Review: Born Pretty Store Holo #10

I won this polish in a giveaway.

Some time ago, Born Pretty Store held a blogger giveaway for their holo polishes and I was lucky enough to be a winner, somehow! I won a mini of #10 which is a gorgeous holo.. but I'm not quite sure how to describe the color. It's not turquoise, nor teal.. so I'll just show you :)

This polish is pretty sheer with one coat, so I wanted to show you what it looks like with just one.

It's absolutely stunning even with just 1 coat, but I couldn't leave it at that so I applied one more coat.

 The holo effect with this polish is absolutely stunning. I don't have any Jade polishes - yet - but just for comparison sake, it does remind me of the Jade holos I have seen pictures of. This is exactly what I want in a holo. Just beautiful!

Here are a couple of pictures where you can't really see the holo effect.. I just wanted to share this with you so you can see what a beautiful color this is even without the holo.

  Affiliate link: Born Pretty Holographic Holo Glitter Nail Polish Varnish Hologram Effect 10# is currently on sale! It's $5.59 instead of the usual price of $12.88, what a bargain! Their other holos are also on sale and they have some beautiful colors you might want to check out :)

Sweet Heart Polish Pop Star, Part 2: Black Light!

Press sample.

I'm a dork so I forgot that neon = glows under black light! So I had to hurry and get out the trusty old black light and try out Sweet Heart Polish Pop Star right away! (If you missed it somehow, please read my review of that polish here.)

I'm actually bouncing around in giggles - this looks so awesome under black light and I just love new finds like this. Of course most of the polishes I used on my wheel were already neon so they glow pretty darn well to begin with, but they look even more interesting when topped with Pop Star.

This last picture is a bit blurry, sorry about that.. but look at the glow!

Review: Sweet Heart Polish Pop Star

Press sample.

Today I have a fun polish from Sweet Heart Polish, a glitter called Pop Star. This glitter is like nothing else I own. It's a lot of fun because it's full of white, grey and black circle glitter as well as little neon pink circle glitter and larger neon pink star glitter. Black and pink are one of my favorite color combinations so of course I love this!

I knew as soon as I opened my package that I was going to try this out over neons - I think of the word pop star and the 80s come to mind so you can't beat neons for an 80s look. I tried Pop Star over a lot of different colors. I love how it looks over neon yellow, purple, blue and green the best. I also tried it out over Sinful Colors Sugar Sugar, a red shimmer, and it looks great! There's definitely a lot of potential for this little polish.

 I received a mini to sample. I really like her label, simply because it has a lot of important information on it that you don't always see on indie labels: it's animal safe, flammable, shelf life of 18 months and 5 free.

The polish itself was nicely packaged, simple but good! As you can see, I have one more polish to review next week and she also sent me some candy.

Let's move on to my actual manicure, shall we? I decided to do something rather strange.. or at least color wise it's strange for me. I'm really into gradients right now so I decided to do a gradient using Kleancolor Neon Yellow and Neon Green. I used just 1 coat of Pop Star.

This polish is a bit on the thick side, but since it's a clear polish that really isn't too much of a problem! I did have to fish around a little bit for some of the glitters, but then that's one of the things I like so much about this polish - you can get a very different look on each nail.

 I've kind of been in a rut with my manicures lately, so I think this polish was good for me.. it gave me a chance to do something funky and something very different from my typical style.

Thanks to Cassandra for sending me Pop Star to review! You can find Sweet Heart Polish on Etsy here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/SweetHeartPolish
I'm definitely going to keep my eye on her store.. lots of pretty things! You can purchase Pop Star in full size bottle for $8.

You can also find Sweet Heart Polish on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SweetHeartPolish

My 2nd Franken

I have nothing to disclose.

It's another heat wave today, with the heat index probably near 100 and about 10 degrees warmer inside my home. So today I'm just showing off the second franken polish I made. I wish I could have gotten some better pictures, but these will do.

I didn't bother with clean up and as you can see on this first picture, there's a bit of a mess on my hands from where I was swatching yesterday, oops. So please pardon the mess. :P

(there's those awful glitters from KKCenterHk, stuck to the bottom... I need to get some balls to mix my frankens.)

This is a jelly base, and I had just done my nails when my boyfriend came home and asked me to do something.. so I applied 1 layer of Seche Vite, waited awhile but they still got messed up a bit. Oh well. The formula was a bit thick and hard to work with. Still really pretty, though it hasn't lasted long. It's full of shimmer and tiny little holo hex glitter.

I got some more nail mail yesterday for review, yay! So I'll have a few more things to share with you in the weeks to come. Thanks for reading :)

Blog update

I just want to mention that I switched comments over to the Google+ system. I also added the Pinterest code so now you can pin any of my pictures on there :) I'm also adding a bunch of my pictures to my Pinterest account.. something I've been slacking on :P

I should probably also update the blog layout sometime.. hmm..

Hope you like the new changes!

Sinful Colors polish haul!

I bought these items.

Last week I made my first polish purchase in what feels like forever. I had a coupon for Sinful Colors, I could buy up to.. 8 or 10 polishes, I forget which, for 98 cents each at my local grocery store. So I picked up a couple I've had my eyes on for awhile now.

left to right: Blue By You, Purple Diamond, I Miss You and Sugar Sugar.

