Large amounts of 'stuff' on my plate right now.
My mom has pancreatic cancer and it's been a downhill battle for the last 2 years. I've been handling home care for her since she was diagnosed and it's to the point where nothing has helped and she wanted to just stop chemo and other treatments. My dad and I have been taking turns for the last 6 months and hospice was started this week. Having family and friend support makes a huge difference. Enjoy what you have in life and don't take anything for granted. <3
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Monday, February 3, 2014
Salon Perfect Valentines Top Coats
Product purchased with my own money, opinions are my own.
Salon Perfect came out with 4 limited edition special top coats for Valentines Day. I saw these at Walmart yesterday and the display was labeled that they were LE, and had some other reds and glitter colours in the same display, but were specified that they were perm colours. All swatches are over 2 coats of Sally Hansen Blew Me Away! These are really basic glitter top coats, good coverage, non-smelly, very minimal fishing, good dry time. My hands were really dry when I took these swatches, so my cuticles look ultra gnarly.
Touchy Feely is a matte black/white small round glitter top coat. This swatch is one coat with no placing the glitter.
Loves Me Loves Me Not is extremely similar to Touchy Feely. It's a smaller glitter size, but it's a pastel pink instead of white, mixed with black. Separately, they look almost identical, but next to each other you can see the difference in colour and glitter size.
Hearts A Flutter is a rose-purple square glitter with gold hearts top coat. This is the only one I had to fish for the gold hearts and place them, but it was VERY easy to fish out the hearts. The clear base is very viscous and makes placement easy.
One Love is a medium and small iridescent glitter top coat. One coat shown.
Honestly, the formula and coverage is what really makes these top coats awesome, but otherwise they're pretty 'meh' to me. Only one I really like is Hearts A Flutter since I don't have any hearts glitter polish. There's so many black/white matte glitter polishes and iridescent polishes out there, it's almost like 'why' with these.
Salon Perfect came out with 4 limited edition special top coats for Valentines Day. I saw these at Walmart yesterday and the display was labeled that they were LE, and had some other reds and glitter colours in the same display, but were specified that they were perm colours. All swatches are over 2 coats of Sally Hansen Blew Me Away! These are really basic glitter top coats, good coverage, non-smelly, very minimal fishing, good dry time. My hands were really dry when I took these swatches, so my cuticles look ultra gnarly.
Loves Me Loves Me Not is extremely similar to Touchy Feely. It's a smaller glitter size, but it's a pastel pink instead of white, mixed with black. Separately, they look almost identical, but next to each other you can see the difference in colour and glitter size.
Hearts A Flutter is a rose-purple square glitter with gold hearts top coat. This is the only one I had to fish for the gold hearts and place them, but it was VERY easy to fish out the hearts. The clear base is very viscous and makes placement easy.
One Love is a medium and small iridescent glitter top coat. One coat shown.
I'm totally backlogged on posting my Impulse polish swatches that I did bottle shots last week. Eek I need to hurry up!
Feb Julep Boho Glam Box, Addons and Swatches! Plus: Maybelline + OPI + Loreal comparisons
Product purchased with my own money, opinions are my own. Non-affiliated links used.
Julep is an interesting company. They have some really, really neat products and do a monthly subscription. Some hate the fact they've changed how the monthly subscription is (skipping options changed for the newly subscribed), and they're changing the square caps. Feb's box was a hard one for me to decide since there's a few different box options. I figured the Boho Glam was the best one to pick, and get addons. I wanted to try the new eye shadow and the Stardust texture polish. I'm going to cheat a tad and use/expand on my review/swatch post from /r/BeautyBoxes.
All the polish! Love, Cameron, Rooney, Glam Roc (addon), Goldie (addon).
Eye sheen in warm fig.
Jar Label, the container product matches the box top color. I'm smart and dropped the jar out of the container. Fig goodness went e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e. Barely any survived, ugh. Good news is that it didn't shatter the jar, didn't stain the tile, nor ceramic. I started cleaning (cuz explosions) and forgot to take a picture of them together.
Swatch doesn't show the very fine silver glitter, which isn't obvious, but it's very pretty.
Love : Jane’s gift- Gold, pearl & fuchsia microglitter
2 coats, Orly Liquid Vinyl on ring finger with 1 coat over. Love was a bit thick (thickest one of this months colours I got), but dried like normal. Very smooth finish. Initially I thought it was similar to Maybelline's Gilded Rose, so here's some comparisons. Are Julep's Love and Maybelline's Gilded Rose dupes? No. They use different accent glitter, Julep is small-sized red, Maybelline's medium-sized light pink. They have the same gold shimmer base.
