Illamasqua Art of Darkness Scarab, Viridian nail polish swatches!

So I indulged again. Illamasqua has a tendency to bring out some really bold and beautiful colours, the Art of Darkness collection being no exception. Here we have Viridian and Scarab:

Oh don't they look Christmas-ish together. Scarab is a deep metallic red and appears a little darker on the nails than it does in the bottle, not that you can tell :-P

I don't actually have a lot of reds so this makes a wonderful new addition to my excessive nail polish collection :-D Flash shot above and I believe 2-3 coats although 2 would be plenty.

The winner for me is Viridian. I know I lean towards the teal/green/aqua colours naturally but this colour, in sunlight is drop dead gorgeous:

Viridian is described as a peacock green. Flash shot below:

I think this might be a new favourite! On a side note, there is some amazing artwork in the Illamasqua Autumn/Winter 2010 catalogue. Blown away!

MAC Venomous Villains Haul, Philosophy, Haighs and other faves!

Last week I checked out my (new!) local MAC counter in Myer and by Friday the majority of the Venomous Villains collection was sold out :-( But I got to swatch the things I wanted and prepared myself to pounce on the website as soon as online orders were up. They were up Saturday so by 10am Saturday I was a very happy lady! I didn't even mind walking down to the PO Box in the rain to collect my stash:

I wasn't planning on getting much from this collection, I was particularly interested in the nail polishes which are a Pearl finish and gorgeous by the way:

My MAC counter didn't have a display version of bad fairy (for some reason there was a dark cream purple looking polish in its place?!) but I ordered all three going on the first two that I saw. In order of preference we have Formidable! Mean & Green and of course Bad Fairy:

I cannot wait to wear these! One of the MAs at the MAC counter was wearing mean and green and it was so interesting!

I also picked up the Innocence Beware! cremesheen lippie, the Her Alter Image veluxe pearl eye shadow, the Oh So Fair beauty powder and the My Dark Magic mineralize eye shadow. I love Malificent so I had to get something with the special packaging! I opted for beauty powders because I prefer them for travel as they have a mirror and I cannot explain the eye shadow. It was simply me going me want :-D

While I'm at it I might as well mention things that I've been enjoying recently. It isn't limited to makeup :-P I mentioned in an earlier post that I went to Haigh's to stock up on choccy - well my cherry ripe bars are gone and this is all that's left of my assorted creams:

That rose cream would be done and dusted by now but that's the bf's :-( And what's with the tiny pink sugar candy on top? Those used to be huge! Ripped off I tell you. But my faves are: Violet, Rose, Lemon Myrtle, Lime, Strawberry, Peppermint, sigh the list goes on... but I really hate coffee, and I'm not the biggest fan of almond, passion fruit or mandarin. But I love dark choccy so it's all good. And I always get dark choc pastilles @_@

Next we have the Philosophy shower gel in unconditional love. Oh my gosh I cannot describe how much I love this scent. I received a sample some time ago from Meccacosmetica and I was in love! Then I went to mecca and they said we don't have a purple shower gel, and I couldn't remember the name at the time and I ended up going home with Falling in Love shower gel instead. While it's nice and somewhat similar, this is so much fruitier and just wonderful! I just purchased a new bottle :-D

Lastly we have the beauty products I've been loving right now. I'm someone that finds something and runs with it non stop for a good month or so and I've been doing that with the NARS rajasthan eye shadow duo, MAC MSF in Stereo Rose, Dior shimmer powder in Amber Diamond and I although I've been mostly using the Clinique long wearing mascara, I just fell in love with the Volume Million Lashes by Loreal. Despite its odd smell :-/ And oddly I'm using the benefit stay don't stray eye shadow primer as more of an actual concealer due to a bad pump where it ALL comes out at once. But I love Stereo Rose. It was nice and warm but now that winter's over I don't think I'll be getting away with it for much longer. Time to tone it down. Perhaps with the Dior rose diamond shimmer powder that I have :-D

OPI Go Goth! Halloween 2010 part 2!

Whoopsie, I forgot about the rest of the goth polishes when I blew up over the OPI Ink replica so here they are! I alternated between 2 and 3 coats because for some reason today I found the mini brushes extremely frustrating... they are not as good as the Sephora ones in my opinion. Let's get the messy swatches started!

Here is sanguine, and I assume they were going for a blood red theme here but it had a berry feel to it. This is my favourite out of the lot, and looks pretty in both natural light above and flash:

Vampy. Anyhoo, onto Unripened, a black with blue glitter, very pretty in the sun:

I think I went for 3 coats here because I was completely unco in my application. Flash version:

And continued my unco'ness in lining up my fingers all pretty :-| But you get the idea.

Last we have obscurity. It's a black matte finish and quite frankly, gross. So well suited to Halloween then ;-) Small mini brushes are even more difficult when the polish is matte, I tried though:

And the flash version:

And while I was feeling icky, I decided to sport the cuff bracelet.

GRR, argh!

Illamasqua Strike Nail Polish swatches

When I went to Sydney recently I checked out the Illamasqua counter in Myer and got to look at all the pretty nail polishes. I was quite restrained and only picked up a couple, one of them being strike:

Isn't it pretty. Honestly I must have picked it up 3 times in the shops before I was 'right, this is mine'... oh and maybe one of these :-D

Two coats, then of course I stuffed them up and dented them good. But nicely pigmented all the same. I didn't have a good camera on me at the time, but I took a quick sneaky shot of the display out the front:

There was a lot to be tempted by there... but I was a good girl and only walked away with nail polish :-)

Nail polish organisation and storage - new storage rack!

