lady was lovely on its own but this kind of has that extra oomph without being too ‘look-at-me’. It’s kind of subtle but shows that you pay attention to your nails 🙂 and nice and work-appropriate too. More waffling…

So, My Fair Lady applied beautifully, glided on my nails perfectly (the Ciaté brush is a godsend… explained here) and while it’s very sheer, that’s exactly what I want in a nude polish, although I know that most people don’t feel the same way! I’ve worn this before with 4 coats and it still wasn’t totally opaque. It dried quickly too which is good. It’s also not quite nude, it has more yellow and a hint of pink, kind of like the inside of coffee chocolates in Thorntons 😛 I wore 2 coats. Also it lasts well, 2 days later and I still don’t have any tip wear. It covered up/evened out my nasty stainage nicely too 🙂

I have two niggles with the Claire’s Gold Glitter. For these nails, one of the niggles turned out to have a nice effect actually – what I can only presume is supposed to be a clear base has turned a kind of orangey-pink colour in my bottle. It was this way when Andy’s family kindly gave it to me for my birthday, but they also gave me two other Claire’s Glitters which both have clear bases so I think it’s meant to be clear! If I had really cared about preserving the base colour in the look I would have minded, but actually it gave a nice warm peachey glow to my nails so that was actually quite nice :). You can see the difference between My Fair Lady’s bottle colour and the colour of my post-glitter nails in the 2nd photo.

My other niggle is that the glitter doesn’t spread all that evenly but it’s not such a problem as the polish dries super fast so you can just go over it again until you have the desired effect. I actually only used the 1 coat for this look. It does dry a little grainy so it’s worth having a topcoat handy if that bothers you.

All in all I’m very pleased with both polishes as well as the overall look of my nails 🙂

I realise that My Fair Lady obviously is no longer available as it’s not part of Ciaté’s permanent line, but there are a few floating around on eBay here. And pretty much all Claire’s Accessories shops stock the Gold Glitter amongst many other fabulous looking glitters (oh and did you know they sell Justin Bieber’s Nicole By OPI range?! Me neither!).

Hope you’re doing alright my lovelies, I know I promised a giveaway but I now only have 99 followers because 2 people unfollowed and 1 person followed so I feel a bit of a fraud doing a 100 follower giveaway haha so there’s just 1 person to go!

Emma x

Disclaimer: Everything mentioned in this blog post was either bought by myself with my own money, or given to me as a gift from friends/relatives. All opinions expressed here are my own.

So, it’s been a while… I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get round to posting because I love my blog and I’ve had my nails painted with new polishes practically every day since I last posted, but for some reason I just haven’t had the motivation to blog. Anywho, I’ve missed you all 🙂 and I have a lovely polish in store for this post!

Look what M&S has sneakily produced, all ready for the party season!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had Marks & Spencer pegged as a conservative brand for a more dignified lady. But I have been surprised by their increasingly adventurous polish colours!

This polish doesn’t have a name so I’m going to name it “Cherry Rainbow” 🙂 if you look closely, it’s a pinky-red shimmer, filled evenly with holographic silver glitter. But what’s unusual about this polish (and seemingly impossible) is that the base colour is almost jelly-ish. A shimmer jelly glitter?! It makes it very easy to apply though 🙂 No dragging streaky mess here!

This is 2 coats of the polish, and totally opaque. I really can’t fault the application, the shimmer base made the formula nice and workable, and I barely had to cleanup, apart from where I accidentally slipped and painted my cuticles (user error!)

It dried super-fast, which I guess can be attributed to the glitter in the polish. The polish dried slightly rough and gritty due to the glitter particles but had a wonderful glow due to the shimmer in the base, so you can really wear it with or without top coat. 1 coat of top coat pretty much evens out the nail.

This polish is perfect for Christmas parties! It’s so pretty, the holo reflects in the glitter are even more apparent in person. In the bottle, it doesn’t look like the colour will work with it, but it totally does 😀

And you can probably guess that I didn’t buy this for the lipgloss, but I did a quick swatch for you just in case you’re interested 🙂

The lipgloss is a kind of deep mulberry shimmer which is gorgeous on darker skin tones. It has a doe-foot applicator, but I personally found the lipgloss to be quick tricky to work with – I couldn’t get a nice line around my lips and if I rubbed my lips together I lost the pigmentation in areas and gathered it in others, so I’d recommend that if you’re thinking of buying this set just for the lipgloss, don’t, it definitely isn’t worth it! I suppose the problems could be alleviated with the use of a lip pencil or base lipstick but is it really worth it?

The nail polish on the other hand is definitely worth the whole £6 😉 it isn’t available in their permanent line, so get it while it’s still around! You can get it in several different gift sets, the one I’ve shown you is here (along with another colour choice of gold, which is available as a single polish in some stores) , and there’s a nail gift set of three here, and there’s a nail, lip and lashes gift set here (the lashes aren’t permanent either).

Oh and any Hello Kitty lovers? Check out the M&S (Cruelty-Free!) Hello Kitty range here 🙂

This is a really unique polish, I kind of feel like it’s the cherry pink cousin of GOSH Green Hawaii 😛

What do you guys think? Super duper long post I know, but that’s just me I suppose. How are you all? Everything’s going really well for me at the moment, I’m now fully into my course at Uni and loving every minute of it. I am so so so tired at the moment though due to the very early morning buses I have to catch! I feel in a really good place at the moment though. Hope you are all just as well as me 🙂

Emma xxx

Disclaimer: Everything mentioned in this blog post was either bought by myself with my own money, or given to me as a gift from friends/relatives. All opinions expressed here are my own.