Jior Couture Raspberry Lemon Slush and Pineapple Cooler

I received these polishes in exchange for an honest review.

Today I have 2 polishes from Jior Couture's Jior Nails and Drink Collection which is going to be released this weekend! Here's a little bit about the collection if you're interested :)

*The collection will consist of Photochromic (changes color/gets darker
in sunlight), shimmer, fluorescent, and glow in the dark lacquers.

*There will be 6 colors/'flavors': Orange-Mango, Purple-Mixed Berry,
Red-Raspberry, Yellow-Pineapple, Green-Green Apple, Blue-Blueberry

*Each color/'flavor' will have 4 drink inspired lacquers each. Every 15
ml bottle will come with a recipe card for it's inspired drink!

*The lacquers will NOT be scented but each color/'flavor' group will
have a scented top coat. example: Mango scented top coat, Mixed Berry
scented top coat, etc.

*The release date for this collection is Saturday June 28, 2014

*In addition to regular 15ml bottles, 9 ml bottles for full collection (30 piece set) or group collection (5 piece sets) available for purchase only.

*Individual bottles will only be available in 15 ml bottles.

First up I have Raspberry Lemon Slush which is described as a glow in the dark coral red. I found this one to be more of a coral orange. The color is amazing and this polish is just perfect. It applied perfectly with 2 coats. I've been wearing it for about a week now and the majority of my nails are unchipped. The formula is kind of a jelly cream, and it's pretty easy to work with.

Best of all, as I mentioned, it glows in the dark! Please pardon the mess, but here it is directly under the black light.

The glowing power of this polish is absolutely amazing. Normally I don't have enough light to capture polish glowing on camera without at least the black light. Here you can see it glowing, far far away from the black light. The glow is just astounding with this polish and oh so pretty!

Now check out the topper I received, Pineapple Cooler. This is one coat of Pineapple Cooler over Raspberry Lemon Slush!

Pineapple Cooler is a light yellow with yellow and gold shimmer which darkens in the sunlight. Here's the proof of that! :)

So unfortunately I didn't notice a huge difference in the color when applied on my nails, but as you can see from my picture it definitely changes in the bottle. The dry time for this polish is fantastic, and the shimmer is just so pretty so even without the fantastic color shift I was expecting, I'm happy with this polish. Apparently it smells pretty good as well? I don't know, since I can't smell much :P


So I actually applied this by itself to my right hand to test it before I found out that *duh* this is a topper. I'm afraid I didn't notice much of a change in the color with it alone, either. Our weather has been mostly cloudy and or rainy, so I'll have to test this one out some time when we have a lot more sun!

The other colors in this collection look absolutely beautiful, so I hope you can get your hands on some of these polishes while they're available. I'm sure they won't last long!

You can find Jior Couture on all of the major social networks.
Twitter @jiorcouture
Instagram: jiorcouture
Pinterest: Jior Couture
Google +: Jior Couture
Youtube: Jior Couture
Wordpress: www.jiorcouture.wordpress.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/a.JiorCouture

 These and the rest of the NailsandDrink Collection will be available Saturday June 28, 2014 from Jior Couture's online store for $8.50 in full size. My thanks to Jior Couture for providing me with these samples.

Nail Cones! Review

I received this product in exchange for an honest review.

Today I have a fun product to review for you. Nail Cones are a fun way to paint your nails, and protecting your fingers at the same time! These are stickers which you wrap on your fingers to prevent the polish from going on your fingers during the manicure. Perfect for someone such as myself, who as my regular readers are very well aware, is extremely messy.

Nail cones come in 3 different sizes. Hopefully you can see the perforation lines in the picture below?

Here's the instructions, but honestly these are very easy to work with and not much thought is needed to use them.

Here's the before picture.. I know, pretty silly looking, right? Honestly, these were just a lot of fun to just wear and walk around the house and make monster like noises with (I'm amused easily, what can I say?)

Yup, it totally looks like my fingers were wearing bibs :D

I decided a nice, bright color would be perfect to test these with so I used Jior Couture Raspberry Lemon Slush, which you will be seeing more of tomorrow.

 So how well did these work? Take a look for yourself.

I'd say pretty well. I just got a little bit of polish around the edges where the Nail Cones didn't quite cover but that was a much much easier clean up than usual.

