Question for My Readers...

Hey guys! Just a quick question for now! I'm approaching 100 followers and I want to do another giveaway, so what are you guys lemming (within reason, obviously!)? Glow in the dark for Halloween? Crackles, like the new OPI Pink Shatter for Breast Cancer? Glitters? A surprise? Nail care supplies? A bunch of polishes, or one really great one? Let me know in the comments so I can pick some stuff up and have a readers choice giveaway!

xoxo,
Amanda

100th Post & Pink Wednesday! Deborah Lippmann Candy Shop

Hey ladies! This post is a milestone for me: 100th post! I'm hoping I've come a long way since post number one, but you can all be the judges of that LOL My blogiversary will be January 5th, so in about 8 months I've written 100 posts, gained 80+ followers, and hopefully refined my technique. I'm hoping this year to make a lightbox, perhaps get a better camera, and continue writing things that interest you guys. What do you want to see more/less of?
Anyhow, I started off wearing this OPI color that's a really old dusty and I don't know the name. It looked better on me on person but still not great. It's kind of a corally-orange color? It makes my nails look disgusting here, actually. I feel like I'll think of the name once I post this, inevitably. Anyway, here it is:

But THEN I bought my Deborah Lippmanns... as you all know, I struggled with this decision morally. Is $42 for three polishes too steep? Would I have buyer's remorse spending so much? Should I wait for a dupe, or create my own? The answer to all of these questions: no. They are pricy, definitely not polishes I would buy all the time, but they are really good quality and applied much better than a cheaper polish, so I have no complaints. Plus, they're gorgeous and glitter-ific. And I love them!

Anyway, so I was too impatient to remove the original OPI dusty color and threw Candy Shop on over it, and this is what resulted:

Candy Shop is pretty opaque in two or three coats, and the glitter is really dense so it doesn't take effort to get the glitter placed all over the nail like some glitter polishes.

I was absolutely IN LOVE with this manicure. It's definitely in my top 5 favorites ever, I think. The polish is just so fun and happy. It reminds me of cupcakes and happiness and unicorns and rainbows. I know it's probably easily dupe-able, but I'm happy just to have some Deborah Lippmanns in my collection. What do you think?

xoxo,
Amanda

Updates!

Hi guys! No pictures for this post, I just wanted to say hello to my new followers coming from both Polish-aholics Anonymous and Face and Friends. Although I was somehow removed from the second group, I know a few of you made your way here because of it and I thank you for checking me out! Please leave a comment with your link so I can see your blogs since I was deleted before I got a chance to check out the blog list.

For anyone just tuning in, I wanted to link you to my 50 Follower Giveaway and please feel free to enter, even new followers! 100 followers is coming up quick so I'm planning another after that :)

Finally, this is my 99th post and tomorrow I have a very special 100th post with a Pink Wednesday theme! Stay tuned!

xoxo,
Amanda

Butter LONDON Scoundrel

Hi loves! How's your week going? I only have one picture of today's polish because, well, I guess I got lazy? I'm not sure why. I think I took this right after painting my nails and thought I'd go back and take more later, but then forgot... I've been forgetting a lot lately! On my vacation I forgot shampoo, conditioner, soap, and a slew of other things! Anyway, this polish is too gorgeous not to post at all, so here's my one picture of Butter LONDON Scoundrel:

This is actually a very color accurate picture, for some reason this Scoundrel comes out much darker than the bottle but I still love it. It felt like more of a fall color though, so I'll retry this when it's cooler outside :) As always, application was magnificent and the color was gorgeous. Thoughts?

xoxo,
Amanda

Some Haulage!

Hello my lovely readers! Just wanted to give a friendly reminder to enter my 50 follower giveaway, which should be up in the right hand corner with my most viewed posts. There's lots of goodies you could win, so tell your friends and enter yourself if you haven't already!

Anyway, ending the self-promotion. LOL On to some of my recent buys! First off is an Ulta trip (which really, finding out I live within an hour of one of these was dangerous!):

Ulta: Alter Ego, Sweetheart Pink, The Jungle Look:

Then I found some Pop nail polishes, which is apparently a British company with some awesome polishes! These two were originally $10 but marked down to $5! The top is Foggy, bottom is Pink Glitz (again, blogger rotated the photo and I can't get it back - if anyone has a way to fix this pleaseeee tell me!). Pink Glitz is actually opaque in 2-3 coats, so I'm waiting for a blingy event to wear that one!

