MAC Surf Baby Nail Polish Swatches, Hibiscus Nail Art and Pandora :-D

Oh MAC polishes, how you tempt me and frustrate me at the same time. I wasn't planning on buying the summer collection polishes from the MAC Surf Baby line. However I noticed they were creams and I thought 'ooh, perfect for nail art'. Especially tempting as one looked nude/skin toned. You won't find it hard to guess where I got the nail art inspiration from ;-)

Ah yes, the Surf, Baby! line has cute hibiscus flowers on the packaging and I'm a sucker for different packaging. I can't say I like the red flower so I went for white over MAC's Ocean Dip.

Obnoxious yellow packaging? Check.

Alas you might think these are both creams as the bottles claim but looky here at the swatch of Hangin' Loose:

Up close that flash shot reveals shimmer! Subtle yet still pretty at two coats I was slightly disappointed. I thought cream meant no shimmer :-/

And here is a swatch of Ocean Dip. So pretty. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of teal/jade/blue/green shades but this one is lovely and I couldn't wait to wear it.

Now here's the sad part. Normally when I swatch I don't get the opportunity to wear the polishes for very long. I wore Ocean Dip for a couple of days and despite my heavy base coating, my beautiful white nails turned slightly yellow. Which yellows and blue shades tend to do. But quite frankly this annoyed the crap out of me because I had just last week (after filing away the remainder), finally removed the last of my *very* yellow nails from a previous naughty polish. All I can say is wear Essie's Mint Candy Apple without base coat at your own risk. Looking online I see similar claims. It takes months to grow out badly stained yellow nails and over the last couple of years there's a few polishes that have been thrown in the 'sin bin'. The joys of nail polish?

Back to the hibiscus nail art! Only a few colours required and my current favourite MAC polish Ice Cream Cake makes a return :-) I really need to start looking for a new white nail polish as poor China Glaze Snow is getting thick and hard to work with.

To start with, I simply drew the outline of the flower with five petals, slightly pointed at the end.

Second I filled with white.

Next drew the pistil (uh thank you google?) with MAC Hangin' Loose and the shimmer while visible, didn't detract from the look.

Finally added MAC Ice Cream Cake to the centre of the flower and as stamens at the top. Then I just finished with a top coat!

Onto something slightly off topic, the boyfriend and I celebrated an anniversary on the weekend. He presented me with a bunch of red roses, one for each year we've been together. There were six and he is very sweet.

The roses came with this cute balloon!

And because the weather has been absolutely dreadful here (cold, windy, rainy) we had a picnic on the lounge room floor. Complete with picnic blanket and a small bottle of bubbly :-)

And a whole lot of cheese! Oh my I was so full after this cheese and cracker epica.

I was surprised with a bag from Pandora, and there was a small wrapped gift box inside.

Revealing a new charm for my bracelet :-D I had my eye on this duotone star charm for a while and was stoked when I saw it.

My updated Pandora Bracelet! Which I promptly cleaned and polished. Silver gets tarnished SO quickly! But I love the charm, it was a really lovely weekend.

Well I hope you enjoyed the flowers and swatches, let me know if you've been tempted by anything in the Surf Baby collection. I was very tempted to get the eye liners but resisted :-( Hope you're all having a wonderful week and I'll see you next time!

MAC Quite Cute Nail Polish Swatches and garden nail art ;-)

So I wasn't tempted by the cool colours of the MAC quite cute makeup collection but I did see some pretty polishes. I was so torn, MAC polishes are expensive and the brushes are quite frankly, crap but they were looking so pretty. I ended up buying them :-) And I was inspired to use the mint green Mischievous Mint to do some garden nail art:

Inspired by my last post and my Hello Kitty calendar :-) Onto the swatches!

Left to right we have 3 cream finish polishes named Ice Cream Cake, Mischievous Mint and Little Girl Type.

Above is Ice Cream Cake, a bright cool pink. These are about 3 coats I believe with top coat. This one is my favourite.

Above is Mischievous Mint and like the name suggests, it's a mint green.

Above is Little Girl Type and it's a pale purple. Lovely. The pink is still my fave though :-D And if you think these colours look familiar, take a look at 3 of the OPI Pirate collection colours next to this collection:

Look familiar? Yeah the OPIs are more muted but I'm still feeling a little silly for owning all of these :-P

Now onto the disappointing aspect. MAC nail polish brushes. Honestly. The majority of my MAC nail polishes look like this:

Look at that. And no it's not temporary, several uses and still a bristle pokes out waiting to ruin your mani. Believe it or not the pink one is much worse:

At least with the purple you can use one side of the brush and still get a nice mani. The pink sticks out in ALL directions and makes for messy application and quite a ragey Leanne :-P Seriously MAC learn how to make a brush? $22 for this crap? 'nuff said.

