Author: RiaG

Very pale baby blue winter nails

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What would be a better shade for a lovely, snowy and sunny winter day than baby blue with some subtle shimmer? For this manicure I used a coat of Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau and two coats of Essence Snow Jam (Trend Edition) collection’s white Top Of The Ice-Stream polish. Top Of The Ice-Stream gave the baby blue polish more pale and softer look. I loved this combination :)

You can probably still find Take Me To Your Chateau from eBay and online stores. Where to find the Essence I don’t know. This bottle was sent to me by a lovely lady along with the whole Snow Jam collection. Go check out her blog and her AMAZING photos at The Swatchaholic. Thanks so much Jeanette ♥ *squish*

 

 

Nail Pattern Boldness – Is Someone Loving You?

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I got this stunning glitter polish from Nail Pattern Boldness indie brand. Is Someone Loving You? is one of the four polishes from their brand new Valentine’s collection called Hello?. This polish has a lot of pink and holographic microglitter, bigger pink circle glitter, smaller square glitter and holographic butterflies (OMG!!!) on a clear base. This polish is STUNNING! So delicate and beautiful! I’m bummed out about my nails being so short at the moment. How gorgeous would this look on longer nails *deep sigh*

I also got their highly praised top coat Glitter Food. Many bloggers are totally in love with this top coat and for a good reason. I’m going to test this out with few more glitter polishes and then write my review of it with some example photos. I can already tell you it really works though. I tried it with this polish and only used it on my left hand nails with a coat of Inm Out The Door on top of everything. On the right hand I only used Inm Out The Door and the difference is noticeable. Left hand Glitter Food nails have much more depth in them, glitter is shinier and the surface is smooth. Right hand nails look flat, duller and you can feel the glitter through Inm alone. Using Glitter Food also didn’t make the dry time for the manicure any longer.

In this mani I used Essie Nourish Me x1, Essie Beam Me (whitening base coat) x1, Color Club Sugar Rush (sheer pink with a cold toned pink flash), Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food x1 and Inm Out The Door super fast dry top coat.

You can buy Nail Pattern Boldness polishes from their Etsy store. You should also “Like” their Facebook page to get the latest news and restock info. At the moment the Hello? collection is sold out but I believe there is going to be a restock next week. I’m sure the dates and time will be announced on their FB page.


***This was sent for a review.

Hare Polish – Midsummer’s Midnight

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It’s time to continue my adventures in the wonderland that is indie polish. This time I have HARE Polish Midsummer’s Midnight for you. This is a glitter polish with multicolored, shaped and sized glitter on a dark sheer-ish base. This is totally awesome!! I especially fell in love with the square glitter in it. Yet another beautiful and unique addition to my polish collection.

In this manicure I used one coat of black Color Club Where’s The Soiree? and two coats of HARE Midsummer’s Midnight plus a coat of Inm Out The Door. I think you can get away with just three coats of Midsummer’s Midnight alone but I wanted to use black base to really make the glitter pop. This was easy and even to apply and glitter went on the nail nice and smooth without extra work. I was very happy with the quality of this one. This was my first HARE Polish but I can already tell it won’t be the last ;)

I bought this from Shoppe Eclecticco. This was my first experience with this store and it was a very positive first experience. I got answer to my question about restock for other brands within minutes via email (this of course must depend on the time of the day when you send your question). The order itself was deliver to Finland in a week. Great service in my opinion! Thanks!

 

 

ABC Challenge – D is for drip manicure

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So it’s that time of the week again and this week it’s letter D! I chose to go for a nail art type instead of a polish name and did a drip manicure. It was a first time I gave this type of a manicure a try and I quite like how it turned out. Result could’ve always been better and next time I’ll pay a little more attention to details :P

I used two coats of OPI Pedal Faster Suzi! and then I used Flormar U29 and did the drips with a little help from a dotting tool. Quick and easy! I think that next time I give this a try, I’ll do pastel skittles drip mani.

I just really wish my nails would grow super fast and I could get to my ideal nail length already *sigh*

 

 

Essie Nourish Me – 4 weeks after

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It’s been four weeks since I started using Essie Nourish Me base coat and the results are impressive as you might have seen from my previous week reports. The condition of my nails keeps getting better and this week I managed to file off all the damaged part from my left hand nails. There might still be a tiny bit of weaker part left on the right hand nails. I filed a good amount of off my nails before taking these photos and I’m hoping to finally be able to start the length growing project. I’m not gonna file anything off for the next two weeks just to see how the tips react to growing them out a bit. So next Tuesday I won’t be writing my usual week report but I’ll be back with some news in two weeks.

Here are the photos of how my nails look now after four weeks of using Essie Nourish Me hydrating base coat.

