China Glaze Skyscraper

Hi everyone!

It's early morning here in London so sorry if I still sound a bit sleepy and under-caffeinated!

So- now- China Glaze: Skyscraper!

What can I say? I love love love this polish. Adore it! It's so rich and beautiful. It reminds me of a starry sky, and funnily enough when I was putting it on, I was watching Titanic on TV, so the colour also reminded me of the huge 'Heart of the Ocean' diamond Cal gives Rose in the film.

In general, I wouldn't say I wear blue nail polish an awful lot, although I have been trying to get a bit more experimental in what I wear recently. But China Glaze Skyscraper? This one was love at first sight! It's, to me, kind of the blue version of China Glaze's Ruby Pumps, which is probably, at a push, my favourite red.

Anyways, enough of that! -Skyscraper: here it is!

China Glaze Skyscraper view I

Stunning, no? The colour of the base in this polish is beautiful too. I like the fact that the base does actually have a a colour, otherwise it would be like the other glitter in China Glaze's Metro Collection, CG In The City, which despite being very cool for layering, would be pretty tricky to wear alone, probably due to it's clear base.

 China Glaze Skyscraper view II

For China Glaze Skyscraper, I used two thickish coats for the deep, rich kind of opacity I was after. If you like to apply your lacquer thin and want the same sort of depth of colour and opacity, I'd apply three coats.

China Glaze Skyscraper view III

Such a gorgeous polish. I was kind of annoyed at myself for only purchasing one bottle!

Try this one out, for sure. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

China Glaze CG In The City

CG In The city from- yep, no prizes for guessing here- China Glaze is a lacquer from their new Metro Collection. It's a complete sparkle fest, and has lavender, gold, silver and black glitter particles in a clear base. The sparkles in this polish are very small, so it looks very saturated with glitter.

Overall, looking at the bottle, it looks like a lavender/pewter colour... And the sparkliness is blinding!

I think this shade is really nice, but if I had one thing to say about it, I wish that the base holding it together was not clear- a grey shade perhaps would have made this one a bit easier to wear alone.

As it stands, it's probably best to use this one as a topcoat. It's still gonna be buildable of course, but you'll have more of a base. Some people using this polish may not mind that you'd probably have to use about seven coats to make it completely opaque, but I really don't have the patience to do a Mani like that.

Therefore, I decided to layer this polish over China Glaze's Street Chic, also from their Metro Collection. I felt these two lacquers would go quite nicely together, especially as they're from the same collection and season.

Application with CG In The City was good. No problems there! I used one thickish coat over my base.

Here is CG In The City over a Street Chic base Mani:

China Glaze CG In The City view I

CG In The City view II

CG In The City view III

Ooooh! Sophisticated and elegant yet blingy- I like this combo a lot.

Could you get away with wearing this Mani to work?

;)

*China Glaze CG In The City was provided to me for reviewing purposes. I was not paid to review this polish or to say great things about it. All opinions, good or bad, are my own*

China Glaze Street Chic

Good morning from London, everyone! It's a lovely sunny day here today :)

Today I'm going to post on a new China Glaze acquisition- Street Chic, as part of the Uptown Set from their new (and may I say very lovely) Metro Collection.

Street Chic is an extremely creamy mushroomy dark taupe shade. It's also very Autumnal and work appropriate too, as it's very neutral, yet fashion forward too. Look at all this point scoring! :)

Get ready for the swatches!

China Glaze Street Chic

Literally this polish is so wonderfully creamy. It applied beautifully and the colour looks very sophisticated and ladylike, right?

It's not something I'd wear all the time because I tend to gravitate to sparkly shades a lot of the time, but sometimes I do like to go back to basics and just wear a plain creme, and this polish fits the bill!

China Glaze Street Chic view II

What do you guys think about this one?

*China Glaze Street Chic was provided to me for reviewing purposes. I was not paid to review these polishes or to say great things about them. All opinions, good or bad, are my own*

The Impatience Test: Crackle/Shatter Lacquers

A bit of background for you guys before I get started on this post:

I've lived in London for six years now and it's a fast paced life- running round the city on the Tube, battling the crowds on Oxford Street (don't ever do that on Christmas Eve- what a complete and utter nightmare!), darting from one friend to another, attempting to prevent myself getting flattened by black taxis....
You get the picture.

London has transformed me into one of those city types who wants it all, and wants it now!

With my patience and attention span of a flea, I've found my ventures into crackle/shatter nail polishes very interesting. I've already reviewed OPI and Barry M shatters, if you haven't seen them yet you can check them out here-

http://london-lacquer.blogspot.com/2011/08/what-come-on-opi.html (OPI)

 ...And here:

http://london-lacquer.blogspot.com/2011/08/opi-and-barry-m-combo.html (Barry M)

...Anyways, today is the turn of China Glaze Tarnished Gold Crackle Glaze, and Color Club Smash Hit (pure Black shatter)

Let me just start the review by saying that, because this is an Impatience Test, I didn't let the colours I used on the base dry in either case with these shatters. I was swatching that day and didn't use my Seche Vite topcoat, as I always do when doing a complete Mani for either swatches I tried the shatters out on.

