China Glaze Harvest Moon - Fall is Coming!

Hi all, it's been some time. Since I last posted we had our house built, got another dog and 2 cats, moved, I got laid off/got another much more demanding job, etc. etc. etc. I'm still trying to adjust. Cleaning a house 3x the size of my last is a lot to take on!

I wanted to share a Fall manicure. Glitterbombs are great because they wear like iron and I only get time to do my nails once every few weeks now. This is China Glaze Harvest Moon from the 2012 Hunger Games collection; the collection that got me into nail polish.

This is 2 coats on its own. I love this one. There's a cheaper Sinful Colors dupe for it, I hear! Are the rest of you as excited for fall as I am?

P.S. My blog name changed, yes. I've been meaning to pull the trigger on it for some time now. :)

Thanks for reading!

K x

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-Kellyne

Zoya Song + DRK-B

So, a couple months ago I got engaged. My ring was custom-made by the fine folks over at Art & Gems Jewelers. When the Mr. announced to me that he'd picked out a TARDIS ring for me, I was floored; I had secretly wanted this ever since I saw the first renders, but since he's very traditional I never in a million years thought he'd be OK with me having anything but diamonds, or a Doctor Who ring for that matter.

Anyway, it got here, I love it to death, so the first thing I did was coordinate my nails and do a shoot! I used Zoya Song for the base color and stamped using DRK-B and OPI DS Radiance. DS Radiance is an amazing stamping silver, and the DRK plates are so worth it. The below is 2 coats of Song.

 

Again, thanks for reading!

K x

Pretty & Polished Swamped + Valentine's Lip Balm Preview

Hi readers!

Today I have for you a preview of the LE Valentine's Day lip balm from Pretty & Polished, Dipped Berries. First of all, it smells delicious! Just like the description, which is "chocolate covered strawberries." Mmmm. One of my fave treats :) When I put it on though, maybe I'm just crazy but it tastes nothing like chocolate covered strawberries, it tastes like a PB&J sandwich (sans bread flavor, obviously haha)! Definitely a novelty taste, I loved it. Anyone who knows me knows I'm downright obsessed with food-flavored lip products :)

This lip balm would be perfect for those who like a more "waxy" lip balm; personally, I prefer a really oily lip balm, but for people who don't like to feel like there's a lot on their lips this would be right up their alley. It's really light and you don't feel it "sitting there" after you put it on.

Dipped Berries will be available in a limited edition Valentine's Day gift box called "Sinfully Sweet Gifts" and will include the following (from P&P's description):
The Sweetheart of the bunch, "Pinkie Pie" nail polish
The Sinful polish, "Bedroom Delights"
An aromatic hand and body lotion, "Sin City"
and a sinful and sweet lip balm "Dipped Berries"
Sin City smells like delicious dark chocolate and Dipped Berries smells like chocolate covered strawberries.

Secondly I have Swamped, a P&P core line polish. Swamped is a murky green filled with all sorts of glitters, little red squares and hexes, little green hexes, silver hexes, and more! It definitely has a fitting name, I've never seen a swamp in person but this is what I might imagine the color of one might be :p I don't think this is quite my color, it gave me wildly bad lobster hands (curse you, olive green!)

My camera hates macro!

This is three coats of Swamped, finished off with 1 coat Nail Pattern Boldness Glitter Food &
China Glaze Fast Forward Top Coat.

 

This color may not be my skin tone's friend, but I have nothing but good things to say about Pretty & Polished. They were one of the first indie polish makers I discovered when I first got into polish. My first order ever was Black Swan and Galactus, still two of my favorites :) I've never gotten a polish from her that didn't go on perfectly, never had to fish for glitters and have always gotten exactly what I expected. A bonus plus...her mini bottles are great! I usually hate the brushes in mini bottles, which is sad because I love minis (you really don't NEED full size bottles when your collection is 1k+), but I don't have this problem with the ones she uses.

Swamped is $4.25 for a mini and $9 for full sized at the below links. The LE Valentine's Day box will be released Wednesday, January 16th.

You can order Swamped and the rest of her gorgeous colors here:
Pretty & Polished
P&P's Etsy Store

For news and updates, follow:
P&P Facebook

As always, thanks for reading!
K x

Note: The products in this post were provided to me for review in exchange for my (as always!) unbiased opinion.

Color Club Put A Pin In It - ABC Challenge "P"

A few months back Birchbox sent me a Color Club mini, a rose gold metallic called Put A Pin In It. Around the same time I had just gotten Zoya's Peter Som 2013 trio in the mail, and thus this combo was born. Shown is 2 coats Put A Pin In It and Zoya Neely. No cleanup was done, I was in a hurry and didn't feel it was needed :) Caution, picture spam, I got a little happy with this color combo! Also, please ignore the dent on my ring finger!

Put A Pin In It can be purchased at Birchbox's website, $8. Zoya Neely is also $8 at Zoya.com.

