Sinful Colors: I Miss You, Purple Diamond!

I have nothing to disclose. I purchased these polishes.


How is it almost December already? Well, it looks like this is going to be the last of my purple manicures for this month in honor of National Epilepsy Awareness Month. That's one more thing about epilepsy - and I know this is true for most people as well - but it seems like I always have tons of things I need to do and just never enough time or energy to do them. This is perfectly true for people without health problems, but when you have chronic problems like I do.. well, it's just even more so.

Please head on over to PiggieLuv to read my friend Narmai's post about Epilepsy Awareness, she did a beautiful manicure :)

So anyways, I've got 2 Sinful Colors polishes to share with you today. First up is I Miss You.

This is one coat of I Miss You. As you can see, it is a purple based jelly with lots of pretty holo glitters. Sorry for the messy cuticles :P It's obviously sheer, but I'm surprised at home opaque it gets with several coats. For this reason, it does make for a pretty polish to layer with!

-3 coats of I Miss You-

Purple Diamond is a very sheer, light lavender shimmer and I kind of want to say it's a bit iridescent. I suppose some might consider this a frost? I'm not really sure, honestly :P

-1 coat -

 Again, this one is quite sheer so for me.. layering is again necessary! I really love this color, but I do have to say that it's not exactly anything unique. But that's OK.

-2 coats-

I just had to combine these two for a manicure, so I applied 2 coats of Purple Diamond and then topped it with 1 coat of I Miss You. This combination was really beautiful.. it came across as a really pretty purple with just hints of silver sparkle shining through. A fantastic combination.

(sorry for the grainy picture.. not sure why that happened! )

While these two polishes look great together, they do still end up being pretty darn sheer and you can at times see some streaks if not applied perfectly smoothly. But for cheapie drugstore polish, it's not terrible.

Whew! So it looks like my month of purple is over at last. I'm looking forward to doing some reviews soon and a whole bunch of fun Wintery, Christmasy manicures :)

Indigo Bananas Halloween polishes

I won these items.

A couple of weeks ago, I won some Indigo Bananas polishes in a giveaway from The Mercurial Magpie. There was a mistake with the original shipment of my prize, so Andrea was awesome enough to offer me an extra polish and how was I supposed to say no to that??? I got to pick out three polishes of choice, so I went with three polishes from her Halloween/Fall 2013 line: Medusa Transducer, Enchante and The Secret to Life.

- shown here, Medusa Transducer, 1 coat -

First up, Medusa Transducer: "'Medusa Transducer' won't turn you to stone (well maybe make your nails look like stone... stone that glows, with the fire of Halloween ;)), but it will apply as a charcoal, near black jelly polish with orange-gold-green shifting iridescent glitter, a mix of microshimmers, and will glow teal in the dark once charged."

 I found this polish to get a bit goofy with multiple coats (might be our high humidity here) so I would recommend using this one as a topper.

I have to say, the glow effect for these polishes is AMAZING! These are simply the best glow polishes I've seen. Here's the shop description: "polish will then glow very strongly for 10 minutes, strongly for 45 minutes, and then slowly fade to a medium glow for 90min or so. After that point it will be at a low-medium glow for hours."  Yeah, she's not kidding about that!

My camera is virtually incapable of capturing glow in the dark polish without at least a black light on. So to emphasis how much this polish actually glows.. here's a picture, with absolutely no light!

 Ok, it's not the best picture in the world but dang it.. my camera actually captured something! The glow effect for this polish really is pretty amazing.

Next up is Enchante: "'Enchanté' is a (true) red jelly polish with black glitter, that glows blue in the dark. Note: the glow on this polish is less bright than other glow polishes, because red + blue glow interferes in some way. However, there is a really neat effect for this polish - when charged, and you are in dim lighting (but not darkness) the color on your nails is violet/purple/pink depending on how it's glowing. It's a fully visible glow when charged, just not as super duper bright as the other glow polishes or top coats."

I wouldn't call this one true red.. it's a very pretty pink which does of course darken with multiple layers. This one reminds me of watermelon :P The glow effect is absolutely awesome for this one! I think Enchante is my favorite of these three.. the color is just so pretty.

