EDIT: If you think this polish is a little too harsh, too blue or too brushstrokey for your skin tone, have a look at this much softer substitute: Beauty Without Cruelty Heather Mist

EDIT #2: This polish is now available on the Barry M Website, and in Superdrug, sold at £3.99.

Two things to mention before we press on! Firstly, thank you so much to Andy’s mum Gena for buying me this gorgeous nail polish! Secondly, I don’t know whether this is Superdrug exclusive but I get that impression (if Superdrug kept their site remotely user-friendly I’d be able to deduce for you but you know…) This polish is LIMITED EDITION, and FREE if you spend £6 or more on Barry M Nail Paints (this may include other Barry M products, I’m not sure 🙁 sorry girlies!). Otherwise you can buy it alone for £3.99.

Gorgeous, right? It’s worth mentioning that:

• The brush strokes really aren’t visible at all in person unless you have your nails about an inch from your eyes! – For some reason, my camera’s picked up a load of imperfections which really aren’t noticeable.
• The polish isn’t quite as blue as the photos show, it’s a little more silvery-lilac, but that’s as close as I could get.

Application Tips:

You can pretty much get away with 1 coat. However, from what I’ve experienced, I’d recommend 2 very thin coats as the formula is a little thicker than other Barry M polishes and a thick coat will take a while to dry. Also, try to keep the brush strokes as straight as possible just to avoid any visible brush-stroking, just in case!

I found that the polish dried quickly, which was good, and has that kind of finish that doesn’t really look right with a topcoat 😛 as I mentioned before, it is a little thick, but it’s not really a problem. I can’t really decide whether I’d deem this a pearl or a frost or a chrome finish, somewhere in between I think! Pearly frosty chromey lilac.

Nevertheless, the finish is really lovely, I wasn’t convinced by the silver foil effects Barry M has brought out recently and I know the gold will just look dreadful with my skin tone! But this lilac colour is so pretty, particularly lovely for little girls I think. Well, Christmas is coming up! 😀

I rather love the finish, so much so I now have my eye on China Glaze Metallic Muse in a rather severe way… must… resist!

If I was to give this polish a more interesting name, it would have to involve clouds – it’s just such a calming, relaxing colour!

What do you think of this one? Definitely worth it in my books, even if you get it free and hate it, you can use it for a Christmas present!

I’m getting a little stressed with lots of deadlines coming up at the moment, but I find out my placement details tomorrow so that’s rather exciting! Can’t wait to go Christmas shopping, I’m really getting into the Christmas mood now. Oh, and my mum bought me this lovely cherry-tree fairy light lamp for my bedside the other day – I love it!

Hope you are all doing well my lovelies, have you entered my 100 follower giveaway yet? There are some fab suggestions from two lovely ladies and I’m finding it very helpful finding out what you like or would like to see on my blog!

Let me know your thoughts on Lilac Foil!

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.

Sooo… I’ve always been one of those ‘oglers-from-afar’ when it comes to American nail polish brands (purely because of the price), I usually pick out my favourites, put them on a wishlist then realise the wishlist total comes to £100+ and think “Oh my God, step away from the laptop Emma, put your debit card DOWN!”. So it’s quite rarely that I actually buy more than one polish from a collection, and if I do so, it’s usually long after I’ve seen the collection. But then OPI came up with the wonderful glitters of the Muppets Collection and I am on such a glitter kick that of course, I had to have them! That and the fact that ASOS had a 25% for students day meant that I simply couldn’t resist. I bought three of the six glitters in the collection, the first of these being Rainbow Connection.

I wanted to not only show you Rainbow Connection but also what it looks like layered over different polishes. So here we go 🙂 lots of pics btw, hope I don’t crash your browsers!

Click on the pictures to enlarge!

 

1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats Ciaté My Fair Lady

 

2 coats Rainbow Connection over 2 coats My Fair Lady

So hopefully these pictures give you an idea of how the polish looks alone. As far as I can work out, there are 6 colours involved: orange, yellow, turquoisey-blue, green, red-violet, and silver. There are 2 types of glitter involved – small hexagonal glitter and large hexagonal glitter. It’s important to be aware that this larger glitter doesn’t always lie flat and can catch on things, which is why, every time I’ve worn this, I’ve worn a generous coat of topcoat.

Black: Rimmel Black Cab. White: Barry M Matt White.

Index and middle fingers are both 1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of the base colour. Ring and pinkie fingers are both 2 coats of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of the base colour.

