a hoarder's blog

Fleur Est Belle is an exclusive limited edition shade created by Cirque for Mei Mei's Signatures. It is described as "a petal pink that evokes images of the warm tropics and pink flowers that emanate whimsical femininity." This polish was launched since January 2013 and will be available at Mei Mei's store until June 2013. 

Fleur Est Belle looked like it would apply sheer but I was surprised to see that it wasn't that sheer after only two coats. The pink jelly applied really well and the glitter didn't require any fishing. 

If you notice that most of the glitter is at the bottom of the bottle, turn the bottle upside down for a few minutes and the glitters will start moving to the mouth of the bottle. That way, it's easy to catch more glitter on the brush. 

Here I have layered it over Essie Lion Around.

And here I have it layered over a black base.

It is a beautiful shade with a complex mix of glitter. If you haven't gotten yours yet, head over to Mei Mei's website to grab it! It has just been restocked

Essie Da Bush is a murky light khaki green shade with a yellowish/grey undertone. It is creamy and pretty smooth to apply. I did two coats here.

Over Essie Da Bush, I applied Dollish Polish Dino-mite Yoshi from the Super Mario Bros collection. It is a complex mix of pink, orange, white, bright green and pale green glitter of various shapes and sizes in a clear base. Really really interesting and very very pretty.

I really loved this pairing. It's almost like they were made for each other.

What better way to use two untried polishes than to use them together?

Here is essie Cascade Cool from the Summer 2012 collection and Nails Inc Topping Lane from the Sprinkles collection, part of the Special Effects range. 

Both polishes had great application, and I did two coats for full opacity.

The glitter in Topping Lane is really really dense. It's a combination of fuchsia, silver and blue glitter in a pink polish base. They don't sparkle the way normal glitters do when applied as they are mattified.

With this combination on my nails today, I had an overdose of pink.

Another blue mani this week where I paired Essie Bikini So Teeny from the Summer 2012 collection with Essie Stroke of Brilliance, a new addition to the Luxeffects line. 

Bikini So Teeny is a pale sky blue, leaning slightly purple in certain lighting conditions. In the bottle, you can see lots of silver shimmer but they barely show up on the nails. It does make this polish look extremely bright though. The formula is great to work with, smooth and not runny. Two coats for full opacity. This colour definitely stands out.

Stroke Of Brilliance is kinda like Set In Stones and A Cut Above's sibling, except that it's blue-greyish. It is made up of small glitter and larger hex pieces in a clear base. An easy to use top coat to liven up any manicure.

I did this combination in blue using essie Blue Rhapsody from the Mirror Metallics collection and Cirque Ophelia from the Dark Horse collection (Cirque is an indie brand exclusively stocked by Meimeisignatures in Singapore). I have worn a few Cirque colours already and I only have good things to say about them. The formula has been great so far, and the smell is a plus point. They all smell so good as there's clary sage and lavender essential oils added to them. The scent lingers on even after I apply top coat and I find myself smelling my fingers sometimes. I know that sounded weird.

Ophelia is a glitter polish made of multi-sized periwinkle glitter. It is pretty dense and one coat is sufficient if you are just using it as a top coat kinda polish. 

I found Blue Rhapsody a bit hard to work with at first. It dries very fast and if you go over a layer that hasn't completely dried, it gets patchy. So I learnt to get my strokes right the first time round and not go over again until it's fully dry. The end result is a beautiful silver blue colour.

I applied Ophelia over black polish on my ring finger. You can see the different sizes of glitter more clearly.

This is a follow-up post on my Essie Luxeffects haul here. Doing a little comparison with two other similar flakies polishes that I have in my stash currently: nubar 2010 and inglot 202.

This is just one coat of Essie Luxeffects Shine Of The Times. It is just so dense and beautiful, won't you agree?

Comparison with Nubar 2010

One coat of Nubar 2010 doesn't produce as much flakies as one coat of essie Shine Of The Times.

At two coats, it is looking slightly better but I say no prize for guessing which one is a winner here.

Comparison with Inglot 202

Almost similar there. The density is on par with Shine Of The Times.

If I were to rank them, Shine Of The Times would win hands down, followed by Inglot 202 and lastly Nubar 2010

I finally have the Essie Luxeffects collection in my hands and after swatching them, I am really happy to have them all.

All swatches below are on a black polish base. All swatches are also just one coat.

Left to right: Set In Stones, A Cut Above, Pure Pearlfection, As Gold As It Get, Shine Of The Times

Set In Stones and A Cut Above are similar, except that one is silver and the other is pink. They both consist of small and medium glitters as well chunky hex glitters in a clear base. One coat was enough to produce an even and rather dense layer of glitter. There was no need to do a second coat (unless your intention is to completely fill the surface of your nail with glitter) or put in effort to "place" the glitter evenly.

