Nails Inc 4 Piece A Listers Nude Collection

Greek/ Ελληνικά

I was craving this set since I saw swatches of Covent Garden Ballet a few month ago and I got it at the asos sale for £15.50. What a bargain! Getting four great polishes for little over the price of one! 

First, it's Covent Garden Ballet shot through with a delicate grey with pink-bronze shimmer. It's adorable, what more can I say! We need more delicate beauties like this. 

Next is Ledbury Road, a metallic taupe colour that looks like two of my favourite eye shadows.

In the bottle it looked a lot like my Shu Uemura ME 860 (2nd generation) ...

...while on the nail it looks more like Shu Uemura Ir 850 (2nd generation). I love them both of course so I can't help liking the polish that gives me the rather odd opportunity to match my nails to my eyeshadow. 

Lower Sloane Street is a soft caramel nude cream. It's pretty, it's easy to wear and work appropriate. A nice basic colour.

And lastly there's Mayfair, a pearlescent off-white. Even though I'm not a huge fan of white, I like this one because it's not stark. It's a little bit muted to be stark and in spite of the pearlesence, there's not issues with brush strokes. The only problem I had with this was that it's a bit goopy, not goopy enough to complain though!

If chaos looks lovely...

...surely it can't be bad! After wearing Mavala - Platinum Marble for a couple of days I had had enough of the pearl shine; shimmer tires me quickly I'm afraid. I filed my nails and since the polish was still in a good shape I decided to give it another chance. Out come my two trustees, Manglaze  - Matte is Murder (matte black) and Fuggen Ugly (matte gorgeousness), and taraaa! Beautifully chaotic mani! I loved the feel of it, especially on the second day when it became smoother, but was still matte. It looked amazing! Excuse the dry hands. The weather is so cold at the minute, it's almost impossible to keep them hydrated no matter what I use. 

 (natural light)

  (natural light)

(artificial light)

Mavala 175 Platinum Marble

This little gem of a colour from the Winter 2012 Paradox/Paradoxe collection by Mavala caught my attention straight away. It's in that region of colours that you can't quite describe as what you see depends heavily on the light; it can look greyish, lavenderish, brownish, pinkish and all of these together. Of course catching it all with my camera proved to be impossible. It is packed full of a super fine shimmer which makes it look like a pearl. I know a lot of polishes have a 'pearl' finish, but this actually looks like a pearl and (hooray!) it's not at all streaky.

I was a bit disappointed with the pigmentation though. I did 3 coats for these pictures and it still wasn't fully opaque. The good thing is that because of its shimmery finish the nail line is not as visible as it would be with a cream polish. It is a shame though.

On with the pictures!

Experimenting with Dots and Stripes

I felt a bit inspired and was in the mood to experiment with the striper brush and my dotting tools. The result was neither quite how I imagined it nor perfectly neat, but I'm pleased since it's only a first attempt. The more I was doing, the more ideas I was getting and it ended more messy than I initially planned, but that is the nature of experimentation I suppose!

Also, I know that some people prefer to see pictures post-clean up, but I want to mark my progress in not making a total mess when applying polish so I prefer posting my pre-clean up pictures. Eventually I won't be making a mess of my cuticles and my pictures will look neater! Enough with the rant, here's the manicure 

(artificial light)

The base colours I picked are all shot through with a subtle white pearl which makes the manicure come to life, but this element doesn't translate well in the pictures. What a pity!
Base colours (index to pinky)
Misa - Fribbelicious
Zoya - Pasha
Nina Ultra Pro - In a Tiff
Jessica - 687 Au Natural

Stripes
CM Nail Art - 4 Brown

Dots
Ciate - 030 Gold Digga
Nina Ultra Pro - In a Tiff
Misa - Fribbelicious

Bourjois: Rose / Or 39

 ελληνικά

One of my most loved polishes is a nail polish from more or less 10 years ago by Bourjois called Bleu/Or. It was a colour that had become my trademark since I used to wear it all the time and people would always comment on it. It was a proper little chameleon that depending on the light conditions and angle it could look anything from taupe, to steel grey, light gold or iris blue. I went through three whole bottles of that magic polish and I was heartbroken when I couldn't find it any more. I don't know why I ever got rid of the last bottle. Ah! The days when I didn't know about nail polish restore.  

Recently I decided to look on  e(vil)bay in case there was any of it there. Unfortunately I didn't find any, but I did find its two sisters, Rose/Or and Violet/Or so I bought those two. I remember them sitting side by side in the display! Alas! Poor Bleu/Or! 

Rose/or is a pink champagne gold and it's the base colour in the picture. The colour doesn't shift much, but it is quite nice and discreet. I was pleasantly surprised to find that these polishes do not have Toluene and Formaldehyde, which you wouldn't expect from polishes that old. It does take a while to dry though, even with a fast drying topcoat. 

I used Bundle Monster plate BM223 for the design. For the ring finger I used Mavala Minsk polish while for the rest of my fingers I used Sephora by OPI Metro Chic. I couldn't believe that MS looked so light when used for stamping!