Index: Julep, Middle: Maybelline, Ring: Julep over Orly Liquid Vinyl, Pinky: Maybelline over Liquid Vinyl.
Goldie : Full-coverage gilded microglitter
2 coats, Orly Liquid Vinyl on ring finger with 1 coat over. I loooooooooooove this colour. *_____* So shiny!! So glittery! Spoiler alert: I had a nasty time getting the glitter off. It'd come off the nail great! But if any got on my skin, good luck and scrub.
Cameron and Rooney. I use an OttLite, so the lighting in the pic looks goofy from it.
Rooney : Walnut bark crème
Polish looks more 'grey' in the bottle than on the nails. Lighting was goofy for the first Rooney pic. 2 coats, ring finger is 1 over Orly Liquid Vinyl. Really streaky, should have gone with 3 coats. Dry time was the longest of this box.
Cameron : Silver lilac stardust (matte glitter)
Ring finger is the same, 1 coat blahblah. This is also very pretty in person. It's like a pale lavender crumbled aluminum foil, and my pic isn't showing how good it really is.
Glam Roc : Midnight purple & gold stardust (matte glitter)
Next to OPI Alcatraz....Rocks. I wanted to compare, they look basically identical in the bottles. And these names are too similar. Geez guys.
One coat of Alcatraz....Rocks on ring finger, 2 coats of Julep on the rest.
3 coats of Opi on ring finger, and thumb is 1 coat of Julep with 1 of Opi over it. Opi is -just- a tad more shiny/less matte than Julep, and it requires 3 coats to be as dark as Julep (which only needs 2). I personally consider it a dupe.
Here's the kicker: Are L'oreal Too Dimensional?, OPI Alcatraz...Rocks!, and Julep Glam Roc all dupes? Yes, and no. L'oreal has more gold shimmer than the other two, Julep is the deepest and darkest, Opi is the most glittery and has more depth.
L'oreal looks so different to the other two. One layer comparison:
Ring finger is one coat of Julep, middle is L'oreal, ring is Opi, pinky is L'oreal.
Two coats, and the similarities are very apparent. Overall this was a very good and interesting month for Julep!
Julep is an interesting company. They have some really, really neat products and do a monthly subscription. Some hate the fact they've changed how the monthly subscription is (skipping options changed for the newly subscribed), and they're changing the square caps. Feb's box was a hard one for me to decide since there's a few different box options. I figured the Boho Glam was the best one to pick, and get addons. I wanted to try the new eye shadow and the Stardust texture polish. I'm going to cheat a tad and use/expand on my review/swatch post from /r/BeautyBoxes.
All the polish! Love, Cameron, Rooney, Glam Roc (addon), Goldie (addon).
Eye sheen in warm fig.
Jar Label, the container product matches the box top color. I'm smart and dropped the jar out of the container. Fig goodness went e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e. Barely any survived, ugh. Good news is that it didn't shatter the jar, didn't stain the tile, nor ceramic. I started cleaning (cuz explosions) and forgot to take a picture of them together.
Swatch doesn't show the very fine silver glitter, which isn't obvious, but it's very pretty.
Love : Jane’s gift- Gold, pearl & fuchsia microglitter
2 coats, Orly Liquid Vinyl on ring finger with 1 coat over. Love was a bit thick (thickest one of this months colours I got), but dried like normal. Very smooth finish. Initially I thought it was similar to Maybelline's Gilded Rose, so here's some comparisons. Are Julep's Love and Maybelline's Gilded Rose dupes? No. They use different accent glitter, Julep is small-sized red, Maybelline's medium-sized light pink. They have the same gold shimmer base.
Index: Julep, Middle: Maybelline, Ring: Julep over Orly Liquid Vinyl, Pinky: Maybelline over Liquid Vinyl.
Goldie : Full-coverage gilded microglitter
2 coats, Orly Liquid Vinyl on ring finger with 1 coat over. I loooooooooooove this colour. *_____* So shiny!! So glittery! Spoiler alert: I had a nasty time getting the glitter off. It'd come off the nail great! But if any got on my skin, good luck and scrub.
Cameron and Rooney. I use an OttLite, so the lighting in the pic looks goofy from it.
Rooney : Walnut bark crème
Polish looks more 'grey' in the bottle than on the nails. Lighting was goofy for the first Rooney pic. 2 coats, ring finger is 1 over Orly Liquid Vinyl. Really streaky, should have gone with 3 coats. Dry time was the longest of this box.
