Essence - You Rock! Collection

Yesterday I posted old Essence spam. And today? More!
I found another bunch of swatches hidden away in the depths of my computer. Even though this collection is no longer current, I can't just delete them without posting them.

Aren't these bottles cute? The lovely Caroline from Good Lack Nail sent me these probably 2 years ago when I was a total swapaholic. But don't ask me why I swatched them right away and then didn't post them.

Essence - Cut off the Beige 
Really interesting beige/taupe shade with shimmer. 

Essence - King of Mints
Blue-turquoise with shimmer.

Essence - Let Me In Pink
Standard pink creme. I can see in the photo that I don't think the formula was very good. It is showing off all the imperfections in my nails at the time. (What was I doing to them?! They look so damaged!)

Essence - Speed of Light Blue
Light blue, shimmer visible in the bottle but not really on the nail. Nice fresh and clean shade.

Essence - Love Peace and Purple
The star of the collection! A dupe (or very close to) Chanel's famous Paradoxal.Very strong purple shimmer in the purplish gray base. Lovely!

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Again, no idea why these ended up on the "cutting room floor" or maybe "swatching room floor" for so long. They are really nice polishes! 
I think I might go put on that last one.
But after I watch the finale of How I Met Your Mother and bawl for an hour.

Essence Swatch Spam

I hope you're in the mood for swatch spam...
I just stumbled upon a folder that was totally stocked with swatches of some of the old-style Essence Color&Go polishes. I think I took them two years ago! Obvi the pics aren't my current standard but they are pretty decent! Good enough to post for sure.

Essence - High Spirits 
Dusty army green with silver shimmer. Really like this one which is why I put it first.

Essence - Gleam In Blue
Light metallic blue, kinda frosty.

Essence - Black is Back
No description needed. I like to use this black because it doesn't stain the way my old go-to black did.

Essence - Glamorous Life
Ooooh, pretty glass-fleck pink.

Essence - In Style
Tealish blue shimmer. Lil' bit frosty.

Essence - Luxury Secret
Gunmetal gray metallic shimmer. Kinda frosty too but that is more hidden with the metallic finish.

Essence - Modern Romance
Semi-sheer peach with pinky shimmer. 

Essence - Make It Golden
Gold glitter and shimmer topcoat. Very lovely.

Essence - Nude It!
A nice neutral nude.

Essence - Time for Romance
Pink glitter and holo glitter in a sheer dark pink base. In this picture it's layered over a metallic pink I think.

Essence - Ultimate Pink
Standard pink creme.

Essence - Wake Up!
Bright orange creme.

Essence - Wanna Be Your Sunshine
Yellow creme with some subtle shimmer. 

Essence - Walk on Air
Royal blue creme, a biiiit jelly.

Essence - Walk of Fame
Nice neutral taupe creme.

Bonus swatch:

Essence Nail Art Topper - Hello Holo
Some nice holo glitter in a clear base! Not as small as the glitter in, say, CG Fairy Dust, so this gives a different and more obvious glitter effect. I'm a fan!

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Phew! That was a lot of swatches. I just remembered I did a spam of these before as well - see that here.

I miss the bottle and brush of these old little Essence polishes. I have so many. At one point I had a list of them all and I was going to try to get all of them... But then they changed the bottle and I said "f'get about it."

Ruby Wing - Eternal

Today I'll be sharing with you a polish that really is not appropriate for where I live. Why you ask?
Because it changes color in the sun. What sun? I know not about this sun you speak of.



Ruby Wing - Eternal is a UV-activated color changing polish. In the above Instagram video I used my UV lamp to show the change because it is winter. Sad, sad winter. Never ending winter. Sigh...
Anyway. The polish at first is a suuuuper bright turquoise that totally freaked out my camera and made my skin look weird and the polish look streaky but it really wasn't.

And then when you're out in the sun...

Dark purple! The change is SO quick and intense. I always expect color changing polishes (be it thermal or UV) to not change too much. But this is crazy! Really strange to watch. I immediately had to show my mom. Hahaha.

When you come out of the sun (or the UV lamp) it changes back really quickly too! That made it hard for me to get photos, actually, where I couldn't take pictures while still inside the lamp, obvi! You can see the purple starting to change back in the above photo where I was trying to compare the color.

