OPI Texas Collection, some more swatches!

Yesterday I posted swatches for the OPI Texas lil shooters lacquers set and mentioned that I picked up two more polishes from the collection - Too Hot Pink To Hold Em and It's Totally Fort Worth It:

So I picked up it's totally fort worth it because it had this subtle purple shimmer that I couldn't resist. You can sort of see it if you view the full size of this flash swatch:

Bit disappointing. I feel like this one suffers the Chanel Paradoxal trick where it's prettier in the bottle. Daylight shot below (3 coats).

After I took these photos I put about 5-6 coats total on to try and bring out the purple more, but it didn't work :-P Ok I really want to show you this purple shimmer that made me buy this polish. Insert crappy lowlight iPhone shot :-D This is what I saw in the shops:

If only it was more purple on the nails. Sigh. It does show a subtle shimmer but I wanted more. Let's move on to Too Hot Pink To Hold Em, one of the sorbet finish polishes:

I like this one better than do you think I'm tex-y. It's brighter and more in your face. Now these swatches look red but I assure you it's in the pink spectrum :-/ Natural light shot below. About 4 coats I believe because I like mine less sheer.

These sorbet polishes have a super shiny finish and I quite like it! Flash shot below.

I'm kinda tempted to get one more sorbet polish from the collection but I shall try and restrain myself... I kinda really want the pink and purple sorbet ones. Well I hope this helps you choose what colours you want to buy from the Texas collection. I feel this is one of those collections where you definitely need to see swatches first! Until next swatch...

OPI Lil Shooters Mini Lacquers for the Texas Collection

The OPI Texas collection has just been released and I wanted to try a few of the new colours. I picked up the lil shooters mini lacquers set at David Jones last night:

I'm annoyed that they threw in a top coat instead of a fourth colour but what can you do right? Left to right we have Austin-tatious turquoise, I vant to be a-lone star, Do you think I'm tex-y? and a rapiDry top coat. I have some swatches of the three colours. I was mostly interested in this collection because of the 'sorbet' style of polishes and do you think I'm tex-y is one of them. So let's start!

The sorbet look is supposed to be sheer jelly-like with super shine. Coat as you will but I found 3-4 coats to be best for me personally. Flash shot of do you think I'm tex-y above.

Daylight shot above. Very cherry, very pink and all round pretty and I'm glad they included one of them in this pack but I would have preferred a mini pack of the jelly colours. That would have been awesome.

Austin-tatious turqouise is your typical peacock blue green beauty with lovely shimmer. I would buy this if I didn't have so many other in the same colour spectrum. Not a dupe for anything that I currently have but still this colour is the pretty one from the collection. I believe the shot above might have been four coats. The natural light shot below is a little sheerer:

This is about 3 coats. I do want to mention something about the formula. You pay a lot for OPI but at least you're getting quality. While I love the colour range of other brands, OPI still lead in the formula department in my opinion. Orly comes close but OPI is my favourite.

Next we have I vant to be a-lone star. A pale blue grey shimmer. There are two light grey colours in this collection and I actually picked up a full size of the other (called it's totally fort worth it) because it has this subtle purple shimmer to it. And you know my love for purple :-D

Natural light shot above. I personally wouldn't buy a full size of this but that's why the mini sets are great. You get to try before you buy in a way :-P

Well that's it for the Texas collection for now. I am yet to swatch the other jelly/sorbet colour I purchased and it's totally fort worth it but those will be coming up in the next few days. And since it was late night shopping last night, I also picked up some lush goodies:

Mrs Whippy and the frog prince bath ballistics. If the frog is like that other ballistic that makes my bath a sickly yellow again I'm going to :-| into next February. Mrs Whippy smells sweet, typical lush style but the frog prince is a bit more citrus and "fresh". This shall be interesting next weekend...

Lastly I picked up some cheap nail art brushes and plastic gems. I'm eager to do some more nail art and I found I need more than one brush on hand during the whole process. Well I'm off to have lunch, get my hair cut and look at houses! Until next time...

