Pink Wednesday Comparison: Lex Cosmetics vs. Ulta

Hey girls! Quick comparison swatches today! For a while, I was stuck on finding the perfect pale pink polish (this all began with OPI Play the Peonies). In this process, I've acquired quite a few similar pinks, and unfortunately, quite a few super-sheer ones I have no use for. As I searched through my stash here at my apartment (I took only two shoe-boxes of my stash from my dad's) I realized I brought two pale pinks that were nearly identical and thought you guys might want to see. If you don't, avert your eyes now...jerk.

On the left, we have Lex Cosmetics Sweetie Pie and on the right is Ulta Baby Doll. I swear, the nicknames are just a coincidence!

Two coats; both are streaky and not evened out

Three coats; opaque, VNL might be showing on a natural nail, though

Three coats

As you can see, they are fairly similar. Lex Cosmetics is a touch less opaque, but they could be built up to the same opacity easily. The main difference is that Ulta's is a hair pinker than Lex's, but similar enough I'd say you don't need both. If I had to choose, I'd choose Lex just because I like that she donates to charity and has colors created by the fans with stories behind them. Lex Cosmetics is available online at www.lexcosmetics.com for $10 per bottle, with $1 going to a charity picked by the inspiration (BTW, my color is on there too, check out Tuilleries!). Ulta is found, obviously, in Ulta stores and at www.ulta.com for around $2-6, depending on sales.

xoxo,
Amanda

Bluey Comparisons

Hi loves! Happy Tuesday... except I'm not really a Tuesday person either ;) On Tuesdays I do outreach therapy in people's homes for part of the day which is always interesting, but mostly I don't like working 9am-7pm on Tuesdays. Anyway, enough whining! Call the wahhhhmbulance ;)

MariJo requested that she wanted to see this comparison on my last Butter London Bluey post, so I scrounged up not only Zoya Noel, but a few other blues in my stash to compare. Good news: I may have found a dupe, you be the judge!

I decided to compare these four: Orly Sweet Peacock, Butter London Bluey, OPI Yodel Me on My Cell, and Zoya Noel. Here's how they compare in the bottles (pretty diverse, to us polish addicts!):

And a side view of the bottles so you can see the colors better (in retrospect, I should have shaken Noel a bit more, it looks much more silver and metallic than it truly is).

Here they are in the same order, on a nail wheel. Orly is 1 coat, BL is 2 coats, OPI 2 coats, and Zoya 1 coat.

Close up of Orly and BL:

Close up of OPI and Zoya:

And altogether at a different angle.

So overall, here's the breakdown:

Orly: Metallic/foil finish. The most unique of the bunch; glows from within, color is most similar to OPI. Bluest of them all.
BL: Shimmer/microglitter finish. Similar to Zoya.
OPI: Shimmer/microglitter finish. Similar color to Orly but different finishes. Second most blue of these four.
Zoya: Metallic/foil/shimmer finish. BL's possibly twin sibling, looks pretty similar in these pictures. I would say these are fairly close to dupes, in my opinion. My untrained eye (read: boyfriend) studied these two in the bottle and couldn't notice a difference. BL is a hair greener.

So for the short of it: Orly is kinda dupey for OPI, BL is dupey for Zoya. Could you have all four (like, ahem, me)? Sure, I suppose. I don't think these four are different enough to own them all, and some of these may end up going to other polish mommies from my stash, but definitively: all four are lovely colors :)

xoxo,
Amanda

Quick Comparison: China Glaze White Cap vs Orly Winter Wonderland

Hey hey hey! How is everyone out there in the interwebz?! It's Friday, which is always great anyway but my one client of the day canceled - so I'm pretty pumped to have the day off now! :) Today's post is a quick comparison. I recently bought China Glaze White Cap, thinking it might be a backup bottle for Orly Winter Wonderland, which happens to be one of my favorite polishes for lightening up or refreshing a mani. Here they are layered over a black creme, in front of their respective bottles:

Immediately you can see that, nope, they are totally different (well, to a nail polish addict; my boyfriend thought they were comparable). ChG is much more sheer than Orly, and Orly pretty much takes over the scene. (What an attention whore!)