To put these to the test, I reused the same ones from my left hand again on my second hand. Yes, it worked fine so hurray! These can definitely be reused. Also, when I first looked at these, I thought it made more sense for them to go on my hand the other way. I was distracted and not really paying attention to what I was doing when I did my right hand, so oops - I accidently put these on backwards for the second hand but that's OK. I got to test them out this way as well :D

I did have more gaps along the sides doing it this way but honestly, I think getting polish on my cuticles is one of my big problems so for me this kind of worked better. I actually didn't have any clean up at all using them this way.

These definitely get a big thumbs up from me. You can purchase Nail Cones on their Web site. You get 4 sheets per package and each sheet has 15 cones so you get a total of 60 cones.

(Side note: notice you have remaining stickers left over when you apply these? I'm definitely going to try to use the circle stickers for something in the future, just haven't had a chance to yet :) )

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.

My first acrylic manicure!

I have nothing to disclose.

I've been painting with my acrylic paints recently, for the first time in.. oh, about 10 or so years. I've seen a lot of people paint manicures with acrylic paint so of course I had to finally give it a try.

I didn't do anything super fancy, just tried to do a basic manicure. From everything I had read about working with acrylics, everyone seemed to make it sound like the paint was just going to wash right off my hands (should have known better from actually painting with them, haha! oops.) As you can see from my pictures, that didn't happen. Cleanup was a pain in the bottom and just wasn't happening that day.. but I wanted to get pictures anyway so pardon the mess :P

 It also chipped rather quickly and yes I did use top coat.  Aside from the quick chipping and the messy cleanup, I think I rather enjoyed working with my acrylics. I think I'm actually neater with them than with polish for some reason. I may have to dive into my box of paints again sometime :)

Have you tried doing a manicure with acrylic paints? What do you think? Let me know!

Because I'm me

I bought this polish.

So about a month ago, we were expecting our first really warm day. It didn't happen but that's another story. Because I'm me, I broke out the last of my Pop Culture Cosmetics polishes which I bought for Christmas last year. This one is called Frosty and yes, it looks like a melted snowman. So please pardon while I interrupt your regularly scheduled Summer manicures with something cold :D

This one applied fine with no issues. I expected it to be a bit more of a white creme base so it is much more sheer than I expected but I still really liked it. I love how cute the little glitters make into a snowman face.

Here's a closeup of the sparkling pretty base.

While I was very happy with this particular polish, I can't really recommend Pop Culture Cosmetics as a brand. I've had issues with one of their polishes in the past, and I can tell you their customer service SUCKS. I never did hear back from them, and I'm stuck with a really crappy polish :(

Review: KKCenterHk flocking powder

I received this item in exchange for an honest review.

Today I have one more KKCenterHK review for you. This time I finally decided to try out their flocking powder, which they call nail art "fluff". As good a description as any, I suppose? I'm reviewing item N.NAIL Lovely Villus Nail Art Decorations-Peach Pink [NNAIL-DRN860].

This manicure was inspired by a couple of manicures +Narmai Nan did, but unfortunately it didn't turn out quite as nice as I expected. My fault, not the product. I started with two coats of Wet n Wild Buffy the Violet Slayer, then I added some of the black lace nail foil which I reviewed here. I randomly placed the foil, then applied the fluff beside it.

 
 I did sprinkle this on my nails, which I think I'm going to stop listening to the directions and press the powder on my nails next time. It seems to turn out more fluffy and uniform that way. So this didn't turn out quite as nice and fuzzy as I had hoped. It seems kind of sparse. It lasted I want to say about an hour before the fuzzies started coming off. Definitely not a long lasting product, but it's easy enough to apply and fun to play with.

Now for the cool part! This flocking powder is fluorescent so check it out under my black light :)

(It's really hard to get good black light photos so sorry for the blurriness!)

What do you guys think? Fail or no?

Thanks again to KKCenterHk for providing me with this product sample.

 
Use code GETFANCY at checkout for a 10% discount.

website: http://www.kkcenterhk.com
Blog: http://kkcenterhk.blogspot.com/
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Review: KKCenterHk full nail water decals

I received this item in exchange for an honest review.

I'm back with another KKCenterHk review for you all today. I've loved the water decals I've received from KKCenterHk in the past, and this time I thought I would try out their full nail decals. I figured they had to be better than the numerous foils I've tried in the past, right?

