An amazing swap and a breathtaking Nfu.Oh

Hey there :)

Some time ago I did another swap with Jackie from Candy Coated Tips and she got me these goodies:

 OPI Blue Moon Langoon, Sally Hansen Purple Pizzazz, Milani Dot com, Sinful Colors Let's Talk and Wet'n'Wild Blue Moon

 Orly La Playa, China Glaze Mummy May I and China Glaze Ghoulish Glow, their Glow in the Dark polish/topcoat

some sweets and a beautiful card :D
Thanks again Jackie for this wonderful swap, you rock!

My recent army of Nfu.Oh's left you all drooling, so here's the first one I used: number 52. I used Essence's Midnight Rocker as a base but the pictures turned out to be really bad, so I'll reswatch it. Midnight Rocker is one of Essence's new shades and is an almost black purple. It needed two coats to be opaque and I layered one coat of Nfu.Oh 52 over it. The Nfu.Oh flakies are stunning and I couldn't stop staring at my nails when I was wearing it.
I used different angles to show the different colors the flakies.

Playing around with magnetic polishes

Hey there :)

The other day I was playing around with my magnetic polishes. I bought my (sadly only) bottle of the L'oreal Star Magnets years ago(7?8?) before I got into nail polish. I got the agnes b. one from the sweet Kesha over at Nail Polish Obsession. And if you follow me on Twitter, you might read that I stumbled across the magnetic ones from Alessandro.

All of them are opaque in one coat and you have to work quickly because the pattern might not show up as you hoped (i.e. the contrast is not as strong as you wished,...). Another thing is that you should be carefull with the magnet. You can see in the pictures later, that you'll get polish on the magnet and it'll ruin your manicure.
To avoid this, I'd suggest to place the magnet in a horizontal angle.
About the magnets: I liked the one from Alessandro best- you can adjust the height (or what do you call that?, the picture below shows it) of the magent. The other two are quite the same- but I wish the pattern of the one from L'oreal would be a tad bigger. My other complaint about the magnet is, that the one from L'oreal is that it is fixed and you can't detach it to make it easier to make the pattern.
I know Essence is comming out with some magnetic polishes next month too but I haven't seen/bought them.

from left to right: Alessandro Blue Chip, Agnes B. Cuivre Rose, L'oreal Star Magnet Magnetic Prune
Now to the swatches:

from left to right: Magnetic Prune, Blue Chip and Cuivre Rose
Alessandro's Blue Chip (BC) has a purple shimmer wich you can best see in the promo picture and you can see it in the darker stripes of it  at some angles. Magnetic Prune is as the name implides, a prune color. Cuivre Rose (CR) is a warm copper shade.
And lastly, I played around with CR and BC and the other two magnets.

As you can see, it works with different magnets too and somehow I think that the one from Alessandro has the most magnetic particals (or the substance that causes the effect). It may only be that the darker color pops out more.

Teaser: How about a little army of Nfu.Oh's?

I think the title is self-explanatory ;)

Skin Food Black Holo and α-Rainbow

Hey there :)

As you might have noticed, that I haven't posted a lot in the past few weeks is because I am drowning in college work and I'm not sure when this work-load is going to end. I hope you understand that and I'll hopefully have more time to blog once I'm used to this semester's routine/schedule.

I got the two polishes I'm going to show you today from a sweet MUA'er in a swap. I'm slightly addiceted to find black/charcoal holos and have quite a few now.

Skin Food's Black Holo (that's what I call it, it has a number instead of a (proper) name and my bottle is MIA now) is a grey-almost black holo similar to Color Club's Revvvolution. It only needed two coats to be opaque. I really like the bottle design of it.  α (alpha)-Rainbow is a dark silver holo and was more sheer than Black Holo. It needed three coats to be opaque but the holo effect was stronger. I didn't put a topcoat on them.
Sadly, the camera washed out the holo effect, but you can see how it is in the bottle :)

P2 Crackle Polishes and a comparison with Isadora and BYS

Hey there :)

P2 recently released two crackle polishes and I *had* to have them. There are only two colors (so far) and I hope that they're going to release new colors because unfortunatly the Isadora ones are quite expensive compared to P2( ~2€ vs 9€ or ~2,6$ vs ~11,7$).