Bottle shots; Orly has much larger chunks of glitter, it seems



And up close, you can really see the difference: ChG has a golden glow whereas Orly is all silver. I prefer Orly, but that's because I prefer silver; but both are pretty! Which do you like?

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

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

Black Crackle Comparisons

Hello my lovely followers and new readers! How are you all doing today?

Today I am here to answer the age old question: Are all crackles the same? (Okay, maybe not age old, just since every brand started releasing their own crackle)

I have three black crackles in my collection: China Glaze Black Mesh, OPI Black Shatter, and La Rosa black (sent to me by NailDeRoyale).

I applied them all over OPI Extravagance to see the differences, using the same technique of applying like a normal polish (from cuticle to tip in three separate strokes, one center, two sides). Here are the results:

As you can see, China Glaze is a little more linear, and created lines in the direction of the brush but not many horizontal lines. The OPI (which, by the way, dries out in no time and was chunky as h-e-double hockeysticks when I broke it out to try this, which reminded me why I never use OPI's shatter) broke up into smaller bundles of crackle, appearing more like a leopard print pattern. Finally, La Rosa broke up pretty evenly, leaving the gaps in the polish but the overall look is black. La Rosa was actually my favorite because, as you can see, China Glaze and OPI require some coddling (special techniques, thinner) whereas La Rosa just applies like a dream. Its consistency is quite similar to a normal polish and isn't thick, so you can work with it pretty easily.

Which one do you prefer?

xoxo,
Amanda

OPI DS Extravagance vs. Ulta Material Girl

Hey again! :) How is everyone doing? My day is going rather craptastically, and I'm in need of some cheering up!

Today's post is a comparison I stumbled upon by accident. Dolores at Colorful Bottle and I have been in the midst of an epic cross-continent polish swap, and she requested OPI DS Extravagance for her friend. I went to Ulta to pick one up (I have it at home, but wanted to give her a new bottle), and happened upon Ulta Material Girl.

In the bottle at the store, they looked nearly identical in color and holo. Of course, I thought of you guys and doing a comparison post. The Ulta was on sale for $3 and OPI was about $9, so I scooped up two bottles of Ulta (one for me, one for Dolores or a giveaway if she didn't want it) and decided if she wanted the DS, I could send her my bottle. I quickly swatched both for her so she could compare and you can see for yourself: which one is which?

Answer: OPI is on the left. The only real difference was that OPI has a bit more holographic glitter, but other than that the colors are pretty much the same. The angle and lighting here may have affected the holo, but the colors are so similar! OPI could have been one coat but I applied two coats of each for uniformity.

In the end, Dolores decided Ulta was just as well and passed on the OPI. What do you think? Dupes? Similar? Totally different and I need to get my eyes checked?

xoxo,
Amanda

Comparison Post: Milani Gems vs Claire's Bedazzled

Good morning! Today I have a comparison swatch for you ladies. I know a few months ago, the Milani "one coat glitters" were hugely popular, but not everyone got their hands on it. I got Milani Gems through a swap a few months ago, loved it, and hadn't used it very much, mostly because it was winter and all it did was snow and so glitter wasn't really appropriate. But now it's sunny and I busted my glitters out and discovered, oh, this Claire's polish I bought the other day looks really similar, let's check that out...

Milani Gems is on the left, Claire's Bedazzled is on the right in all the pictures and both swatches are two coats.

So, you can see they're close. The large, hexagonal glitter is in the same color scheme for both: teal, pink, orange, silver, and small green glitter. The difference, I think, is that Bedazzled also has this small green glitter accompanying it. There's some medium glitter in Gems, but Bedazzled has lots of the really small glitter, which you can see in the middle of the swatch on the right side.

So what do you think? Not exactly dupes, but I think they're close enough you could buy one and not the other (whoops!) or that people wouldn't necessarily notice the difference if you were wearing one of them. And I must say, I am really stuck on the multi-colored glitter because I just bought Pinata-yada-yada at Ulta yesterday! (Yes, you read that right, I went to an Ulta! It was mindblowing. Haul pictures to come soon!)