Cameron : Silver lilac stardust (matte glitter)
Ring finger is the same, 1 coat blahblah. This is also very pretty in person. It's like a pale lavender crumbled aluminum foil, and my pic isn't showing how good it really is.
Glam Roc : Midnight purple & gold stardust (matte glitter)
Next to OPI Alcatraz....Rocks. I wanted to compare, they look basically identical in the bottles. And these names are too similar. Geez guys.
One coat of Alcatraz....Rocks on ring finger, 2 coats of Julep on the rest.
3 coats of Opi on ring finger, and thumb is 1 coat of Julep with 1 of Opi over it. Opi is -just- a tad more shiny/less matte than Julep, and it requires 3 coats to be as dark as Julep (which only needs 2). I personally consider it a dupe.
Here's the kicker: Are L'oreal Too Dimensional?, OPI Alcatraz...Rocks!, and Julep Glam Roc all dupes? Yes, and no. L'oreal has more gold shimmer than the other two, Julep is the deepest and darkest, Opi is the most glittery and has more depth.
L'oreal looks so different to the other two. One layer comparison:
Ring finger is one coat of Julep, middle is L'oreal, ring is Opi, pinky is L'oreal.
Two coats, and the similarities are very apparent. Overall this was a very good and interesting month for Julep!
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Impulse Co. Nail Polish.
Product purchased with my own money, opinions are my own.
New bottles! Yesssssss! I love these kind of bottles, I think they're funky and unique as compared to the typical cylindrical ones you find with most mass market branded ones. This is just a bunch of bottle shots prior to swatching them and comparing how they look in the bottle. These are all full size (15ml).
They bagged each polish individually and then put them in another one, and bubble wrapped it all up in a block of goodness.
Country Mile is a chocolate brown with an icey green duochrome.
Narcissa is a berry grape with an intense, fine, and bold green/aqua duochrome.
These two next to each other so you can see how different the duochromes are:
Sweethearts is a glitter topper that's only pink, blue and some iridescent. It seems to have 1 large black glitter in the polish (You can kind of see it in one of the pictures) and the iridescent seems to be more orange/red/yellow than blue/green.
Sweethearts with Petticoat and Gumdrop, and just Sweethearts and Gumdrop:
New bottles! Yesssssss! I love these kind of bottles, I think they're funky and unique as compared to the typical cylindrical ones you find with most mass market branded ones. This is just a bunch of bottle shots prior to swatching them and comparing how they look in the bottle. These are all full size (15ml).
They bagged each polish individually and then put them in another one, and bubble wrapped it all up in a block of goodness.
Country Mile is a chocolate brown with an icey green duochrome.
Narcissa is a berry grape with an intense, fine, and bold green/aqua duochrome.
These two next to each other so you can see how different the duochromes are:
Sweethearts is a glitter topper that's only pink, blue and some iridescent. It seems to have 1 large black glitter in the polish (You can kind of see it in one of the pictures) and the iridescent seems to be more orange/red/yellow than blue/green.
Sweethearts with Petticoat and Gumdrop, and just Sweethearts and Gumdrop:
Impulse Co. Lipstick swatches
Product was purchased and gifted to me. All opinions are my own.
I got a new job this past week, now I'm feeling busy and behind. More Impulse Co. lipstick swatches! These are some samples I got a few months ago in a gift swap. It was my gateway to indies and Etsy. What a horrible and wonderful present!
Medusa: "is a dark, merlot red with a strong purple undertone." It is currently unavailable on their etsy store. I didn't blot to make it matte, so it's more shiny than it should be. Pretty accurate swatch.
Bombshell: "is a bright, watermelon/coral pink with an orange undertone." It is currently unavailable on their etsy store. The colour is very happy and bright. My indoor lighting was making my pictures look blue tinted, but their swatch is pretty accurate.
I got a new job this past week, now I'm feeling busy and behind. More Impulse Co. lipstick swatches! These are some samples I got a few months ago in a gift swap. It was my gateway to indies and Etsy. What a horrible and wonderful present!
Medusa: "is a dark, merlot red with a strong purple undertone." It is currently unavailable on their etsy store. I didn't blot to make it matte, so it's more shiny than it should be. Pretty accurate swatch.
Bombshell: "is a bright, watermelon/coral pink with an orange undertone." It is currently unavailable on their etsy store. The colour is very happy and bright. My indoor lighting was making my pictures look blue tinted, but their swatch is pretty accurate.
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