NOTD: Essence - Choose Me!

Hi girlies! :)
Hope you had a great weekend! I had a pretty nice one! Sorry I've been slacking on posting this past two weeks! I have a ton of things to post, I've been a bit busy though and my computer and Photoshop have also been giving me problems. So I've had posts all ready to go, but it's just the photos that have been giving me trouble!

The polish I'm showing you today is Essence's Choose Me! And how could I NOT choose it?! ;) It's beautiful! I don't know how I feel about it on my skin tone but it's too pretty for me to care!

Essence's Choose Me is a dupe for about a million other polishes. Okay, only two that I know of. OPI's Catch Me In Your Net and Zoya's Charla. And it's a fraction of the price. You could buy like 10 bottles of this polish and it would be equivalent to only one bottle of OPI! Plus, I believe the OPI one was limited edition and is harder to find. Choose Me is a permanent colour in the Essence Colour and Go line so it's fairly easy to find! :)

This polish totally reminds me of a mermaid or something. It's sort of a blue jelly base with green and gold shimmers (or perhaps it's glass fleck? I'm not too good at determining the difference between shimmer and glass fleck... Help me out if you know)! It almost seems duochrome-y!

I'd recommend using a good base coat with this one. The first time I wore it, it stained on me a bit, but the second time it didn't! Weird, but yeah! Maybe double up on the base coat just to be safe. :) Anyway, it's so pretty I wouldn't have minded if it stained!

Sorry that my watermarks are inconsistent in the above photos. I'm still trying to figure out how I want the watermark to look!

Do you own this polish, or one of the many dupes? :)

-Elissa

Essence Nude Glam Polishes

I'm so sorry it's been about a week since I posted! I have some posts planned though so (hopefully) look forward to me posting frequently! :)

Essence recently released a line of nude polishes to suit different skin tones! Well in Australia they recently released it, anyway. Probably a long time ago in other countries!
I love Essence polishes and want to own every polish from them! I love buying nude polishes but I don't wear them all that often. I bought Essence Nude Glam - Cafe Ole, a light taupe-beige sort of nude, a while back but just put it in my drawer and never wore it. I bought the nude polish in Iced Latte a couple of weeks ago, which is a light pink-beige sort of nude. I'm not the best at describing colours like this, sorry. x)

I thought I'd swatch the two nudes side by side to show you. They're pretty different in my opinion. On my ring and pinky is Cafe Ole, and my middle and pointer is Iced Latte. Both very nice nude shades.

A full manicure with Iced Latte.

I prefer Iced Latte on my skin tone but Cafe Ole doesn't look bad. :)

Essence polishes are great! The quality is awesome and they have a great colour range! They are sold in Target stores in Australia for $2.55. They're also popping up in Priceline stores at the moment, check the Essence Facebook page for a list of the stores around Aus that will be stocking Essence!

NOTD: Purple Leopard Print Manicure!

I decided to skip days 8 (your favourite nails) and 9 (geometric) of the Winter Challenge and do leopard print nails! I'd seen an AWESOME leopard print tutorial by Sarah at Chalkboard Nails and decided to recreate it! :)

It's super easy and Sarah even included a video tutorial! All you need is three colours of polish, a dotting tool and a fast dry top coat! Well the top coat isn't completely necessary I guess but it makes life easier. ;)

The three colours I chose to use were Revlon Top Speed - Lily for the base, OPI - Do You Lilac It for the dots, and Essence - Break Through for the darker part of the spots. :) So my overall look is purple.

I'm slowly getting more and more into nail art! I just feel like sometimes it can look a little tacky. I guess it just depends on the design. I prefer more subtle nail art so this is quite crazy for me to have on my nails but I think it's cute and in my opinion, looks like it was really hard to do but it's actually super easy and doesn't take as long as it might look like it does!

Click 'Read more' for more photos & other info! :)

Free Nails Inc Polish With August CLEO Magazine!

Hey there! :)
Just thought I'd quickly come on here and share something for all you Aussie girls! :)
All you polish addicts should definitely go out and find the August issue of CLEO magazine (Mila Kunis on the cover) because you'll get a free Nails Inc polish with it!! :D This is very exciting to me because Nails Inc is worth $18 and I'm not entirely sure how much the mag costs but it's definitely under $10. My guess is about $7-8. :)
I didn't buy the magazine myself, because I rarely read them but my mum bought it and since she doesn't wear polish, she gave it to me! Her exact words were "Not that you need any more. But here you go." HAHA.
The shade she picked for me is "Cleopatra's Kiss", sort of a gunmetal silver metallic colour! My mum said that all the colours were "wishy-washy"... Whatever the heck that means. She said they weren't nice. But I bet I would think they're nice so I'm gonna try and grab another copy of the magazine to get a different polish colour! :)

Here's a photo I quickly snapped on my phone of the polish. Sorry it's not very good quality! I'll try to update this later with a better photo. I just want to get this post up ASAP so you'll see it sooner rather than later!

I feel like this is one of the only good things about being Aussie. ;) LOL. We get pretty good freebies with magazines from time to time! I've previously gotten two Butter London polishes from magazines! :D That was before I even knew what Butter London was though! Haha!

