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SpaRitual Nomad

Posted on 6 January, 20154 January, 2015 by Cynthia

Have you been to Ulta lately? A week or so ago I mentioned finding a bunch of awesome polishes on clearance. I think my Ulta jumped the gun and had 50% off clearance items before the rest of the stores did which is how I managed to get crazy deals on some polishes. I managed to pick up a few polishes from the SpaRitual Wander collection for like $2.99 which is amazing! I know some ladies were finding them for around $5.99 which is still a good deal. The polish I have for you today is SpaRitual Nomad which is probably the star of this collection. Let me show you what this beauty looks like.

SpaRitual Nomad is one of those ugly/pretty colors, and I definitely love it. I think that what makes this polish spectacular is the satin finish that just makes the polish glow. The formula seemed a little sheer at first, but it was perfect after the second coat. I also loved that the polish didn’t dry too quickly so you don’t have to worry about overworking it.

I feel like SpaRitual is definitely on my radar because of this amazing collection. I’ve purchased a few of their polishes previously but was never blown away like this by them. In fact, I have a whole story about a SpaRitual holiday set that I still get a kick out of when I think about it. (You can read about it here.) So what do you think about this polish? Is it something you would wear? I’m sure these polishes are getting scooped up soon but it’s worth a look in the clearance section at Ulta if you’re interested in getting it. Thanks for visiting today, and I will talk to you soon.

Cirque Colors Metropolis Collection January 2015

Posted on 5 January, 20154 January, 2015 by Cynthia

Today you are seeing my much ignored non swatching hand. I don’t really have a hard time painting my nails with my non-dominant hand, but polishing them in blog quality, meaning not getting polish on my cuticles and doing good clean up if necessary, can get difficult. I usually don’t have to do any clean up on my manicures because after 3 years of almost daily polish changes, I have gotten pretty good at being neat–but it’s still more difficult when I’m using my left hand to apply polish. Well, for the next few weeks/months you’ll be seeing my right hand in my reviews because I chopped off my nails on my left hand. I ruined my nails due to over-buffing and they were so paper thin and painful that I decided to just cut them down to nubbins and wait for the damage to grow out. I don’t know how long that will take, but I can guarantee that I will never buff my nails again. Today I’m pretty excited to be showing you 2 amazeballs creme polishes because you all know how I feel about cremes. I love glitter, I love holos, I love shimmers, I like duochromes, but there is nothing more gorgeous to me than a rich, buttery and shiny creme polish and these do not disappoint. Cirque has been putting out two monthly creme polishes that have NYC as their inspiration. For January, the Cirque Colors Metropolis collection brings you Midnight Cowboy and Empire State of Mind.

Cirque Midnight Cowboy is one of those rich navy blue cremes that blue lovers go gaga over–myself included. The formula on this baby is so creamy and delicious that it basically applied itself. It’s very opaque, but you will need two coats to achieve full opacity.

Who doesn’t love vampy nails? Well, for all of you vamps out there, I offer you Cirque Empire State of Mind. This rich red oxblood color is beautiful and has the same perfect formula as Midnight Cowboy. The redness you see around my cuticles is not actual staining from the polish, it’s slight irritation from a new cuticle remover I used that I left on too long. That’s what I get for watching The Walking Dead while doing my nails.

This is the first time I try out cremes from Cirque and goddam they are amazing. Considering how pigmented these shades are, I did not get any staining even though I didn’t use a base coat–now that’s saying something. I also love how shiny the finish is, almost like patent leather. I always use Seche Vite as my top coat, and the shine was the same even before I top coated them. These 2 new additions to the Metropolis collection became available on January 1st and you can buy them here where they retail for $13. Will you be getting any of these? Don’t even mention Mirror Mirror to me because I am still kicking myself for not getting it when it was last restocked. Well, I hope you’re having a good Monday (oxymoron?) and that you’re staying warm if you live somewhere that has actual Winters. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I will talk to you soon!

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Delush Polish Green With Ivy

Posted on 4 January, 2015 by Cynthia

Every Friday I tell myself that I’m going to get all my errands done on Friday so I can lounge around and be lazy on Sunday, but I always end up scrambling trying to get everything done in one day. Today I have about a bagillion loads of laundry and have to do a bunch of other stuff around the house. BLAH! Fortunately, I made some time yesterday to do enough swatching to have posts lined up for the next week. I love to have things planned out, but I also have to write up the actual posts which is usually the hardest part for me, and I end up procrastinating anyway. I’m going to try to write up a few posts today so wish me luck! For today’s post, I have a polish that I enjoyed wearing very much during the holidays: Delush Polish Green With Ivy.

