Manicure of the Day- China Glaze Crackle: Fault Line

China Glaze Crackle is here!! I'm stoked. I purchased all the colors and will be sharing them as I use them!

The color lineup is:

Black Mesh - A plain black

Cracked Concrete - A creamy medium grey

Lightning Bolt - A stark white

Fault Line - A shimmery purple

Broken Hearted - A medium pink

Crushed Candy - A light pastel blue

Aaand here we go!

Fault Line over China Glaze White on White

These new polishes are remniscent of the Cover Girl crackle polishes from forever ago. I only owned one and it was a funky grassy green. It never looked right because it was so thin, but these China Glaze Crackle glazes are fantastic!

These do take some getting used to. Firstly, you MUST let your base color dry fully. Next, you do need to work quickly with these because they dry very fast. These are not for the nail perfectionist. I just slop the color on evenly as possible, don't try to cover the whole nail seamlessly, and don't try to double dip and layer because by the time you come back the polish will be halfway through it's drying process. These NEED a top coat, unless you like the matte finish they have.

I've been reading reviews of these polishes and a lot of people are having difficulties. I read one review that said the purple didn't crack much, if at all. But as you can see, mine cracked a ton! I tested them all and had no problems at all. So if you purchase, test them out and be a tiny bit patient.

And this is my right hand, just to show you how it cracked on my other hand.

Overall, I'm so excited that crackle polish has been re-released! It's such a fabulous grungy, messy and funky way to liven up your regular manicures!!

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Orly Haul

This haul was from a while ago, and as far as I know these colors are still available online. I will link to them at the end of this post.

Keep in mind that all of these shades have fabulous glitter that is ridiculously difficult to capture. I have provided close-ups of the bottle, and swatches. Click to enlarge any of these pictures!!

Enjoy! :)

Winter Wonderland

A milky off-white base infused with tons of white chunky/small flaky glitter and micro glitter.

This polish is from the "Tis the Season" Collection.

Galaxy Girl

Purple-ish plum brown base color with teal reflects. in some lights it's plummy, in others is brown. Lovely.

This polish is from the Cosmic FX collection.

Lunar Eclipse

An intense medium bright blue with purple reflects. The reflects are much more intense than my camera could pick up. Amazing, though.

This polish is from the Cosmic FX Collection.

It's Not Rocket Science

A darkened acid green with teal reflects, when swatched it comes off a touch orangey. Really interesting.

This polish is from the Cosmic FX Collection.

Meet Me Under the Mistletoe

A dark foresty green that leans slightly blue toned, with Medium green and greenish-yellow reflects. The green and yellow reflects almost counteract the blue tones of this polish.

This polish is from the "Tis the Season" collection.

So I finally own all of the Cosmic FX collection, you know, it only took me forever. haha

Either way, I purchased these because they are different from anything I own.

That's my new mantra when it comes to purchasing new nail polishes, they have to be different in some way to what I already own. Otherwise I'll have to make up an excuse to justify my purchases ;)

If you see anything funky in the land of nail lacquers, let me know!

Orly Cosmic FX Collection can be purchased here.
Tis the Season and Cosmic FX Collections can also be purchased here

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Manicure of the Day

New Installment!

I will start doing "Manicure of the Day" installments to go along with "Today's Look". These will not be reviews, but eye candy. I will still do reviews of new or unusual products.

With Flash

China Glaze Heli-Yum, a darkened fuschia pink.

Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure, a flaky glitter topcoat with multi-colored reflects.



Without Flash



Without Flash



Without Flash



Without Flash. It doesn't look like much in the bottle, but it looks different over different colors. Black gives the most striking effect, but it's so amazing over other colors like Heli-Yum!



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China Glaze Twofor: First Class Ticket and Golden Enchantment

China Glaze's First Class Ticket is a lovely deep indigo color with teeny tiny blue glitter, and Golden Enchantment is a gold glitter with small rainbow glitter pieces in a clear base. Simply put, it's a glitter topcoat.

I LOVE purple nail polish, and I especially love purple nail polish with gold glitter over it.