 

Left hand nails are now in a very good condition.
Right hand is looking pretty good too.

Urban Decay – Naked Basics

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Urban Decay keeps releasing new products on their Naked range. Recently also Naked nail polish collection. I myself have all three eyeshadow palettes. Naked Basics is smaller than the previous too palettes and contains six shades. Venus is a very fine shimmer shade, Urban Decay calls it off-white demi-matte. Other five eyshadows are mattes. Foxy can also be found from the Naked 2 palette.

Naked Basics palette is light and small which makes it easy to take on trips and carry in your makeup bag if needed. Shades are all velvet-y smooth and well pigmented. As you can see in the swatch photo Foxy blends in perfectly with my warm toned skin and makes it my go to “nude -no makeup” -look eyeshadow. Naked Basics is great addition to the Naked palette family and matte eyeshadows are a very welcome change from all those shimmers and glitter shades. I’m glad to have this one in my makeup drawer :)

 

Yes, Foxy is there too. It’s just hard to see cos it matches so perfectly with my skin tone.

OPI – French Quarter For Your Thoughts

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Today it’s just a basic creme manicure. Every now and then the bright colors and sparkling glitters can feel like a little too much and for those times it’s good to have these toned down basic colors in your stash. A little while ago I noticed that I don’t really have any grey cremes in my polish drawer and I’ve been keeping my eyes open for them ever since. I found this one from a discount bin earlier this week and since I’ve already considered buying it, I decided to give it a new loving home.

OPI French Quarter For Your Thoughts is a smoke/cement grey creme polish from the Fall 2011 Touring America collection. Formula is ok, maybe a bit on the thin side. This was quite streaky on the first coat but evened out very nicely with the second coat and I didn’t need to apply a third one. Dry time was normal with Inm Super Fast Drying top coat. I like this shade a lot. It goes well with my skin tone and gives a sophisticated look. Neutral shade that still has that something in it to make it special. Good buy :)

 

 

 

Pink dotting tool manicure

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Today it’s my first try on a dotting tool manicure. It’s been a lot of first times for so many things for me and this blog lately. My last year was so insane that I had no time or energy to obsess over cosmetics or nail polish. Life is starting to return to normal and my inner cosmetics freak is raising it’s head again, big time. Lately I’ve also gotten into indie polish and been shopping a lot of those lately. I hope you guys are gonna be interested in what I’ve found from the indie world too cos there’s gonna be a lot of those coming up.

Oh well, on with the babble and let’s talk about this manicure ;) For this I applied two coats of Models Own Soda Pop Pink and let that dry for a bit. Then I used different size dotting tools with Color Club Where’s The Soiree?, OPI Alpine Snow and Models Own Moody Grey polishes to make the dots. Then I allowed the dots to dry for a little bit before applying the top coat to prevent them from smudging. This was a quick and easy manicure and IMO it looks pretty cool too.

 

 

ABC Challenge – C is for China Glaze Caribbean Blue and circle glitter

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Yay!! It’s time for our weekly ABC Challenge again and this week’s letter is C. For that I chose China Glaze Caribbean Blue with circle glitter. Enough C’s there for y’all? LOL Circle glitter awesomeness polish is Stay Behind, Catch a Wave from Elevation polish.

I applied two coats of Caribbean Blue and one coat of Stay Behind, Catch a Wave. The circle glitter lays so flat that I only needed to use Inm Out The Door Super Fast Dry top coat to smooth it out. I’m totally in love with this circle glitter. Such a nice change from all the hex glitter I’ve had on my nails lately. So sparkly and looks like raindrops on your nails. Stunning! Can’t wait to layer this with other colors too.

Stay Behind, Catch a Wave can be bought from Elevation Polish store but it’s sold out at the moment.

 

 

 

Essie Nourish Me – 3 weeks after

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Here I go again with my weekly Essie Nourish Me report. It’s been three weeks and the peeling is almost grown out. This time you can see a tiny bit of peeling on the tips of the nails but since the tips are already weak and thin I decided to not buff those out anymore. I don’t think those are new peels, they are just left over from what I didn’t get off with my last buffing. Looks like I might be able to file them off with the length next week though. I’m hoping that after two or three more weeks my nails are gonna be healthy again and I can start growing a bit of length on these too.

I now have a tear on my index finger nail too. That happened when my hand slipped from a frozen car door handle. Oh well, it’ll grow out too while I’m growing out the peeled parts.

I will continue these weekly reports until the peeling has stopped and my nails are good as new again. After that I’ll still post about the nail growing project and let you know if Nourish Me can help on the nail growing project and keep the tips from peeling and breaking even when I don’t file off the length every week.