Review: Sephora by OPI Once a Cheetah, Always a Cheetah (urgh)

I was in Sephora the other day and always have mixed feelings about the place, now that there's a "nail bar" at the store in the Eaton Centre in Toronto. It used to be I'd have to make a pilgrimage to a mall in further north to get access to all the fancy polishes but now they're all available downtown. Not only are they too easy to get to, the teenagers always manage to make everything look messy and tawdry as they either paint their nails in the store or cover the displays in polish. Even the lighting in the display makes it really hard to tell the colours. It just makes it all vaguely disappointing. I buy polish, you know, cos it's there, but it's never a good experience. This isn't a terribly good segue but whatcha gunna do. It's been bugging me. Anyway, let's take a look at a polish I extricated intact from the display, Sephora by OPI Once a Cheetah, Always a Cheetah.

I've been burnt a few times by overestimating how sheer a polish is so I started with two coats of Essie Vermillionaire as a base. It's a nice orange coral and goes well with the bright orange glass-fleck of Once a Cheetah, Always a Cheetah. I then added two thin coats of OAC,AAC. The result is a very fiery, sparkly orange, very eye-catching. To keep with the fire motif (apparently I'm all about fancy words today) I added a simple gold glitter gradient, using loose gold glitter placed using my usual technique. It may have been because I was around a higher proportion of women than normal but these nails now hold the record for most compliments! The gold gold just made the entire thing look like fire so I count that as a win!

The Verdict: Can't go wrong when your nails garner 10+ compliments in a single day. Fire nails win!

The Polishes:

Essie Vermilliaire, various locations
Sephora by OPI Once a Cheetah, Always a Cheetah, Sephora

Review: Nicole by OPI A Million Sparkles is Accurately Named

It's amazing what you can find when you wander around at night. My favourite time to go shopping is ridiculously late and I'm extra happy when it pays off. I've been looking for Nicole by OPI A Million Sparkles for a while now at that couldn't be more up my alley if it tried. I finally managed to find it in a Shoppers last night and it really does live up to its name. A Million Sparkles is a predominately blue glitter that has an amazing ability to look like a foil after a couple of coats. Combine that with gold, silver and pink bar glitter and you have a winner. It's seriously so sparkly I got distracted from what I was saying at lunch today. Application is decent but you really need four coats to get completely opaque coverage. That's ok, glitter dries fast. It's a little rough too but nothing Seche Vite can't fix. The Verdict: Yay glitter! If, like me, you like sparklies to the point where it's the biggest tag on y

Review: JENsations Stars in Space and S'mores

Guess what everyone? I'm going to review some indie polishes that you can actually buy without having to wait for email messages! Yay! And sparkly too! Imagine all the holo glory as while my lightbox produces lovely even white light, it saps any and all rainbows from manis, leaving me to try to take pictures in my kitchen like a barbarian. It may not sound that hard but when you use a manual focus 60mm macro lens that has a wafer-thin depth of field, it's not the easiest. Anyway, let's take a look at two, that's right, two, beautiful polishes from JENsations , Stars in Space and S'mores. First up, Stars in Space. I started with two coats of Zoya Caprice, a very bright purple creme that you'll be seeing a lot of as it makes for a great base. Next, two coats of Stars in Space, the most fabulous mix of silver holo glitter. There's stars, squares (man, I love square glitter), hexes and micro glitter. I liked this one as there was enough glitter on

Giveaway for Reaching 100 Posts!

So I've been blogging here for coming up on two months now but I've already managed to get to 100 posts! To celebrate, I'm giving away the FULL COLLECTION OF CHINA GLAZE PRISMATICS! These are incredibly hard to find but I love you guys and want one of you to experience the awesomeness too. Enter below, someone is gunna win allllll these:

Polish All the Nails

Search This Blog