I looooove how it looks on the middle finger!

The coloured glitter really ‘pops’ when layered over the bold black and white – I love this combination, particularly over black.

Thumb to pinkie finger (base colours): Boots 17 Fury, Barry M Spring Green, Barry M Yellow, Missguided Misstaken, Eyeko Saucy Polish.

All shown with 1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of base colour.

Thumb to pinkie finger (base colours): Barry M Cyan Blue, GOSH Attitude, Barry M Bright Purple, Boots 17 Pink Grapefruit, Rimmel Your Majesty.

All shown with 1 coat of Rainbow Connection over 2 coats of base colour.

I don’t know about you guys, but I definitely prefer Rainbow Connection over black, white, dark blue, gold, or silver. Somehow the rest just don’t do it for me, but I hope I’ve helped someone in doing this 😛 I did notice, just by the way, that Rainbow Connection does look a lot better over shimmer polishes than it does over cremes, so maybe I’ll do another post on that soon!

I have to say… there’s something about this one that makes me think ‘treasure trove’! I’m not so keen on Fury on its own as it clashes with my skin a bit, but paired with Rainbow Connection it looks ah-may-zing!

Application:  Rainbow Connection itself is those six different colours of glitter (and 2 different sizes) suspended in a clear base. The glitter is rather sparse, but in my opinion, that makes for a rather good layering glitter 😛 it was quite easy to push the glitter into place if you’re that way inclined, but it does give a fairly even spread of glitter. I have no idea how many coats it would take to make it opaque 😛  It did require quite a thick coat of topcoat to ensure that the larger pieces of glitter weren’t semi-attached and ready to cling onto any loose material it could get hold of. The polish dried quickly so the topcoat requirement wasn’t a problem. I did notice that without the top coat, the clear base seemed to dull the glitter almost, and the topcoat certainly brought it to life!

Now I know that this is VERY similar to Deborah Lippmann’s Happy Birthday, some bloggers go so far as to say they are dupes, but after careful research on Google 😉 I discovered this wonderful Happy Birthday vs Rainbow Connection comparison. So for those of you who are wondering, the general consensus is that they are not dupes – the hexagonal glitter in Happy Birthday is considerably smaller than in Rainbow Connection.

This one will be PERFECT for the party season! 😛 I personally loooooooove this polish to bits, and I have had so many compliments on it at university. People have started paying attention to the fact that my nails are different practically every day – haha! Sorry this is a bit of a long, wordy post, I just seem to have so much to say! 😛

Also, kudos to ASOS Customer Services – at the checkout I was only given 20% off but they refunded me the extra 5% off within 2 days of my order!

Hope you are all doing well my lovelies, give me your thoughts on Rainbow Connection!

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 last post, I told you I had my first manicure since I was 7! (The one I had aged 7 I can’t actually remember so I was very excited!) My better half, Andy, gave me a gift voucher for a manicure + embellishment as part of his present to me for my 18th birthday 🙂 He also gave me a voucher for the baths in Bath, and for a photoshoot. I’m very lucky!

Back to topic! I got my nails did at a salon a little way from me, called Utopia Beauty Salon. I don’t have any real experience of salons but this one was gorgeous 🙂 Lovely interior decoration, very girly and relaxing! They have a few pictures in their gallery so take a peek if you’re intrigued! The lady who did my nails was very lovely and we had a good chat about nail polish haha. She uses Nubar, which was fab really because I’ve never tried Nubar and always wanted to 🙂

There was an amazing choice of polishes, and I, being terrible at making decisions, could not for the life of me decide. In the end I went for the one that caught my eye the most out of the whole rack – Nubar’s Violet Sparkle, from a collection released in Spring 2010.

I want to just make you all aware that my pictures are NOT COLOUR ACCURATE because for some reason my camera just keeps pulling blue, but actually this polish is a very gorgeous cadbury’s chocolate purple. Bloody camera! So I will leave you with two links to some pictures I would deem much more accurate: Scrangie (final 2 photos) and The Phalanges Files.

I just looove those cutie little blue hearts! They had a duochrome effect too, sooo pretty! And just look at how neatly it’s painted round my cuticles (I am in awe, so good compared to my lame-o attempts!)

I wanted to mention that when this polish was under any kind of artificial light it sparkled this wonderful magenta colour, it’s just sooo pretty! Sadly there was absolutely no sunshine in the few days I had it on, but I’m willing to bet it looks amazing in sunlight!

