HSI Professional Argan Oil Review

Disclosure: I got this product as part of an advertorial.

 I never realized how frizzy my hair gets until I moved next to Lake Michigan. Frizzy hair is now one of my biggest hair enemies! With having such high humidity at all times, my hair shows it. I've heard a lot about argan oil from all of the different beauty bloggers I follow, but I had never tried it until now. HSI Professional provided me with a sample to try out in exchange for a review. I received a 60 mL / 2 oz. bottle which I've been using for the past month.

 (Check out my Parnevu review to see how my hair normally looks.)

As you can see from the picture, this product is supposed to leave hair silky and soft and also repair damaged hair. It definitely did that! I noticed after just a few uses my hair was softer. After about a month of use I realized I wasn't having to brush my hair as often either. No wonder, I also noticed most of my split ends are gone! Big cheers for that!

This treatment didn't get rid of all of my frizz, but it definitely helps. I really didn't expect it to help with the quality of my hair as much as it did so I am very happy it's undone so much damage. As long as my hair is, you're probably wondering how much of the bottle I have left. I typically shampoo my hair about every other day, so that's about how often I used this. I applied a little bit more when my hair was extra frizzy. After a month's use, I still have about half a bottle left.

Believe it or not, but my hair is actually pretty curly when it's wet. Unfortunately those curls never stay. It does seem as though this oil has brought out some of my curls, however! I don't have a picture of that to show you, as I had brushed my hair before taking these pictures obviously, so all of my waves were brushed away :(

Here's a close up of the ends of my hair. I think you can see it's still pretty frizzy and crazy looking. Hopefully after another month or so of use, my hair will be in even better shape.

HSI Professional products are available exclusively at professional salons. You can also purchase their products online. Their argan oil hair treatment oil is normally sold for $29.99 for a 2 oz. bottle but looking at their site today, it's 37% off so you can get it for $18.99! It is also available in a 4 oz. bottle which is normally $49.99 but on sale for $32.99. Good deal!

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Here I am!! With an oldie..

I bought this polish.

Yep, I'm still around. I just haven't been on the computer much lately, been too busy doing stuff offline to really work on my blog much but I do have a whole mess of reviews coming up for you. In the meantime I thought I'd go back and look through a bunch of my old pictures and post some manicures I never shared. So for today at least here is JulieG Blueberry Fizz, an awesome and gorgeous texture polish which I used back in September and never posted the pictures :P Oops.

I love all of the gumdrop polishes because they're just so pretty and so far these seem to be my favorite textures polishes. Someday hopefully I'll be able to get some more of them.

OK, I guess this is a short post for today but hopefully I'll be back with more again soon :)

Have a good weekend & thanks for reading!

Review: Born Pretty Store Mini Fox Rhinestone Decorations

I received this item in exchange for an honest review.

Today I have my third Born Pretty Store review for you. If you're not familiar with Born Pretty Store, they sell a ton of nail art supplies and they ship for free worldwide.

This manicure was inspired by one of my characters I've been writing about for the past 2 months. With him as an inspiration, I kind of had to go crazy with the layering for this manicure.

I used: Color Club Beyond, a black holo, topped with Sally Hansen Nail Prisms Diamond, a grey holo. On the accent I used Zoya Dream, a blue holo, topped with Diamond followed by another coat of Dream. All of this I topped off with Essie Shine of the Times, a gorgeous flakie. If you're familiar with just Beyond, Dream and Shine of the Times, you'll get a good idea of just how crazy gorgeous this manicure was. Full of sparkles and rainbows.. and just wow, amazingly beautiful.

 The item I am reviewing today can be found here. There are 8 different styles, this one is #167. For $1.99 you get two pieces.

I found these to be really cute, and I did get compliments on my manicure while I was out shopping. My cashier really thought these were cute. I found they did not snag on things nearly as much as some other nail art decorations do. Given the extra large size, I expected them to snag on everything but I think with them being on just my accent nails it really wasn't terrible.

However, they didn't stay on my nails long. I think I only wore them on my nails for 2 days before I finally left them off. They just kept falling off. This might be my own fault, I'm not sure. Looking at the directions on the Web site, I see you're supposed to put these on your nails and then apply top coat directly over them. That's not what I did. I top coated my nails and then glued these down with nail glue. So... next time I will have to try applying top coat over these to see if that works any better to hold them on or not. I have trouble imagining that it would, but you never know.

I think these would be fabulous for a simple manicure, say of just solid black. Something simple and elegant which really showcases the nail decoration. Hopefully I've done these cute little guys justice by showing they even can stand out against something as sparkly and shiny as this manicure :)

So in summary, these did apply easily and make for an interesting nail decoration if you want something a little bit different. They did fall off a lot but that might be my own fault. The only other problem I did have with these is the black fell out of one of the eyeballs so I may have to see if I can paint it back in. Or just leave it with two crazy looking eyes :D

Don't forget, you can use my coupon code to get 10% off your orders at Born Pretty Store! Just use the coupon code QTX31 at checkout, and of course you'll also get free shipping worldwide! Be sure to check out their new arrivals as well, they have tons of great looking new products.

Thanks to Born Pretty Store for providing me with this sample.

Review: Born Pretty Store Rhinestones

I received this item in exchange for an honest review.

I have another Born Pretty Store review for you all today! If you're not familiar with Born Pretty Store, they sell a ton of nail art supplies and they ship for free worldwide.

 BPS were nice enough to provide me with a sample of their rhinestones which you can find here. For $3.99 you get 24 individual rhinestones in 12 different colors. These rhinestones are available in 7 different shapes, including circles, hearts, diamonds, and so on. I was provided with the teardrop shaped rhinestones (item #6).

For some reason these are quite a bit larger than what I was imagining them, as you can see from the size comparison picture following. You can also note one of my rhinestones did arrive damaged, but the others were all fine.

I'm a bit confused about the product description on their page, which reads as following: "Stick anywhere you might use a sticker!" These are being marketed as stickers which I find very strange since they are not sticky. I just wanted to mention that because it does seem kind of misleading. I attempted to try to stick these on my nails using just top coat because sometimes that does work, but I found they kept falling off so I ended up just gluing them back on with nail glue. Even so, they did fall off quite a bit and I never did find one of my missing rhinestones. They also snag on basically everything.

I did a full manicure with these, so I think next time I would just use maybe one or two as accents. Despite the problems I had, they do look really nice.

I decided to do a skittle manicure, so I started with a base of LA Colors Circuits, a black creme. Then I applied 1 coat of 5 different Sally Hansen HD polishes: Byte, Wavelength, Hue, Resolution and DVD. See some of the color shift in the polish in the pictures below?

I tried to pick complimentary colors for each nail when applying the rhinestones. Even though these are so large, I really liked how these looked. I was surprised by how much I liked the looks of this. I thought it might be too much, with having the rhinestones on each nail but I really didn't think so. It added a nice, pretty sparkle with ease. The rhinestones made me feel pretty fancy :)

Because I am me, I switched the order of the colors around on my right hand.

Don't forget, you can use my coupon code to get 10% off your orders at Born Pretty Store! Just use the coupon code QTX31 at checkout, and of course you'll also get free shipping worldwide! Be sure to check out their new arrivals as well, they have tons of great looking new products.

Thanks to Born Pretty Store for providing me with this sample.