Delush Polish Green With Ivy is an absolutely delicious green jelly based polish full of green and blue glitters in varying sizes. It’s such a ridiculously gorgeous polish, and I was so excited to receive it as a gift from Amanda. This polish is part of the Holidaze Collection which is still available on delushpolish.com.

So what have you been up to this weekend? This weekend is almost over and I’m already looking forward to my next weekend. I hope you got some rest and that you’re all geared up for another new week! Thanks for stopping by today, and I will talk to you soon.

Stamping Saturdays #50

Posted on 3 January, 2015 by Cynthia

It’s the first Stamping Saturdays of 2015! Where has the time gone? Where is my happy ending? Where have all the cowboys gone….? I just had a Paula Cole moment–it just happened organically. What happened to Paula Cole anyway? I remember really being into her music back in 1997–goddam I feel old right now. It’s kind of freezing right now, but next week our temperatures are going to go back to Cali-Winter norms so we’ll be in the upper 70’s. We really are spoiled, aren’t we? For today’s Stamping Saturdays mani, I used yet another gorgeous blue: Cirque Midnight Cowboy. I’ve been using blue a lot lately which isn’t surprising since it is one of my favorite colors. Let me show you how gorgeous it is.

Cirque Midnight Cowboy (press sample) is part of the January duo release for the Metropolis Collection. Each month, two luscious NYC inspired cremes are released by Cirque and this month we get a gorgeous navy and a deep oxblood red. Midnight Cowboy is creamy perfection. It applied like a dream and needed two coats for full opacity. Love this!

I can’t get enough of white and blue nails so I took this strange pattern from plate Born Pretty 05 (press sample). I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be, but since it was in an aquatic type plate, I figure it must be coral? It kind of also looks like brains to me. Am I weird? If you’re interested in checking out these plates, you can see them on Born Pretty Store here.

So what do you think about this mani? I think it looks so strange that it somehow appeals to me. I hope you’re enjoying your weekend so far, and thank you for stopping by today. I will talk to you soon.

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SpaRitual Oasis & Happy New Year!

Posted on 1 January, 2015 by Cynthia

Today is the first day of the rest of your life…NOT! I know we all tend to make a big deal about the new year, but it really is just another day. I don’t necessarily make official resolutions, but I do tend to think about things that I would like to change or improve. When I actually to promise myself to stick to resolutions, inevitably I break them right away and then I end up feeling super guilty. The biggest thing for me this year is to just be happier. I finally have a job that I like so that makes a huge difference in the quality of my life overall because we spend so much time at work. I know that the #1 resolution is to lose weight, which I desperately need to do, but I’m not going to say that this year. I just need to develop better eating and exercise habits and the rest will fall into place. As far as my blog goes, I want to get back on track with my posting. I haven’t been very consistent these last few months and I have felt that my heart just hasn’t been in it lately. I am feeling recharged and hope to do more nail art to get my creative juices flowing. Being more active on IG has been a lot of fun because I have been able to interact with a lot more people. I also feel that my blog needs a major facelift, but I don’t even know where to start so that will be a project that I will tackle a little later in the year. I wasn’t sure what to wear as my first polish of 2015, so I just grabbed one of the bottles that I recently acquired: SpaRitual Oasis. Let me show you how pretty this polish is.

I recently found most of the SpaRitual Wander Collection at my Ulta for $3 each. What a deal, right? The polishes in this collection are supposed to dry to a satin finish, but this one did not dry down to that finish and looked uneven I ended up top coating it to get an even glossy finish, and I was not disappointed.

And just because it’s been so freaking cold here in SoCal, I decided to use KBShimmer Flake Dance (press sample) to make this whole mani kind of icy and sparkling. I love this glitter and I love how easy it is to use to take your manicure to another level.

So how has the first day of the new year been treating you? What are you hoping to work on for the coming year, if anything? Well, I hope that you had a safe and fun NYE. Thank you very much for continuing to visit my little corner of the internet and I hope to get to meet more of you this year. Have a great rest of your day!

