Blueberry

As the days are becoming darker and colder, so are the colours on my nails. I didn't wear all the summer brights I planned to wear, but I don't mind, I'm already in a "autumn-winter palette" mood : ) And because in April I was not yet, MIYO Blueberry was waiting to be tried since spring, since the time Akuma Kanji sent it to me in a swap. 

MIYO is a brand available in Portugal, but presumably fabricated in Poland. It was the first MIYO polish for me to try, and I should say I'm pretty satisfied. Dark polishes are always super hard to work with for me, but I managed to apply it very smoothly and easily. I can even say I was proud of myself : )

MIYO Bluberry has a colour of... guess what?...blueberry! : ) Actually not. As a fan of blueberry, I'm telling you it's way bluer. The polish is a dark purple creme, so dark that it will seem almost black indoors. A tone too dark for my taste maybe. The texture, as I said, is nice and super opaque - 2 coats on the photos, but you can get away with one easily.

All the pictures are taken in a gloomy daylight, I had no chance to test the colour under the sun.

Well, I know this post is pic heavy already, but I have to show the stamping I did, too. Pls have some patience and take a look at the bundlemonstered Blueberry : ) For that I used Stargazer Chrome and BM-320.

Uf, that's it. The next post will be shorter and lighter I promise :)

Blue Matte Glitter

Sometimes I think I don't play with my matte top coat often enough.. So I decided to change that and made a simple glitter matte manicure, the one you see below:

But I wanted to show also how I reached this look. First, I started out with 2 coats of OPTIMA polish (nameless, numberless), a medium-blue frosty shade. Frosty! What was I thinking when buying it?! Obviously, "oh, a new polish brand detected! Let's check it out!". This checking out turned out to be an epic fail buy : {

Ewh, just look at that streaky finish. It neither works ok with stamping, so with a cold heart I just sold it on ebay a couple of days ago. Probably because I wanted to get rid of this yucky finish so desperately, I covered it with NYC Lights, Camera, Glitter!. This magic baby can always make things prettier. It did, in a way, in this case too:

But even that was not enough. So I topped all that with Essie Matte About You, and only after that I was totally satisfied : )

Do you have any bias against frosty finish? Or it is what you like? :)

Hunt Me Down

Here's a real polish champion in terms of waiting to be tried.. : ) It's a real shame to say, but H&M Hunt Me Down was waiting for its turn to appear on my nails for 1.5 years... gross! And I can't even come with any excuse why I was postponing to paint my nails with this pretty shade: 

Hunt Me Down is a dusty khaki creme with a nice 2-coat-opacity formula. I don't even know what else to add, apart from it's pretty and that my nails feel so cozy in this colour during the autumn days.

Now, girls, is there anyone worse than me in the world in terms of untrieds? What's your record? :)

Swap №11: First WIC & Indie!

After quite a while I did another spontaneous swap. Lovely Sarah from Netherlands contacted me about one polish we had here in Germany, and in exchange she offered something I couldn't resist :) Here's what she sent me: 

Left to right:

- Hugo Boss Nuit parfume (I loooved it!)

- W.I.C. by Herome Bogota

- China Glaze Stone Cold

- Lush Lacquer Party Rockin

So, I got my first W.I.C. by Herome nail polish, first indie brand polish, Stone Cold which I was chasing mainly for stamping, a bunch of nice sweets and a cool perfume. How pleasant is that! : )

Traditionally, I'm showing swatches of one of the received polishes, although I tried all of them already. But for this time, it's W.I.C. by Herome Bogota:

I was craving Bogota since I saw some random swatches long ago. Moreover, I so much liked the concept of W.I.C. (by the way W.I.C. means World Inspired Colours) - naming the polishes by cities/countries! Before recently I had not a single connection with Bogota as a city, until my bf went there for a couple weeks for his work and brought a bunch of interesting pictures and stories. I think I urgently need "Frankfurt" too :)

Bogota has a muted dusty greyish-blueish jelly base complemented by golden shimmer. The texture is semi-sheer and light, the coverage in 2 coats gives a decent opacity though. If you don't want the 'tip wear effect' which is so common for jelly polishes, you have to polish your nail tips well, also from the ridges.