And here it's almost back to the indoors color. Isn't that a strange shade?
Best part is, I got this one on clearance. Duh. 

Verdict: I am totally impressed with the effect of Ruby Wing polish. What is usually just a cheap novelty is actually a really great product! I have two more of these interesting gems in my stash (glitters!) that I am definitely going to have to try soon! Or maybe I will wait until July when I have real sun... Blerg!

The Lacquer Legion: Lucky

March's theme for The Lacquer Legion is Lucky!

I thought about lucky things, like lucky charms, and I was this close to trying to base nails on a pair of lucky underwear I used to wear to my best friend's hockey games in high school... But A) I thought that might be weird (however apparently I wasn't above telling you about it) and B) I can't really remember them.

So I kept thinking, and realized that the luckiest thing in my life is my dad!
He is seriously lucky. He always wins on scratch tickets, poker games, even the lottery! (He hasn't hit the big one yet... But I sure hope its coming.)

I decided I would get him to choose three random numbers corresponding to my polish stash list. So he picked from 1-1279. The three colors he chose turned out to really go well together!

#396: Color Club - Warhol
#519: Essence - Nude It!
#777: Nail-Venturous - Evil Barbie

I wasn't in the mood for anything too intense, so I did a base with the nude polish, added two pink nails plus a pink stripe on the thumb, and put the glitter on top. Voila! Easy but eye catching manicure with a fun idea behind it.

Not gonna lie, I was a little worried he would end up choosing orange, purple and brown or something. But he truly is lucky I guess! I hope I've inherited some of that lucky touch. Especially for my microeconomics final next month... That sucker is gonna need a lot of luck.

I hope you guys liked this mani! And don't forget to share yours on our Facebook page, or anywhere on social media with the tag #LLlucky.

Maybelline Brocade Collection - Lavishly Lilac

Hola! Remember I'm Feeling Sashy from yesterday? Here's how I wore it!

Maybelline - Lavishly Lilac
I added two accent nails in this beautiful glitter from Maybelline's Brocade Collection. It only needed two coats for full coverage on top of my purple base, but you may need three on a bare nail.

The glitters in this collection are really different, with blends of different glitters and shimmers, creating a really unique look. Don't you love it when you see a new polish in a display and can honestly say you don't already own something like it? I actually bought three of them... Haha.

I also added a quick gradient to my thumb to complete the look. I just did the gradient with the polish brush - making sure there was very little on the brush to blend the glitter down onto the base.

Don't these polishes go well together?

Did you pick up any of the Brocade glitters? At only 3 or 4 bucks a piece, they're pretty hard to resist! I'm itching to wear the green one now... I think I will go put it on!

OPI - I'm Feeling Sashy

Hey everyone! Before I start this post I wanna take a moment to mention the changes happening to Facebook for pages. You probably have seen people mentioning this already: Facebook is going to be showing posts from pages like mine to less and less people. For example, I have 8.5k "likes," but in recent weeks only around 300 people get to see any posts I make. That's a tiny amount! Scrolling back a few months, 2,000 people were seeing every post.
A Facebook spokesperson said, “the best way to get your stuff seen if you’re a business is to pay for it.” Frankly, I am not paying Facebook to share posts that I create and share for free.

This means you may not receive my content anymore in your news feed. If you want to be sure you get my updates, head over and try to interact with my page! Like something, comment on something, post something. If you interact, you should be able to keep seeing posts from me.

If you wanna be even more positive that you'll get my updates, why not subscribe via email? The box to sign up is in my side bar.
You can also follow me on Twitter. I don't use it much, but as of today I'm gonna be sure to post all new blog posts on there, in case some readers prefer to catch up with me that way.
And if you wanna interact with me even more, you can check out my Instagram! I love me some IG.

And now let's see some polish!

OPI - I'm Feeling Sashy
This is a nice dusty purple polish from the Miss Universe 2013 collection. Originally I passed on this color, but then a few people said it reminded them of Parlez-Vous OPI? and then immediately I wanted it because I love that color so much. They're not quite the same, but... Hold on, maybe I should do a comparison. Lemme go do that...

