Adorned Nails: Catrice London

Eeek! This is new territory for me - yellow nail polish. To be honest, I bought this purely out of curiosity.

The Catrice London nail polish belongs to the Catrice Big City Life Collection. As mentioned before, four cities were represented in this collection: Sydney, Berlin, London and New York. For each city, there is an eyeshadow palette and a nail polish.

You've seen the eyeshadow palette from The Berlin Collection which, in my opinion, had the best combination of eyeshadow shades out of the four palettes. I didn't think the one from The London Collection was that great and that, I believe, is also the general consensus. Stocks of the eyeshadow palette from The London Collection didn't move as swiftly as the others.

The London nail polish is simply a pale yellow with fine shimmers. You would no doubt have noticed the various famous landmarks depicted on the bottle.

Just for fun, I added a barcode-like stamping design. I used a old brown KONAD stamping polish and KONAD plate M44 which has stamping designs for french tips. I decided to stamp it on the cuticle side of the nails.

Further reading:
My review of Catrice The Berlin Collection Eyeshadow Palette
Catrice Big City Life Collection

Adorned Nails: TheFaceShop PK103

It's spring and with it, comes pastel shades. I thought I'd welcome spring with a predictable sweet pink from yet another South Korean brand, TheFaceShop. Thank you, Danielle, for sending me this.

TheFaceShop's naming convention for its nail polishes is typical of cosmetics brands from the Far East: an abbreviation of the colour followed by digits. TheFaceShop Nail Color PK103 is a sheer baby pink polish with fine shimmers. Application was trouble-free and I have three coats on here. I left it at that despite the visible nail line as I was planning to do stamping anyway.

It's the Konad M66 plate again. I've been waiting for a long time to use the beautiful cherry blossom design.

I feel like I'm wearing Barbie's wallpaper, which is ironic.

I don't even like Barbie.


More information:
TheFaceShop website

Adorned Nails: Herôme W.I.C. Mykonos

I know this looks like a white polish. It's not.

Herôme W.I.C. Mykonos is a very, very pale mint green. I expected more green on the nails but it's so subtle that it looks almost white. A disappointment, if you ask me. It has a sheer formula with shimmer and I applied four coats. I could have done a fifth, but I got tired.

Herôme, by the way, is a sister brand of KOH, with Herôme positioned as a mid-price player and KOH on the higher end. Herôme polishes retail for around €7 (different stores have different price tags) for a 7ml bottle. The W.I.C. in the name stands for World Inspired Colours.

It's commonly known that Herôme polishes thicken after a while. I've had Mykonos for many months and indeed it had thickened a fair bit.

As with my previous experience with Herôme Ottawa, Mykonos took a long time to fully dry. I did wait for at least twenty minutes between coats but still, I had a deep dent in one thumb three hours later. And just like Ottawa, when it's really fully dry, it's pretty hardy.

I'm not a fan of white polishes. I bought this only because I wanted a pale mint green polish. Mykonos the polish turned out to be so plain. It needed some stamping. So, I chose the bamboo design from the KONAD plate M66 and used the green of Etude House Petite Darling GR603.

I like the delicate design of the bamboo on the nails.

The other polishes mentioned:
Herôme Ottawa
Etude House Petite Darling GR603

Adorned Nails: Arcancil Addicted Fuchsia

Arcancil is a brand that I don't see or hear much of on the net. There never seems to be any buzz surrounding this French brand and I wonder if it's the same in its home country. It does come across a bit staid but I keep an open mind.

I've had good experiences so far with Arcancil nail polishes. Their prices are quite easy on the pocket (think GOSH). They polish well and they don't chip within the first day like some. Perhaps a drawback would be their limited colour range but if you took the time to look, you just might find that one gorgeous polish that would make your heart sing.

I found mine. In fact, I found three, one of which I've shown before: Arcancil Bronze Caprice. I have another one that I totally adore and I will feature it here later.

The third one is what I have on today: Addicted Fuchsia (seen here in two coats). Of the three that I love, Addicted Fuchsia is perhaps the 'plainest' of them all. It is a crème polish in simple fuchsia. It looks unassuming in the bottle but on the nails, it is so look-at-me!

As I indicated the other day, I'm taking a break from floral stamping images. So, I took this wire mesh design from the KONAD plate M44 meant for French tips and stamped with KONAD's black stamping polish. I knew I would have problems aligning it properly on the nail tips, so I stamped it diagonally far, far away from the tips. Problem solved!

I have slightly shorter nails now, no thanks to a little incident in the kitchen. Ah well, I'm just a normal person like everyone else with dreaded household chores to do.

If you like Addicted Fuchsia or if you'd like to try Arcancil nail polishes, leave a comment here. Your comment might just put you in good stead later.

You may find more information on the Arcancil website. Check out also my feature on Arcancil Bronze Caprice and leave a comment there too, if you wish. You just never know......

Adorned Nails: SpaRitual Hope Springs Eternal

After letting my nails have their first ever lick of a SpaRitual nail polish with I Feel The Earth Move, I just knew I had to have more of this brand. While that first one was dark and quite foreboding, this second one that I’ve bought is very bright and screams of boundless happiness!

This cheerful polish is one of six spring colours that was released a while back by SpaRitual. Hope Springs Eternal is the name. It’s truly a bright, rather gaudy fuschia-like pink, but I wouldn’t call it offensive. After all, I can’t fault it for being happy.

The formula is thick (at least, that was the case with my bottle). The finish is metallic and I thought that the paint strokes were conspicuous if you looked close enough. But then, because it’s bright and it's got so much shine, you would tend not to see the lines. So, let’s just not dwell on that.

Each of the six spring colours comes with a little silver charm with inspirational words like Yes I Can, Shoot For The Stars and I Believe In You. Mine says simply Hope.

Shown here are with two coats of Hope Springs Eternal. I just couldn’t resist taking a couple of pictures of my pink nails with some real cherry blossoms. Hey, it’s spring! I took these pictures almost two weeks ago when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom in my garden. As we all know, once they bloom, they don’t stay proud and beautiful for very long (well, they're all shrivelled up and dried now). All images in this post were taken in natural lighting.

And then, there’s the stamping, predictably with cherry blossoms, I’m afraid. I used my first ever Konad stamping plate, S9, a plate with many cute cherry blossom images.

Using an old white nail polish, I took a portion of this image and did the stamping on all nails this time. I don’t think it looks OTT here because the nail polish is so shiny that, at one glance, you wouldn’t easily notice the stamping. View it at an angle, as I’m showing here in the following images, and only then will you see the cherry blossom images. That’s subtle enough for me.