 On the wheel: Sugar Sugar and Blue By You, Purple Diamond and I Miss You, 1 coat each.

Blue By You is a pretty blue shimmer, Purple Diamond is a really lovely light purple shimmer. Originally I was just going to buy Purple Diamond but I decided to splurge :P

I Miss You is a really lovely purple base with purple, silver and holo glitters.

Lastly is Sugar Sugar, a really interesting red polish. We bought this one for my boyfriend's sister for Christmas last year and I've kind of regretted not picking one up for myself as well. This one is another shimmer, except it has little flecks in it as well. Not a flakie, but the specks do shine kind of gold in certain light. Very pretty.

So sorry I haven't been posting much as of late. It's been really hot here lately, as we're under a heat advisory until Friday, with temperature near 100 degrees. I have a few manicures to show you sometime soon but it's just too hot to sit in the computer room for long!

Thanks for reading :)

Review: U-Neek Polish Blueberry

Press sample.

Today I have my first thermal and one of my new favorite polishes to share with you, Blueberry from U-Neek Polish. Blueberry is a gorgeous polish. The base turns clear when warm, and blue of course when it is cold, and it's also full of little blue glitters.

I'm really starting to like sheer polishes, and I really love this one just by itself. Here it's shown with 2 coats. You can see especially on my pinky how it turns blue on the tips where it starts getting cold. Really cool.

Here's a better picture of the effect. To be perfectly honest, at first I wasn't sure about the color itself. Because I'm so pale to begin with, clear blue nails kind of made my nails look a bit creepy as though I had dead people nails. The glitter definitely helped take away from that, and the polish did grow on me.

 Here you can see how much different it is when completely cold and completely warm :)

I absolutely love this polish because it was just so much fun to play with. The day I received it in the mail, we were going fishing so my 5-year old niece had to be the first test subject. We had a lot of fun painting her nails with this and watching them turn color all day. I kind of can't wait until Winter again just so I have an excuse to play with it some more. I tested it over a ton of different polishes. I'll be posting more pictures on my Facebook page instead of posting them all here but I do want to show you a few of what I did.

For this manicure I used 2 coats of Kleancolor Neon Pink with 1 coat of Blueberry. On the accent, I did a kind of jelly sandwich with 1 coat of Sinful Colors Pinky Glitter, 1 coat of Blueberry and 1 more coat of Pinky Glitter.

It was a bit too warm here to get very good pictures of the cold effect with this, my body just warmed up my nails too quickly. I really loved how this looked over both of the polishes, but especially matched with Pinky Glitter.

I did find that this polish didn't have much effect over dark colors but I'm assuming that would be true with any thermal polish. However, it did make some really beautiful matches when layered. You'll definitely be seeing more of this polish from me in the future and I hope to be able to get my hands on more thermal polishes from U-Neek Polish.

My thanks to Janet for providing me with this polish to sample.

Here are some ways to follow U-Neek Polish and definitely check out their shop once Janet is back from vacation :)

http://www.etsy.com/shop/uneekpolish
http://www.uneekpolish.blogspot.com
http://www.twitter.com/uneekpolish
Instagram: @oneandonlyjanet

4th of July manicures

I have nothing to disclose.

I'm being lazy today, so before I write up a review I have to do, I'm going to quickly share my 4th of July manicures with you.

First up is a most definite fail. I wore this on the 4th, and I was stuck wearing it all day. I hope everyone had a good time that day... I went hiking and rolled about 15 feet down a steep hill. I'm still a bit sore from it and still pretty bruised up. Anyway, I'm not going to bother cropping this pictures... I started with two coats of Sation Midnight Blue, which is a gorgeous dark blue polish. I absolutely love this color except it most definitely smurfed me. I tried doing a glitter gradient using Hard Candy Fireworks and then topped with a bit of Julep America. I have to say, America is kind of horrible and Fireworks isn't much better. I do like Fireworks with 1 coat. I should have left it alone, but sometimes I just don't know when to stop :P

I do think I need to try to thin America because some of the bottles of it were thicker than others and I just happened to get one of the thick formulas. So as soon as I figure out what I did with my thinner.. something to experiment with.

Next day, I removed this ugliness and tried out another gradient: this time, I played with my crackles to try out a manicure I've been wanting to do for a long time now. I liked how this one turned out much better. First I used one coat of Sally Hansen White Tip. Next, I followed up with my two Sally Hansen crackles, Cherry Smash and Distressed Denim.

I topped this off with NYC matte top coat. I really like how this turned out, what about you?

Here I am!

I haven't posted in awhile, so of course now I'm behind on my posts. I had a migraine every day for about a week and a half so I wasn't really doing much of anything for half of that time, the other half of the time I've been spending time with my family just relaxing and enjoying some of the nice weather. As you can see from my picture, we've been enjoying the beach at Lake Michigan quite a bit.

So anyway, I'm still around and still painting my nails. I have a few manicures to share with you soon.. as soon as I feel like blogging about it. I have one really awesome polish to share with you so I hope you'll continue to read my blog :)