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.

A new beginning

Alright, so this blog had been left for dead for a long time because it was just a hobby and other things (school and work) had started to be too demanding to have anything even remotely resembling a life outside of the world of engineering. But that's over, so... I'll start anew with reviews of various beauty products. I'll try to go through everything in my existing stash and also cover new collections or things I'd like to try. So, reviews coming soon!