Also, the base colours (and finishes) I used in the Impatience Test were different. With both of the bases I waited until I had taken pictures and both of the Manis in question were touch dry when I put the shatter coats on.

With that said, let's get started!

First up, China Glaze Tarnished Gold Crackle:

Great shade, I must say. This is a beautiful shimmery gold crackle containing gold and silver pigment, which I layered over OPI DS Temptation.

Here is the result:

 China Glaze Tarnished Gold Crackle over OPI DS Temptation

A close up of China Glaze Tarnished Gold Crackle over OPI DS Temptation

And now for Color Club Smash Hit over Color Club Hot Like Lava:

L-R: Index finger- thin crackle coat, Middle finger- thick crackle coat, Ring finger- thin crackle coat, Little finger- thick crackle coat

So after doing these two Crackle swatches, I thought- well, obviously the Color Club turned out out a lot better than the China Glaze Crackle... I also really liked the fact that with the Color Club, it seemed easier to get a thicker or thinner Crackle effect, as demonstrated in the photo above. Color Club had won the Crackle battle!...

...At least for now. I later thought that it might have been unfair to judge China Glaze perhaps too fast, and so I decided to experiment with the polishes further and conduct a completely fair test.

For my bases, I used different finishes:

* Color Club Artsy Crafty: Creme
* Color Club Hot Like Lava: Metal/Foil
* OPI DS Original: Holographic
* China Glaze It's Alive: Glitter

I painted all four colours twice on a nail wheel and left them to dry to touch, before layering over the China Glaze and Color Club crackles.

Here are the results:

Left Set: Afore mentioned colours plus Color Club Smash Hit (Black Crackle) and Right Set: Afore mentioned colours plus China Glaze Tarnished Gold Crackle

Color Club crackle close up. I lightened the the Artsy Crafty nail a bit to let you guys see the crackle effect better.

A close up of the China Glaze set.

I still prefer the Color Club crackle. I like the way it 'separates' more than the China Glaze, and I mentioned, I really like that the color Club crackle seems more versatile- it can easily be crackled thin or thick for different effects.

Color Club wins for me!

What do you guys think?

*China Glaze Tarnished Gold Crackle and Color Club Smash Hit were provided to me for reviewing purposes. I was not paid to review these polishes or to say great things about them. All opinions, good or bad, are my own*

Olympia Beauty 2011

Hello everyone!

Hope you all had a lovely weekend! Yesterday, Sunday 18th and Monday 19th of September, were days I had been looking forward to for nearly two months! The reason? It was the the Olympia Beauty event in Kensington Olympia, London.

BIG woooooo!

...Anyways, more about that in a minute. First let me show you guys the manicure I did for the event. Seeing as I blog about Nails, I wanted to create a really special, completely blinged out Mani for the event.
This is what I came up with:

Nail Expo Special Mani!

A close up-

Pretty, no?

For this Mani, first of all I used two coats of Orly Dazzle, then two coats of OPI Crown Me Already!, then glued a Swarovski crystal onto each nail with nail glue.
It came out pretty cool I think, I felt a bit like GaGa or something- this is one impractical manicure! Still, I got lots of compliments on them whilst going round all the stalls, so that was nice.

To start, can I just say, omg! The event was so much fun!

OPI was there, as was Nubar, China Glaze, Color Club, Essie, Jessica and more!

Here's a video I shot on my phone- as you can see, it was busy, busy busy!

Olympia Beauty Event

Some pictures of the stalls:

The OPI stall was insanely busy the whole time! -Look at those brand new, unavailable in shops Muppets Mini packs! I picked one up, of course! Swatches coming soon... :)

To prove how busy the OPI stall was all the time, here's a picture of the queue:

OPI Mania! (And yes, in case you were wondering, the queue was this long all the time! Go OPI!)

...And who can blame people when OPI was being sold at trade price!? Discontinued Lacquers were discounted to £3.00!

£3.00 OPI's!? Thank you very much!

I also had a lot of fun getting my greedy little polish loving mitts on some lemmings I've had for certain polishes from other brands:

The China Glaze stall view I

China Glaze view II

Here's the Nubar Stall:

The Nubar Stall

Discontinued Lacquers at Nubar were only £2.00!

 What a bargain!

The Color Club stall was brilliant. I was really excited to see this stall here because I've only ever seen Color Club available on the Internet. It was great to see all the shades in person...

Color Club view I

Color Club view II

And some general shots of the Exhibition Centre:

View I

View II

View III

As you can guess, I was loving every minute of it!

My Top 5 new acquisitions from the Expo are (in no particular order):

* China Glaze Skyscraper
* OPI DS Temptation
* Color Club Wish Upon A Rock-Star
* Nubar Purple Rain Glitter
* OPI I Brake For Manicures

Lots of new swatches to come soon for your viewing pleasure!