Then, I went into Christmas Tree Shops. I don't know if these are nationwide or a New England thing, but they're great! They have this huge cosmetics section with Color Club, Nicole by OPI, Orly, and drug store brands. On this particular day, I happened to check out their clearance area and found these two for $1.48 each!
Sterling Silver Rose and Pretty Please (I got Pretty Please for my BFF who is a light pink fanatic haha!)

Then! I had a swap with Dana from Polished Claws Up! She's a huge sweetheart and I was her first ever swap :) She's posted one of the goodies I sent her, but I think I may have made out in this swap! She included: Orly Lemonade, Orly Star of Bombary, Wet n Wild Diving for Pearls (from the HTF Mermaids Cove collection!), LA Colors Purple (no name?), Colorama Give Me the Chills (iridescent topcoat with whitish peach glitter that flashes red!), and Colorama Ruby Rays, one of her prized polishes! Ruby Rays is a gorgeous red flaky that I'm already in love with! Thanks Dana!

Then, I ordered a couple of polishes from Amazon.com. The first is Jessica brand, which I haven't seen around on blogs but is Big 3 Free! So here's Jessica Witch's Brew, which ran me about $7 with shipping included and came in this adorable bottle:

 Inside it is black and orange bar glitter in a clear base! It looks awesome!

At my local salon, I picked up two of the OPI Miss Universe or Miss USA or whatever collection: Crown Me Already! and It's My Year. I was very close to grabbing another, but my salon has a special deal that only counts for buying two at a time, so I'm going to wait until there's another OPI that I want.

Then, in another Amazon order, I got China Glaze, Haunting. Sorry the picture is off center, but it was the only way I could get my camera to take a picture that showed the sparkles! In reality, this color is much darker, a very dark gray or light black with silver in it, but I wanted to show its sparkles instead. I'm excited to wear this one!

And finally, here's some swatches. First is OPI Flit a Bit (which I got on sale for $3.25 at my local salon!), Haunting (which has some orange showing through, ignore that, sorry! haha), no color, and the LA Colors purple with the Jessica glitter over all of them. I can't wait to try this for Halloween!

Sorry! This post was so long! Hope you guys liked the goodies! Which was your favorite?

xoxo,
Amanda

Quick Comparison: Vintage Violet vs Sparrow Me the Drama

Just a quick post for today, not at home to use my computer so unless I have tomorrow off, probably no post for tomorrow. All depends on Irene, whose center is set to hit us in 2-3 hours.

Hi! After I brought home my recent Ulta purchases, I noticed Vintage Violet looked eerily similar to one I already own, OPI Sparrow Me The Drama. I did a quick side by side to show you the comparison:

Vintage Violet on the left, SMTD on the right. As you can see, VV is slightly mauve-r than SMTD but they are pretty close. I know this picture isn't the best but my camera died right after and I forgot to take more pictures. In my opinion, you could own one and not the other. I slightly prefer SMTD's color but the application of VV was much more opaque.
Dupes? Close? Do you need both?

xoxo,
Amanda

Magnetic Shimmering Silver

*This is a scheduled post for today, as I'm away for the weekend! Please feel free to interact as usual, but my responses may be slightly delayed. I'll be back on August 28th!* update: looks as though I'll be home tonight since the hurricane is going to hit here badly. I may be without power Sunday and/or the days following so if you don't hear from me, that's why!

Hello my dears! How is everyone today? My NOTD post for today is a beautiful, holographic polish by Magnetic, called Shimmering Silver. Let me start by saying this polish is gorgeous, and I loved it, and my friends loved it... wait. My friends? Okay, okay, I did this mani while with my friends. Drinking. So maybeeee it's not my best application. Maybe it needed another coat. Maybe it needed better lighting. But can't we just get past that and enjoy the prettiness? If you are angry with me for the nails, please feel free to refer to the bottle for the true gorgeousness of this polish and how much I adore it. :)

So the moral of the story: don't drink and polish. This has been a PSA by Amanda, the Nail Polish Enthusiast.

xoxo,
Amanda

ELF Mango Madness

*This is a scheduled post for today, as I'm away for the weekend! Please feel free to interact as usual, but my responses may be slightly delayed. I'll be back on August 28th!*

Hello there! Up for today's post is ELF Mango Madness (which reminds me of my favorite Snapple flavor..) which is an orangey pink color. Application with ELF can be tricky, but this one was actually not too bad! A little thin, but not unworkable. It dried really shiny (the picture below is without top coat)

Then I got a little bored and added Nubar 2010 on top, which is my first ever flaky polish! I really liked the way Mango Madness complimented the orange flash of flakies in 2010. Excuse the darkness in this picture, blogger makes my pictures dark sometimes and it won't correct it even if I re-upload?

