Wet N Wild Ice Baby Collection

I have a fabulous friend who gifted me with the entire wet n wild coloricon Holiday Glitter 2011 Ice Baby Collection.  The entire set!!

Let's get started with a look at these cute little bottles...

Rockin' Rubies - Believe Me, It's Real - 24 Carats - Give Me A Price Quote

It's All In The Cut - Back Alley Deals - Cost Is No Issue - Diamond In The Rough

Here's one coat of these glitters over one coat of black creme polish.  All of these polishes are clear-based and their opacity varies, but I wouldn't describe any of them as sheer.  They are gritty, top coat-sucking glitters so I think layering makes wear and removal easier.  If you want to wear them solo, you'll only need two or three coats to get full coverage.

Rockin' Rubies - red microglitter with pink hex holo glitter
Believe Me, It's Real - blue microglitter with purple hex glitter
24 Carats - yellow-gold microglitter and bar glitter
Give Me A Price Quote - warm gold microglitter with gold and orange bar glitter with pink flash. I can't tell where that pink is coming from, but it's there.

It's All In The Cut - lavender microglitter with pink hex glitter

Back Alley Deals - purple microglitter with red hex glitter

Cost Is No Issue - light greenish blue microglitter with blue hex glitter

Diamond In The Rough - charcoal microglitter with silver holo hex glitter

As a glitter fan, I love every single one of these polishes. The colors are bright, the color and texture combinations are creative, and the overall feel is so playful.  They cover the nail easily, dry quickly, and wear for days without chipping.

If I had to pick my Top 3 Favorites from the Ice Baby collection, I'd go with... 

Back Alley Deals - It's like an awesome glitter version of China Glaze Flying Dragon.

Believe Me, It's Real - Blue and purple and it's all glitter? oh yeah! 

It's All In The Cut - It's so girly and Lisa Frank-like.

I'm wearing these all as NOTDs, so I'll have future posts showing them off on their own.  If you live by a Walgreens and find this collection, buy these polishes! Pick up your favorite colors and I'm positive you'll be wearing them non-stop through the winter/holiday season.

Sally Hansen Salon Effects Ghoulie Girl

By request from a friend, here's a quick look at my Halloween nails.

My mom treated me to the Sally Hansen Salon Effects Real Nail Polish Strips in Ghoulie Girl.  This pattern has rows of alternating orange and white ghosts on a black background. The little ghosts look like the guys from Pacman, which was my absolute favorite Atari game when I was a kid.

 

Last time I wore these strips, I had much better wear using a separate top coat.  Since the patterns look a little matte after they're applied, the top coat also adds much appreciated shine.

Unfortunately, I wore a separate base coat this time, too.  Can you see the chip on the tip of my index finger?  That happened within the hour of putting these on.  I don't have peeling or splitting or anything else going on with that nail to explain immediate chipping, so I think the addition of the base coat affected the strips' wear.

The Lesson Learned - Sally Hansen polish strips work well with top coat, not base coat!

I hope everyone has a safe and Happy Halloween!

MAC Dirty Martini + Comparison

 It's almost Halloween and it's time for a murky, swampy olive color!

I used to think light blue polishes were too crazy for me to wear - so stark, so bright, so blue!  I even gave my bottle of Barielle Swizzle Stix away because I just wasn't ready for it in 2009.  I also wasn't ready for the ugly-pretty camouflage colors that were starting to show up.  For its name alone, I bought Dry Martini from the MAC Fall 2009 by Jin Soon collection.  After two years of taupe, mushroom, and greige, I've slowly grown to enjoy these types of shades and I'm finally ready to love this polish!

Dry Martini is a dark, brown-leaning olive green creme.  On me, this polish looks green indoors and brown outdoors.  My bottle had been untouched for so long that it needed some really good mixing.  I don't think I mixed it enough, so it took me three coats to get this polish on opaque and even.

I was so happy with the look of Dirty Martini that I tried to put on an ombre mani with some of my other drab green cremes (I know the OPI has a faint shimmer, but it's only visible 2% of the time so it barely counts as shimmer!). 

Rescue Beauty Lounge No More War (index), Zoya Shawn (middle),
Dry Martini (ring), and OPI Here Today... Aragon Tomorrow (pinkie)

Shawn is a bit dingy looking in the bottle, but it looks so vibrant when it's in the middle of all these brown-tinged greens. I don't have Zoya Dree (still on a low-buy), but I think that green would've fit in much better with the other olive shades. I used two coats on No More War and Shawn and three coats on Dry Martini and Here Today Aragon Tomorrow.