Last is my bonus prize, The Secret to Life: "'The Secret to Life' is a dark purple jelly polish filled with a complex mix of flakies - pink, purple, silver, blue predominantly are visible, along with larger (real) silver flakies and violet iridescent shreds that shift color from green-blue to blue to violet depending on the light to give a glowing effect."

 I was kind of disappointed with this one, at least by itself. It was a bit lumpy with multiple coats, and well, kind of boring. I think I'm going to have to try this one layered over some different colors sometime.. I feel pretty confident it will look prettier layered. Plus, no glow in the dark effect for this one :(

Thanks again to Kirby & Andrea for my prizes! Especially Andrea for providing me with the extra polish, it was greatly appreciated :)

Herome Dublin and Lynnderella Mums the Word

I won/was gifted these polishes.

 Well, I feel fancy. Today I'm wearing two special polishes - Herome Dublin, gifted to me by my friend Narmai, and Lynnderella Mums the Word, which I won from Love Lynnderella.

Herôme Cosmetics is a Dutch brand and their W.I.C.  (World Inspired Colors) are all named after different places around the globe. This is Dublin, and let me tell you - the quality of this polish is pretty amazing. It dried really quickly and this is just one coat!  Herome, you need to start selling in America! Now!

This color isn't exactly something I would normally wear, but that's OK - it means I have absolutely no other colors like it, making it that much more unique in my collection.

I decided Lynnderella's Mum's the Word would look perfect over Dublin, and I think I was right. Mum's the Word is described as "a tribute to the ubiquitous chrysanthemum. Yellow, coral, lavender, lilac, pink, violet and bubblegum matte and satin glitters in a rose-gold-shimmered clear base."

The combination of these colors is almost a penny copper color, at least in my dark light of night shift :P I applied just 1 coat of Mum's the Word over 1 coat of Dublin, and unfortunately it looks like Mum's the Word caused some shrinkage to Dublin :/ Hate it when that stuff happens!

I did have to dab some of the glitters on, but otherwise I was pretty happy with this polish. Next time though I think I'll do more layers, just to get more of the glitter on.  But I like this look, this combination and I love how these two came out together.

Thanks again to Narmai and Love Lynnderella for my polishes! :)

Nail mail from the Netherlands!

My good friend Narmai of Piggieluv.com sent me some nail mail recently and I just got it in the mail today! :)

Let me show you all of the awesome Dutch goodies Narmai sent me :) First of all, nail art supplies!

We were talking and trying to figure out what to send each other, and Narmai asked if there were any nail art supplies I don't have.. so she sent me a bunch! Ohhh lookie, flocking powder! I'm going to have to try that out like.. this week sometime since it's purple :) She also sent me some sliced fimo which is awesome because I don't have many of those and still haven't tried out the ones I do have. There's also some studs and glitter in there, too!

You may have also noticed, she sent me a little wooden clog that could be used on a keychain.. but which I'm going to add to my little Christmas tree :) Really nice, neat little gift, I thought!

She sent me a couple extra stamping plates she had, too! Good, I need to practice! :P

So in addition to the nail art goodies, she also sent me a few Dutch treats to try out! First up are these little licorice candies. I don't even know how to describe these things, the flavor is very unique. They're kind of salty, with just a bit of sour and not sweet. They're also not really gummy like our licorice here in the states. I wish I had like.. taste-o-vision for the Internet or something just so you could taste these. They really are unique.. they're good, just very different! But different is good :)

Next are pepernoten, which are yummy!! They remind me very much of ginger snaps. They really are quite good.  Narmai, I can see why you love these so much and I'm sorry you can't have any.. I'm definitely enjoying them for you this year! Yum yum!

My personal request was some marzipan because I haven't had any good real marzipan in.. oh.. let's just say too many years. Look how cute these are! :) I honestly hadn't thought about them being in little shapes so it was a neat little surprise to see them. I love the little piggie :)

Of course Narmai also sent me some polish.. so I'm excited to say I have my first real Dutch indie polish & more European goodies!! I've been eyeballing some of these brands for awhile :P

Just look at all those goodies, will you? Ok, I will open them :D (I was talking to Narmai on Facebook while opening my package.. she was getting quite impatient with me as I saved the polish to open last, haha.)

