Purple and Gold crackle nails

It's almost fall, so I can finally start wearing some of my favorite colors (teal, gold, deep purples, etc). I like rich, dark colors, and I love gold. I fell in love with the whole gold/purple combination a few years back when Sephora advertised a look with UrbanDecay eyeshadows Mauie Wowie and (I think) Purple Haze. So anyway, I bought these nail polish last year. The colors are Sexy Divide by Essie, which is a rather thin and easy to apply royal purple with purple and magenta shimmer. The top coat is Antiqued Gold Crackle Overcoat by Sally Hansen. I put on a single thick coat. The pictures don't do justice to how nice the Essie polish is, but sadly I don't have better photography arrangements at the moment.

Shooting star nails

Today is one of those grey, not quite rainy days, and I had too much time on my hands. I also knew that very soon I would have very little time on my hands (yay, back to school!). So I did nail art, inspired by one of the pins I found a while back. This was done freehand, I didn't really want to bother with tape (mostly with finding the tape) so it's a bit messier than it could be, but I'm rather pleased with the end result. I got the stars from eBay, in case anyone is wondering. I started with two coats of New York Color in Prospect Park Pink then added a trail of glitter in Sally Hansen Gem Crush in Razzle Dazzler. The NYC color is really opaque, I probably could have put only one coat on. It is slightly pearly, although that doesn't show too well in the picture. A nice color, and it performs well for such a low-cost brand. It is one of my favorite colors for makeup, it's really flattering for someone as fair as I am (it's difficult to find colors that look nice when your skin nearly glows in the dark). So, in all, I'm happy with the results, even knowing I will curse when I'll have to try and remove the glitter...

SH Gem Crush in Razzle Dazzler and NYC QuickDry in Prospect Park Pink

The end result.. which might benefit from some cleaning up of stray glitter

Juice Beauty - Green Apple Cleansing Gel

Okay, I managed to go through my first product since I declared I would use up my stash before buying new stuff (unless I am stuck with a product that really doesn't work for me, in that case I'm allowed to give/throw it away). And I also managed to cheat (honestly, how could I not buy a shower gel that smells like lemon cupcakes? More on that later). So I just finished my bottle of Juice Beauty Green Apple Cleansing Gel, which I've had for longer than I care to admit and it was probably way older than the expiry date. Please, don't follow my bad example and try to use things within their allotted lifetimes, or reasonably close to that.

My empty bottle of Green Apple Cleansing Gel

As the name implies, it is a gel (you can check what it looks like here, sorry I didn't take a picture before I emptied the bottle) with a nice smooth and thick consistency. It does have a tendency to dry out and form rubbery bits in the nozzle, but that's only after prolonged shelf storage. It has a very nice light fruity/floral smell that isn't much like apples but a bit more of a citrus/apricot smell. On another note, their oil-free and SPF 30 mineral moisturizers smell like Froot Loops. It lathers well and removes regular makeup easily, and will remove some waterproof makeup as well. For example, it will take off 90% of my MUFE waterproof liner but my Dior Waterproof Blackout won't budge.

Now for the ingredients! The firsts on the list are fruit juices, followed by glycolic acid from cane sugar, various plant extracts and honey. It also contains tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E) and retinyl palmitate (vitamin A) which have proven benefits for skin. Good stuff, so far. At least, that's what's on my bottle. Seems like they changed the formula a bit now, but it's roughly the same stuff. At first glance I don't see anything in the updated formula that jumps out as a lathering agent, so I'm not sure how well the new version lathers. But that also means it's very gentle compared to products with harsher surfactants. Juice Beauty is nice for that, their products are mostly based on natural ingredients. I have very sensitive (and extremely fair) skin, and this doesn't bother it at all. Then again, that's just me, perhaps there's people out there who are sensitive to this. 

Overall, it's a really great product. It does what I want it to (remove daily makeup in one step), doesn't sting my poor skin, contains natural ingredients, smells good... it's a bit on the pricey side, but it is worth it for the quality of the product. I can't say there was noticeable improvement of my skin from using this product, but let's keep in mind that I pulled it out of my stash about two weeks ago and only used it for a short period before finishing it so that may account for the lack of results. I would definitely buy this product again, and when I do I will try a real scientific assessment of the improvements from regular use over a long period of time (most products take at least 6 weeks to work their magic). 

Philosophy - Pumpkin Spice Muffin

Alright, trying to go through my stash of shower gels. I just made a rule not to have more than three bottles at once. Including tiny 100ml bottles. Let's see how long that lasts before I snap and go "ooooh this smells gorgeous, I NEED it". So, sadly, I just finished one of my all-time favourite gels: Pumpkin Spice Muffin, by Philosophy. And it's discontinued, as far as I know, so the goodness is gone forever.



Philosophy makes some pretty awesome shower gels in general: they smell like real food (in a good way), they lather well, they leave skin moisturised enough.. although I honestly never really noticed a difference between this and other brands, let's just say it doesn't dry my skin, at least. My main concern is how lovely shower gels smell, aside from their cleaning power. And this smells beyond lovely. It smells exactly like pumpkin pie muffin batter. o_o It's a difficult smell to describe, but it's slightly sweet and spicy and.. well. Make a batch of muffins and you'll understand. The recipe is on the bottle, actually. It's a very comforting scent, and it's perfect for those autumn days when the weather is really nasty and you need something warm to cheer you up.

Personnelle - Corinne nail polish

Alright, so I was on a quest to buy a cream nail polish as a base for this:

                                                       Source: timepasss.com via Rachel on Pinterest

And since I can get pretty impatient when I want something I find gorgeous, I didn't want to order the right products online and wait days on end to try it out. So obviously I went to the nearest drugstores to try and find the (cheap) equivalent. The only thing I found that was remotely close in color was the shade Corinne by Personnelle (which is a house brand). I usually stick to better known brands because they're of better quality, but it was this or nothing so I decided to give it a try. This formula is clearly made as a top coat for french manicures because it is so bloody sheer. Even after 5 coats, the natural tips still show through. The shade is really nice, but I don't like the idea of having half an inch of varnish on my nails just to get the opacity I want. So, a huge fail.

I didn't wait to order the Butter nail polish either (the shade is Rosie Lee), so I ended up getting Gem Crush shade Razzle Dazzler, by Sally Hansen. The colors are similar, a slightly peachy pink microglitter in a transparent base, but the Sally Hansen version has larger silver glitter that are absent in the Butter color. It is a pretty decent product, and requires two coats to get enough glitter to cover the base color. 

So here's the final result (I was too lazy to clean up the smudges from the glitter, sorry)! It's not as perfect as the original (and I don't have the equipment to take professional quality pictures..), but it still is a really nice style. I've been wearing it for a few days now and aside from the normal wear, there's no chipping yet.

EDIT:  This lasted beautifully, over a week and a half later it still looked like new. But I got bored and wanted to change, so I removed it.. it was a  pain to remove the glitters! Maybe it's just because I'm no longer used to glittery polish but this was beyond annoying. Spending almost an hour removing this was aggravating.