Nail 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.

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.

So, they’ve FINALLY brought Revlon Top Speeds to the UK! They still haven’t brought Revlon Royal over though, 🙁 I reaaally want it haha. Anyways, I picked up two of the Top Speed polishes (I’m currently lusting over Revlon Guava too, think I may have to splurge on it next time I have the money!) one of which is Hazy!

Was this worth Revlon’s fairly large £6.49 price tag? Personally, I don’t think so. I have to be honest, I bought this when it was on offer in Boots at £4.49, so I didn’t pay full price. I probably wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. Because while the formula and finish is nice, I don’t think it’s a unique enough colour to pay £6.49 for. Anyway. It’s unfortunately no longer on offer, but Boots has an offer on at the moment of 3 for 2 on a lot of beauty items, including Revlon.

Dry time was good, although I have to say, for a ‘top speed’ polish, it wasn’t exactly top speed! I’d say it was probably comparable to the speed at which Rimmel I <3 Lasting Finish polishes dry. In any case, it was manageable, certainly a lot better than the normal line of Revlon polishes I’ve used!

The polish is quite opaque, this took just 2 coats. I can’t really fault it, there’s nothing wrong with it,  I suppose I’m just not so keen on the price! Oh and I have this pet hate with Revlon polishes, when you put the brush back in the bottle, it scrapes the glass at the mouth and that scraping noise is just so… arrrghh. I hate when nail technicians on YouTube dip the brush in and out in and out scrape scrape scrape *cringe*. Ever since I’m so careful not to make the noise haha.

My only other tiny qualm is that it was a little trickier than some polishes to keep the start of the polish near the cuticle neat, but that’s easy to fix with some cleanup.

I did a tiny comparison of Hazy with Rimmel London Grey Matter for you guys 🙂 I compared them in the shop, I really hate to waste my money buying dupes!

Rimmel Grey Matter is shown on my ring finger. So Hazy is a fair couple of shades lighter than Grey Matter, as you can hopefully see. Grey Matter is more concrete, Hazy is more breeze blocks haha.

My general feelings about Hazy are that if you’re a grey hoarder, it’s a good grey to have,  very work-appropriate, quite sophisticated etc etc but it’s not a very unique colour for the price you pay. Though I suppose it depends on how much you love it as to whether the price matters! For a poor student like me… it really does 😛

I think I’m guilty of being taken in by Revlon’s pretty polish names, “Hazy”, “Stormy”, “Cloud” – all fairly standard coloured polishes but somehow the name just makes me want them!!

I know I keep promising this giveaway guys but I can’t find the polish I really really wanted to give away – would you rather a giveaway minus that one polish or would you rather wait til I have it, making the total up to 6 polishes?

I hope you’re all doing good, anyone else starting university in the next few weeks? I start on Tuesday, I’m soooooo nervous haha.

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.