Snowy Little Glitter Skittles

Oh dreary old winter, when will you be gone?

…

Seriously. It’s too cold. I don’t want. At -32 degrees Celsius, it’s the coldest day of the winter yet.

So I needed something reminiscent of spring, and allowed myself to be inspired by my last year’s Easter mani and one of the prettiest glitters that China Glaze has ever released — Snow Globe.

Ungh. They are all so pretty. OPI’s Shrek collection has to be one of my favourites from that company. (But I think it might get dethroned by this year’s Holland collection? Seriously everything in it looks amazing.)

So, starting from my pinky I did my nails with OPI’s What’s With the Cattitude, Who the Shrek are You?, Rumple’s Wiggin and Fiercly Fiona. My thumb was done in the baby pink of Alessandro’s Pretty Ballerina. My hand literally refused to be positioned so that I could get a picture with my thumb nail included, so you see the bottle colour only.

These polishes are all so smooth, creamy and perfect two-coaters… ♥

Then I took the multicoloured pastel glitter of Snow Globe and sponged it over my tips to tie the mani together. I can’t get enough of Snow Globe this year!

I can’t actually make up my mind about over which colour I like this best… Can you?

My plan today? Lots of rooibos chai. Loads of it. With soy milk and honey. Hopefully, it’ll help me stay warm while I re-organize my nail polish boxes. As everything is overflowing. 😮

MLV.

Gold Fleck’d Black

My love. 🙂 Completely. Black cremes with gold flecks are definitely and without a doubt some of the prettiest (and yet edgiest) polishes around.

So, why did I not put Gold Old Buffy as my first from Essence’s Vampire’s Love collection? Probably as it’s not the most awesome representative of that finish I own. My love for these kinds of polishes started when I went through the drama of ordering Ciate’s Twilight (btw, what’s up with all the vampire references with polishes like these?) online a year and a half ago and my package got misplaced and I had to reorder, etc…

The polish itself was awesome though. Another one of these is Alessandro’s Marvelicious Dream, which was one of my top ten polishes for 2011…

How do all these compare, I asked myself.

First of all, Ciate has the prettiest bottle, Alessandro  is the smallest and Essence the biggest. That aside… 😉

Twilight is the darkest here and the most pigmented. Gold Old Buffy is (I can’t really call it the lightest) the least saturated and has the largest flecks. It’s also the sheerest, but still completely opaque at two coats.

And Marevlicious Dream is a dream! 😀 It is the brightest, most saturated and glowy. It also has the easiest formula to work with. (Taking into consideration that it also has the smallest bottle at 5ml it’s also five times as expensive per ml as Gold Old Buffy.)

No doubt in my mind that while I love all of these pretty babies, Marvelicious Dream wins this race hands down.

Check out the individual posts for these — Ciate, Essence, Alessandro — and have a look at them all together again.

Heee. 🙂 I need two more and then I can go for an actual ombre with these. Any recs? 😉

MLV.

Dreamin’

This is one of my favourite nail polishes to come out in 2011 — Alessandro’s Marvellicious Dream from the autumn/winter collection.

The idea is simple — antique golden flecks in a black base. Very similar in theory to another love of mine — Ciate’s Twilight and several other polishes I can think of. What makes this polish special is how many of those flecks of gold there are. It’s gorgeous and glowy in all lighting conditions during this grey and dreary winter.

I mean, this is artificial light. In sunlight… out of this world! 😀

I also like the new-ish bottle design of the Alessandro trend edition polishes and the wider brush. Very easy two coat application. 🙂

MLV.

Vault: Orange Sparkle Gradient

I love orange. There, I said it. I used to think orange nail polish was horrible, but sometime this summer I changed my mind. This is again an older mani using two oranges: Alix Avien No 180 — a bright orange jelly — and Alessandro Long Island — an orange glass fleck polish.

They are really close in base colour, so the gradient is really subtle. I used two coats of the Alix Avien polish, which still left me with VNL, but I wasn’t too worried about it as I sponged Long Island over the tips.

sunshine

shade

I utterly adored the subtle sparkle of this mani when I wore it.

Now, this is my final automated post as I should be home in a couple of hours ready answer your questions and hopefully not too sunburnt. 🙂

V.

Vault: Most Inaccurately Named Peacock

I wore this polish sometime in early July after happening upon a new (for me) brand called MIYO. It has a line of about twenty different polishes in pretty interesting colours actually (plenty of blues and greens).

I picked up a polish from them named Peacock. And I actually checked the name on several different polishes, because a very pale pastel yellow creme is not what comes to my mind when thinking of peacocks.

For a pastel yellow, the application was good enough — opaque and even in three coats.

It’s a cute polish and I decided to make the mani even cuter buy playing around with dotting tools. I used American Apparel L’Esprit for the lilac dots and Alessandro Pretty Ballerina for the pink ones.

I thought it turned out quite adorable. 🙂

V.

Estonian ladies, I found MIYO polishes at Rosalind in Tallinn.