NOTD - Shooting Star Over A Midnight Blue

I got a letter from the Canadian Space Agency about my grant application so I thought it would be fun to do something a bit...sparkly!



First I used one coat of Rimmel Lasting Finish Pro Midnight Blue, a dark -almost black - navy shimmer. I've always been impressed with Rimmel's nail polish formulas (e.g., Lycra Wear and 60 Seconds lines). It glides on smoothly and has good staying power. The packaging now is just so sleek too! I'm not too thrilled about the brush though. It's one of those super dense ones a la Sally Hansen Insta Dry.


(natural light)


(direct sun)

For the "top coat", I layered on Sally Hansen Hard As Nails Extreme Wear: Shooting Star (Seriously a mouth full!). It's a holo-glitter (square shaped ones and my favorite, circular ones) suspended in a light blue base. You will never get the colour in the bottle so it's best to layer it over another polish. Th picture below is 4 layers of Shooting Star alone.

NOTD - Rides, Stuffies, Cotton Candy, and all thing born from Fairs&Carnivals

Fun times call for fun nails. Especially when it seems like everyone is pouring in from the surrounding cities to partake in 4 hours of free PNE entrance and commemorate the annual Vancouver fair's 100th anniversary.

I found OPI What's With The Cattitude? (Part of the Shrek collection) to be so fitting. It's bright, but not obnoxiously bright. A pretty sky blue creme that reaches total opacity in 3 coats, although I got away with 2.

In a way, it reminds me of the cotton candy I bought today ^^


I decided to do a comparison between this and LA COLORS Breathless Blue. Which do you like better?

RANDOM - Wet N' Wild Throughout The Ages

The first bottle of nail polish that you ever had... did it look anything like this?


Mine did because it was from Wet N' Wild and the oldie (mid 90s, 99 cents) bottles looked like this! Then the company went through this evolution and well, I picked up some trinkets along the way.



The Crystalic Collection (nearing the millenium) 14mL
Cheapie polish claims to be enriched with calcium and be toluene, formaldehyde, & phthalate free? I didn't believe this but it's what I told me mom way back then when I polluted the livingroom with polish fumes :)

483B GOLDEN ROSE
Mid pink-peach with gold shimmer.
Last summer (when Sephora first opened in Vancouver), I swatched Nars Orgasm polish at the store and thought the colour looked darn similar to something I had. This was it.
What's with the labels always disappearing on these bottles eh?


491B N.Y.P.D
Greyish blue with purple flash.
I dare you to go up to a police officer and put this against his uniform. For comparison purposes, of course.


471B MOONSTONE FROST
Pearl white frost.
Not overly sheer or frosty (which results in streak overload).
I fell in love with this colour and even though I have so many polishes this one is my all time favorite. I wore it to two proms and I even did my bff's nails with it :) It's almost near empty but the consistency is still as creamy as ever.




The Crystalic Collection: Revamped (somewhere around the millenium) 14.5mL
Still cheap, affordable and look - there's an extra .5mL in the bottle! Unfortunately, that doesn't hide how ugly the bottle itself has become. What were they thinking?

479C FEMME FATALE
Hot fuschia with super fine shimmer.
The colour just seemed appropriate after watching Legally Blonde.




The Wild Shine Collection 12.7ml
$1.99? Really now? The packaging still looks incredibly cheap but the formula is not bad.

BLAZED
Mid coral creme.
Finally drugstore polish has creme formulas! I caught a girl on the bus checking out my nails when I wore this colour :)




The Craze Collection (2009) 10mL
Toluene & phthalate free (formaldehyde's status remains unmentioned) but let's be serious. The bottle was the first thing that got us oohing and ahhing in the first place. Then the whole toluene and phthalate thing was just a bonus. I didn't even care about the missing 4mL.
At $2.99 a pop, they used the extra money towards the packaging fund.

285 MORBID
Dark green (almost black) with forest green & silver shimmer.
If the colour's too unique to be from a drugstore, I'll be happy to put it in my cart.


237 GLITZ
Purple (predominantly), blue, silver glitter.
This one is a 3 (or more) coater. I don't like how gritty it feels when layered over another colour. Heard it was similar to Sally Hansen Rock Star.




The Megalast Collection (2009) 9mL
Mmm, denser brush. Getting smaller by the minute... I really loved the colour selection (more than the Craze collection) and there were a lot more cremes. Unfortunately, I bought one to try out and... sigh.

