China Glaze Sweet Hook Toughened Up

It's been almost four weeks since my last post. I'm not even gonna try to make excuses as to what happened, I'm just hoping you guys can still be entertained.

In the last four weeks, I have made a rack for my polish bottles (post to come) so I could see what colours/finishes I have and what I can still justify purchasing new bottles. It happened that I was buying the same colour in different brands, mostly because every time I bought a new polish, I would use it a couple of times and store it in a filing box and I couldn't really see what I already had. 

This post is about one of those polishes that I justified as I had nothing remotely similar. If you haven't guessed from the title of the post, it's China Glaze Sweet Hook from the Electropop collection that was released in the States in February 2012. I'm going to thank Tasha for this colour being added to my collection for two reasons. First, she has it on her stash and has let me use it a couple of times, each time in only one finger though (because i was using one colour/finger to create a skittle not coz she wouldn't let me), I fell in love nonetheless. Second, she pointed me towards eBay as the place to get cheap China Glaze. I got mine from this seller for about $7 bucks. 

I present to you my version of Sweet Hook. This polish was sooo sweet, it got me hooked... Bad joke, I know. It was almost like a dad joke.

I've mentioned before I'm not usually a fan of pastel and light colours but I'm warming slowly to them. The swatch above was done with two coats of this almost flawless formula. I felt like I needed to take some of the sugary goodness of this colour away and added some 2 mm square studs from Born Pretty Store. I used Manicare's Hi-Shine Top Coat to stick the studs and to finish off the mani. I really like the combination of the lilac and gold. What do you guys think?

One other thing that I have managed to do in this post is to take close-to-accurate colour pictures. The photo below shows fairly closely the actual colour of the bottle. I'm really proud of that! Woohoo! I have to admit, I have been trying to make my skin look paler that it actually is. I guess it's like looking at glossy magazines and having their expectation of beauty to  match reality.

I hope you guys can stick around. After building the polish rack, I discovered I have close to 300 bottles, which need to be put to good use.

Til next time, 

Laura 

Polish Binge Pt. 1

A couple of weeks back, I went on a massive nail polish shopping binge, mostly on Beauty Bay as they had 20% off everything and free international shipping as a part of their Black Friday sales.

I got the first out of two packages on Friday. I got a heap of mini polish sets and the first one I'm going to show you is one by Orly. It's called Mani Minis Hot Shots and it has four brightly coloured polishes.

From left to right: Hottie, Hook Up, Holla, Blue Collar. All two coats except for my middle finger, in which I needed 3 coats to make Hook up opaque.
I added an accent with Bundle Monster's BM-225 plate motif of what I believe is a Christmas bauble with essence's Silver twister.

These are my first Orly polishes and I was amazed. This spread like butter and dried fairly quickly. Even Hook Up, the yellow one, was a dream to apply. I find any yellow polish takes a bit of work to make it look good but not this one.

I'm so happy with these purchase and I'm really looking forward to showing you the rest of my (new) stash.

Till next time, 

Laura