I first layered them over my excisting manicure (Orly Wild Wisteria& Prisma Gloss Silver).

from left to right: P2 Silver Blast, P2 Black Explosion, Isadora Black Tag and BYS Black Crackle.
The effect isn't very obvious my nails except my pinky and sadly, the BYS didn't crack like the others, it had a cracked surface but the base-color wasn't shining through and my nail remained black.
Now, let's see how the colors look over a lighter base color, in this case P2 elegant (a 2 coater).

To me, P2 and Isadora look the same, tough the crackle-pattern varies how thick/thin you paint it. I tried to paint about the same amount of polish on all nails but due to the different brushes* it was quite hard.You can also see the pattern of the BYS crackle polishes I described before: they have a crackle-like surface but the base-color doesn't peek through. It's quite unique and I've never seen such a pattern before.

*P2 and BYS had quite skinny/average sized brushes, whereas Isadora had a wide brush about the same size of the OPI Pro Wide only a bit more brush-hair.

All in all I like the P2 crackling polishes. Due to the price they are definitly a steal and I really hope P2 comes out with more colors.

Alessandro Stilleto No 022 and Nfu.Oh 50

Hey there :)

Just a little warning: This post is going to be with a lot of pictures.
I already showed you Alessandro No. 022 and I just wasn't that wowed by the color. So I dug out my Nfu.Oh 50 and wasn't dissapointed with this layering.
I used one coat of Nfu.Oh 50 over the excisting manicure. I tried to capture the different colors of the flakies, they were mostly green and blue.

A glamorous Franken

Hey there :)

The first minute I saw pictures of OPI's DS Glamour, I knew, it had to be mine. Time passed, a lot of other polishes happened and I still am not *that* ready to buy it at the prices they offer it at the bay of evil. So I tried to franken one for myself. I used a drop of Wet'n'Wild Noctural- nah, too much green and then I used Essence's Deep Blue Sea (sadly, discontinued) and Glam Nails Rainbow, which I already raved about here.

And those two polishes mixed together was this:
 (I used two coats, no topcoat- it was even more holo than it shows in the pictures :D )

Claire's Shy/Flirty

Hey there :)

 I recently got Flirty/Shy from another swap with the lovely Karen (if you'd like to see what she got me, I've added the pictures at the end of the post). Flirty/Shy is a blue and changes from a light to dark blue. I used two coats and it dried to a matte finish so I finished it up with a topcoat.
This is how it looks like most of the time:

And when it's warm (somehow the camera captured my visible nail line which wasn't visible in person)

And when my hands are cold:

And now, the goodies from Karen. Originaly it was two swaps but the first package got lost somewhere between the US and Austria (probably stuck somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle like our first swap package :P). Thank you so much again Karen :)

Alessandro Stilleto No 022

Hey there :)

You may have heard about the brand Alessandro  because they are going to release magnetic polishes in October. Alessandro is a German brand and here in Austria it's sold in the drugstore Müller and Douglas. I really like their LE's with the mini bottles and they've released some kick-ass flakies and duo-chromes.

No. 022 is from their Stilleto line which is supposed to be for "toenails only". The line has 3 shades including this one and there are a few other products for feet too (a foot-cream, etc.)

It didn't had any weird smell, it was the same as any other (B3F) nail polish I have. The polish dried quick but I didn't experience an outstanding shine (or I may have been spoiled with Seche Vite and my other beloved topcoats).

The color is a vibrant light purple. Imagine it less blue-toned because my camera always pictures purples wrong. I used two coats and didn't had any problems. I really like their brush because it was a wider one. The formula was good too :)