The closest shade to Bogota that I had in my stash was Orly Pixie Dust, so I couldn't but post a lil comparison. The difference is that Pixie Dust is greyer, and has silver half-flakies half-shimmer, and Bogota is bluer with golden shimmer. Because I love such texture so much, I'll keep both in my stash.

And, although I won't post swatches of China Glaze Stone Cold today, I'll show how it stamps instead. It was exactly the reason why I wanted this polish - a graphite shade for stamping. And I was right, it does work well, with one only condition: you have to be fast. By fast I mean lightning fast. Otherwise it dries on the stamper and never transfers to a nail. With some efforts to understand its character, here is the result I got: 

Oh, and I can't wait to show Stone Cold alone! It's such an enchanting matte graphite polish.. And Lush Lacquer is great too. So stay tuned : ) 

Grape Escape

Early autumn.. Grape time, no? :) We have crazy low prices for grapes now and I seriously think I got grape overdose in my nutrition plan :) Whatever, I'm never sick of them, neither of the grape colour in polishland. Well, conditionally "grape colour". Just as the creators of the polish below imagined a grape colour. The creators of Barielle Grape Escape: 

I don't have much to add, you see everything yourself at the pictures. Flawless application in 2 coats with Barielle thin brush (❤). At some point I saw the bubbles, but it might have been my fault - sometimes I apply basecoat, go eat a slice of pizza and then continue with polish : {

And some fruit bonus :) I'm not really fond of swatching with fruits, but because of the name of the polish I couldn't but make an exception :)

If the grapes were really the same colour with the polish, I would assume that they are too toxic to be eaten. But look at OPI Grape Fit, China Glaze Grape Pop, Grape Juice and A Grape Fit!, etc. - they are all the same. Somehow THIS is the grape colour in the perception of the polish makers. Not in mine though: my grandpa used to make wine as his hobby, and I saw a looot of grape types of different shades, but of this one. Whatever, I still like it! :)

Berry Jelly & Sparkles

The polish I'm showing today is one of my favourites in the whole stash. Although I already posted the swatches of it, I think it fully deserves to be reswatched and also shown on shorter nails. MNY #265 is a berry jelly packed with holographic shimmer, which looks like subtle sparks on nails although the particles seem to be rougher in the bottle. 

The shade is so squishy, so juicy...mm love it! And for a jelly, the formula is super nice - 2 coats and that's it. Here are some pics under the sun:

And a close-up. I'm not a fan of VNL, but although you can see it on the pics, it's not so visible in reality, so no problems with that.

And now the saddest part: this beauty is obviously discontinued : ( It's just MNY, the whole brand, disappeared from German drug stores for unknown (to me) reason. I'm already upset in advance when I think that this bottle may end someday : ( On the other hand, I saw something similar within new Maybelline Color Show lines, but I'm afraid it's not the same. 

Uf, I definitely need more jellies in my life. Houston, we need a jelly! : )

P.S. If you want to see this polish on my looooong nails, klick here : )

UPD: One of the readers, Maria (thank you!), just told me that Maybelline relaunched this colour in their new ColorShow line, just like I thought. In Germany, the colour is called Wine Shimmer (#265!). Maria wrote that in Russia this shade is called Colorama #54 *facepalm*! BUT all three polishes are the same, check Maria's swatches to see :)

Navy Jelly

Girls, I urgently need to share this awesomeness with you - Layla Ceramic Effect #13! I bought it during my trip to Italy with a bunch of other cool Italian polishes : )

Look, look at this 'syrup effect'!!

Layla #13 is a fantastic navy blue jelly that creates a glossy glass look on your nails. What I didn't like was the brush - too wide and quite hard to manipulate whereas with dark shades it's especially important to be as precise as possible.. But the formula is nice - 2 coats are enough. 

And a couple of illustrations from "how I wore it" series : )

So, if you are lucky to live in Italy, I really recommend you to grab this one. If not, you can ask our Italian nail bloggers for a swap : ) Oh, I wish I could come back to Italy soon to get my hands on their local polishes.. : )