Happy St Patrick's Day!

For my St Paddy's day posting I decided to go with the blingest green I own

Welcome into the ring, the Bright, the Sparkling, the Apple Green Queen of Holo Glitter, Green Hawaii!

 
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Bottle love

So this is GOSH Green Hawaii, isn't she just wonderful?

She's an apple green with multi coloured holo glitter

This is 3 coats and I still have some VNL, but heck, who's gonna notice? I'd be tempted to layer if I had anything else that colour!

She also does nothing for my skintone but oh so pretty, and unique, I don't have anything like this in my collection, in fact I'd be pretty confident there isn't anything like this out there? Anyone care to differ?

Hope you're all having a fab St. Paddy's day

Green, Green Grass of Home

Continuing with green week, I thought I'd take a walk on the bright side

This is Mojito from Ciate Paint Pots



It's a bright, but not acid, mid green creme. It was pretty sheer, this is four coats, not something I'd usually do but it's such a fun colour.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day and I'm off out to a gig in the evening; of course my mani will be green, but which one?

At the moment I'm torn between Illamasqua Rampage and RBL Orbis non Sufficit, I love Rampage but haven't worn ONS before - decisions, decisions

Fried Green Tomatoes

Another installment of green week

This is Battersea Park from Nails Inc



It's a khaki green creme and this is two coats with no top coat, as ever application was faultless.

Another one that looks different on the nail - perhaps it's a green trait? It's more olive tinged and dusty on the nail.

This was part of the Handbag Collection which I think was exclusive to QVC, IIRC they sold matching handbags in the same colours (I'm missing the handbag gene!)

Green Door

Just a quick green post for Sunday night...

This is BYS Fern, a dusky dark green with silver glitter.

 
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I'm pretty sure BYS is an Australian brand, over here (UK) I found it in one of those discount beauty/perfume places and it was inexpensive.

This is 2 coats, no topcoat. Formula was great, I'd definitely buy more of these.

Anyone else got experience of BYS?

P.S. Initially I was going to call this post 'Behind the Green Door' those being the key lines I remembered from the cheesy 80's hit by Shakin' Stevens (Wales' answer to Elvis) but on googling that line I changed my mind - I didn't want those kinda hits!

Anne of Green Gables

Next up in Green week is Ciaté Apples & Custard, part of Ciaté's Spring/Summer 2009 Candy Couture collection.

Apples & Custard is a gorgeous dusky mid green creme and to my mind looks nothing like apples & custard and more like the first edition cover of Anne of Green Gables, hence this blog post title.



This is 2 coats in the shade.

This is another that is rumoured to be dupey to Chanel's Jade but as I don't have that I can't really comment.

Ciaté's Candy Couture collection was actually a great collection and I think I have all of them so watch out for future non-green swatches from this collection

How green is my valley?

It's green week/month over on my favourite nail board Make-Up Alley , inspired by St Patrick's Day, so I thought I do a few green posts too.

This is GOSH Metallic Green, a pale green foil that is oddly paler on the nail than in the bottle, something to do with the foiliness I assume.

 
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Despite being a foil the brush-strokes aren't too bad, just ignore that ding on my little finger :-)

This is two coats, no top coat.

It's an unusual colour, I don't think I have anything like it but I'm not quite sure it's me - perhaps it's the foil again. I'm not sure I've embraced my inner foil-lover yet...

Sleek Nailed - Oxford

Sleek Makeup is a UK cosmetics brand targeted at woman of all skin colours. They're sold in Superdrug (a UK drugstore) and Afro-Caribbean stores.

They're most famous for their amazing iDivine eyeshadow palettes, 12 colours of awesome intense pigmented shadow for a very reasonable £5ish.

But they also do polish, called Nailed, not a huge selection of colours but I thought I'd give them a try...

This is Oxford, a denim blue with strong blue shimmer

 
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Good points
This is 1 coat! Very, very opaque.
Easy to work with

Bad points
Pretty thick & gloopy
Oddly unshiny although this was easily fixed with topcoats (not shown)

LA Colors - Purple Ice

This one could've been so good....

It's a beautiful colour, purple with fine blue & multi-coloured shimmer - look at the gorgeousness

 
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And the sparkles


But - this is 4, yes four!, coats and I still have VNL.

