Revlon Parfumerie in Surf Spray, Stamping and Colour Matching

I'm gonna include three bits of information in this post so I'll try to keep it as concise as possible. 

First and foremost, I'm gonna show you another one on the Revlon Parfumerie polishes I have recently acquired. Surf Spray is a slightly-leaning-towards-aqua blue shimmer with light blue and purple almost flakie-like, tiny glitter. It is a rich colour on the bottle but it doesn't fully translate to the nails; not that's a bad thing, it looks different than expected but it's still pretty nonetheless. 

Surf Spray is very sheer and it can take 3-4 coats to reach full opacity; I may have cheated a little and put some undies on to make sure this dried quickly and I didn't use too much of the polish.  Can you tell I used two different polishes for the base?

There's not a lot of difference but if we must, I used Max Factor Mini Nail Polish in Candy Blue on my middle finger (left in the below photo) and Essence's Let's Get Lost on my ring finger (right). I could see a very slight darker duochrome effect with Candy Blue but that might have to do with the fact that CB was the darker base.

After all that, I used one coat of each base colour and one coat of Surf Spray on each nail. There was no change on the depth of the polish whether it had the 4 coats or the undies on. The formula is pretty good and stays where one puts it with the brush. It can get a bit streaky but careful application can solve the problem, if that's something that bothers you.

Oooh! I forgot about the scent. Surf Spray could be interpreted in a lot of ways but these guys seemed to go along the way of washing powder and marine scented hand wash. It's one of the scents that has grown on me and it's not overpowering, so leaving it on makes me feel like I have clean hands when they may not actually be. :/

Now for the stamping, I used an old Sally Hansen in Antique Bronze that I bought for stamping about a year ago because of the colour but it turned out too sheer; now that time has passed, it has gotten a tad thicker and it starting to stamp well on certain colours. The design came from MoYou's Suki Collection - 04 plate and I'm not sure if you've noticed but my pinky and ring fingers mirror the pattern on my middle and index fingers. Super revolutionary, right? I topped it all off with one coat of OPI Mate Top Coat. 

Now for the last part of the post I'm gonna keep it super positive. I am rubbish at picking colour combinations. I usually have to consult a trustworthy colour wheel to see what may look good together and pray that it actually turns out OK. That was until today. Looking for colour wheels on Google, I went past the first couple of results and discovered this interactive colour wheel by Adobe. I would have never thought of the combination above by myself so I was super happy that I could choose a colour close enough to the base and discover that a brown would be a good combination. Considering the base was a shimmer, I figured a simmer would be good. Voila! A good combination.

I've been playing around with it all afternoon and picking polishes from the rack to see future combination and I'm pumped to get some those out. Thank you whomever come out with it!!! I'm hoping by putting this here it might help someone else, maybe...

That's it from me, I wanted to keep it short and I'm still babbling on.

Till next time, 

Laura

33 Day Challenge: Shapes

Today's vague 'shapes' prompt was a little bit too much for my over thinking tendencies so I jumped on Google to give myself some direction. One search lead to another and I ended up with an idea completely different to what I had googled but it all turned out for the best. Have any of you girls played with a tangram at some point in your lives? I remember having a couple when I was younger and when I got my first smart phone, one of the first games I downloaded was a tangram. I finished 200 levels of this puzzle in less than a week and went ahead and got myself another app that had different shapes. Thinking about it, it's kinda lame how excited I am about tangrams and doing a mani about them. Well, lame I will be because I really liked putting the shapes of the tangram on my nails.

I started with two coats of Sally Hansen's White On and a coat of Seche Vite and let that dry completely. I then used striping taping on my fingers to create the shapes of the puzzle, one finger at the time. Most of the colours I wanted to use were a bit sheer, so instead of putting layer upon layer of the same polish, I used some undies on all fingers but my thumb. Colours used (base first, top colour second) on each finger:

Pinky:  Sinful Colours in Innocent and Topshop in Eclipse

Ring:    Max Factor Mini in Purple Haze and Topshop Plume

Middle: Essence in Flashy Pumpkin and Sally Hansen Lustre Shine in Lava

Index:   Max Factor Mini in Candy Blue and Sally Hansen Lustre Shine in Scarab

Thumb: Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Golden-I and Revlon in Fire Fox 

I didn't use any topcoat after creating the shapes to keep the slight 3D effect they have. 

This is the picture I based the tangram shapes on. There are a lot of variations of this puzzle but this configuration is the one I remember playing with. Disclaimer: The shapes in my manicure are for illustrative purposes only. Scale may vary in real life . :)

Source

Only shot I got in sunlight. I think the colour's a bit off but it shows the shimmer well enough.

In a slightly related note, there is a Topshop opening tomorrow in my city and I am sooooo tempted to go raid their polish display but I'm thinking that may be a bad idea. I may end up poor and I hardly have any  polish rack space as it is... This story will continue.

Check out the other ladies' manicures for today's prompt. 

Till next time, 

Laura

essence A Piece Of Forever

This post is full of cheap goodness. Firstly, we may all know that essence is amazing at keeping up with trends at a very low price. In this occasion, essence has released a collection to coincide with the release of the latest Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn Part 2 (according to iMDb.com, the movie comes out on this Thursday, 15th of Nov. I'm not a fan so I'm not keeping up with release dates for these movies).

The collection has four polishes but the only one that really caught my attention was the yellow gold one that looked thick enough to be a one coater. To tell you the truth, I didn't even pay attention how much it cost when I first bought yesterday. However, I went to Target in the city today and bought another bottle because it's so good for stamping. I just checked my receipt and it turned out to be $3.95. Not too bad.

My other awesome purchase was a Max Factor Max Effect Mini Nail Polish from Big W for $.72. Yep, that is seventy two cents. There weren't that many colours available but I liked the blue enough. 

This was my little haul for the day.

And this is the mani I came up with:


Polishes used: 

Blue: Max Factor Mini in Candy Blue
Gold: Essence The Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Part 2 in A Piece Of Forever
Top Coat: Sally Hansen Insta-Dri
Plate: Bundle Monster BM-218

It seemed a little to plain to have the same pattern on all my fingers so added an accent on my ring finger with the gold polish.

I didn't like how it looked so I stamped the blue onto the gold for this result.

I think I like it but I'm not sure. I'll let it grow on me, if not, there's always good ol' nail polish remover and endless combinations of polish colours and finishes!

Just a few notes on the polishes, Max Factor's Candy Blue was a dream to apply with a non-streaky, almost one-coater formula that dried fairly quickly and it worked well for stamping. In the above photos, I have two coats on but I could have gotten away with one carefully applied coat. Love it. The only bad thing I can come up with is that Big W's sale finishes tomorrow and they weren't great at stocking up their shelves with this awesome offer. Oh well. I guess I can do without those extra bottles of polish.

Now, the gold polish. To start with, the colour seems a bit odd, and even though I'm a sucker for gold polishes, the yellow gold hue that it has put me off a little bit. Yes, it is great for stamping and that's basically why I got it... Plus it's essence. Essence = Cheap. 

The other problem I have with it is that the application on the nail is S T R E A K Y. Every single hair of the brush can be seen on the nail, even when dry. You can't see it in the photos above (or can you?). I came across this post from Spektor's Nails, which in turn borrowed the idea from Polish Art Addiction, to avoid those streaks on metallic/shimmer polishes. So I applied a first coat, which would have been enough if not for the streaks, then sponged a second coat on. You couldn't see the streaks but because I used a new makeup sponge, bits of it got stuck to my nail. :(

What do you like better, gold over blue or blue over gold? 

Till next time, 

Laura