Narmai got me Let it Snow, a gorgeous winter glitter polish from Let it Glitter, a Dutch indie polish maker. I will definitely be using this one soon! She also sent me Essence express dry drops, which will definitely come in handy. That last item is a black glitter with kind of a holo sparkle to it. The labeling is pretty nondescript but at least in the bottle this one looks really pretty, also! Narmai knows my tastes so well :)

Narmai also got me a couple of Herome polishes! I've been eyeballing this brand for over a year now except Narmai had to inform me that no, the brand is not called WIC (and I will forever and always think of these as "wick" polishes.)  She sent me Minsk and Dublin :) She also sent me a gorgeous little mini polish by Etos Effect Nails. It looks like I have one more little purple polish to try out before the end of the month!

Last but not least, check out this pretty little franken she made for me using spectraflair!! Ohhhh I'm dying! Can't wait to try this one out and the color will be perfect for my winter nails :)

Now I have my very own PiggieLuv :)

Thanks to my awesome buddy, Narmai for all of my amazing goodies and for being extremely patient with me as I haven't sent her package yet. You'll be seeing more of these polishes soon!

Blog update

Sorry for the massive amounts of blog updates as of late.. I just wanted to post for a second and apologize for the lack of nail polish posts this past week! I'm working on cleaning up my blog a bit and doing some behind the scenes stuff to improve my blog, make it easier to navigate.. all of that fun stuff. It's taking up quite a bit of time because I do have a lot of cleaning up to do, so I will be back at it with the nail posts in a couple of days :)

I have 3 Halloween polishes to share with you (because I just got them recently) and hopefully a couple more posts for National Epilepsy Awareness Month, plus I hope to do something special for Thanksgiving.. then it's on to my favorite time of the year! Christmas manicures, woohooooo!!

Bloglovin

OK, I'm a dork. I didn't think about the fact that I could just contact Bloglovin and have them switch over my new URL. So thanks to those of you who are now following me on the new account! I have contacted Bloglovin and hopefully will get this sorted out sometime soon so I don't loose all of my old followers :)


SOOOO good lesson. If you change your URL, don't just link up to the new URL. contact Bloglovin and they will switch it for you so you don't lose your followers :P

Social media request

Please follow me on my new Bloglovin feed!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I also just updated my Facebook username:

Find me on Facebook here!

blog update

Hi guys, I just want to mention real quick that I'm going to be changing over the blog url to reflect the actual name of my blog now.. something I should have done ages ago, huh? :P

So.. I'm not vanishing on you!

Meet Pikachu and Marvin!

I have nothing to disclose.

 Yes, I'm still here! Mike's hours have been shifted around this past week, so he had 5 days off in a row so needless to say I wasn't on the computer that much. I have a bunch of manicures to share with you, but first.. here's the new addition to my family!

Meet my new gerbils, Pikachu and Marvin! (Yes, I really did name my gerbil Pikachu.. I know, I'm a dork.)

They are both male, and according to the little sign at the pet store, they were born on September 30th so they're about 7.5 weeks old.

Marvin is, I believe, an Agouti color type, which is the wild color type. Basically, he's brown :P Poor Marvin looks to have broken the tip of his tail at some point in time before we got him. It doesn't move quite right, but it doesn't seem to bother him.

Pikachu I believe is a Light Dark Eyed Honey color type. His coat is a really pretty peachy cream color, with a white belly and white around his ears and eyes. His nose is darker color and the tips of his fur are ticked.

This is their home! I got a ten gallon tank and a caged tank topper from FleetFarm, plus a water bottle and some timothy hay treats all for under $60. Then I got home and discovered the cage came with a little food dish which I won't be using because it's plastic, and a water bottle. So now I have a spare water bottle. If you've ever had gerbils before, you'll know... no, their tank no longer looks like this! They destroyed the hammocks and toys I made for them pretty quickly.

I'm really excited to welcome these little guys to my home. I'm sure you'll be seeing more of them in the future :)

TIOT: In which I try to recreate Fantasy Fire

I bought or won these polishes.