Since the greens looked so different on the hand than they did in their bottles, this mani turned out just to be a comparison swatch.  It's still a useful look at these popular polishes, even if it isn't a real ombre mani!

OWWWP - Ulta Grin & Berry It featuring WnW Correction Tape

Even though our days are still warm (we're talking highs in the 90s), it's October so I'm wearing some fall shades.  I think berry is a great shade of pink for fall.  It may be on the conservative side, but it's a little darker and richer as it moves us closer to the deep jewel tones of winter.

I'm wearing Grin & Berry It from the Ulta Salon Formula line. I picked it up because it was on clearance (they were changing from the rectangle bottles/black caps to the new round bottles/silver caps) and I thought I saw an orange-gold flash. That flash of color isn't really visible on the nail except slight hints of it in low lighting.

It's a berry shimmer that definitely looks best with three coats. The brush and the formula made the application really easy.  I wore this for a few days this week and I had really bad tip wear, but no chipping. The shimmer and the color of Grin & Berry It is so rich that it kept playing with my camera so I could only get a decent shot of it in indirect light.

This berry shade made me think of one of the glitters in the new Wet n Wild Fast Dry polishes I just found.  Yep, I was lucky enough to find a full display of On the Prowl, their limited edition Halloween 2011 collection.  Here's Grin & Berry It with one coat of Correction Tape layered over it. There was slight bubbling on one nail, but nothing at all like the Party of Five Glitters bubble-fest.

I was on the fence with buying Correction Tape because of the awful time I had with Party of Five Glitters but look! There's more glitter coverage with one coat. It has hex and square glitter pieces. I even like the color combination of Correction Tape more - check out that black glitter!!

I did want more glitter on the nail, but I didn't go any farther because I already had three coats of Grin & Bear It on.  Next time, I think I'll use multiple coats of Correction Tape on an accent nail or over a base color that needs less coats for full opacity.

Get It On & Wicked Fast - Part Two (Sale Info!!)

Quick follow up on the Cult Nails Get It On Perfecting Base Coat and Wicked Fast! Quick Dry Top Coat...

They are available for purchase now and on sale through this Sunday!

 For the official release, Maria explained  
the creative process behind her treatments.   

And it turns out that I wasn't going crazy about how magically nourishing the Get It On base coat felt on my nails - it was specially formulated for weak and splitting nails!  I'll get an occasional rip when I'm rough on my nails but I don't think of them as generally weak and splitting.  

Without being told the specific details behind the Get It On formula, I still saw an effect and thought it definitely left my nails in better condition after wearing. My nails feel moisturized (no more random dry patches), stronger, and growing faster than ever.  As always, formulas work differently on different people but I still wanted to share my personal experience with these treatments.  

I recommend checking out her article to learn more about the development of Wicked Fast, the pricing for both these treatments, and the release of the brand new eggplant purple polish Vicious.

You can buy Get It On, Wicked Fast and a Cult Nails Lacquer for just $20!  Put the Get It On/Wicked Fast combo (retail $15) and any polish (retail $10) in your cart and use the code TREATS when you check out to get this special bundle sale price.  This is a great deal but it'll only be around for a few more days so act fast!

OWWWP - wet n wild How I Met Your Magenta

This polish has been shown off since it was released earlier this year, especially for Pink Wednesdays, but I just recently picked it up during the month-long Walgreens sale on all their $1.99 items.  I was reluctant to try more Fast Dry Color polishes after the bubble fest from Party of Five Glitters, but why not give the line a second chance for $.99 a bottle?

Wet n Wild How I Met Your Magenta is a warm bubble gum pink with fine gold shimmer.  This polish dries to a semi-matte finish.  I prefer to wear this shade with a shiny top coat because it makes brush strokes, which are visible in its semi-matte finish, disappear.  My index finger doesn't have any top coat so you can the difference between its matte vs. glossy.

The brush is full and straight so it was easy to work with but definitely had to be manipulated and worked around where the nail bed has curves, like the cuticle edge.  The brush did make getting a medium-thick coat of polish on the nail in only a few strokes easy.

Unlike Party of Five Glitters, How I Met Your Magenta really did dry at lightning fast speed.  Maybe because this polish is kind of a matte? hmm.... 