Ah well, good job it was cheap - £1 or £2 IIRC

Illamasqua Nudge

Oooh, how exciting, arrived in Birmingham yesterday (for planned gig in Nottingham)to find gorgeous birthday present from my lovely friends Liz & Matt...

How well do they know me? Well enough to buy me fabulous Illamasqua nail polish

Luckily we had time before we left to apply a quick mani and this morning I grabbed a couple of pics.

 
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This was two coats on all nails except my index finger which took three (and I didn't do a great job with the third coat - we were drinking sparkling wine, never condusive to great manis!)

This was pretty good to apply, especially for a pale creme polish, not as good as some of the darker Illamasquas but not terrible.

I also had to tweek the colour of these pics to make them more colour accurate, the original pics were too blue, IRL it's a minty green, so ignore the lobster hands!

I don't have Chanel Jade to compare it to but from pics on NailGal I'd say it was lighter and more minty green than Jade and doesn't have the secret shimmer

Anyone else have any of the Illamasqua Pastels?

Sue Moxley Suede Fx 30

The last of my Sue Moxleys is SuedeFx 30

This is my first 'suede' polish - the recent spate of suedes from OPI and Zoya are pretty spenny over here in the UK and I hadn't seen any cheapie versions.

So Fx 30 is a blue grey suede finish with silver shimmer - just gorgeous...

;


This was two coats, it was a bit tricky to apply, both the brush and polish were a bit gloopy...

From the pictures I've seen this looks to be similar to OPI Suede - thoughts?



Then I tried topcoat over my first 2 fingers and left 2 matte - and it's just as lovely with topcoat!

Overall a big win - formula wasn't the best but lovely colour and finish - I'm sold.

Sue Moxley 14

Sorry - another weeks break - but this time I have a good excuse, it was my birthday(!) and my beloved was working in Amsterdam and so I headed over to join him for a celebratory weekend. The weather was bitterly cold and very wintery but we hired bikes, bought hats & gloves and cycled round like locals. We also found great places to eat and I may have picked up a couple of bottles of polish to share with you all.

But for now, back to the regular programming...

The second Sue Moxley I picked is the aptly named 14, well who knows maybe the number 14 is a slightly frosty peacock green. It obviously is in Sue's world!

This is a little too 'frosty' for me, but it's a lush colour and best of all qualifies as a one-coat-wonder. I did two out of habit but if you were in a rush, one would work fine which redeems the slight frostiness for me

 
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Overall good application, nice shade, just let down slightly by the frostiness.

Famous by Sue Moxley no11

Gah, another week without posting, the house project, now thankfully in it's final stages is still eating up my free time.

Sue Moxley is a make-up artist, I can't say I'm particularly up on make-up artists so I've never heard of her, have you?

She has a range of makeup called Famous by Sue Moxley which I'm pretty sure is unique to Superdrug. I've perused the range in the past but as often in Superdrug the display was a bit of a state and while some of the eyeshadows looked interesting the prices were quite high. And there was no nail polish so how interested could I be?!

But revisiting the range I found they'd introduced a small but interesting range of nail polish - hooray! So I snapped up a few to try.

Let's look at the regular polish first, called Advanced Performance Nail Colour - this is 11 - no names, how dull.

 



Vibrant Purple creme, this is three coats, but I probably could've done two. It's nothing unique but a pretty colour and very shiny!

ASOS Paint Pots by Ciaté II

I mostly bought these because they were cheap - the ASOS sale is a dangerous place to be - but they turned out to be pretty good.

I don't normally talk about the packaging but this was interesting so I thought I'd show you. Although ASOS do sell Paint bottles individually I bought these as duo's and they came in these cool boxes

From the outside it's a striking black box with high impact lettering

 

then you slide open the box (like a matchbox) to reveal the two polishes nestling in their own compartments inside. Sweet, huh?

 


So onto the polishes...

First up is Agyness, a blackened puple with pink shimmer

Look how pretty it looks in the bottle



Unfortunately much less so on the nail. The shimmer doesn't really come through at all.


This is 2 coats with no top coat


The second in the set is Pixie (I'm assuming Pixie Geldof). It's a mid green, slightly blue-toned green creme



Again this is 2 coats.

I really liked this one, the colour is unusual and coverage is good.

Overall this is two good polishes, interesting packaging and a great price in the sale.