I was pretty iffy on First Class Ticket when it first came out with the Vintage Vixen collection, but now I'm sold. The color is so pretty, plummy indigo with blue glitter? Yes, please! The application was fantastic. It could have been a one coat-er but I always do at least two coats of my nail color.

I've had Golden Enchantment for a while now, and I adore this over many different colors of polish. It's so multi-purpose, how can you not love it? It's very thick, and I like that. A lot of glittery polishes are so thin that you can't get anything out of them, or the glitter slides all over your nails. Not this. It goes on like a regular nail varnish. Awesome.

Blurry to show the glitter

Tiny Bare Minerals Haul and Review

A couple weeks back I went to Bare Minerals and purchased two new eye colors. I'm fully addicted to their products, especially the eye shadows, so I had to have more. Each of these retails for 13$ each. Which isn't bad considering the cost of some company's loose eye shadows. *cough*MAC*cough*

At any rate the two colors I purchsed are Angel, and Purrfect.

Angel is a matte mid-toned pinky-purple.

The application isn't as smooth as I'd like, but I'll cope just because it's such a fantastic shade. It goes on a bit chalky, but not so much so that it just flakes off. I'm thinking that a sticky white colored base for this shadow would make the ease of application increase ten fold.

Purrfect is a lovely tarnished gold color, a tiny bit of a green hue. Very glittery, and pigmented. Ease of use on this is very high, smooth application, and very blendable.

I absolutely love Purrfect, Angel is good too. But out of both, Purrfect gets my vote.

As always I adore Bare Minerals. They have some amazing products, check 'em out!

China Glaze: Mummy May I?

 Mummy May I? is part of China Glaze's Halloween 2010 collection. And may I just say, I'm stoked about this color. Don't get me wrong, Zombie Zest and Ick-a-bod-y are great too, but purple is my all time favorite color.


 








 These swatches are of two coats of the featured polish and two coats of Out the Door top coat.



The purple glitter in this polish is slightly warmer in tone in person.

This polish looks crazy murky in the bottle, so I was slightly worried that it would be the same on my nails. To my surprise the first coat was very plummy purple. The second coat turned it into the perfect blackened plum color shot through with fantastic purple glitter. Pure Love.






This is a better picture of what it looks like in the bottle


I'll tell you what I didn't love so much...

This polish is odd. It's not really gooey, but it's thick. And if you don't get enough on the brush, application can become streaky. And to top it off, I continually felt that I had plenty on my brush when I really didn't. This left me with clumping around my cuticles.

That's ok, I still love you, Mummy May I? ;)

Overall, I love this color. It's subtle but gorgeous, and I want more like it!!

China Glaze: Rich & Famous

China Glaze is my absolute favorite nail polish brand. Their formula is awesome, and application is usually easy. The best thing about their formula is that it has a built in nail hardener. I have fairly weak nails that crack and split easily, but since I've been using China Glaze my nails are in better condition.

I'm going to try to post pictures each time I paint my nails, as I have a fairly large collection of China Glaze polishes (I own other things too that I will of course post as well). :)


Rich & Famous, a lovely mid-toned creme pink. This color has no glitter or shimmer at all, so for you pink creme lovers, you may want to try this out!!

This is part of China Glaze's permanent selection.

The formula for this polish was a little runny compared to their other shades. besides this the color came out nice and even, not streaky or gooey.

Without flash

With flash

With flash, on a different background

With flash

My fingers are a bit messy, but who is perfect?

Overall, I love this shade. It's the perfect pink. That's why I purchased it ;)

Mini Rite Aid Haul

I have a small haul I'd like to share with you!

I purchased four new Jesse's Girl eye shadows, and I am very excited. The shades are; Rouge Flambie, Secret Weapon, Hi-Ho Silver and Majestic Green. You probably know how I feel about this brand already, but if you don't, here's a link to my review; http://impassionatevanity.blogspot.com/2010/09/you-know-i-wish-that-i-had.html


Secret Weapon and Rouge Flambie














Majestic Green and Hi Ho Silver


















Bottom to top: Secret Weapon, Rouge Flambie, Hi Ho Silver, and
 Majestic Green



Secret Weapon, Rouge Flambie, Hi Ho Silver and Majestic Green




















It's so hard to pick up on the true duo-chromatic nature of these shadows. For example, Secret Weapon is a pure white base with blue and teal reflects. It's amazing, and I totally understand why it's called 'Secret Weapon". Hi Ho Silver has an almost rainbow effect to it. Either way, I'm really stoked about using these in a look soon.
They look a bit Christmas-y together... oops :)