Unfortunately, I don’t think this polish has the opacity to ever fully cover the nail line.  The VNL isn’t that visible in pictures or some lighting, but it’s there about 90% of the time staring at you from under the bright pink.  However, the quick dry time makes it easy to put on three coats of color and head out the door in 15 minutes with a fully set mani.

The VNL is almost a deal breaker for me, but this is a very pretty color that’s fast and easy to use.  I think I’m going to keep How I Met Your Magenta around for one day manicures when I need something quick and peppy but will come off before that VNL bugs me.

Cult Nails Get It On & Wicked Fast!

I was lucky enough to be one of the few people chosen to test drive the new base and top coat from Cult Nails!  Are you ready to see what Maria's come up with this time?

I've never done this before, but... here are my bare nails (eep)!!  

I had some funky staining awhile back so I lightly buffed my nails.  As you can see, there's now a clear line straight through the middle between buffed and unbuffed nail.  I've been using a ridgefiller base coat while the buffed part grows out to make the surface even again.

Here are my nails with one coat of Cult Nails Get It On Perfecting Base Coat.

Where's the uneven line between buffed/unbuffed?  Where are my minimal ridges? Perfected! One coat and everything was smoothed over.

Get Even has a shiny finish, but not in a slick way. The dried texture is slightly rubbery so it's ready to grab on to the polish.  It also dries quickly - I can't stand base coats that take forever to set. Get Even is one of those base coats where Finger 1 is dry by the time you're done putting it on Finger 10.

It was Friday, so I was ready for fun weekend nails.  I decided to try out Get Even and Wicked Fast with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Blue Me Away.  This shade was released in Spring/Summer 2009, but I didn't buy it until it recently made it back on to drugstore displays as a featured shade of the season.  It's very pigmented, so some people can get away with just one coat.

I wore it here with two coats and one coat of Wicked Fast.

Here are my tips with Blue Me Away after four full days of wear.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of wrapping the tip of the fingernail with polish and top coat to my friends who want to make their manicures last longer. It really works! Don't leave the edge of the nail bare - seal that color on!

Normally, tip wear is minimized but the combo of Get Even and Wicked Fast cemented Blue Me Away on. Even after days of cleaning, typing, dish washing without gloves, there's still polish on the nail edge.

Here are my bare nails right after I took Blue Me Away off.

Four days of wearing a bright blue shade over only one coat of base coat and there was no significant staining on my nails themselves.  I even got crazy smurf fingers when I was taking Blue Me Away off - there's still a touch of blue staining on the right side of my cuticles visible - but my nails were fine!

I think one of the best tests of base/top coats is how they act with cremes because it's a very unforgiving finish.  Jellies would have to be the next hardest finish because of its tendency to bubble and pull away from the tips.  Next up was my manicure to celebrate "the end of summer" over the long Labor Day weekend.

Here are my nails with two coats of New York Summer Hot Orange, one coat of Cult Nails Captivated, and one coat of Get Even and Wicked Fast each.

Here are my nails after five full days of wear.

My nails grew out but the polish didn't go anywhere!  I wore Get Even and Wicked Fast for a day or two with other polish brands and finishes.  The results were consistently the same - once the polish dried, it stayed put nice, shiny and smooth.

I loved Get Even Perfecting Base Coat from the second it dried on my first nail.  I had to get to know the Wicked Fast! Quick Drying Top Coat before I grew to love it.  Why?  Because it's not a thick quick drying top coat, so it shouldn't be treated like one!  That seems like a logical no-brainer, but I've been using thick top coats like Seche Vite and Poshe for a few years and old habits die hard.

Wicked Fast is a thin top coat. You don't need a large bead to be slathered and oozed on the nail for it to work.  The more you put on, the slower it'll dry and the more likely it'll bubble. You don't need a thick layer or multiple coats of Wicked Fast.  One thin coat.  That's it.  Really.  That's all you'll need to make this work!  Put it on thinly and it'll dry quickly to a hard glass-like finish.

After trying Get Even and Wicked Fast for the last few weeks, I know that I'm in love. So far, they get along with all of my polishes, they make them last forever, and they're so easy to work with.  I love the Cult Nails bottle and brush and I love their formulas. Once again, Maria has blown my mind with her creations.

Get Even and Wicked Fast are expected to go on sale at the end of the month, so keep your eye on the Cult Nails shop and definitely plan on getting your own!