NOTD: Warm & Fozzie Disaster

So if you follow me on Instagram you will know all about the disaster that happened last night while I was shopping with my little sister! We were shopping for a dress for her to wear tonight and I had a little money so I decided I'd buy an OPI polish.

In Price Attack they had a little rack of OPIs for $14.95 (as well as all the new collections but they're a little more expensive) including some of the Muppets Collection and I've been dying to buy Warm & Fozzie for a while so I thought I'd bite the bullet and finally buy it! :)

We were walking around looking at clothes & I was getting impatient because my sister takes a long time in the shops. x) She was all whingy as well because she couldn't find anything. We went into a store and just as we were about to walk out, I dropped my little plastic bag with my beautiful Warm & Fozzie inside... I picked it up and realised that the inside of the bag was looking very brown. THE BOTTLE BROKE. :'( I could've cried! I probably would have if it happened at home! I basically ran back to the store and asked if there was anything they could do, even though I knew they wouldn't be able to.. :( I was right. The owner seemed really sympathetic though. He was like "oh no! :(" haha. But yeah I was very pissed off and I ranted on Instagram right away. :P I saw a friend of mine like 20 minutes later who also likes OPI and she sympathized with me. LOL. But I was bugging my sister so much to hurry so I could get home and try to salvage the polish into an empty OPI Nail Envy bottle. :( I was already in a bad mood but that just topped off my night...

I did end up salvaging a full OPI mini bottle (3.75ml) and about half of another. So like a third of the full size polish. Kinda annoying since I spent $15 on it. But anyway I'm sort of over it now.

ANYWAYYY, after all that. I knew I had to put Warm & Fozzie on my nails as soon as I got home. I was slightly disappointed because other swatches I'd seen, looked much more beautiful! But after taking pictures and seeing it outside, I'm happy. :) I don't even know how to describe this polish so I'm not going to try. ;) Go to Scrangie's blog post about the Muppets Collection HERE where you can see better swatches and a good description.

More info & swatches after the jump! :)

NOTD: My Favourite Polish of All Time

A few weeks ago I discovered my favourite polish of all time. I found myself wanting to wear it all the time and I love how it looks on my nails! But I only had it in a mini size so while I was in Sydney I picked up the full size version!

 Essie - Lady Like is a muted mauve-taupe sort of colour that can also look nude in some lighting. This polish is from Essie's Fall 2011 collection I believe. But this collection is still the one on the stands here in Australia. It's been on the stands since maybe February; that's when I first noticed it. We have a very limited selection of Essies. I'm hoping they restock soon though and give us the Winter 2011 collection, even though we're a third through Winter now. I can't even remember what the Winter collection was, off the top of my head (though I'm usually good at remembering things, so this is weird...). Lady Like is very simple and classy and I just love it so much! It makes your nails and hands look polished without drawing attention to them. It was the first Essie polish I ever wore and I was very impressed with the formula, since I had heard that Essie formula was very sheer and hard to work with but this polish isn't that at all! Great polish to work with and was opaque in two coats. :) I think this one would be very job interview appropriate. Or just work appropriate in general, if you work somewhere more conservative. I'm loving netural polishes lately. I own a lot of them but in reality I don't actually wear them all that often. xD

PS. I'd like to apologise for the fact that my cuticles are looking a little dry in my photos. I believe I took these photos literally right after I washed my hands, or showered or something and hadn't applied any cuticle oil or hand cream yet. Which is weird for me because I am ALWAYS doing that. ;)

More info & swatches after the jump! :)

NOTD: Coral Fever

I've been really into mixing polishes lately! Mixing white into bright colours to make them more pastel, mixing colours into clear polish to make a "jelly" polish. It's so fun to me.
Here is the result of a polish I mixed!
I started with Essence - C'est La Vie. I wasn't a fan of that polish. I'm not sure why I bought it actually. I guess I thought it was more coral but it was actually very orange. So I thought I'd add some hot pink to it to make it more coral! I tipped out about a quarter of the Essence polish and I added some of Rimmel - Hot Shot to the polish; I don't remember how much exactly. And I then added a bit of a white polish to tone down the brightness of it. And I absolutely LOVED the result!

Daylight

More info & swatches after the jump! :)

NOTD: Midnight Manicure

I found it funny that I'm typing this at exactly 12:00am (midnight), and the polish I am wearing right now is called 'Midnight'!

I am wearing one of the polishes I picked up in Sydney over the weekend, in a chemist. About a week ago & a half ago I discovered that the Revlon ColorStay polishes had been release in Australia! I don't know how long they've been out in the US but since I only recently started to see them popping up on blogs & YouTube so I thought we wouldn't get them for another 4-6 months but I unexpectedly saw them in Chemist Warehouse and flipped out!

I have worn one other ColorStay but didn't take any pictures on my camera (only my phone-bad quality) so I'll have to swatch it again soon.
I really like the formula of these polishes, they're quite thick and the ones I've tried so far are opaque in one coat (though I always do two). I am not the fondest of the brush, however. The brush is wide and a bit stumpy. I tend to get polish all over my cuticles with these polishes which is really annoying because usually I need to do minimal cleanup! But I still really like this line anyway.

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So the one I am wearing 'Midnight'. It's a dark teal colour (though my photos don't show that so well...). I have been wearing a LOT of blues on my nails lately. I used to think blue/green was a very unusual colour for nail polish but now it's probably one of my favourites!

I then topped the polish with CND 'Crimson Sparkle', a shimmer/micro glitter top coat that flashes red (as the name suggests!) and gold! It's really gorgeous and when I googled swatches I saw it only used over dark colours so I thought this would work! At first I wasn't a fan of my combo but it's growing on me! :) I think this topcoat will also look great over pastels for a more subtle look.