Have a great day, everyone! :)

Deborah No. 18

Ok, as promised here is the Deborah No. 18 review post!

I picked this up at the OVS store (Italian High Street store) in San Remo, Italy.

Here it is!

Deborah Shine Tech No. 18

This is quite a nice polish. It's got a black base with shimmery rainbow coloured glitter- kind of similar to if you put China Glaze's Fairy Dust on top of a black base. The glitter in Deborah is much finer, though.

I reckon it's a cross between OPI's My Private Jet (Original), the new MPJ, and a coat of China Glaze Fairy Dust! It's very pretty, for a black shade. Good for a sunny day in Winter!  

Deborah No. 18, blurred so you can see the glitter! Woooo shiny, shiny!

The glitter in this looks great in the sun, and it's pretty evenly spread throughout the polish, which is a bonus! No more bald glitter patches. In the shade, the sparkles in this polish just look silvery, so it's definitely one for sunnier climes, which is presumably the reason that this polish is from an Italian, not English brand! :)

For some weird reason, the black base itself in this polish dries kind of textured- not lumpy, bumpy or bubbly or anything, just kind of... textured. It's no biggie, I was just wondering why it did that, really. Seemed a bit odd.

Still, overall, a nice polish. Nothing to scream and shout about, but nice all the same. 

Until next time, folks! 

:)

Italian Haul! Mamma Mia!

Hi lovely people!

Today I've got a little Italian haul I got the other day to show you.

I bought these three polishes in an Italian 'high street' style store called OVS. They had a really good nail polish section in there, with plenty of different polishes in there, some of which are available on their website. Here is the link if you wanna check it out:

http://www.deborahmilano.com/en/sub-subcategory.php?id=132

So, to the fun stuff- what I picked up! I wanted colours that I hadn't really seen elsewhere, unique, more unusual sorts of colours. With that in mind, here's what I got:

L-R: From the Deborah 'Pret a Porter' line, no. 26, next from Deborah's 'Debby' line, no. 113, and from Deborah's 'Shine Tech' line, no. 18!

There! One polish from different Deborah lines- I was very eclectic in my choices, no? :)

Anyways, about the polishes, from what I can tell going by bottle shade alone-

No. 26 looks like a very pretty pale baby blue foil. Looks like it will be a stunner for a cool 'frosty' Winter mani.

No. 113 looks like a beautiful purple/gold duochrome shimmer. I'm actually extremely interested to swatch this alongside 'It's MY Year' from OPI's Miss Universe collection, to see which I prefer. That should make for a very interesting comparison which'll be featuring on here shortly! Stay tuned for that!

No.18 looks like a pure black base with multicoloured very fine glitter running through it. Think more of a finer China Glaze 'Fairy Dust' suspended in a black base than the original version of OPI MPJ.

I think all of these polishes look really nice!

The first one from the three that I decided to do a Mani with was....

No. 18! My nails are short (at least by my standards!) at the moment, so I'm liking the darker colours at this time....

...Check the next post for my Deborah No. 18 review!

Happy polishing, everyone! :)

                                                      

Ruby Pumps: What a classic!

So today I have China Glaze's Ruby Pumps for you.

I'd say this was in my Top 5 favourite nail polishes EVER. It's trans-seasonal, something I always fall back on. It's great for layering with darker colours such as burgundy or black as a base as well. Those are especially good combos for Winter, when you want a Vampier shade.

I just think that RP is so, so beautiful. When wearing this, a few of my friends have asked me to pick a bottle up for them... It's seriously THAT good. Liquid crushed Rubies.

Isn't it SO beautiful!? :)

...Unfortunately, NO photo of this polish will ever do it justice, so if you don't have it, I suggest you run and go get it!

:)

Hmm, tasty recipes! :)

My Top 5 favourite nail layering efforts from the nail wheels I painted up are as follows...

Hannah's Top 5 Layering Recipes:

1- OPI Black Cherry Chutney (base) x2

    China Glaze Ruby Pumps (top) x1

(I am SO obsessed with China Glaze's Ruby Pumps, I ADORE it!)

2- OPI Absolutely Alice (base) x2

    OPI Last Friday Night (top) x1

3- Orly Matte Vinyl (base) x2

    OPI Last Friday Night (top) x1

4- Orly Dazzle (base) x2

    OPI DS Original (top) x1

5- OPI DS Mystery (base) x2

    OPI DS Original (top) x1

(Hello, Original MPJ!!)

6- OPI Princesses Rule! (base) x2

    OPI Teenage Dream (top) x1

(Uber girly sparkly perfection)

7- OPI Absolutely Alice (base) x2

    OPI DS Original (top) x1

    (Lavender/Cornflower blue sparkly hololiciousness! Utterly incredible combo!)

8- OPI Have You Seen My Limo? (base) x2

    China Glaze Fairy Dust (top) x1

9- OPI Teenage Dream (base) x2

    OPI Last Friday Night (top) x1

10- Orly Matte Vinyl (base) x2

      Nubar 2010 (top) x1

Which one should I swatch first!? 

Votes please! :)