How do you store your nail polishes? Do you put them in a box and hide them away under the sink? Do you display them loud and proud on your vanity/chest of drawers/some random piece of furniture? Well, you know you have a problem when you require a nail polish storage solution as big as this:

This is meant to be an OPI nail polish rack, as you can see it fits 13 OPI nail polishes perfectly on each shelf. My bf being the kind and creative man that he is, decided to build one for me because I don't like to keeping my polishes hidden. I think it makes me buy more because I don't realise how much I have. I'm not sure this is going to help me though, I go 'ooooh space for more OPI' :-D This is rather loosely based off another nail polish rack I spied online, I'll be darned if I can remember where, you'd think I would have book marked it!

Anyway, I decided to start with the OPI and try to somewhat colour co-ordinate my collection:

Purples first of course :-) Then I decided to build from the ground up and fill with other random nail polish brands that I have, but of course if I have more OPI, the others will be moved off elsewhere. I did mention that I may need a second rack and the bf was just :-| hehe.

I have noticed that some people colour co-ordinate polish regardless of brand but I prefer to keep the different brands separate. The OPI looks too nice all lined up together. And also shocking how many unopened Sephoras there are, but my excuse is that I have mini bottles of those... oh and I have no idea where to put the mini boxes of polishes! I also need to get rid of one Essie polish so it all fits nicely on one row... or buy a lot more :-D I think I know which way I'll be going there. Sigh.

Sephora by OPI I'm with Brad swatches

Not so long ago I hauled quite a few nail polishes on eBay, one of them included I'm with Brad. I was wooed by the promise of a deep shimmering red but I found it's much darker than what it appeared online. I would have known that had I looked on the Sephora website and read the colour description. But who cares, I throw caution to the wind when it comes to nail polish and haul like no tomorrow :-D The red does show up nicely under flash though:

I wanted to take a daylight shot but alas Canberra has decided to celebrate spring with a lot of rain of late and I got poured on walking home today :-P It was raining so hard I thought I was getting hailed on @_@ But at lunch I managed to get a semi-sunny shot of how dark this polish is:

I still find the Sephora brushes a pain to work with, they are so long and thin but funnily enough I feel this is one of my best paint jobs to date. Probably because I was trying so hard :-| I would like to say this is my last red for a while but I've gone a bit red crazy as upcoming posts will reveal...

Essie Sew Psyched and Merino Cool swatches, Floriade and target.com jewels!

I know when I did my Essie Collection post I mentioned that I was looking forward to getting the Fall 2010 colours - but of course it's spring here (hooray!) so we probably won't be getting them for a while. Just like the OPI summer flutter collection has only just been released here, when I bought those overseas in June! Note to self, make travel plans for the American summer next year. Actually I'm thinking about going to New York next year... so this may be a reality! Anyway I'm impatient and eBay is a wonderful thing. So I shopped :-D

Sew Psyched was first on my list. The daylight swatch below is two coats:

Today is a dark and gloomy 'spring' day in Canberra. So this colour suited me well.

Flash swatch above. I also picked up Merino Cool:

Another two coats for this one although it appeared slightly sheerer than Sew Psyched.

This colour is a little darker than it appears in the bottle. Copying Chanel's trick I'm sure :-P

Off topic though, I have been very patiently waiting for my hopshopgo order to be delivered. If you haven't heard, hopshopgo is one of those online shopping sites (by PayPal) that allows you to buy from US websites that don't ship internationally. Which is fantastic because you could get your MAC, Macy's, Nordstrom, Saks stuff whenever you liked and since the dollar is fantastic right now, this is the time to do it. So I decided to make a small order and test it out. I really missed not being able to get to a Target on my last trip so I made a target.com order - using their 'buy for me' option. I got some sterling silver jewels :-D

The great thing is that you can make as many orders as you like then bulk them up into one big international shipping delivery. As your order arrives at your 'US address', it will stay there free for 30 days. So you have time to make additional orders and ship them all at once. You have to be careful of shipping though, it's calculated by dimensions and weight and I know that international courier fees can be expensive. I think that's why I went for jewelry :-P Anyway, it's shipped by DHL express and once my order was shipped, it arrived quickly. Something worth checking out if you can't wait for the latest MAC collection to get here or if you're like me and want random stuff from target :-D

Off topic again, I thought I'd mention something nice about Canberra since I'm always whinging about the cold gloomy days. If there ever was a reason to visit Canberra, it's for Floriade. It is almost over but I went last weekend when the weather was absolutely perfect: sunny warm and still. The best day this year to go to floriade. So basically it's this massive flower festival (I have no idea how many flowers there are but it feels like thousands), usually with a different theme each year. I've gone every year since I moved to Canberra (2005) and I just love it. And look there's a ferris wheel.

I didn't capture any photos this year that really shows you the sheer volume of the flowers, I got distracted by the pretty:

And the miniature:

And random weird things. Last year I believe there were Chinese lanterns in the trees?

Spring is finally here!

And while I was distracted taking pictures above, the bf found what everyone was hovered around:

Baby swans! So darn cute! Oh and if you're not tempted by thousands of brightly coloured tulips or cute baby swans, at least go there for the Vienna nuts. I get the Macadamias every year and scoff the lot in one go :-D