Wednesday 20 January 2010

L'Oreal Star Magnet

I saw this on some beauty blog AGES ago (so alas I can't link) and was determined to get it, so I searched high and low (ie, ebay) to find it. Annoyingly it only comes in this red colour or a navy-ish blue. The basic premise of it is that you paint it on, then hold a magnet (that comes with the polish) over the wet paint, which causes metal bits in it to arrange themselves into a star shape.

 




It's pretty cool but it is SO HARD to do the magnet thing!! You have to hold the magnet riiight over the nail, and keep it totally still for 30 seconds or so. The biggest problem I found was that the polish draws itself upwards to the magnet and sticks to it like some lame cousin of the T1000 from Terminator 2.

 







All in all, it's a nice novelty, but it's very hard to do well, and even when you do do it well, it's too subtle to really wow anyone, so what's the point in all that effort

Tuesday 19 January 2010

OPI 'Purple With a Purpose'

For Christmas I asked for some OPI nailvarnishes from my mum, who graciously bought me some! I'd never had it before but I always read about it on other nail blogs, and it seems like a fancy brand so I wanted to try it. This colour is called 'Purple With A Purpose' but it should totally be called Cadbury's Dairy Milk Purple as it's almost the exact same colour as the dairy milk packaging!  It's maybe slightly pinker than the Dairy Milk, but very close otherwise.



 



The brush of this seems much bigger than usual, but fans out nicely and paints well. The consistency of the polish is great, has excellent coverage, and the bottle is huge (for a nail polish) with 15mls compared to the Rimmel polishes from yesterday with only 8mls.


Monday 18 January 2010

Paul & Joe Polish

I bought this from asos.com, as I've hankered after Paul & Joe's beautiful packaging for ages, but never had a good excuse to buy anything from them. I believe this was on sale at the time I bought it thus vaguely justifying my reckless purchase! (It's about £9 a bottle :/) It was worth it, as not only does it go on like a dream, but it has a lovely slightly translucent consistency that makes it look somewhat juicy, but also has a nice smell once it's dry!

Sunday 17 January 2010

NYC 'New York Colour' Nail Polish

I got this at Superdrug for a few pounds- not sure why I bought this colour as it strikes me as a little gothy, but it's a lovely deep blue, nothing like the somewhat trashy name of 'Skin Tight Denim Creme' might suggest. I also have a clear topcoat from NYC (New York colour, ie, not the city? But the state of New York? These are the official colours of New York state?) but it would be pretty boring to have photos of that. Having said that, they both have fairly average brushes and great consistency, quite thin but excellent coverage.

Saturday 16 January 2010

Rimmel London 60 Seconds 'Green With Envy' and I Heart Lasting Finish 'Sunshine'

I'm not normally one for gimmicks like 'dries in 60 seconds!!' or 'has real lycra in it!' or whatever, but these were on sale when I got them, for their colour rather than anything else.



 

The drying in 60 seconds thing is more annoying than anything- it just means it starts drying as soon as you put it on and makes it hard to get a nice even coat without it thickening up and going lumpy. And who paints their nails in a rush anyway?

The 'pro-cision brush' was just a normal brush, so I don't know what the fuss is about there. No complaints but it wasn't like 'ohhh my god this brush is totally pro-cision to tha maxx!'.

The yellow one, 'Sunshine' (what an original name for a yellow item) doesn't have the same 60 seconds thing, so it's not as annoying in the build-up respect, but as it's such a pale colour, it is hard to get it to go opaque. In the photos below, my index and middle fingers have a base coat of white on them, my ring finger is two coats of just the yellow, and my little finger is just one coat of the yellow, to give you an idea of what the polish on it's own looks like. I think the two coats on it's own actually looks ok, but it really pops with a coat of white underneath.



Friday 15 January 2010

Butter London '3 Free' Nail Polish

I bought this polish because I wanted the colour for my pastel rainbow nail set that I like to do sometimes (I'll take photos next time I do it!). I got it from asos.com, and I think it was on sale.

 

I think it's a nice colour, but for a polish that costs almost £10 full price, it has a really crap brush. Also, the huge rectangular lid doesn't come off to reveal a normal brush, you have to use the whole unwieldy thing to paint onto your nails. So whilst the formula is pretty nice, the brush lets it down badly. Also, it's a fairly measly 3 fluid ounces, so overall, not a great product. Their whole schtick is that it is free of formaldehyde, toluene and 'DBP' whatever that is, hence the '3 free' thing. So... good for you, Butter, but it doesn't make up for such a measly and badly designed product.

Inglot Nail Polishes

Inglot is a weird brand- noone seems to know about it and I don't think I've ever seen it in any magazines. It's a store I first went to in Canada, and since then I've visited one in the Westfield Center, but even it's website doesn't work. Weird.
But! I really like their stuff! It comes in a literal rainbow of colours at slightly above Boot's prices. And generally seems like good quality. I've tried their eyeshadows and nailpolishes so far and both seem highly pigmented and theyhave a massive range of colours.

