A Makeup & Beauty Blog – Lipglossiping

This striking pewter polish is from the Orly Birds of a Feather collection that was released for this Autumn/Winter.  It’s a beautiful grey with silver flecks that gives it a stunning metallic effect without the usual brushstroke issue that actual metallic polishes present.

Fully opaque in two coats with absolutely no application issues, this is a cracking polish for Autumn/Winter and one that I recommend you have in your collection.  Flawless.

Orly Sea Gurl is available to buy online at BeautyBay.com, priced at £6.95

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I’m not generally a fan of jelly nail polishes… they have to be quite special to turn my head. I like a nod to a jelly finish, infact, one of my favourite Butter London polishes has a slight jelly edge (Come to Bed Red) but in general, I’ll take a creme finish any day.

Orly Fowl Play from the Autumn/Winter Birds of a Feather collection contains a myriad of multi-colour flake, glitter and sparkle in a purple jelly base.  I love the razz but am just not digging that base which always looks kinda… unfinished to my eye.

The simple answer is to layer it over a cream polish, which is exactly what I’ve been doing… just one coat over a black looks incredible but for the sake of swatching, I’m showing it to you in it’s 3-coat glory over a bare nail.

Orly Fowl Play is available to buy online from BeautyBay.com, priced at £6.95

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I love a good bargain and this W7 polish, purchased for the princely sum of £1.95 is a very good cheapie indeed!  Sure, it’s sheer (4 coats minimum) and it stinks so badly that I was worried my husband would phone NHS Direct for advice on solvent abuse.  But look, for less than £2 – it’s a pretty, pretty subtle duochrome.

Wear was great, I often find this with sheerer polishes… perhaps a side effect of those multiple thin coats?  Either way, I have no complaints on chipping or any of that nonsense.

I purchased W7 Metallic Mars online from www.nailpolishdirect.co.uk, priced at £1.95 – I believe that it’s a discontinued shade so don’t hang around if you fancy adding it to your collection!

Andrea Fulerton Nail Boutique have expanded their popular line of nail products with a set of ultra-cute glitters encased in little ‘puff’ tubes… let me tell you a bit about them…

Four shades of glitter that are designed to be ‘puffed’ onto a wet nail… the design of the ‘pen’ is supposed to afford directional coverage, giving you the ability to do cool things like create half-moons and glitter tips.

Frankly, I’d do a better job at creating a precision design if I snorted the glitter up my nose and sneezed it onto my nails.

The actual glitter is beautiful!  Fine, super-sparkly and not even too gritty… but the whole puff system is just massively flawed.  When I first squeezed the tube to activate the puff, nothing happened.

So of course… I squeezed a little harder, and the harder I squeezed, the more my eyes slitted in anticipation of a puff that would put a mushroom cloud to shame.  The anticipation damn near killed me, but nothing came out.  I recomposed myself, by which time my nail was of course, too dry to be of much use.

Eventually… I got a puff – the most anti-climactic moment of my life.  A splodge of glitter about half a centimetre away from where I’d wanted it placed.

Glitter…

Ultimately, these are beautiful nail glitters with a really awful delivery system that just doesn’t work well enough to create any kind of precision effect.  You may aswell just get a pot and dip your nails in that way.

Andrea Fulerton Glitterati Nails are priced at £10 available to buy at Superdrug.  Yano, if you really want to.

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Let’s have some festive nail candy!

China Glaze Love Marilyn from the Eye Candy 3-D Glitters Collection is a bonafide contender to be my Christmas Day nail polish.  Does anyone else meticulously plan their Christmas Day manicures?  It’s a little bit of a Christmas Eve tradition of mine to super-bling it up in honour of the big day!

I’m thinking I might wear it as a french tip though over a red cream (something like Butter London Come To Bed Red).

The above photo shows 3 coats for a full coverage over a bare nail.  Removal is a total pig and I did get a fair bit of chipping from this one despite a top coat.  But you know, it’s easier to forgive these things when it’s OMGGLITTERREDCHRISTMASPOLISH.

I bought this on eBay from the U.S. but if you wanna buy on these shores, you can nab it from www.nailpolishdirect.co.uk priced at £5.95

Do you have your Christmas Day mani sorted out?

Regardless of what your birth certificate says, Christmas is the one time of year we can wear an unadulterated amount of glitter on our nails and not feel even slightly embarrassed of ourselves.

Avon Nailwear Pro in Violetta Sparkle is a festively-themed combination of purple and gold – it also conveys flashes of red when under the right lighting – but it’s mostly about the gold.

Application was fine and the above shows three coats.  I found the brush a touch long and thick but what you sacrifice in precision, you make up for in speed of application.  It also dried quickly despite the three coats.  It’s a hair grainy thanks to the glitter but a single coat of topper smoothes that out nicely and gives a needed boost to the shine that really brings out the sparkle within.