Up close for detail:

What do you think of Mango Madness, 2010, or the combo?

xoxo,
Amanda

Magnetic Powerful Purple

Hello friends! Today I'm going to show you a misleading but pretty polish, Magnetic Powerful Purple. First, Magnetic is the name of the brand, it's not a magnetic polish. Second, as holo as this looks in the bottle, it struggles translating on the nail. :( However, PP (hehe) is still a beautiful purple that I loved.

PP applied like a dream in 2 coats and dried pretty quickly, but slow for a "holo" (which is where my suspicion began that maybe this wouldn't be as holo as I predicted). It has a slight scattered holo effect, but not super pronounced so it was work appropriate for me.

What do you ladies think? Still pretty or a dud? I'm a fan!

xoxo,
Amanda

Favorites Stash

Hello again! Today's post is a little different, I'm showing you some stash pictures! I organize my stash in plastic shoe boxes (for now) and I'm up to four. I have two tried bins, one untried, and this one: my favorites. Polishes I've tried and loved, for various reasons. Here's the overall look:

 Below is an assortment of random brands and my China Glazes:

Then Claires/Icing and OPI:

More OPI and some Color Club:

And finally, Zoya, Color Club, and some random brands:

See any colors you recognize? Colors you like but don't know the name and would like a label for?

xoxo,
Amanda

My High Priced Splurge Haul

Hello all! Today's post is a little sensitive... to my wallet. Sigh. I could not resist the lures of high-priced polish and I gave in.

First up, I got some nail mail from Amazon. Look at this big, well packaged box:

And all for this:

 LOL! Butter London Victoriana and Scoundrel both came in, but they each had a separate box. Weird. (No pictures of Scoundrel today, because she's a NOTD post coming up!)

Then, I dragged my poor, loving, considerate, unfortunate boyfriend all the way to Nordstrom an hour away to get this baby:

 Deborah Lippmann Happy Birthday, Candy Shop, and Forget You. I was totally on the fence about getting these, because they are apparently easily dupe-able but I have no DL polishes yet and I NEEDED them. And couldn't bear frankening with my favorite hex glitter polishes and wasting them lol.

And finally, my first Sephora by OPI ($OPI) Spark-tacular!

Here's a macro shot. This is primarily small, fine glitter but there's also some larger round glitter. I'm wondering if this might be a dupe of the new Nicole by OPI Kardashian Kolor, Rainbow in the S-Kylie, or the Muppets collection rainbow, but no matter what I'll probably end up with all three. I'm a sucker for glitter.

Thoughts on this haulage? Try not to talk about the price tags, my wallet is here and she's very sad. ;)

xoxo,
Amanda

Epic Comparison Post, AKA I'm a sucker.

Well, hello there, my dears! You're looking dapper today! ;) If you aren't all in a good mood now, you'll be in one by the end of this post because either I am high from fumes typing this or these polishes are just AWESOMESAUCE. (And that is a word I don't use lightly!)

Let's start with a back story. (I wish I could somehow insert the wobbly lines down your vision like they do on TV to show a flashback LOL) Back in the day (okay, about a year ago) I became obsessed with my first lemming. Yes, the polish that started it all: Mad as a Hatter. The problem was that it was about 2 months after the collection came out, and I couldn't find it ANYWHERE. I became that obsessive polish fiend we now all know as "Amanda" ;) Alas, I didn't ever find it, until the fabulous Jamie sent it to me (love ya!) and the lemming was fulfilled. But not before a lot of other polishes came home with me...

So after a lot of taunting from my boyfriend ("oh, another one?" "wow, that's a lot of rainbow sparkle", etc.) I decided to put this collection to good use, and I swatched them all and will compare them so you can decide just which one is the perfect one... for you. For me, they're all perfect.

 (Ignore the smudged Sharpie, I was going to label them on the wheel but it would not cooperate. So I got creative and wrote the labels around a piece of paper). These are two coats of each in order of the bottles above: Wet n Wild Party of Five Glitters, Sephora by OPI Spark-tacular, Claire's Bedazzled, Essence Circus Confetti, Ulta Pinata-yada-yada, Milani Gems, Nyx Carnival, and (the epic, the ultimate) Deborah Lippmann Happy Birthday (yes, I broke down and bought it).

And here are some close ups in the same order: Wet n Wild Party of Five Glitters, Sephora by OPI Spark-tacular, Claire's Bedazzled, Essence Circus Confetti below.

