December Untrieds: Essence Carrie and Mr. Big

Hey everyone! Day two of December and I am going strong! I wonder how Amanda and Madeline (note: new blog!) are doing... anyway, I'll stop procrastinating :)

Today I am lucky enough to have Mr. Big and Carrie from Essence's Nail Art Twins collection. I absolutely adore every single duo to come out of this line so I was certain I wouldn't be disappointed, especially since I LOVE Sex and the City.

Mr. Big is a purple-red creme. Perfect coverage in one coat, which I love. All of this line covers amazingly!

Then I added Carrie on top and voila! Instant nail art and beauty. a perfect couple :)

xoxo,
Amanda

Lazy 15: Bonfire Night

Happy December! I'm sorry I failed at this challenge so much, I've just been so lazy. So so so lazy.

I was a little uninspired for bonfire night but a conversation early on with some of the creators of this challenge gave me an epic idea: bonfires + nights = okay. But bonfires + nights + S'MORES = FUN. So these are my S'mores nails.

My nails are the pieces of a s'more: graham crackers on pointer and pinky, marshmallow on middle, and chocolate on ring. The marshmallow is Essie Marshmallow, chocolate is Essence Sneezy, and I only have one brown polish in my entire collection (you can see it right in that photo) so I actually had to Franken another polish for the graham crackers. It's Sneezy with one drop white and one drop fall orange Migi.

There you have it, belated challenge mani!

xoxo,
Amanda

Saturday Mini-Challenge: Cling-Wrap Mani

Hey everyone! Happy weekend! I'm so so so glad that it's the weekend, work has been nuts lately and I love my breaks on the weekends now.

Anywho, a few of my twitter buds and I decided to challenge ourselves to do a cling wrap mani... just once. My fellow challengers are Nicole, Wes, and Fitzy. It's a one-time challenge - right up my alley! haha! I've never actually done one before this so I was having a lot of trouble deciding what color combination to do... and then I had an epiphany. ALL THE COLORS!

Magnetic Radiant Red, Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure Shrimply Devine, OPI Atomic Orange, Zoya Pippa, Essence Bashful, Essence Sleepy, A-England Tristam, Color Club Pucci-licious

I heard that putting dark colors over light worked best and it just so happened all my light and dark colors alternated so I could do every other for my base coat. We have Sally Hansen Shrimply Devine, Zoya Pippa, Essence Sleepy, and Color Club Pucci-licious as my base colors:

I waited for them to dry (a tough feat since I'm impatient). I only did one coat even though they have some bald spots because I knew they'd get covered up :) Then I added the remaining colors (Magnetic Radiant Red, OPI Atomic Orange, Essence Bashful, and A-England Tristam) on top, and used the Saran wrap to dab it away while it was still wet.

 

Here are a close up of the nails I liked better:

There you have it - I managed to use all of the colors of the rainbow. Even indigo! (Which after intense twitter debate, it was discovered can be one of 4 shades and I just chose the darker blue version of the definition.) I really like this method and I loved the results! The Magnetic brand one is a scattered holo and it came out really pretty, it kind of looks like the glitter crackles earlier this year.

Anyway, HOOOOOOOOLYYYYYYYYYY chattiness this post. Sorry about that! Kudos if you made it through and I hope you enjoyed ;)

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

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

The Rest of My Recent Haul Skittles

Hello again my lovely readers :) How is everyone today? I decided to skittle swatch the rest of my recent hauls and I realized a few things: 1. I am obsessed with nail polish. I know, I know. Who saw this coming? Well, apparently not me when I ordered like 700 polishes all in a week and actually verbally yelled YES! in my front yard when I saw a package. 2. I like purple, a lot. It replaced pink as my favorite color, I think. At least in terms of nail polish... Anyway.

Left to right, starting with thumb is: Catrice Dirty Berry, Ingrid 351, Essence Bella, Catrice Purplelized, and Deborah Milano Knock Out Violet.