202A BREAK THE ICE
Greyish white with silver shimmer.
This is the kind of colour you wear when you want to be an 'ice princess', but the formula was awful. The application was too sheer for my taste, uneven and resulted in streaks. It chipped in one day. I was disappointed because I did want it to work out... Tell me the other ones aren't like this colour!




The Craze Limited Edition Collection (2010) 6.5mL <--stop this, I'm serious. I demand you go back to being 99 cents.
Pretty!!! Every creme had it's own shimmery counterpart. I hope you had a chance to pick some up. I don't like things being limited edition =/

33450 BORA BORA
Dark pink shimmer.
This is a sheer shade - a three coater at least. I've had this on for five days and there is only minor tip wear.


Here's a picture comparing the size of the regular and limited edition Craze collections. Far right is Sally Hansen Strawberry Icing if you prefer similar formula but a lighter color than Bora Bora.


That ends today's long history lesson. Comments? Questions? Suggestions?

NOTD - Risky Business

Don't ever underestimate how often people see your nails. I can't help but feel bolder wearing OPI Catch Me In Your Net [part of the Summer Flutter collection], an absolutely stunning teal shimmer that flashes green or turns blue in different lighting! Gives me a pop of color among the drab dreary weather of Vancouver while having coffee with my penpal from Korea :)


CMIYN is opaque in two coats. A plus for anyone who gets easily annoyed by sheer glitters/shimmers. It's so beautiful, even my camera is confused on what to focus on: the shimmer in the bottle or on my nails (so one or the either will always end up blurry -.-).


Can you see the green flash in the bottle?!

LOOT - NYC In A New York Color Minute

Oh NYC nail polishes, you make me nostalgic about elementary school when I first got my first bottle of vampy blue (similar to West Village) polish and I was the shit because everyone else was still into reds and pinks.
I came to expect more from you as you launched later collections...



Honestly, when I first saw this collection last year with names inspired by NYC itself (SoHo, Times Square, Penn Station, Chinatown), I was just not that excited. The colors were blahh (except one). The formula was outright awful, ranging from streaky, watery to chipping the next day.
Even when this cheap polish is on sale, it's still not worth it :(

222B SOHO - a princess pink pearl (3 coats)
Pros: Love love love this color. Not overly cool-tone. A tad darker than OPI Bubblebath which is a favorite of mine.
Cons: The most watery of the batch. Hard to get an even application (tell me I just got a bad bottle)



224B TIMES SQUARE - Bright coral (going into red) creme (2 coats)
My camera has a habit of making reds more orange than they really are. I had high hopes for this colour but our relationship just didn't work out.


230B PENN STATION - Cherry red with red shimmer
Super appropriate for xmas which is the only time I wear it =P


210B CHINATOWN - Grey-blue ink shimmer
If you're reading my colour description and asking what? That's right. This was the only unique shade in the entire collection...


If you're on a budget, I still wouldn't recommend you buy these BUT if you're a colorholic, definitely check out Chinatown. Soho makes a nice alternative to OPI Bubblebath (I'm not saying it's a dupe so don't be confused).

ANNOUNCEMENT - Nail Craze and NYC

Spotted - Wet n Wild Nail Craze Limited Edition nail polishes now at Zellers! Pick them up. They're going fast.

Sale - NYC In A NY Minute polishes are a dollar off ($1.29) at London Drugs. Do you sense a new polish line coming in?

Happy shopping!

//Edit//
Just came home from shopping.

Spotted - OPI Swiss Collection for Fall 2010! [released 08/01/10]
$7.50 each



Now, I am particularly biased towards this collection because I have a penpal from Switzerland (HI SABRINA) who has made me love everything Swiss the more we talk :)))))

I really wanted to get at least one bottle from this collection since I couldn't resist the names like From A to Z-urich, Color So Hot It Berns, or Glizterland! I can just see it now, me stepping off that plane at Zurich airport with one of these babies.

Having said this, none of the colours really wowed me :( Apart from Lucerne-tainly Look Marvelous, everything looked like they've been done before. I wanted to love The Color To Watch but it was just... horrible.

My picks (after trying them out of course) are heart tattooed in the picture: Lucerne-tainly Look Mavelous, Glizterland, Yodel Me On My Cell, and Cuckoo For This Color.