Lilac Seduction

Lilac time! And not just a simple lilac, this tiny pretty thing called Deborah Milano Prêt À Porter Lilac Seduction made its way together with me from its motherland, Italy! : ) Since there were so many beautiful polishes in Italy to bring home, I was choosing only some kind of special ones, and I do think this one can be called so too. 

Lilac Seduction is a lilac (obviously) polish, slightly muted, with pink microshimmer. Some of you will say it has a frosty finish, and I will not disagree. It's just a matter of the subjective crossing line between a shimmer and a frosty polish... everyone defines this border by himself.

The tiny bottle.. I just love them. Most probably I will never finish it up anyways :P 

Oh, in case you missed out the little sisters of this polish, Startdust and Love At First Sight - just click the names to see them :)

Close-ups: yes, you might see the streaks, but it's obvious that they are not visible in real life. Unless you stick your nails right under someone's nose, I mean.. :)

Oh, I shouldn't forget to mention the application: you seriously can apply Lilac Seduction with your eyes closed. From the first look I expected this polish to be on a sheer side, but it flawlessly covers the VNL in 2 coats. What I also liked is the way how the thin coats layer one over other - smoothly and without any cuticle "build-ups".

Still not sure if I would call this polish a duochrome, but it definitely has such features, shifting from lilac to pink and back.

And I cannot but share how much I missed nail stamping!! Both the process and its results, which I'm happily posting now:

The stamping job was done with the help of Cheeky Plates - CH44 and Wet'n'Wild Buffy The Violet Slayer as a stamping polish.

And lastly, this was actually my manicure to wear the Nevskiye Berega Beauty Expo - I just wanted to create something catchy but yet not kitschy :) I should have gone for kitschy though, I would be much closer to the expo thematics :)

Cheeky Beauty Stamping Plates: Summer Collection (CH30-CH55) ~ Review

In my today's post I have an honour to present you a review of a whole set of stamping plates created by Cheeky Beauty - I'm sure you have hears of this brand already : ) In their online store they offer a whole range of nice stuff for nail art, stamping beauty and more. 

The stamping plates set I am going to review is Cheeky Plates Summer Collection 2012, it consists of 26 (!) stamping plates and includes 161 different designs. This set is currently a top-seller on their web-site, and it's available here for 24,99$ (+free worldwide shipping!) - less than 1$ for a plate, which is a super fair deal.

The plates arrived to me in a big envelope full of cute colourful things, including 2 postcards, a personal letter (very pleasant to get :)) and, of course, the plates themselves. Do you see this adorable box on the photo below? Seriously, I think it's the best packaging for a stamping plates set I've ever seen!   

If we open the box, we see the plates piled inside... and not only! There is also a plastic card, which - ! - can be used as a scraper! I never use a metal scraper anyway, but I can tell you that this card is very handy to scrape away the excess polish from the plate, because it's a bit thicker and more resilient than other plastic cards I use. It's also much cuter :) 

Shall we see the plates themselves? The summer collection includes the plates numbered from CH30 to CH 55. The previous plates, CH1-CH26 are combined in the Vibrant Collection, available here.

Why I liked the Summer Collection set is because it combines small images together with full-nail designs, and because the designs themselves are pretty cool and unique. I fell in love with the monsters on CH32!! 

(all images below are clickable!)

Each plate is covered with a blue protection film (that's why the plates look blue on the previous photos), which is easy to remove. Under the film, the designs are very accurate and well-engraved, thus providing a high quality of stamping.

Each plate has also a paper back to protect the fingers and hands from cuts. The edges of the plates are not sharp. And I took a photo of the card again - it's a "nail artist license" as well : ) Now I'm a licensed stamper, hehe : )

And one more VERY POSITIVE feature of the Cheeky plates I wanted to mention - the size of the images! Finally the designers of stamping plates realised that there are women who wear longer nails than nubbins, and that they want to stamp them, too.. The size of Cheeky Beauty plates is approx. 15x20mm, which is larger comparing to, let's say Konad and Bundle Monster. 

And now it's time to move from 'theory' to 'practice' : ) 

Before I show you some designs I made with Cheeky plates, I should say that I was fascinated by the outstanding quality of the plates and their user-friendliness. It's so easy and pleasant to work with them, that even if you are not a stamping pro, I'm sure that you'll get a nice result. Okay, now to my manis with Cheeky plates: 

1. Andreia #75 (2 coats) stamped with CH46 and Manhattan Melting Cobalt

2. OPI Don't Pretzel My Buttons (2 coats) stamped with CH52 and Konad Black stamping polish

3. Essie Knockout Pout (2 coats) stamped with CH44 and OPI Pink Flamenco

What do you think, girls? Do you own Cheeky plates? Or planning to get them maybe? :)

*The stamping plates were kindly provided by Cheeky Beauty PR team for my consideration. In this post I expressed my honest and unbiased opinion about the products.