And the remaining four: Ulta Pinata-yada-yada, Milani Gems, Nyx Carnival, Deborah Lippmann Happy Birthday.

And, not to be outdone, Dana actually pointed out one I was missing so I snatched this one up just before this went to presses: Confetti Tazmanian Devil:

So here's the rundown: All nine (!) of them have a clear base and a variety of glitter: either micro-glitter (small specks), small glitter (next size up), and regular glitter; either hex, round, or square in shape.

• Wet n Wild Party of Five Glitters: Small red and green circular glitter, slightly larger green circular glitter, hex glitter in silver and light blue. Price: about $3-5 depending on the retailer (I forget what I paid exactly.)
• Sephora by OPI Spark-tacular: Multicolored micro-glitter, small pink, blue, orange round glitter, and sparse larger hex glitter in orange, pink, blue, green. Clearly different from the others because of the abundance of micro-glitter outweighing the hex/round glitters.  Price: $9.50
• Claire's Bedazzled: Multicolored micro-glitter, large red, orange, yellow, green and blue hex glitter. Price: $4.50 but can be combined with Claire's buy one get one half off special.
• Essence Circus Confetti: Sparse multicolored round micro-glitter, some multicolored small hex and round glitter, and large pink, orange, yellow, silver, blue and green hex glitter. Price: unknown, estimated about $2-5 but I got this in a swap and it's only readily available in Europe.
• Ulta Pinata-yada-yada: Small round multicolored glitter, red, pink, orange and yellow hex glitter. Dries a bit matte. Sparser glitter than the others, definitely meant as a top coat and not to be used on its own. Price: $5 in the old Ulta bottles, $6 in the new cylinder bottles.
• Milani Gems: Small round multicolored glitter, red (?), orange, green and silver hex glitter. Although this is usually hailed as the dupe for Happy Birthday, it doesn't have the light blue hex glitter. Older versions also don't include the pink hex. Price: unknown, I got this one in a swap also, but it's available from beautyjoint.com for about $5-7.
• Nyx Carnival: Small round multicolored glitter, pink, orange, silver, green, and light blue hex glitter. Price: about $3-4, also available through beautyjoint.com
• Deborah Lippmann Happy Birthday: Small round multi-colored glitter, Pink, orange, yellow, green, light blue, silver hex glitter. Very dense compared to the others, only required one coat to compare to the others at two coats. Price: $18, or as part of the Get This Party Started set which is 3 polishes (Candy Shop, Forget You, Happy Birthday) for $42.
• Confetti Tazmanian Devil:  Like $OPI, it has a lot of microglitter which sets it apart. Multicolored small round glitter, pink, orange, yellow, green and light blue hex glitter. Dries matte, not as sparkly as the rest. Price: $2 at CVS

Whew! Okay, now that my vision is blurry from staring at swatches of these glitters, I'm going to rest haha. I hope you all enjoyed this comparison, but which one is your favorite and which ones do you own? Obviously, I own them all haha but my favorites are probably the ones without the microglitter, like DL Happy Birthday, WnW Party of Five Glitters, Claire's Bedazzled, and Essence Circus Confetti. Are there any questions left unanswered? I'm hoping the price points, glitter rundown, and swatches were helpful!

xoxo,
Amanda

50 Follower Giveaway!

Hello my dearest readers! We did it! I'm up to 50 followers and I'm so happy :) Thank you all for your support, comments, and for following! To celebrate, I'm hosting a giveaway for my followers. Here are the rules:

1. The giveaway is open to all followers in the United States and Canada (sorry international readers, but every time I've sent a package overseas it's caused a lot of trouble for the recipient, and I don't want to have you guys paying taxes on it!)
2. Entries must be received by September 9th just before midnight, and the winner will be announced that weekend. (This will give me time to verify all entries, so, yes, I will be checking and duplicates/false entries will be disqualified) They will be organized in the order they were received and I will use random.org to choose a random number for the winner. The winner has 48 hours to respond or another winner will be chosen.
3. Entries should be submitted as a comment on this post. Comments on other posts will not count.
4. Entrants must be 18 years or older or have express permission from their parent/guardian to participate.
5. Here's what you can do to win:

• One entry for your Google Friend Connect (GFC) username. This entry is mandatory. Please also include your email address so I can contact the winner. New followers are welcome!
• One (optional) entry for tweeting about this giveaway and following me on twitter at Amanda_NPE. Include a link to the tweet (click on the time it was posted and it will give you the direct page to that tweet)
• One (optional) entry for posting about this on your blog, in your sidebar, or adding me to your blog roll (include a link for which one you did)
• One (optional) entry for telling me your favorite post on my blog so far and why. (You don't need to include the link, just a description of the mani or the name of the post is fine)

So you will have a maximum of four entries, minimum of one (obviously) to enter. And now for the important stuff: what can you win?!