Chill out with ice cream nails!

Oh where to begin with this. This must be the most random design I've done. I wanted something like summer fruits but it didn't work out so I went back to the drawing board and ended up with ice cream nails ;-) And it was a process but eventually I got there:

These super cute nails were a bit of effort! First I'll show you the colours I used:

Left to right we have China Glaze Snow from the holiday 2010 collection, Essie Demure Vixen, Knockout Pout, Splash of Grenadine and Lapis of Luxury and finally Inglot O2M polish in no. 631. Whew! What a list.

To start off with I painted Essie's Lapis of Luxury and Splash of Grenadine to the left and right of each nail. These stripes were 2-3 coats, then I did a stripe of China Glaze Snow down the middle (using the side of the brush so it wouldn't be too thick), again about 3 coats. I finished off with a top coat, Seche Vite.

Next part was a bit tricky. I drew the outline of the ice cream cone on a bit of paper and used that as a guide of what I wanted to end up on my nails. Then I used an Orly detailer brush to draw the outline of the ice cream tops (easier to start with the ice cream in case you make your cones too big), filled in with the brush and painfully waited for it to try and repeated 3-4 times. Then I did the same for the cone. For the ice cream I used Essie Knockout Pout and the cone was Demure Vixen. I added a lattice type effect to the cone to give it that 'waffle cone' look with Inglot 631. So after a lot of effort I ended up with this:

I was going to stop there but I decided to add some dots to the ice cream with China Glaze Snow to bring the ice cream more to the foreground. I felt it was getting a bit lost in the stripes :-) And voila! Pretty ice cream cone nails (natural light shot below):

Even though it took a bit of effort, I love this design. And you can make it work with any colour, I wanted mint choc chip to start off with but by the time I figured that out it was too late ;-) Well I hope you enjoyed this look and try it out for yourself! I'd love to see alternative colours. Have a lovely weekend everyone and I'll see you next time.

Tropical Island Summer Nails for Australia Day ;-)

Happy Australia Day! Since summer has finally landed (it's currently 36.5 degrees outside !_!) I decided to do some tropical island nails, using OPI and Essie creams:

Cute hey! Yeah a little messy but here we have palm trees, beach and blue sky. For this look I used the Shrek OPI mini set again, this time with What's with the Cattitude as a base, with a half moon of Fiercely Fiona for sand. Then the trunk of the tree was Essie Playa del Platinum and the tree tops were Essie Pretty Edgy:

I used the Orly dotter again to draw the trunk and tree tops but you could use a nail art brush if you like. I find the dotter is better for opaqueness while the brush streaks a little.

I wanted to do more 'sand' with a bit of a layer of the yellow and a lighter green over the dark green tree tops but I think it looks nice as it is. Sometimes simple is best ;-)

Natural light shot above. I really love this design! Now I hope everyone has a fantastic Australia Day if you're celebrating and a great week ahead. I'm off to get food ready for the BBQ :-D Until next time...

Flirty Heart Nails for Valentine's Day

Wow you should see the storms we've been getting today. I wanted to do some appropriately themed dark heart nails but alas, the inspiration wasn't there. So I busted out my favourite colour (purple) and decided to make use of the Shrek Mini OPI set I got last year:

Yes a little messy and of various size, but the good thing about drawing them on with brushes / nail art tools is that you get to pick your colours. And I love these two from the Shrek Collection:

I painted my nails with Rumple's Wiggin', drew some heart outlines with a Sally Hansen nail art pen (originally started with brushing China Glaze snow but the pen worked out better), then filled with What's With The Cattitude. Quite like the result actually, very flirty and cute. Natural light shot below:

This purple/lavender is so pretty! The formula is brilliant and I kinda wish I had a bigger bottle now...