Hope this was helpful for at least someone & that I enabled your polish addiction. ;)

-Elissa

I am not associated with CLEO magazine or Nails Inc.

Winter Challenge Day 6 (and 7!)

So I had planned on doing manicures for day 4 (black) and 5 (grey) but didn't have time over the weekend for doing my nails. :( I had plans for both days too which sucks. But hey, I can still do those manis some other time. :) So look out for those sometime soon, possibly!

Day 6's theme is "pink". I'm not sure how pink fits into winter but hey, pink is pretty all the time so I'm not complaining! :)
I chose to use a pink polish from my (embarrassingly large) stash of untried polishes. This one I won in an Instagram giveaway from Aveyou; I won the Essie Bikini So Teeny - Summer 2012 collection mini set from them! :) I was so excited to win a polish set from them, I've never won any giveaways before. Though it was extremely easy to enter. All I had to do was be in the first 200 or so to screenshot something. I was really excited to receive these polishes in the mail last week; I'd expected it to take a lot longer to arrive than it did! But sadly, Ayeyou isn't doing international giveaways anymore. I guess they'd had many more international winners than they anticipated. So all their giveaways are US only now, but that's great for you if you live there so follow them on Instagram to see when they have their next giveaway! They give away polish sets pretty frequently.
ANYWAY! Sorry for my blabbering about that!

Click 'read more' for more pictures and info! :)
and you can see the (super simple and easy) nail art I did after wearing this for a day!

Winter Nail Challenge!

I've decided to join in on the winter nail challenge that some other Aussie bloggers are doing! :) Yes it is winter right now. We're about halfway through and I really wish it was summer right now. I like winter but I can't handle three months of it! And spring doesn't get that warm until like October/November here either! :(

Anyway, if you'd like to join the winter challenge then go The Blog for Beautiful Living's blog here to see the list! :) I'm a few days behind but I thought I'd join anyway!


Here's the list for the Winter Nail Challenge!

Yesterday's theme is "blue"! I used to hate blue polish before I got addicted. I thought it was a really unnatural colour to wear on your nails so I only wore pinks and girly colours. Now I own a TON of blues so it was hard for me to choose which blue to wear out of my collection!
I did this manicure yesterday but didn't have time to post last night, so sorry it's a day late! I may post all the manicures for this challenge the day after I do them. I'd like to post them on the day I do them but I don't really have time to do that.

I ended up choosing two untrieds from my collection! :)
I did one coat of Revlon - Royal, a royal blue (as the name would suggest) jelly formula polish (sorry I didn't take a picture of it before I added the next polish!) and one thick coat of Essence - Blue Addicted which I believe is a Deborah Lippmann dupe for Across the Universe and at only $2.55AU ($1US I believe), who would buy the actual Lippmann when you can get this so much cheaper! Essence bottles are very small but you could buy a few of them and it'd still be much cheaper than the Deborah Lippmann polish. :)

Click 'Read more' for more pics & info!

Current Lemmings

Hi girls! (and guys if there's any reading this. I don't know of any guys who read my blog but there could be. So hi!) :) I saw some other bloggers do this and I thought it'd be fun. Also I've seen my sister on "Polyvore" alllll the time lately (where I made this collage) so I wanted to try it. I'm not really sure what the site is actually used for but I think it's mainly to make collages of outfits and things like that.
I used it to make a collage of my current wish list/lemmings that I hope to get my hands on in the near future! :) I thought it would be fun to show you what products I'm wanting at the moment!

Descriptions and more after the jump!

NOTD: Second Try of Fly

Indoors

I tried OPI Fly a couple of months ago, late at night, painting my nails in bed. I usually do my nails late at night but when I do them in bed, it doesn't turn out so well... I ended up smudging the polish a ton, getting it all over my cuticles and it just was not fun. The colour also looked really strange and not like other swatches I'd seen! (Turns out this was just because I was in a poorly lit room, thankfully. I was scared I got a dodgy bottle or something.) I ended up getting a bunch of sheet marks and even more smudges in it when I woke up as well, so I just removed it first thing in the morning. It did stain my fingers a little with removal too. I also broke a nail that morning.

Swatches & more info after the jump!

NOTD: Russian Rainbow

I finally got my hands on a Spectraflair top coat about a month ago! I had been wanting one for a while & the lovely Angela on Instagram started selling them in her Etsy shop! :) I quickly snatched one up from her! Check out her Etsy, she also makes AWESOME franken polishes! Spectraflair is a holographic pigment that is recently very popular for adding to nail polish to make it linear holographic! Angela also has some AWESOME frankens she's made for sale! Go right now and check them out, I absolutely love them!

This mani wasn't my first time using the top coat but it was my favourite combination!
I wore the top coat over OPI Russian Navy (which is becoming a favourite of mine - I need to get a full size because I only own a mini!), a great navy polish with a magenta and blue shimmer through it.

Indoor lighting

Indoor lighting

Please excuse my cuticles in these photos. I'm aware that I have polish on my cuticles and these photos were taken before I learned how to properly clean up my cuticles.

-Elissa