So this was just 2 coats, yes, 2 coats, and fully opaque! It’s such a fabulous vibrant purple. I loved it. Especially now that I have my green OT hoody, it went perfectly haha 😛

Oh and Nubar are Cruelty-Free and Vegan, not to mention Big-3-Free!

Very very happy about this manicure, I also received a lovely arm and hand massage which was VERY relaxing 😀 And I will definitely be going back! I am very tempted to buy this polish from feelunique.com now… for just £7.25 with free delivery! Yes please!

I succombed, girlies… I bought 3 polishes from the OPI Muppets Collection, as Asos were offering 25% for one day with a valid NUS Extra card. Oh and I got 20% off in Pizza Hut with my NUS Extra card so it is now a vital accessory within my purse! So yep, look out for the Muppets polishes… hint, I’m having a bit of a glitter craze-phase at the mo! Hope you’re all well.

Emma x

Disclaimer: I paid (well Andy paid) for the manicure and I don’t own the polish!

So everyone knows that GOSH Holographic can be a pain for never lasting more than a day. I want to first make you all aware that this wasn’t true inspiration on my part – I read a wonderful blog post here by the Polish Insomniac – she did a topcoat sandwich which is slightly different to my technique but may well have the very same effect 🙂 so yeah 99% credit due to the Polish Insomniac!

So basically, here we have 4 coats of GOSH Holographic sandwiched between 4 coats of basecoat and 1 coat of topcoat, making 9 whole coats total. You may read this and think it’s a complete waste of time but if you want the lovely holo polish to last a couple of days it’s worth it!!

The reason I decided to use basecoat rather than topcoat (as the Polish Insomniac did) was because I’ve always heard that basecoat tends to help to stick polish down to the nail, I don’t know how true this is but it seems to make sense.

Here is what I used:

First, I put 1 coat of basecoat on my bare nail. This brand of basecoat dries super fast so I didn’t have to wait long to put on my first coat of Holographic. At 1 coat, it was very patchy. Once that was dry, I put on another coat of basecoat, then Holographic, then basecoat and so on, until my nail was opaque. I then put 1 coat of topcoat over the final coat of Holographic, to finish off.

I have two things to flag up with this polish and this technique.

The first is that GOSH Holographic drags like no other polish… even when the coats beneath are totally dry. I found the best technique was to literally just slap it on and don’t go over any point on the nail twice because that will cause a drag. I also found that while this caused a few undesirable lumps and bumps, the coats of basecoat and topcoat evened out the nail so it was totally flat, so that was good 🙂 See on this hideous picture of my thumb nail at 3 coats of Holographic, I still had drag marks:

The second issue is that when I’d put the topcoat on all my fingernails at the very end (I didn’t put topcoat on my thumb nail for the sake of comparing), I noticed that while it gave a weird and quite lovely dimension to each nail (almost like it had a layer of water over it) it did kind of take away from the holographic effect of the polish, and in some lights the polish just looked like a cloudy blue-silver colour. This picture doesn’t really demonstrate this but you can see that the thumb nail reflects a lot more holographic-ness than my fingernails:

I mean it’s not too bad and the nails still have the holographic effect, and I presume that the topcoat increases staying-power on the nails, but I didn’t notice any difference between the lasting-power of my finger nails and thumb nail so… up to you guys 🙂

So I really hope this helps someone, I don’t tend to wear my polish for more than 2 days usually but I know a lot of people do, so hopefully this will be of use. I also wanted to mention that the whole process is quite quick because the basecoat I use (Rimmel Stronger Double Duty) dries very quickly, as does GOSH Holographic and indeed the topcoat I used. So all in all I think it took me 45mins to 1hr, including drying-time.

Another thing you could try is tip-wrapping, but I’ve never mastered the art of this so I’ll leave you with this link on how to do it!

GOSH Holographic is a fabulous polish, it’s such a shame it was discontinued but I managed to find mine a few months back in a little Superdrug in my town, so keep looking for it 🙂 I don’t quite know why it’s so ‘desirable’ that people spend £20+ on it on eBay as a fair few other polish brands (Nubar, China Glaze, Nfu-Oh, among others) do silver holos that are more or less the same as far as I can see but there we go!

Hope you are all doing well chickies, I went for a wonderful manicure yesterday and my nails look fabulous, but I will do a blog post on that soon 😀

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.