I’ve only had this on for two days, but so far no chips and considering the vampy colour, only very minimal tip wear (the above photo was taken just now).

Currently priced at only £3.00 on the Avon website, it’s making me want to explore the other sparkly shades in the Nailwear Pro Sparkle & Shine lineup!

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Nubar, your duochromes make my world a prettier place.  Nubar Wildlife is beautifully named as it twinkles between an earthy brown and foresty green depending on which way the light catches it.

The formula builds nicely after the first coat and the above photo shows that two coats were needed for an opaque finish, really impressive stuff.  I did get a teeny chip on my thumbnail after a day, which is unusual for me – but when a polish is as pretty as this one, you can forgive it nearly anything.

You can keep your Models Own Beetle(notveryjuicy)Juice polishes, these Nubars are still where it’s at.

Buy Nubar Wildlife online at BeautyBay.com, priced at a bargainous £5.50

There’s a new nail brand on the scene and they’re devoted to the classics.

NIYOT are headed up by designer and beauty expert Toyin Badiru who spent many years working as a nail technician in the industry before deciding to go it alone with her own range of 4-free (formaldehyde, toluene, DBP and parabens) nail polishes.

The inaugural three shades from the UK-based company hark back to the classic red, my favourite shade for intstant polish (pardon the pun).

CEO Blood (powerful vampy deep red)
Lost Red (classic but difficult to find pillar box red)
Fire Red (vibrant bright red)

Which red would you go for?

The range is available exclusively online at at www.niyot.com and shades retail at £8 each.

How late am I on this trend?  I’m like your Gran when she discovered the button for the interwebz.

OK, well I’m not really late… but I’ve only just got around to photographing a mani with the Boots 17 Magnetized Nail Polishes.  I’ve decided that my favourite way to wear them is with a matte top coat which decreases their lasting power by about five years… but I dunno, they just suit the whole matte finish thing quite well.

I get some real inconsistencies with these magnetic polishes, one hand will often come out perfect… or even just three fingers in a row.  Then I completely get a dud one, despite not doing anything different.  Does anyone else experience that?  So frustrating!

Also… as an aside, I’ve been re-organizing my nail polish collection, which, let me tell you, is far less fun than it sounds.  I originally had them arranged by colour but I’ve changed it to brand and it’s made me realise that Essie is a very under-represented brand in my stash.  Better get myself in check and start nail-blog hopping to find some gems to lust after!

Boots 17 Magnetized Nail Polish in Grey is priced at £5.99 and available online or instore at Boots.

Love the name of this cheeky little number!  Butter London’s Frilly Knickers is a definite contender for a super-cool Christmas polish.  It’s a low maintenance sparkler with more bling than your Christmas lights.

Please excuse my yellow nails (yuk).  Over bare nails, it doesn’t look that incredible, although it’s still a pretty touch for those that prefer a sheer sparkle.  However…

Layer a single coat over a black or dark base and you’re cooking on turbo-powered gas!  A multi-hued, multi-faceted gem of a polish that magically saves shitty manicures with a single stroke.

I heart my Frilly Knickers.

Butter London Frilly Knickers is priced at £11.95 and available online from Powder Rooms.

You can’t polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter…

Ta-da!!

Well, it’s not exactly subtle is it?  A warm brown base colour with a whole heap of chunky holo glitter embedded like sparkly shrapnel.  It needs a top coat to get rid of the grittiness and three overall coats to achieve full opacity.

I like it, but not as much as I thought I was going to.  Apologies for the no natural daylight photo – colour is accurate but the holo is obviously looking a little underwhelming.  You need proper sun for that kind of bling and we’re just not getting any at the moment.

What do you think?

China Glaze Mahoganie is priced at £7.99 and available online from RadiantBabe-Beauty.

I’m usually fairly decisive about nail polish but I really can’t make up my mind whether or not I love or loathe this one from Leighton Denny’s Autumn/Winter Atmospheric collection.

Astronaughty is beautiful.  Let’s get that out of the way first… I’m not denying that it holds that special something to elevate it above the ordinary.  It’s described as an intense plum with sizzling red shimmer – and I have to say that I don’t ‘get’ that.  To my eye, it’s more complicated.

Firstly, it’s not intense.  The above shows three fairly thick coats and although not instantly apparent in the photo… there’s a whisper of sheerness that will remain for at least another coat.  Not that there’s anything wrong with this, but it gives a more smokey effect than the wham, bam intensity you’d expect from the description.

The red shimmer is also quite copper-y red which leans a touch yellow on my already yellowed nails — something that makes this polish really intriguing but ultimately not massively flattering on my nails.

I’ve experienced a bit of tip wear with this one but no chipping.  Ngggh, I just don’t know about this one!

Leighton Denny Astronaughty is available to buy online priced at £11.00

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