 Kleancolors: Kiss Goodbye, Twinkly Love, and Midnight Seduction.

 Deborah Milano Knock Out Violet and Love at First Sight.

 Love and Beauty glitter turquoise, Love and Beauty fuschia/magenta glitter, and Golden Rose Holographic 108 (gray).

 OPI Designer Series (DS) Mystery (a deep purple with gold glitter).

And some nail art supplies: iridescent heart nail sprinkles, black glitter, and laser lace.

I've been adding things here and there so the winner is likely to win some other stuff as well as I stumble upon things before the giveaway ends.

Best of luck to all of you and please feel free to ask me any questions at amanda_npe on Twitter or by emailing at az270890@yahoo.com

xoxo,
Amanda

Bam-blue-zled ... updated!

Hello my dears! Quick post for today to show you how I updated Ulta Bam-blue-zled before removing it: adding glitter! Duh! :) I put 3 coats of Kleancolor Disco Ball (why it's called Disco Ball, I'm not sure...) over it. Disco Ball has small purple and blue glitter in a clear base.

What do you think? I liked this enough and was happy to use a glitter, but it didn't keep me occupied for long!

xoxo,
Amanda

Ulta Bam-blue-zled

Hello lovely ladies! I just want to start today by saying that I'm up to 49 followers! I'm already planning out my giveaway to thank you all and hopefully there's some stuff in there that you are all interested in (hint: it's a lot of glitter LOL). Thank you so much! I feel like I've finally "made it" haha. It's amazing to me when I think there are about 50 people from all over the world reading what I have to say. Thank you, thank you, thank you! (I feel like this is a terrible Grammy speech, and I'm moving on now. Sorry.)

On to the polish: Today's polish is brought to you by creative naming! LOL I'm a huge fan of this name for some reason, but the color is nice too. Bam-blue-zled is one of my recent Ulta purchases and is a periwinkle color. A few of you mentioned you liked it in comments on the Ulta post or on twitter. It applied pretty nicely, although it required three coats on some fingers to even out and had some pooling at the cuticle. Nothing unmanageable, but worth noting.

 No flash, above.

With flash. Completely blurry. I only posted this because this is color accurate, and none of my non-fuzzy pictures would reflect the real color. So weird, right?

Overall, I enjoyed this color but it just wasn't WOW! to me so I touched it up with something, which you'll see in my next post!
What do you think? Did the name draw you in too?

xoxo,
Amanda

Friday is for Lovers: Edward & Bella

Hello ladies! I have a  couple of beauties for you today, and one of my favorite combos. In my Slovenian swap, I got the Essence Twins, Edward and Bella and boy, am I enamored. But, ladies, I have a confession. It wasn't just the color that drew me in. I'm a Twilight fan. There, I've said it. Judge away. But it's important that this doesn't effect our relationship... ;)

Anyway, here's Bella on her own. A gorgeous, medium toned blue-ish teal creme that is a careful one coater or, if you're like me, a two coater to even it out. This is with no top coat over it and it just looks so squishy and shiny!

And here's Edward on top of Bella (ha, ha, couldn't resist.):

And a close up to show the small silver glitter and larger square blue glitter in Edward:

What do you think? I'm in love! I wish I'd gotten all the twins sets!

xoxo,
Amanda

Recent Ulta Visit...

Hello again my dear readers! My follower count has increased because I joined a facebook group called Polish-aholics Anonymous and I love it! So nice to interact with fellow bloggers and polish addicts, so if you found me through there: hello!

As you all know, I'm an Ulta addict. Say what you want about their service or whatever, but I adore it and my Ulta is amazing and hasn't let me down yet. So I decided to stop by recently and picked up these beauties:

Vintage Violet, Bam-blue-zled, and Mint Condition. And with a purchase of $17.50 or more I got...

This cute little wristlet! Filled with all the goodies below:

Pretty spectacular deal if you ask me! I was so excited haha. And below are some super quick swatches of the polishes. Bam-blue-zled (I love that name haha), Mint Condition, and Vintage Violet.

Do you share a love of Ulta like I do? My friend Emily from Embellished Nails hasn't been yet so we're going to get together and go soon! Any suggestions for her?

xoxo,
Amanda