 This is a bit late, but I haven't done a Try it on Tuesday post in ages so I thought I'd go ahead and do one now. I guess technically I've used this polish in the past but not for over a year, and never full swatches on it's own. So here's Zoya Carly, 2 coats.

Zoya describes Carly as : "Very rich, bold, red-toned dark purple with iridescent red and silver metallic shimmer and a dense foil finish. The bold color and sparkling foil finish make Carly like gift wrap for your nails." It is a 5 on the opaque scale, making it as opaque as you can get. In fact, it was pretty darn opaque with just 1 coat.

I love this color, and I love the foil finish. I know foils aren't everyone's favorite but every now and then I do enjoy them. Ithink this would be a great shade for this time of year.

Even though Carly is gorgeous by itself, I decided to top it with my franken Fantasy Fire dupe I won in a giveaway last year. Unfortunately this didn't photograph so well but I think you can see plenty of the "fire" and color shifting which make this absolutely stunning.

I think if anything else, even though my photos of my nails don't capture the full beauty of this franken, the photos of the bottles sure do capture a lot of it!

 This next picture is a bit blurry, sorry about that.. but it's the best picture I got which this color shift. You can definitely see the fire in this picture!

I really love this franken, which is sad because it's running kind of low which means it's getting a bit thick and gunky! I may have to try thinning it out a bit... or just somehow magically get my hands on the real Fantasy Fire :P For the meantime, this franken is a clear winner and I love how this combination turned out.

For today's Epilepsy Awareness post, I am going to OVER emphasis how VITAL sleep is. Your body repairs itself during sleep and without enough sleep, any one can feel out of sync and goofy. Sleep deprivation is probably my number one trigger (although thank goodness over the years I somehow haven't had seizures despite going long periods of time with only 2 - 3 hours a night.)

As I'm writing this, I slept about 6 hours today. That's probably about the minimum I would want to get. Even with 6 hours I'm functioning but not very well - as I type this I can tell it's draining me faster than it normally would.

One more reason sleep is so important - especially to those of us with epilepsy - is that because your body heals during sleep, the opposite is also true. Not enough sleep can actually cause brain damage. When you have epilepsy, more brain damage is about the last thing you want or need.

It's also very important for us to sleep on a schedule. Some people can get away with flip flopping their sleep, or breaking it into different shifts. Staying up all night long and going to bed 5 hours later than normal really isn't good for you but of course it's worse for those of us with epilepsy. The sleep deprivation could cause a seizure.

And now my mind is blanking because I'm so tired so I will go ahead and wrap this up :P Thanks for reading!!

Wing Dust Collections Grape Crush and some stamping

I won / was given these polishes.

Today I have a gorgeous polish by Wing Dust Collections to show you, by the name of Grape Crush. I also have some more stamping to show you! I've been practising and I'm getting better, yay!

Grape Crush is a gorgeous sheer blurple polish full of tiny holo shimmer, iridescent glitter, square and hexagon glitters in white, silver and purple. Here it is with just one coat, please pardon the build up of polish on my pointer finger :P

This polish would be fantastic for use as a topper, or just by itself. I can see this being a great color to use with just one thin coat for a wedding or some other special event. It really is gorgeous all just by itself.

Here it is with 2 coats. I think I must have gotten it a little heavier on a few of my nails, such as the pointer. This is a bit easier to do with this polish unfortunately. However, it does dry quickly so if you want to add more coats, not a problem! This polish would be perfect as a Winter manicure, also! It does remind me a little bit of butter London Knackered, but with glitter :)

I applied a 3rd coat on my accent nail, and then used Julep Gayle and Bundle Monster plate BM 217 to add some stamped accents to the tips. Gayle worked absolutely perfectly for stamping! I was so happy with the results. I'll definitely be keeping this one handy for stamping.. and I'll have to try some of my other Juleps to see how well they stamp. I think maybe I've been using the wrong polishes all this time. I'm really happy how this came out.. now I just need to work on getting the design centered on my nails :P

Looking through my pictures, I realized that you really couldn't see many of the glitters from this polish. I think they mostly settled to the bottom of the jar, even though I did leave it upside down for several minutes before painting my nails. Oh well, still a gorgeous polish and I can't wait to use this one again with some layering.