Set In Stones

A Cut Above

Pure Pearlfection and As Gold As It Gets are silver and gold respectively with a similar kind of effect on the nails. I think these look really chic.

Pure Pearlfection is made up of fine shimmer with hints of turquoise, pink and silver. These colours sparkle in certain lighting conditions but generally, it looks like a layer of white/silver shimmer.

As Gold As It Gets, which I thought was also made up of fine shimmer, actually contains small pieces of gold flakes. There is however no colour change when seen from different angles like in the case of regular flakies polish.

Pure Pearlfection

As Gold As It Gets

Shine Of The Times

One word: Flakies!!!

Does this remind you of another polish?...Click here for a comparison post on similar flakies polish.

As said previously, all of the swatches are just one coat. Can I just say amazing formula? I am simply wow-ed.

I bought the nubar polka dot top coat in both black and white from the sidewalks some time back and I finally got down to using them today. I had swatched them yesterday and i liked this combo so much, I thought I'd do it on all fingers. So yesterday, I decided to remove whatever gelish I had on so that I could paint my nails. I still do have one more gelished nail left. Don't ask me why I haven't removed it, just plain lazy I guess.

The base colour is essie Body Language, topped with nubar black polka dot. The latter is made up of fine black glitter with bigger hex glitter suspended in a clear base.

Here's how it looks like in the bottle.

And this is the white polka dot which i painted over a black base. I had thought that this would be just white glitter, but it actually is holographic glitter (so you can see blue, green, yellow fine glitter) on top of the bigger silver hex glitter.

I bought these when I was in Hong Kong last month (from this haul post) and I'm glad I finally got to wear them this week. I was starting to miss wearing nail polish! What happened was that my nails have just been really weak recently - peeling, breaking, peeling and ...breaking, especially the ring finger on my left hand (long story, but I think I caused it by filing it wrongly, yeah like so dumb). My nail would crack upwards into my nail bed and it was such a horrible sight for a long time, not to mention the pain I experienced at times. But well, there was nothing to do but to patiently wait for it to grow back. I also applied Nicole By OPI Vitamin Plus and Sally Hansen Growth Miracle to help strengthen my nails in the meantime. With that said, you'll notice that my ring finger is shorter in the pics below.

Onto the swatches...

My Lifesaver

It looks like a pastel blue here, but it's actually a mint green. Rich creme formula, opaque in two coats.

The brush that came with this was a bit stiff. Since it was my first time using Nicole by OPI nail polish, I thought it was normal. The brush, which is called the perfect stroke brush, is wide and coats my whole nail in almost one stroke. It felt a bit short and stumpy, but the sort of rounded brush made it easy to apply around the cuticles. Because it was stiff, I had a streaky application at first, but covered that up with a second coat. The brush in the next polish below (I've Got Bieber Fever) was much softer and and more flexible and was easier to use.

I've Got Bieber Fever

It might look like any other purple in the bottle, but on the nails, it's a very pretty deep plum colour with shimmer. I quite like this one actually.

Make U Smile

Mini silver glitter and big hexagonal bits of glitter in this one. I applied one coat over My Lifesaver. It is pretty bling. The bigger pieces shine like mirrors in the light.

Bring On The Tinsel

Multi-coloured glitter in red, blue, yelow, green. I applied one coat over I've Got Bieber Fever. Pretty dense for a one coater, two coats should fill up the whole nail. This is not part of the Justin Bieber collection.

Comparison swatches

China Glaze For Audrey vs Nicole by OPI My Lifesaver

Might look the same side by side, but For Audrey is definitely greener than My Lifesaver when applied. Again, the colours in the pictures here are not accurate. They lean more towards green than pale blue.

Essie Turquoise & Caicos vs Nicole by OPI My Lifesaver

At least here, you do see the difference in colour here. Though they are both cremes, T&C looks more jelly-like compared to My Lifesaver, maybe because it took around 4 coats to get the colour to look opaque (it is very sheer), while My Lifesaver just took two coats. The latter also looks more "milky" in comparison.

OK here's what i came up with today. I just got essie's carousel coral through the mail the other day and wanted to try it out. The colour looks much much more vibrant in real life. I then decided to top it off with China Glaze Peachy Keen from the Up & Away collection and use it as French tip colour. So what do you think of the colour combination? Kinda bright is all I can say.

I'm gonna try doing this on my right hand. I don't know how the French tip will turn out cos I'm not ambidextrous. haha.