Mimco At Your Fingertips

As you guys may be aware, the Australian brand Mimco came out with a line of cosmetics (think lipstick, bronzers and nail polish) in September last year. Yes, I know I'm late for the party but better late than never, right?

Mimco's description of their polishes, as it is on their website:

Glamour at the tip of your fingers, our Mimco Nail Polish is high performance and high coverage. A superior neon pink gloss finish with a quick drying time and a smooth self-levelling formula will have them eating out of the palm of your hands. Free from Formaldehyde, Toluene, Camphor & Dibutyl Phthalate. 

Not bad, so I just wanna show you a few swatches of the three polishes I acquired from this beautiful brand. 

Jade. A bluish dark green creme, not the most original colour, but it has one of the best formulas I've tried. The polish stays where you've put it, it does it so well I didn't need any clean up on the mani below, plus it dries QUICKLY. Another benefit is that it is almost a one-coater, if carefully applied. However, it is shown below with two coats and no top coat. Can you see how shiny it is? I also find that polishes of this particular shade tend to stain my bed nails. Not this one though. It is amazing! Big tick for this one.

Bright Coral. It is bright but I wouldn't call it a coral. I would say it is more of a tangerine,  but I'm sure like Jade above, there was a reason for the name. This also has an amazing, quick-drying formula, though it is rather sheer, still a creme, just a sheer, shiny creme. If you look at the bottle you can sort of see how sheer it is. The swatch below was done with three thin coats and no clean up. Really shiny without top coat too. Another big tick for Mimco.

Riviera Blue. A very pretty baby blue with the tiny, tiny silver shimmer. If you look at the bottle below, you can see the shimmer just above the second M. Can you see it? Unfortunately, it doesn't show in the nail so I was left with just a plain creme. The formula was a little harder to work with than the two above but still pretty good for a light colour. I used two medium coats had to clean up around the cuticles a little. 

After all the swatching (very rare thing for me), I couldn't just leave Riviera Blue by itself and double stamped each nail with Essie's Penny Talk and Bundle Monster's BM-218 plate. The mani reminded me of Cinderella and her pumpkin carriage. Is that just me?

I bought this polishes just before Christmas for about $11 each at a retail shop when they had a $25% off sale. They are now retailing on Mimco's website for either $5, $9 and $15.95 + postage, depending on the colour and, as far as I've seen, they are still in stock at the shops for $15.95 each. Ooh, I forgot to mention, these polishes are Australian made!!!

Just in case, you are wondering what they look like, I've included a photo below. And in true Mimco fashion, they were given to me in a little black, satin pouch. I am impressed. Apart from the not-so-original colours, I'd put these Mimco up there with the luxury brands. Ok, I don't own a lot of the luxury brands but I could compare it to Illamasqua formulas. Yes, I went there.

So, if you are looking for a little luxury from the renowned brand without blowing the budget (who wants to pay $30 for a hairpin?), I would highly recommend these polishes. 

Til next time, 

Laura

Yay!

I had a horrible week of VERY short nails after going back to work. I had to cut and file them right down since I managed to break two of my nails... *cringe*. Now they've grown a little but but my skin and cuticles are a little bit dry. Please excuse them in the photo below, I was just happy that I have a normal length again. Yay!

Polishes used:

Coral: L'Oreal Color Riche in 305 Dating Coral

Green: L'Oreal Color Riche in 618 Santorini Lagoon 

Black: Konad Special Nail Polish in Black

Top Coat: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri

Stamping plate used: Bundle Monster BM-203

I applied three coats of the coral polish to get it opaque and then sponged on the green with some foam. It then took me forever to choose what pattern I wanted to put on the top as the gradient looked a bit strange. I think the pattern above still shows the gradient  but hides my terrible craftsmanship.

Now, onto the L'Oreal mini polishes. I'm always out for a bargain and for some reason I thought this polishes were on special when I was in Target (maybe a big '25% of L'Oreal' sign gave me that idea...) but I ended up paying the full $6.95 for each 5 ml bottle. I had use them by the time I noticed the price so I couldn't really return them, could I? I don't think any of their colours are extremely unique the two above were different enough from what I have in my stash to *cough* justify my purchase.

Unfortunately, the formula isn't great. The coral was sheer and the green is a stainer, and even with thin coats for both, it took them a long time to dry. I wouldn't recommend them or buy them again. If I want a little bottle I'll just buy an essence polish for cheaper.