More info & swatches after the jump! :)

NOTD: My Sydney Manicure

If you read one of my previous posts you'll remember that I went to Sydney for 3 nights almost a week ago. It was an amazing time but before I went, I was very concerned about my nails. :P I knew I wouldn't be able to paint them or pay too much attention to them so I wasn't sure if I should paint them and just hope that they don't chip too much or break, or if I should leave them bare (which I usually don't like to do because I always manage to break a nail when I don't wear polish - eg. Today). So I was thinking about it & I saw Sally Hansen Salon Effects real nail polish strips in a Chemist Warehouse catalogue for $9 (they retail for about $13.95 here I believe) and I've been wanting to try them so I went and purchased them in the "Skinny Jeans" pattern. It's a pretty subtle pattern compared to some of the other ones they have.

I watched a few YouTube videos about these and how to apply them so I was pretty confident that I wouldn't mess it up when I put them on. But they were different than I expected. I wasn't sure if I should use a base coat before applying them but since I wanted them to last as long as possible, I thought I would use a base coat. Mistake number one. I believe you aren't supposed to use a base coat with these, from what I heard from other girls.
I didn't have a good time applying these. They were a mess! I had a hard time getting them close enough to my cuticle without actually touching the cuticle, and a couple of the strips dried out because I took so long to apply them! And for some reason, when one of the strips dried out, I was unable to find another in my packet the same size which was really annoying and left one of my nails with a strip that was too small for my nail and looked funny. Also, the strips didn't want to stick to my nail at the cuticle properly and went kind of bumpy. But I think this had to do with me using a base coat.

More info & photos after the jump! :)

Sydney Polish Haul + More! (Pic Heavy!)

Hey guys!
I'm sorry I haven't posted anything for about a week. I've been away in Sydney, NSW for 4 days!

My mum won a competition (she's a competition junkie, it's AWESOME. We've had some amazing opportunities/experiences thanks to my clever mother! :)) for two people to go to The Voice Australia grand final in Sydney! When she told me, I started crying and laughing (I giggle a lot when I'm excited about something) and almost choked on whatever I was eating! All because Delta Goodrem, my favourite singer of all time, my obsession and role model, is one of the coaches! I've been a MASSIVE Delta fan since I was 9 (about 10 years). I don't think I've ever been so excited about something in my entire life.
So of course my mum said I could go on the trip, I think that was the reason she entered, knowing that I LOVE Delta. But she said she couldn't go with me but that I could take my boyfriend with me! This was even more exciting because we'd never been on a holiday or anything together and it was our 5 year anniversary about 3 weeks ago (the day before I found out about the prize actually) so it was really cool. I then found out that the prize included even MORE amazing things, if The Voice grand final wasn't amazing enough! We were staying in a 5 star hotel, having limo transfers to our hotel from the airport (and back to the airport at the end), limo transfers to/from the Voice at Fox Studios, a 2 hour beauty treatment including facials, massages and a body scrub, a 20 minute helicopter ride over Sydney, a $300 dinner and EVEN MORE absolutely amazing stuff. WHAAAAAAAT!!!!! So freakin' awesome!

So I had two and a half weeks before we left to totally freak out and spend every moment thinking about the trip. x)
I found out we would also have some time for shopping while in Sydney so of course I checked out what type of places I could shop at. ;)
About a 5-10 minute walk from our hotel was some amazing shopping areas! Woot! And as you can imagine, I went crazy on nail polish. But not as crazy as I thought I would. I found a really cool nail supply store and bought some polish there, and also at some chemists and other places where I usually get polish at home, but being in a different city and larger malls/shops they did have a little different variety than what we have at home! :)
I think I bought about 16 polishes all together, including some base/top coats and some other goodies. :D I'll include my haul photos in with my other holiday photos below.
Photos all taken from my Instagram profile.

NOTD: Delicate Ballerina Manicure

I feel so silly. About a month ago I promised myself I'd start posting NOTD posts on my blog but it never happened. So right now I'm bored and figured it was the perfect time to do my first post. :)

I bought the OPI NYC Ballet Collection minis a few months ago but never felt in the mood to wear them, even after seeing the beautiful swatches on Instagram and blogs. But finally a couple of days ago before going out to see some old friends, I was trying to choose a colour for my nails and decided to break out these pretty jellies!

I'm wearing 3 coats of "Don't Touch My Tutu", a pretty white jelly with one coat of "Pirouette My Whistle" over it, which is a glitter top coat made up of silver micro glitter and larger white/matte glitter! I also have used a coat of Sally Hansen's Mega Shine top coat over this mani.

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I did dent this mani before it dried, as I didn't wait long at all between coats of Don't Touch My Tutu. I would definitely wait longer between coats next time so that the mani dries faster and I don't mess it up again.

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I'm hoping to pick up a full size of both of these polishes. Having to use three coats of the jelly for it to be the opacity of my liking really sucks because I'll go through my mini bottles very quickly! This collection would be absolutely perfect for a bridal manicure or something of that sort! :) The OPI NYC Ballet Collection is full of some GORGEOUS, delicate, soft colours that I will definitely be wearing more often.

Thankyou so much for reading :) Please leave a comment & tell me what you think about these polishes!
Also feel free to follow me on Instagram (@elissafayy) or Twitter for updates from me or just to chat :)

PS: Please bear with me on my watermarks.. Haven't really decided on a good one for my photos yet! :) Let me know what you think of it.