The last thing I got was the New Physician's Formula Shimmer Strips gel eyeliners for green eyes. I am looking forward to reviewing this product fully for you since these seem pretty promising. The set comes with three gel eyeliners (my fave) that are meant to bring out green eyes. There's a medium to dark green, a dark purple and a black with teeny green flecks. The kit also comes with a cute brush, so for those of you that use the excuse of "I don't have a brush for gel eyeliner", you have no excuse!! ;) These come in shades for green, blue, brown and hazel eyes. There are also corresponding mascaras and eyeshadow palettes.
These run $10.95 at Rite Aid, and honestly, it's an amazing deal. $3.65 a piece!
I have a soft spot in my heart for Physician's Formula. After a horrible bout with pink eye in 2006, my eyes became extremely sensitive to lower end brands of eyeliner and mascara. Physician's Formula was the first eyeliner I used after that that didn't make my eyes a mess. The eyeliner was called Flatliner, and it was AMAZING, but I can't find it anywhere anymore. So, Dear Physician's Formula, bring it back!! Thanks.

You know, I wish that I had......

Jesse's Girl!!

I'd like to review one my most favorite drugstore products on this earth; Jesse's Girl Loose Eye shadows. These retail for about $3.99 for 2.5 grams of product. These are highly underrated products that are easily accessible!

The first thing that I want to address is I own nine of these eye shadows, and four of them are the new packaging. What this means is, the five older eye shadows lack a sifter. In the new packaging they added a sifter, and since these are loose eye shadows, I greatly appreciated that addition.

The second thing I want to mention is that my old colors have no names on the packaging. So I cannot provide you with the names, and I am not sure that they still carry these colors.

The third and last thing is, they seemed to have improved their formula (for the better) between changing their packaging, and I appreciate that too.

OK!

When I first bought these I got them home and immediately tried them out. I was seriously disappointed. All I got was a crappy wash of shimmery color over my lid. A couple colors worked fabulously so I stuck with those and set the other colors to the side for a year or so.

And then I found out....

These eye shadows are fairly pigmented on their own. However, I prefer to use them with a sticky base such as a MAC paintpot, a concealer, an NYX jumbo eyeshadow pencil, or any other creamy product. This helps the color payoff to be much greater than it is on their own. I know it kind of sounds like a pain in the butt, but believe you me, it's TOTALLY worth it.

The texture of the shadows is great, they blend amazingly. They are some of the smoothest drugstore eye shadows I have ever used. The old formula was OK. Not great, but OK. The new packaging and formula are good, and it was almost like they were two different products. Now remember, of course I am only speculating that the formula was changed, or perhaps I learned how to use them better. Also, the lids on the new colors seems to be easier to remove and put back on, this may sound trivial but I don't like fidgeting with something that can spill all over my bathroom!!

Overall I don't have issues with these, the dark blue in the old packaging fades off of my lids from time to time, but since I learned how to use these, I love, love, love them!

If ultra shimmery and glittery shadows aren't your cup-o-tea, you will probably want to take a pass on these.

Swatch time

The old colors that I have no names for. You can see how sheer the first three are.

Old packages without the sifter
Metallic mid-toned pink, and a metallic medium to dark blue.

More old packaging, you may notice that the red shade is different, this was a limited edition Christmas shade from about three or four years ago. It only contained .7 grams of product! :(
Shimmery teal, a dark yellow-gold with green duo-chrome(FANtastic) and metallic red-orange.

Sparkling Gold (glittery yellow-gold) and Ultra Violet (a slightly pinked purple color with light purple duo-chrome). Sparkling Gold is so sparkling it almost broke my camera! Haha

Antique Green(brown base with intense green duo-chrome) and Blackstar Blue (blackened blue base with blue duo-chrome)

These can be purchased at your local Rite Aid store, or at this address; http://jessesgirlcosmetics.com/