Then, because I had about 900 glitter topcoats I ordered, I added those on top. From left to right, starting with thumb: Essence Circus Confetti, Essence It's Purplicious, Essence Edward (aw, Edward and Bella), Essence Black and White Make Me Holo (which, as you can see, did not make it holo, but did give it a cool pearlized effect), and Ruby Kisses All Purpled Out.

Finally, I decided to try out my Essence magnetics and the final polish that I couldn't fit elsewhere. The magnetics are cleaned up kinda, well, crappily, because I was so busy trying to get the magnet to them to get a pattern with no luck.

Left to right, ending with thumb: Essence Magic Wand, Mystic Wish, Miracle Shine, and Hex Hex!, then Deborah Milano Love at First Sight.

And because I still had more glitter topcoats, here are the metallics with glitter. Left to right: Florimar 010, Essence Hello Holo, Essence Julia (Kirsten, it's SQUARE GLITTER), and Essence Blair.

In conclusion, I'm in love with Essence and everything they do.

If you made it this far, kudos to you! Do you guys like the pictures of the bottles, or is it too much? I like seeing them because, well, they're sparkly. And pretty. And I like pretty and sparkly and colorful. But is it too much for you, as the reader and not as me, the blogger who is obsessed with glitters?

xoxo,
Amanda

Hi, My Name is Amanda and I am a Polish Addict...

Hello all! I'm posting this late, late on Monday because I just can't wait! I came home and my Beauty Joint order was in, completing my trifecta of hauls! This entire post is dedicated to Kirsten at Glitta Gloves because she is a complete sweetheart who has been so helpful and sweet and friendly and funny and always reassures me when I need it. Oh, and she really loves everything that I bought, pretty much.

First up, I ordered Nfu Ohs from Fabuloustreet.com!

 Nfu Oh 63, 64, and 65 (and no, you're not seeing things: 63 and 64 are incredibly close even though 63 is supposedly pink and 64 is purple... but they're both still awesome!)

Then I got my haul from Slovenia from Dolores at Colorful Bottle. Words cannot even do this girl justice! She is such a sweetheart and I absolutely recommend swapping with her if you can: she's so helpful and friendly, and she has access to some amazing goodies! Thank you my dear, you made me so very happy!

 Here's what I got when I poured out the package:

Look at all that cautious wrapping! <3

Here it is all unwrapped:

Again, Blogger is stupid and flipped all these pictures so the labels will be top to bottom and you will just have to crane your necks to see them!

Above: Magnetic Shimmering Silver (holo! super super holo!), Magnetic Powerful Purple, Essence Black and White Make Me Holo topcoat, Catrice Dirty Berry, Catrice Purplelized, Ruby Kisses RNP132.

 Above:
Left column: Essence It's Purplicious; Essence Magnetic nail polishes: Miracle Shine, Magic Wand, Mystic Wish, Hex Hex!
Right column: Essence Bella, Essence Hello Holo, Essence Circus Confetti, Essence Blair, Essence Julia.

Above: silver bag of candies, Puss in Boots magnet for the magnetic polishes :)
Left column: Florimar 010, Deborah Milano Love at First Sight, Deborah Milano Knock Out Violet, Essence Miracle Shine
Right column: Ingrid Cosmetics 351, Essence Edward, Essence Bella, Essence Hello Holo

Finally, the ones Kirsten will adore I'm sure: Kleancolors I ordered from BeautyJoint.com!

 Above:
Top row: Afternoon Picnic, Holo Pink, Twinkly Love
Bottom row: Chunky Holo Bluebell, Shooting Star, Blind Date

 Above:
Top row: Leaves Jingle, Holo Green, Midnight Seduction
Bottom row: Sparkling Cosmos, My Valentine, Party Fever

Above:
Top row: Nyx Carnival (hey, who invited him to the Kleancolor party?!), Kiss Goodbye
Bottom row: Disco Ball, City Never Sleeps

Whew! That was a post-ful. What do you guys think? Any you want to see swatches of? Which is your favorite?

xoxo,
Amanda