I think the thumb heart came out best as I had the most room to work with. Would be super cute for Valentine's Day... ;-) So what else is happening? Well since I recovered from my virus I decided to steal the bf's new BBQ Cookbook and make a cous cous salad. We recently got a new BBQ so we're all set to go for a barbie on Australia Day next week:

I will be taking care of the salads so decided to test run a cous cous recipe in the book - which was pretty basic:

Salad, some herbs, lemon rind and a LOT of cous cous. I'm quite annoyed really because Woolworths used to make the BEST cous cous salad with roast pumpkin and fetta cheese and now they have stopped making it and have replaced it with a red onion capsicum version that quite frankly, sucks. Boo to you Woolworths :-| I should try to make it actually. But anyway, this turned out nicely and I would probably have less parsley next time and maybe some fetta @_@

Well this storm is making me a teensy bit nervous so I'm going to get off the computer and light some candles! Until next time...

MAC Soirée and a Happy Anniversary!

Well, sort of. I've been off sick this week with my THIRD illness since boxing day. Dr thought it would be best to just banish me from work so I would stop infecting and re-infecting myself :-/ Now that I'm less coughy I thought I'd try out MAC Soirée from the Cham Pale collection. Looks promising:

Oh yes indeedy look at all that glitter. Microscopic shimmer that gets all over your fingers and is a pain to remove.

Soirée is a frost and comes out pretty much as it looks on the bottle:

I'm not entirely sure why I purchased this. I had heard comparisons to Orly's Rage and thought well I don't have rage I may as well get this one. But *again* I received a MAC polish with an utterly crap brush with bristles sticking out everywhere, making it extremely difficult to apply. Given that this is my second MAC polish to have a defective brush in my very small collection of MAC polishes, I am not impressed. Maybe they should stick to their eye shadows and leave the nail polish to the brands that know :-)

The colour is pretty though. But honestly, after the MAC Venomous Villains polishes, I think my expectations are still too high and anything after is going to fall flat. Onto something much more bright and prettier!

These are from the bf. They are anniversary / get well soon flowers I think :-) Just gorgeous, I love pink roses and the pink lilies make it perfect. So I put it on top of my jewelry armoire that I got for Christmas:

I had been admiring this in store for some time and the bf was sneaky and got it for me for Christmas. It was funny because he got it quite in advance and I was so disappointed when my mum came to visit and I tried to show her the armoire but it was gone! Little did I know :-)

Well that's it for me today, hope everyone has a fabulous germ free friday and a great weekend. Until next time...

Flower Power Nails for Spring

Ok it's not spring yet and it's still summer here in Australia - although I would question that as I can count the number of days I've had over 30 degrees on one hand. Since I don't feel like it's summer I decided to play with my Orly Dotter Duo and create some flower nails:

Isn't it pretty! I'm more impressed with the colours than the actual flowers, they work so well together. This nail art look combines Orly Limelite, Essie Turquoise & Caicos, Essie Haute as Hello and Essie Splash of Grenadine. The Essie Polishes are from the Summer and Resort 2010 collections. And it was a bit of effort to get there but let's go:

You will need nail polish! I chose the four mentioned above. You could skip the glitter over Essie's Turquoise & Caicos but I love shimmer and the blue-green of limelite adds a lovely shimmer.

You will also need a dotter tool - above is the Orly Dotter Duo which has two different sized 'dotters'. I used the bigger one on the left only.

So first I added 3 coats of Essie Turquoise & Caicos. Beautiful cream finish isn't it. Then I added a layer of Orly Limelite to give it a bit of sparkle:

Then I applied a layer of Seche Vite and left my nails to dry. You want them to be completely dry when you use the metal dotter because it can very easily dent wet nails.

I then used the dotter to first create the center of the flower with Essie's Haute as Hello. Then I wiped the dotter clean and carefully placed dots around the centre dot with Essie's Splash of Grenadine. When it was dry I added a final coat of Seche Vite.

Well I hope you enjoy the look and try it out yourself. Until next time...

Currently listening to: Dirty Talk (Laidback Luke Remix - Wynter Gordon LOVE this version!