(I forgot to post my epilepsy comment of the day so let that be a lesson to you.. having epilepsy definitely makes you more forgetful about some things :P)

Hello Kitty cookies

I won these.

I haven't done a non-polish post in ages, so looking through some of my old pictures I thought I'd start off with a series of posts that I meant to blog about and never got to :P

Ages and ages and ages ago (yes, I know I'm terrible), I won a giveaway from Bunny & Spice. If you're not familiar with Noire, she lives in Japan so she blogs about a ton of neat and interesting things about living there in Japan - everything from beauty products, food, animals.. lots of fun stuff if you're interested in different cultures. Noire was awesome enough to send me a TON of great stuff in her giveaway. Today I just want to share one of those prizes with you... Hello Kitty cookies!!

My 6 year old niece loves Hello Kitty big time so of course I had to share these with her.. which is partly why I'm just now blogging about this. It was a matter of time before I actually got a chance to babysit her and share this with her, and so on.

The cookies are basically just shortbread cookies, and there are a number of different designs the characters come in. The cookies come in a little foil bag, as pretty much typical for American kids snacks.  The back of the packaging, however, had a little cutout Hello Kitty paper "doll" you could take apart to play with. Suzie enjoyed this - at least when it was new. I do remember that something about the doll was hard to figure out how to put it together correctly, I don't remember what exactly... it might have been the top, fitting it together to close? I forget now.

As far as I remember, the cookies themselves weren't anything special and we didn't even finish them all (well, I did, later). They weren't terrible, either!

That's it for now I suppose. Thanks for reading and please come back to my blog again. I'll have more polish posts for you probably tomorrow :)

Cloud manicure time & take a look at this concept polish!

I bought or won these polishes.

 Today I have this special beauty to share with you, along with a cloud manicure I did. I won Above the Curve's Guardian Angel Concept Polish a little while back in one of their Facebook giveaways! You can find my review of the regular Guardian Angel polish here.

For comparison's sake, here's Guardian Angel CP on the left and regular Guardian Angel on the right. Here's a brief analysis of the differences in these two polishes:
CP is more sheer than it's counterpart. Even with 2 coats it's pretty sheer, which would actually make it a great topper!
CP is more of a lavender color will the normal GA is just a bit more plum colored.
It's hard to tell from my pictures, but I do believe the holo effect is actually a little bit stronger in CP!

The differences are very very small and honestly I don't think most people would even notice unless you put them side by side.

So as gorgeous as Guardian Angel CP is, I decided to cover it up a little bit with some nail art. I saw a cloud manicure on Facebook and I thought that would be fun to try, because I don't *think* I've done it before. So I started with Chrome Girl Pleasure Treasure, which is a gorgeous creme. I have to tell you, the Chrome Girl polishes I've used so far are perfect, quick dry time and mostly 1 coaters.

Guardian Angel CP looks quite a bit more pink here, yes? That's one of the minor differences in the colors between the two Guardian Angel polishes.

I decided I wanted a nice contrast with my third color.. nothing to take away from GACP, but something that would contrast with Pleasure Treasure a bit. So I picked up Shany number 24 from their nail art set for the tips, just to give it a bit more of a metallic shimmer on the tips.


Mike informed me that my "clouds" look more like steps.. but you know what? I like them and don't care! I guess that will be my epilepsy mention of the day - having to learn to live with the fact that I am most definitely NOT perfect which as a perfectionist, this was VERY hard to live with (or rather I should say, it is difficult to live with) in part because no of course I wasn't perfect to begin with but all of the issues I've had as a result of epilepsy has caused more flaws :P

Here's one more look at this pretty manicure and only because I managed to get a good shot of the holo effect with Guardian Angel CP! Look at that prismatic effect, ohhh so pretty :)

Let me know what you think of this manicure :)

Do you own any concept polish? I think it's pretty darn cool that Above the Curve sells some of theirs.. gives us a chance to get a look at how their polishes are modified during the creation process.

Thanks to Angel and Shawn for this beauty!