I picked out ANE-NAIL 12 Pcs Flowerage/Flower Transfer Sticker & Files #2014 [ANE-2014] because I thought the design looked really pretty.

Here's the directions from the back of the packaging. Looks pretty simple, right? Well, here's my first complaint. The directions claim this came with a smoothing tool, aka cuticle (yes, that's how you spell it, not cutical) stick. No, it came with a nail file. This was helpful of course because I did have to use the file to file these off at the end. But no smoothing stick so I just used my finger. I really didn't think I needed the smoothing stick afterall, these applied easily enough because they're made out of real polish.

 I want to say it took about an hour to apply these, just because - oh yeah, these are decals! which meant no sticky glue to hold onto my nails while I tried to place them. I thought about trying to use base coat to hold them down, but I discovered my top coat did melt these some what. I'm not really sure how they would react with the basecoat so I didn't try it. If you will note, these are supposed to last 1 - 2 days without top coat, 7 days with top coat.

So these weren't terrible in applying but time wise, I would have rather applied nail polish. Here's how they looked when I was finished. You can see a little bit how these dissolved with my top coat if you look at my pinkie and index fingers.

Here is my manicure about 5 hours later.

 So... 7 days with top coat? Nope, not happening! Needless to say I was not happy once I saw this starting to chip after about an hour. 2 days later I finally took this completely off but by that time, half of my nails were already missing the decals. On the plus side, these did clean up really easily, no problems removing them. Just simple acetone took it off with no mess.

 
Use code GETFANCY at checkout for a 10% discount.

website: http://www.kkcenterhk.com
Blog: http://kkcenterhk.blogspot.com/
Tumblr: http://kkcenterhk.tumblr.com/
Facebook: KKCenterHK
Google+: 108172894204617826877
Youtube: wwwkkcenterhkcom
Twitter: @kkcenterhkcom
Weibo: kkcenterhk
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Solitaire Chess Brain Fitness Review

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

With as many brain injuries as I've sustained, I'm always looking for different ways to improve my brain function. Fortunately, I love puzzles. Chess has never, ever appealed to me. My dad was on the chess club in high school, so of course he tried to teach me how to play when I was little. I've made the attempt to learn it a few times throughout my life but for whatever reason, I seem to have had some kind of mental block against wanting to remember how the different pieces move. Well, no more! About a month ago, I received Solitaire Chess from ThinkFun to review. I'm happy to report I finally know how all of the pieces move, even if I can't name them all :P

Here's a brief description of this game:
Strategic Skill Building Game
ThinkFun® Brain Fitness games help keep your mind young and sharp – all through play. Whether you grew up playing chess or can’t tell the difference between a knight and a rook, Solitaire Chess is for you!
• Ages 8 to adult

Includes:
• 80 Challenges
• 10 Chess Pieces
• Instructions & Solutions

(Image and game description provided by ThinkFun.)

Even though this is Solitaire Chess, my boyfriend and I have been having a lot of fun playing it together. Basically I play it, if I get stuck he comes over and tries to figure it out. Or we just take turns. We also played it together, so it kind of became a game to see who could find the solution first. We both find this game a lot of fun!

They recommend you play this game at least 15 minutes a day to improve brain function. I did this for the first few weeks and I definitely noticed a difference just in the first day I started playing. I could feel myself learning the game, understanding it better and learning to think more logically. I haven't gotten through all of the cards yet, as I keep getting stuck on the most advanced level. Fortunately this does come with a solution sheet which I've had to use a few times, but what I do is just look at the first move and then I can usually figure out the rest. So I'm still testing myself and not feeling like I'm 100% cheating :D

Mike had an excellent question: What happens when you finish all of the challenge boards? Knowing myself, I'm sure I could just start from the beginning again and work through them because I don't think I'll remember all of the solutions immediately. I think it would be great if ThinkFun made additional boards you could buy separately.

Aside from possible replay value issues, I feel this is a wonderful product and it really is a ton of fun. ThinkFun makes a ton of different games which look to be a lot of fun and great for the brain. You can purchase their products on their Web site, but they're also available on Amazon. On Amazon, Solitaire Chess is only $14.99 which I feel is a very acceptable price for this game. I will consider purchasing other games from ThinkFun in the future.

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.