Chevrons and Flowers

Posted on 29 December, 201428 December, 2014 by Cynthia

Happy Monday, ladies! Ghhhaaaaa! It’s the last week of the year, and I decided that I wanted to try something a little different today. While I admire all of the amazing ladies who do tons of freehand nail art, I am usually a big fat failure when it comes to anything more complicated than stamping. I got together with Amy and Siobhan to do a mani based off an image or pattern just to mix things up a little. Amy found an awesome pattern, and we decided to use it for today’s mani.

Am I the only one who wants that shower curtain like immediately?

I started off with OPI Angel With A Leadfoot (press sample) as my base. I’ve been using this white a lot lately for my manicures. Can you blame me? It’s so crisp and creamy.

Since I always end up messing up something simple such as chevrons even with vinyls, I decided to use a stamp for this kind offset chevron design. This image is from plate MoYou London Pro Collection 18 (press sample) and I used my Konad special polish in black. For the flower design, I used a water decal that was sent to me by the lovely Jacqui last year after I mentioned that I had never used them before. She has a great post explaining how to use water decals which I referred to today before I used them. Check out her post here. It was super easy to use the water decal, but I did have to do some trial an error. It’s really important to trim them down do that you don’t have any overhang. Because my nails are naturally very curved, the decal did not lay all the way flat at first so I had to fiddle with it to make sure it was as flat as possible before top coating the entire thing. I really loved this design! Even better, I loved doing this with my girls because sometimes I feel like all I do is swatch. While I love swatching, it can sometimes get tedious so doing something like this can get my creative juices flowing.

Make sure that you check out Amy’s and Siobhan’s designs by clicking their links below. What do you think of this design? It was rather easy to create, and it turned out really cute if I do say so myself. I hope you’re having a great beginning to your week. Thank you for stopping by today, and I will talk to you soon.

Stamping Saturdays #49

Posted on 27 December, 201427 December, 2014 by Cynthia

Hey, it’s Saturday again and here I am with another installment of Stamping Saturdays! I know I’ve been pretty absent on my blog and Facebook lately, but I’m sure you’re all busy with the holidays so you haven’t missed me much! Today I wanted to do something that had a serious holiday feel or at least a seasonal connection. Believe it or not, the weather has been quite chilly here in the land of eternal shorts and flip flops and it’s supposed to get colder. We are also expecting rain next week so I’m looking forward to that. Do you have big NYE plans? I haven’t decided what I want to do cause I hate crowds which means that a lot of the festivities are not up my alley. Anyway, let’s move on to the polish, yeah? Today I am showing you Morgan Taylor Under The Stars which is probably my favorite Morgan Taylor polish of all time.

Morgan Taylor Under The Stars is a deep midnight blue jelly polish with tons of holographic glitter. Two coats are enough for full opacity, but it does dry a little gritty so a generous coat of Seche Vite will give it a nice glassy and smooth look.

I took a blurry picture of this polish to show you the sparkle. This baby looks amazing out in the sun–you will not be able to stop staring at your nails.

I then stamped this pretty snowflake design from plate Born Pretty 01 (press sample) with my Konad special polish. I just love how this turned out! I have been really impressed with the Born Pretty plates that I have used so far. The prices and quality are pretty great so make sure to check out all of their designs here.

I hope you’re enjoying your Saturday! If you haven’t been joining us for Stamping Saturdays, we’d love to have you. You can link up to our blog posts and you can also join us on instagram by using the hashtag #StampingSaturdays so we can find you. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I will talk to you soon!

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KBShimmer Men Are From Mars-ala

Posted on 22 December, 201422 December, 2014 by Cynthia

Can you believe that there is about a week and a half left before we enter 2015? I’m kind of blown away by this because I feel like I’m in such a different place than I was a year ago–in a good way for the most part. But, I’ll leave that self-reflection for another post, maybe my last post of the year after I’ve had a few margaritas. Ooohhh….dangerous combination. One of the things I look forward to is the unveiling of the Pantone Color of the year. Having worked in the paint industry for a bit, I learned to love color and all the different trends that affect how products are marketed. As you may know, Marsala is the 2015 color of the year and I actually quite like it. I heard make people complaining about it and how it’s a grandma color and plain ugly. I love the earthiness of the color, and I think it suits my skin tone quite well. I knew that there would be plenty of polishes coming out with Marsala as the main inspiration and to day I have one of the first ones I have seen: KBShimmer Men Are From Mars-ala.