Sadly, their colours don't have names, just numbers.

721, matte yellow




I didn't actually mean to buy a matte colour, and it's kind of annoying. I think it intimidates me or something and makes me not do it evenly. It dries matte instead of shiny, so you can't paint a drythrough top coat over it to dry it quicker, leaving even more opportunity to mess it up, which all means I've alas never worn this out of the house (unless as part of my pastel-fingers look!!.... shh). As for the colour, it's really opaque but not thick, so it goes on well. I think two coats is optimal... I'm not sure custard yellow is really very flattering on it's own though.

 Number 302, Sheer pale pink with green shimmer.


I really love this colour! It's quite sheer so you need two or three coats if you wear it on it's own, but it looks great over other colours to give an unusual green two tone effect. It's quite subtle with a slight unusualness in the green shimmer.


Number 319, Green Gold
 

This is a beautiful green colour with gold shimmer. It paints on fairly opaque but I usually do two coats to make sure it's even. For a polish with such alot of shimmer, it paints on very evenly and always looks nice :)

Number 338, Opaque pale pink
 

This is a fairly boring colour, but makes a nice change from shimmery pinks for a muted look that's subtle. The pink is not bright at all, almost a blushy skin colour. I don't really know why I bought this but I have used it quite alot for when I don't know what colour I should paint my fake nails but have to paint them something to cover up their fakeness!

Number 842, Flesh colour :/
 

This is such a gross colour!! It's basically exactly skin colour, so it makes your nails look like your skin has covered your nails or something. The reason I have it is that last summer, my boyfriend dropped something on his big toe, and got a gross black bruise under his nail. He asked me to cover it up if I could so I went specifically to Inglot knowing that if they didn't have the right shade in their huge spectrum of colours, noone would. I found it and it worked perfectly! Just a tiny dab over the bruise and it was disguised. Such glamour!
However, since then I have never used it because who wants fleshnails!?

I have a glittery polish from Inglot that I couldn't find when taking these photos, so maybe I'll do a special post just about glitters one day?


Thursday 7 January 2010

How to disguise non-infilled acrylic nails.


I enjoy having super strong fake acrylic nails. I don't have them all the time, I usually only get them done for special occasions (which costs around £20-£30) and then upkeep them for a little while until I get bored of them, or they fall off.

As they grow out, the acrylic on the nail moves along the nail where it's glued on to the real nail, leaving a kind of ridge. After a few weeks of neglect, they really start to show up, especially if you have any kind of pearlescent or shiny nail polish on.

The reason I'm saying all this is as a prelude to my mega top tip of the day... how to disguise non-infilled acrylic nails.

The secret is... Use a glittery nail varnish! The specks of glitter refract the light in such a way as to fool the eye into not realising there's an ugly ridge there... the larger the glitter specks, the better.

So here are my nails after about two or three (or more? Not sure :/) weeks of not being infilled. Pretty noticeable gap there...




(this polish is Sally Hansen Maximum Growth in 'Profound Pink' (which looks lovely on nicer nails))

So I cleaned all that off, and painted them with one coat of MAC's Gee Whiz:


 


Then I put a coat of Barry M Red Glitter over that, and a coat of clear dry-through top coat.

Glitter nailpolishes annoyingly tend to need about a million coats of clear on top of them to get a smooth surface, so I would usually do more than just one, but I couldn't be bothered today. One of the reasons I put the 'Gee Whiz' on beforehand was so I only had to do one coat of glitter. The Barry M glitter polishes are super dense and you can get a perfect look just using them on their own, but then you'd have to spend even more time putting on top coat to get smooth nails (boring).


 

 So there you have it- how to cover up acrylic re-growth nail ridges without paying to get them in-filled.



I hope this was useful to you! This would also work for people who have super ridgey nails that they wanted to cover up perhaps...

Coming another time, a rant about how impossible glitter nail polish is to get off!

Ring Gloves!


I love these gloves! But yeah... £200 is kind of steep, especially considering they'd be so easy to make yourself with a pair of leather gloves and either a large sized ring or a brooch pinned through the top of the glove's finger. I'm so doing this!! I'll report back :)

Monday 4 January 2010

Welcome to my blog about girly crap.

Greetings. If you are here, chances are you already know me, the author of this site, Bryony, AKA Paperlilies. I usually write over at this blog, and post videos here. There are more links to the right, but as I said, I imagine you already know who I am and what I do.

Which brings me to this blog. I started this blog as a space to share the girly crap that I'm interested in that I don't like to mix into my usual online places for fear of alienating people who don't get excited about glitter. I love makeup and nail stuff, the more unusual and impractical the better. Hopefully this will be a blog of interesting links and information and possibly tips and ideas. I'll review things that I think warrant being reviewed... We'll see how it goes. I hope to make some more youtube makeup tutorials but probably on a different channel to my main Paperlilies one. Again, we'll see how it goes!

Welcome to my new blog :)