Tada! It's been a while since I did one of these!
Parlez-Vous OPI? is the more gray of the two shades, and it also has a better formula than I'm Feeling Sashy, which can be a bit patchy if you aren't careful. I think they look more similar in the bottle than they do on the nail.

Verdict? If you are looking to soothe your desire for PVOPI, I don't think this will cut it. But it is a really nice shade on its own!
In my next post I'll be showing the mani I wore with this polish! Hint: it involves glitter.

RLN investigates

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a mystery on our hands.

Here's the scene. Friday night, a girl and her mother entered a local Winners store to peruse for some great scores. The girl approached the cosmetics section, as usual. She inspected the nail polish, only to find that something strange had arrived...

What you're looking at is either:

A) The most legit looking fake OPI polishes I have ever seen, or

B) Very extremely limited edition hard to find strange OPI polishes that no one knows of. 

As soon as I saw the blue one on the shelf I was like "What the deuce? That's no OPI I've ever seen!"

Let's be real. I know too much about OPI. And yeah, I'm sure there are lots I've never seen, but they're usually like, mauve, and they're old school black label. And not bright blue with holo glitter. There was no fooling me. 

I picked it up to check the label. 

Blue Chips?!

Immediately I googled it on my phone and there's nothing. Nothing!! What?!

The label is kinda weird though. No barcode. Maybe it's a sample? Maybe it's super legit fake? Maybe it was never produced? Maybe it's all a dream?

Obvi I then checked for the telltale fake OPI signs like the bottle being slightly different in size, the glass at the bottom looking funny, the writing on the back, the gears in the cap, the pro-wide brush, the OPI on the brush stem... It's ALL legit. (Except for the somewhat strange label.) 

So now I'm standing there with my jaw probably on the floor when I notice the other odd looking colors.

Golden Waves. Googled. Nada.

Tart Green Apple. This is way brighter than Who The Shrek Are You.

Bouquet of Violets. This looks like Funky Dunkey.

By now I was squirreling away all the bottles so the muggles couldn't get them and also so they would stop judging me and I could snap pictures in peace.

Cream in My Coffee. Kinda like a Skull and Glossbones mixed with My Boyfriend Scales Walls.

Just Shocking! This looks like Wing It! Both with exclamation marks!

I carried all six around the store for a while having a SERIOUS dilemma on if I should buy them because they're rare or forget them because they're worthless.
I even made my mom listen to me ranting about it and showed her all the reasons why they MUST be real but definitely CAN'T be real at the same time.

I eventually left them all behind. And I'm still iffy about my choice. But $8 each... Ugh. 

Have you ever heard of any of these? Do you have ANY CLUE what they could be? Almighty polish wisdom, help me!!!

Maybelline - Nighttime Noise

Hey guys! Hopping on late tonight to get this post up for you because I love this polish!

Maybelline - Nighttime Noise (over Lime Crime - Once In A Blue Mousse)
This is a new matte glitter topper from the Street Art collection of Maybelline's Color Show line. The collection has four or five cool glitters but the two blues really stood out to me and followed me home.

As you can see there are many different shapes and sizes of glitter, plus the formula was wonderful. I did two coats for my mani for the coverage I wanted. It's so fun!

I definitely recommend these glitters! Plus they're so affordable, just around $3. Pick them up if you spot 'em.

KBShimmer - Merry Pinkmas!

I know what you're thinking.  
"Bit late to be sharing a Christmas polish, isn't it? Shouldn't you be doing an Oscars manicure? Who do you think you are?"
Too bad. I'm in the mood for glittery pink Christmas.

KBShimmer - Merry Pinkmas
The name alone was enough for me to know I would like it. Pink Christmas. Pinkmas. Yes.
But then beyond that, it was created by the darling Cris of Let Them Have Polish! I knew right away I was gonna need to own this baby, and Cris herself agreed and sent me a bottle. How sweet!

With its candy pink base and pink glitters amongst the traditional red and green glitters, it's definitely a stand-out holiday polish. You can definitely tell that it is festive, but in such a different way. And you can totally wear it all the time, too. Like I am now.

So cute! Thank you so much Cris for the lovely polish :)