As always, thanks for reading!
K x

Note:  The products in this post were purchased by me.

Influenster Cosmo VoxBox Review

So, I got lucky and was sent the Cosmo VoxBox courtesy of Influenster. Influenster is a cool community where you can review products, earn badges via surveys and linking your reviews, and you can even receive products to review! I was excited when I learned I'd be receiving a box.

I took about a month to post this for a few reasons: one, I've actually been thoroughly using the products. Second, I'm so busy with wedding planning it's not even funny. #kellyneproblems.

I opened my box to find several items that I was excited to try:

First up, Forever Red perfume from Bath & Body Works. I'd been hearing a lot of hype about this on the B&BW Facebook page, but I usually avoid their perfumes since they have an alcohol-y note to them. I was pretty impressed by this one, as things go. It's sexy and floral all at once. Unfortunately, it doesn't last very long and it does have that faint alcohol undertone but not as bad as say, the body sprays. Also, this is a very cute little bottle and totally could work as a stocking stuffer. Influenster describes the scent as "a passionate blend of pomegranate & red osmanthus with a sexy surprise of vanilla rum." Ummm...I describe it as "mmm" so I'll just steal their description ;)

Forever Red, price depends per item, at Bath and Body Works

Next up, CHOCOLATE! Next time just send me a box full of this, hahaha. It was just as delicious as you'd expect Ghirardelli to be, and if you love sea salt chocolate...mmm.

Ghirardelli Sea Salt Escape, $4.35 at ghirardelli.com

They included some very cool pens in the package, as well. They're FriXion by Pilot. I'm a sucker for a good pen so I brought these to work to try out. Their hook is that they're erasable. I did try this feature out and, while they erase quite well, it's hard to write back over the area you erased. However, they write very smoothly and as erasable pens go (does anyone else remember having to use those horrid black erasable pens in high school English?) are quite nice.

FriXion ball point pens, $2.68 at pilotpen.us

Lastly, they included a Venus Embrace razor, a coupon for $2 off of refills and an Olay refill cartridge. I used to use the Venus Embrace for a long time, but about a year ago switched to using Gillette Mach 3 Fusion men's razors instead for several reasons: one, so that we could buy one razor refill pack for the whole household, and two, they just work better. I get a closer shave, the shave lasts longer, etc. While the Venus Embrace is very moisturizing, I just don't feel that I get as close of a shave as with the Mach 3 Fusion.
That said, if you don't want to use a "guy's" razor, I found the Schick Quattro Titanium for Women to be quite sturdy. It just has that heavy, well-made feel. Nothing against the Venus Embrace! I've been using it since I got the box and am quite happy to use one again.
Gillette Venus Embrace retailer list at gillettevenus.com

Also, I thought I'd throw in that even though this post is totally NNR, the lovely polish I'm wearing in several of the pics is Allons-Y from Nail Pattern Boldness' Time Traveler collection :) I bought the whole thing (duh, it's Doctor Who) and wore this shade for my birthday since it's Tenth inspired and I just love Ten *flutters*

You can pick it and the rest of the collection up at NPB's Etsy store for $9/15ml bottle!

As always, thank you for reading! Happy new year!
K x

Note: The Influenster box was generously provided to me in exchange for my unbiased (as always!) opinion. The Nail Pattern Boldness shade was purchased by me :)

Julep Gunta (and the lengths I went to to own it...)

Hi friends!

A lot has gone on since the last time I posted, my apologies. Blahblahblah normal excuses, but between massive overtime at work every week, MoP raiding, my birthday, the holidays, etc etc etc this poor little blog has gone neglected. Awww. :(

Anyway, hoping to throw together a redesign somewhere in the next week or so, I'm not too wild about this template.

So a while back I picked up Julep Gunta in one of Julep's many promos. I highly dislike Julep's bottles, I will say. They're awkward to store and aren't very stable during use. However, some of their colors are worth making the exception for! Gunta is one. It's from the Trina Turk Fall '12 collection. Hellloooo TARDIS blue. Gunta went on smoothly, I used 2 coats for the below. Cleanup wasn't that difficult, as far as dark blues go it didn't settle into the cuticles much. There was no staining after I removed it. I wore this for about 4 days since the color was so amazing.

Here's where the story in the title comes in! I wore this before I made my swatch stick of it, so I'd already voted it Favorite Blue Ever. When I went to go grab it for real swatches, I dropped it and it shattered evvveeerrryyywwwhhheeerrree. Lucky cleanup is easy on granite and stone tile, but my foot was covered in blue for a few days. Immediately after cleaning I hopped on Julep's site to buy a new bottle (duh). The single bottle was no longer available! Like, it's up there but you can't add it to the cart. Nothing on Copious, nothing on eBay. The only way I could find to get it was to order the September Boho Glam box. Seriously, guys, I ended up having to buy the Julep brown mascara and a 2nd bottle of Popova (a green) just to own Gunta again. /facepalm Hopefully the pics explain why and I'm not just crazy...it's a gorgeous color. ;)

What's your guys' vote for best TARDIS blue polish? 