Have you guys tried any of the mini bottles? Any shades that are worth the price? Or have you had a better experience with these polishes?

Til next time, 

Laura 

piCture pOlish Kryptonite by More Nail Polish

About a month ago, Cathy from More Nail Polish hosted a giveaway and I was lucky enough to get the fourth out of four prizes. As you may have imagined from the title of this post, the prize was a bottle from piCture pOlish's Collaboration Shades in Kryptonite.

This bottle is my first piCture pOlish lacquer and I will tell you it is amazing!!! The dark green jelly with large flakies has no fault in my eyes. It dries relatively quickly, it is opaque in two coats, it is super shiny by itself and the combination of flakies and jelly gives this polish so much depth. I wanted to do some nail art with it but my limited imagination and the richness of colour/sparkle of the polish didn't give me a lot of options. A swatch wasn't going to be enough, mostly because there are tons of them on the net. So, I just added a coat of my trustworthy Rimmel Pro Matte Finish top coat. We all love matte flakies, right? Or am I too late for that trend?

 Showing off the flakies.

A shiny swatch of this polish can be found here. 

I loved this polish so much I might go to the piCture pOlish website and get some more.

Ooh, I just checked and they have polishes for as little as $6.50. good thing it's payday today. Or is that bad?

Til next time, 

Laura

Too Random Skittle

I've had a few terrible manicures in the last couple of days that were not even worth photographing. I'm talking about extremely flooded cuticles that couldn't be fixed, crooked stamping, smudging of such said stamping, terrible colour combinations and bad gradients. 

This is the first one that looked sort of OK, even though I'm not completely satisfied with the result. I tried using differents textures ( a cream, a metallic and a glitter) in blue, green and pink that I thought would look good together as a skittle mani. Tried tying it all up by having a striped middle finger but the job was kinda dodgy and there's a piece of stray glitter on my ring finger that I couldn't remove!!!!

Anyway, I'll do and learn but here are the pictures.

The obliged matte top coat, which in my opinion, makes polish look a million times better. 

Polishes used:
Pink: B Collection by Bloom in Cologne 
Blue Glitter: Essence in Blue Addicted
Metallic Duochrome: Topshop in Eclipse
Top Coat:   1st pic: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri
                 2nd pic: Rimmel Pro Matte Finish

There you have it. I'm gonna Google Colour Theory and maybe learn a little about what looks good together and keep practicing with that tape.

Till next time, 

Laura

Not So Afraid Of The Marble Anymore

I went to Big W yesterday in search of a new foundation but stumbled upon their massive beauty sale. I found Max Factor's mini bottles for 72 cents. Yeah, that's right. When have I seen such prices for ANY brand of polish on Australia? Never! There were only three colours left so I picked them up and turn around to start running to the checkouts. 

However, in my way, I came across the Face of Australia stand. I'm not a massive fan of their formula as it takes a while to dry but every so often they come up with decent collections and fairly nice colours. Their last one is called Pastels (innovative, right?) and each bottle was $1.94. Woohoo!! I grabbed 6 out f the 7 colours of the collection and ran off to pay. 

When I got home, I took my little $14.52 stash of nail polish and then realised I didn't really like pastels. There was a reason why I never had any before!!! So I had to think of how to use them all at once and the idea of a marble popped up. I brought out my plastic cup of water and started playing with the colours and come up with something I'm actually proud of.

Look at my ring finger. Yeah, I like it.

And some more detail of my index and middle finger (excuse the bubble).

Polishes used:
All Face of Australia
Pink: I'll Take You To The Candy Shop
Purple: Boys 'N' Berries
Blue/Green: After Dinner Mint

I applied the pink polish as a base and added the three colours to the water. The beauty I found with these three polishes is that they took about a minute or so to dry up on the surface of the water so there was quite a bit time to play around with the shapes. I was also really easy to clean up. I didn't use sticky tape or Vaseline to protect my fingers but I managed to just wipe the polish off my skin with some cotton. I found some tiny bubbles from not drying my fingers quickly enough but they're barely noticeable in real life.

I originally intended to use all all six colours for the marble but the yellow and orange polishes from the collection would dissolve in the water by themselves but wouldn't let the other polishes dissolve and dry out really quickly. Really strange considering when when I combined only the yellow and orange, they would play nice and actually create a marble. 

 So, Face of Australia polishes have shown me the beauty of the marble and how I shouldn't be so afraid. Hmm... I wonder what other colours I can try.

Till next time, 

Laura