Colourworks London : Eye Colour Delight

Hey look, it's my first make up post! No nails or dodgy skin in sight. Don't be scared ^.^

I just wanted to share this little kit I picked up in Superdrug the other day. It's from their Christmas gift selection and I have no idea how much it cost originally, but it was on sale so I paid the princely sum of £1.99. Normally I tend to avoid these types of gift set because gift set make up can be a bit hit and miss, but at less than £2 I figured I couldn't really lose. And I'm really quite glad I took the risk!

(without flash)

You get 5 glitter eyeliners for your £1.99, making an average of 40p per liner, in black, gold, copper, purple and a turquoisey sort of blue. The black one has a black base and the other four are coloured glitters in a clear base. Application seems pretty decent - at least it did on my hand. The black one was easiest since it's pigmented, the others are a bit more sparse and you might have to go back and add a bit more in some places (swatch shows one application only). 

(with flash)

I was pretty impressed with their staying power. I kept them on my hand for about 20 minutes while I took photographs and then I removed them with a face wipe. I had to wipe quite firmly to remove them which gives me hope that they'll last quite well on my eyes too. There was certainly no fallout of glitter anywhere - it stayed firmly in the base.

I haven't had chance to try this on my eyes; since it's from a post-xmas sale they won't be around for long. I thought I'd just put these swatches up as quickly as possible for now, in case anyone wants to dash off and grab one while they still can!

SpaRitual : Spirit Child

Hello lovelies! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday, whatever you call this time of year!

Today I'd like to share with you an especially beautiful polish that I wore as my Christmas day manicure - SpaRitual 'Spirit Child', from the Wilde collection released in autumn this year. These are also hopefully the last pictures I will be posting that have been taken with my old camera - I FINALLY HAVE MY NEW SHINY CAMERA!!! Please excuse me while I happy dance all around the room ^.^

Anyway, Spirit child is a berry red shimmer that looks pretty in the bottle, but until now I'd not gotten around to trying it because it didn't 'grab' me like some other colours. Most of the swatches online didn't excite me that much, either. Now I've tried it, I realise it's STUNNING - but quite hard to take accurate photographs of. On the nail, it's a deep, rich, jewel toned, festive red that just... glows. It's extremely beautiful to look at (I got SO many compliments on this one). The shimmer isn't very obvious on the nail but in the bottle it's definitely there. In bright light it takes on a more berry tone, also pretty. When you photograph it, the berry tone seems to take over and it's all you can see. The bottle shot is about the most accurate of these three pictures, just imagine it slightly less berry toned :)

Application is pretty good - here you see three coats, but it was opaque in two. The reason for three coats here? I chipped it (my fault, not the polish) by smashing my finger against a cutlery rack less than an hour after it dried, and was pressed for time, so just repaired the chip and added a third coat everywhere to make it even! You can see the chip on my ring finger. Drying time was actually quite decent - Sparitual polishes can be rather slow to dry, but this one was significantly faster. I added a quick dry topcoat after the 3rd coat, but the 2nd one dried without assistance in a quite reasonable time. Wear was average to good - it was pretty worn and chipped at the end of the second day, but then again it had survived cooking an enormous dinner for 8 people and unwrapping lots of presents.. including the reluctant packaging of lots of kids' toys. (Why do they make it so hard to get those things out of the box?)

Color Club : Sugar Plum Yum

A festival of glitter for you today: Color Club Sugar Plum Yum, from the Scent-Suous holiday collection 2011. This collection is exclusive to Sally Beauty Supply and took a lot of people by surprise, mostly because it just kind of appeared one day with next to no fanfare and very little promotion at all. The whole collection is Christmas themed and scented, with three chunky glitters and three foils, and when I saw swatches online I knew I had to try and get them all!

Sugar Plum Yum is a fun combination of hexagon glitters: green (small pieces) and purple (various larger sizes) that smells like fruity candy (I assume it's meant to be sugar plums but I don't know what those actually smell like in real life!). It's also a tease: I took a million pictures of this polish and never quite managed to capture how insanely sparkly and pretty it is in real life. My camera was so overwhelmed by the glitter that it simply refused to focus properly!

Application is.... interesting (though with glitter this chunky, it was never going to be that straightforward!). You can apply it like a regular polish if all you want is a few decorative hexagons over the top of another colour, but if you want a full on glitter mani like this, you're going to have to adopt the 'blob' approach. Scoop out a blob of glitter, plonk it on the centre of the nail, then use the brush to  spread it around a little like you're icing a cake. Luckily, the glitter in this polish is very dense, so this approach is opaque in two coats if you're careful (though you might have to go back and fill in a couple of bare patches here and there).

You may well recoil in horror at the thought of two thick layers of goopy glitter on your nails, visions of an 8 hour drying time flashing before your eyes, but actually it's not that bad. Drying time was impressively fast and the whole thing was dry in about the same amount of time as you'd wait for three coats of regular polish (though not a fast drying variety). Once it's dry, you're left with a very rough surface; the larger hexagons tend to be rather curly and don't lie completely flat on the nail. This wouldn't bother me that much (I'm prepared to forgive a lack of smoothness for the awesome sparkle!) except the glitter kept catching on my hair, so I added two thick coats of Orly Sec 'N' Dry as top coat and the surface was significantly smoothed - still a little bumpy, but I think another coat of Sec 'N' Dry would actually have sorted that out and it'd have been almost as smooth as a non glitter manicure. Interestingly, the top coat seemed to make the glitter sparkle even more!

(Picture taken in different lighting to try and show the sparkle: you can see the purple much better here).

I was a little nervous about these being scented polishes: I've had ones in the past that you could smell three rooms away and which gave me a headache, but happily the scent on Sugar Plum Yum is much more subtle than that and you only really smell it if you put your nails near your face: not so weak that you wonder what the point in bothering with the scent was, but not so strong as to be invasive. Conversely, I could still smell it after those two layers of top coat and the strength was only slightly diminished. My son was most excited about the polish being scented and kept wanting to sniff my nails!

One last attempt to show the glitter, which shows up much better when the image is extremely blurred! This polish really is insanely sparkly and earned me a million compliments. I kept staring at my nails just to see them twinkling ^-^