Thanks for reading!

K x

KBShimmer Cotton Candy

Ahoy! I have for you today KBShimmer's Cotton Candy, I was lucky enough to get my hands on it when she discontinued it in (August, I think?) along with Cheerleader and Key Lime Pie. Posts for another time!

Anyhow, Cotton Candy...it's a soft pink base with pink, lavender, teal and purple hexes and squares...I'd have to study the bottle for a while to tell you exactly, there's a lot of stuff in there! Application is great as it is with all of her formulas. It seriously is like someone took pink, blue and lavender cotton candy (you know what colors I'm talking about) and shredded it up onto your hands, I love it.

I used three coats but in the future I'd probably put 2 thin coats over some pink undies, the glitter was SUPER dense. This is only a personal preference, though, it's adorable by itself as well. I'll say it again, the formula was great. I didn't do any cleanup work with this polish. It's thirsty so I used 2 coats of Gelous and then SV.

See how cute that is? It's a great quick mani too, when you don't have time for nail art...you don't have to play with the application to get it to look good. The only issue I had was some of the square glitters, watch out that they are flat on your nail. The glitter is so thick in this one that a few of the squares got a little wonky and bothered me until I pulled them off :s

KBShimmer polishes can be purchased from her store and from Etsy for $8.50/full size, and you can follow her Facebook for updates. There's a mailing list signup on her store page too, I highly recommend you follow it, sometimes I miss things on Facebook and it's easier for me to catch discontinues/new shades over email. She also sells bath items that I hear very good things about! Her lip balm is on my wishlist :)

Thanks for reading, as always!
K x

Smitten Polish Glass Elevator

Hi ladies,

First of all, thank you for being patient and putting up with me being MIA on vacation :)
Second of all, here are some posts I need to catch up on! This mani dates back a few weeks, but I never did post my "G" week ABC Challenge selection.

Smitten Polish just keeps knocking it out of the park for me, so I chose one from her Confection collection: Glass Elevator. It's a jelly white with small and large ??seafoam?? glitter. These are my words, mind you, so I could be totally off :p It's pretty, that's all I need to know!

This is 3 coats.

 

 

The formula on mine was pretty thick (same as my Winter is Coming), but that's OK with me since I like thick polishes, they give my thin nails some defense lol. You can do 2-3 coats of this on its own for full opacity, or layer it over a white for more sparse glitter.

As always, yay Smitten Polish! Like her Facebook and follow her blog for her Etsy shop updates ($9 for a full size bottle). She has some super cute fall shades right now that are on my wishlist.

Thanks for reading!

K x

September MyGlam...Or should I say Ipsy??

Hi all, today I want to review my September MyGlam bag for you all.
MyGlam, despite hearing several bad reviews before I began my subscription, has never disappointed me. Every bag has had *something* I was really excited about.

This month they've rebranded, I guess, and changed their name to ...Ipsy. I forget what exactly they based the new name off of, but it doesn't really do it for me.

The postcard I got in my bag. It's a collage of subscriber photos!

This month's bag was a wristlet! Cool, I love wristlets! I will actually use this bag.

The last of the Andrea's Choice Circus nail colors, Tightrope. And Carol's Daughter Monoi Split End Sealer.

This is Tightrope. It's a neon and dries matte, but here it is with topcoat.

As you can see it bubbled somewhat, this is because application was a little tricky...

I used two coats of Tightrope over one coat of Sinful Colors Snow Me White.

For some reason I couldn't get this polish to apply smoothly. Maybe I was just having a bad day!

Regardless, it's gorgeous, I'm not ready to give up neons for Fall just yet.

The bag also came with a smudge brush from London SOHO New York.

Jane Sparkle Pink and Mirabella Semiformal, swatched below.

Jane Sparkle Pink

Mirabella Semiformal swatched with primer (Lorac)

All in all I'd say it was a good bag! The brush was good, soft with just the right amount of substance. You can't have too many brushes! The polish was lovely even though application was iffy (not due to the brush, the polish was just streaky...darn neons). The Carol's Daughter Monoi Split End Sealer...I'm just not a CD fan. I don't really care for the way this smells, either. The lip gloss was OK, nothing special. The eyeshadow is a lovely copper but makes me look tired. I layered some Too Faced gold shadow over it and that improved things somewhat. The bag also included a $20 coupon for justfab.com, which is cool because you can find cheap flats and things. It's good for shoes you know you'll only wear once or twice.

The Ipsy (MyGlam) monthly sub is $10 and you can sign up at ipsy.com. Honestly, in a battle between this and Birchbox, this would win (more about my September BB later...grr).

Did anyone get anything different?? Even better, is anyone on the postcard? :D
Thanks for reading!
K x