Well isn't it just so cold! I know everyone is cold but seriously try living in Canberra. It's ridiculous. No summer and now autumn is winter? Currently the apparent temp is 0.4 degrees. At the start of MAY :-| I thought my fingers were going to snap off walking home today. And I don't know if I got rained on, dripped on by melting frost or hailed on this morning.

Thought I'd post some pics from the weekend. I'm trying to grow some sugar snap peas. Yeah I have no idea how big they are going to get and I'm thinking a new pot for these soon! They are getting so tall.

Oh em gee. Tried to go out for mother's day brekky on Sunday and of course everywhere was absolutely packed, so we ended up going home sad with pre-made pancakes and strawberries. We made the best of it though :-)

Anyway that's it from me for now! I hope you enjoyed the swatches and garden nail art :-) And I hope everyone is rugged up here in Australia and if you're enjoying summer weather, I'm very very jealous! 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...

Illamasqua Boosh with a touch of winter...

I recently purchased Illamasqua Boosh and while the black is just stunning on its own, I decided to play with some craft punches to make a snowflake stencil. This is the result:

The snowflake has Orly Cosmic Kiss as a base which was used to capture the MAC pearl glitter (from the MAC A Tartan Tale thrillseekers cool pigments/glitter set).

These were all the products I used (missing the cotton tips and scotch/sticky tape):

The snowflakes came out surprisingly well for a first go! Here's a close up of the snowflake with and without flash:

So in love with this glitter art right now :-)

If you're interested in recreating this look and have some small scrapbook punches lying about, just follow these few steps:

1. Apply 2-3 coats of nail polish then set with Seche Vite
2. Take a piece of tape and very carefully punch it with a craft punch of your choice. Make sure it isn't too big for all your nails - the snowflake barely fit on my other nails!
3. When you're sure the base polish has set, stick the tape stencil to your nail
4. Take a clear/sheer polish and 'fill in' the stencil shape
5. While the polish is still wet, quickly use a cotton tip and dip into the glitter and tap over the wet stencil
6. Layer on as much as you like and brush off any excess.
7. Very carefully peel the tape off - you might want to start from one side, stop at the middle then start from the other side.
8. Finally when the stencil is off, add another layer of Seche Vite to set the glitter.
9. You may be able to reuse a stencil for another nail but it's just as easy to stamp a new one for each nail.

Note - the final top coat will dull the glitter significantly, so you might want to try an alternative glitter base and/or add more glitter before the top coat.

Well I hope you enjoy this look and while it isn't winter here in Australia, we haven't had much of a summer with all the rain... so this dark look suits me well :-) Until next time...

Sephora by OPI I'm with Brad revamped with MAC glitter!

I recently did a hopshopgo order and while I purchased a LOT of bath and body works, I also picked up the MAC Holiday A Tartan Tale thrillseeker pigments/glitters sets in Smoky and Cool. Today I used the Blackened Red MAC glitter from the smoky set to revamp a well loved polish - I'm With Brad:

When I saw the name blackened red, I was instantly reminded of I'm With Brad as it's a very dark shimmery red. I thought it would be nice to spice it up a little with the MAC glitter and so I dipped a cotton tip in the glitter jar and tapped it onto wet nails (and finished with a top coat of Seche Vite). This was the result:

When you add the top coat it dulls the glitter a little but you could add as little or as much as you want. I went for the subtle look ;-)

The Smoky set comes with 4 small jars of pigments (and one glitter) in this cute little tartan tin:

You could reuse the container for something else but the lid doesn't fully detach unfortunately. The other smoky pigments are gorgeous by the way:

Left to right they are Blue Brown, Dark Soul, Blackened Red, Jigs & Jive and lastly, Naked. I didn't pick up the other pigment/glitter set, I think two sets is enough for one year! And if you're curious this was my Bath and Body Works haul:

Ok I didn't quite realise how BIG 14oz was... that 3 wick Slatkin & Co Frosted Cupcake candle over there almost sent me broke in shipping weight :-| 14 sounded so small... I should have checked it in grams haha. It smells so sweet and divine by the way. That's if you like sweet smells. The leaves candle was for the bf. I think I could be the only person that doesn't like cinnamon, or anything remotely spicy smelling? I swear it gives me a migraine! The bf loves it though. Homemade cookies is sweet, similar to frosted cupcake. Oh and I got one more thing:

Isn't he cute! It's a battery operated snow globe / tealight! And this is the result when you turn it on:

Weeeee! Ok let's be honest. This is what sent me broke in shipping. I had no idea it was this big... (sigh)

Anyway, I hope your new year is off to a fantastic start - I have a few more days off work so I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts. I won't be on holidays again until August!