Look, you already know what I’m going to say because we’re talking about KBShimmer here. This polish is absolutely gorgeous. The formula is buttery and opaque at two coats. While it doesn’t look super holographic here, it does look amazing in the sun. Good job, KBShimmer…you never disappoint.

My friend Amy asked me how Men Are From Mars-ala compared to Deja Brew so I decided to do a little comparison for her.

Totally different! I should have included Rust No One, but that one is also not similar as it is much more red/orange.

So what do you think about this polish? What are your thoughts on the color of the year? If you’re interested in picking up this beauty, it will be available on www.KBShimmer.com for $8.75 on January 1st. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I will talk to you soon!

Stamping Saturdays #48

Posted on 20 December, 2014 by Cynthia

Happy Saturday everyone. It’s kind of a gloomy day here which feels weird for California. I thought that we were going to have more rain, but apparently we’re going to have a pretty sunny and mild holiday week. I still haven’t done any Christmas shopping, and I think I’m pretty much dead on that at this point. Yesterday I went to Target and it was mayhem–what was I expecting? I’m going to try to go tonight to get everything done but first I’m going to stop by and visit my Peanut Brat. Last night I had such a hard time deciding what to to for today’s Stamping Saturdays until I started digging in my untrieds. Let me show you how my mani came together.

First I started with 2 coats of OPI Get Cherried Away (press sample) from the OPI Coca Cola Collection. It’s such a beautiful berry color that is super opaque. I wanted to use this berry shade as my base for the next polish because it has a jelly finish that needs to be built up.

This is the first time that I use anything from Pipe Dream Polish, and I love it. A big thanks to Frosso for this gorgeous polish. I love being exposed to new brands and sometimes I just don’t even have time to check out what’s out there. Pipe Dream Polish Interference is a glitter polish in a dark jelly base. I love the glitter in this polish, but it does dry super lumpy/gritty which is why you need a good thick top coat to smooth it out. I only applied one coat of Interference over Get Cherried Away and one coat of Seche to give it a smooth and shiny finish.

For my stamp, I used my trusty Pure Ice Silver Mercedes and the paisley image from Bundle Monster plate BM-315. I love how cleanly this stamped.

So what do you think of this mani? I really like it, and I loved trying out a new polish brand. It’s always a love/hate moment because now I’m going to be drooling over yet another brand when I’m trying to to be good about my spending. Well, I hope you’re doing well today and don’t forget to join us every Saturday for Stamping Saturdays. You can use the hashtag #stampingsaturdays on instagram so that I can find you! Thanks for stopping by today, and I will talk to you soon!

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The Lacquer Ring – Stars

Posted on 18 December, 201417 December, 2014 by Cynthia

Ello gov’nor! I’ve been wanting to answer the phone at work that way for a long time, but I don’t think that is going to fly. What do you think? I’m feeling kind of silly today and have no idea why. I think that it may be the funky weather, the holidays or PMS…ok, tmi so let’s move right along. It’s that time again when The Lacquer Ring is ready to wow you with our most awesome designs! See? I told you I was feeling silly. Today’s prompt, courtesy of Lesley, is all about stars. At first I wanted to use some stamping plates but then I remembered that I had some nail decals that I hadn’t used so BAM…it all came together.

The items I have used for today’s mani are KBShimmer Stonewashed (press sample), Max Factor Fantasy Fire (gift) and Salon Perfect Star Struck Nail Decal Kit (press sample).

I know that I talk about KBShimmer. I can’t help it–just look at this polish!!!! Stonewashed is such a perfect opaque creme. This is two smooth coats, and it really doesn’t get any better than this.

If I could topcoat everything with Max Factor Fantasy Fire I probably would. I just had an image of my car being topcoated with Fantasy Fire…is that weird? I applied a super thin coat of Fantasy Fire over Stonewashed just to give it that lit from within look.

And finally here are the stars. I have to work a little more on my decal placement but overall I give this mani a meh. I thought it was going to reach polish boner territory due to the awesome base, but I think it just became too much and now it’s just a semi.

So what do you think about this mani? Did the decals ruin it for you? Regardless, I strongly recommend that you check out KBShimmer Stonewashed cause it’s just divine. Anywho, don’t forget to check out the other stellar designs from my girls. My girls as in the other members of the Lacquer Ring, not my boobs. Just thought that I should clear that up just in case. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I will talk to you soon!

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