I have decided that fate doesn't want me to blog about nail polish at the moment.
Because of my pesky ongoing achilles tendon problems, I have to have physiotherapy on a Thursday afternoon.
Because I don't have enough annual leave left for my hospital appointments, I'm having to work on Saturday morning instead to make my hours up. This is so INCONVENIENT! Guys and girls who regularly work at the weekends, you have my undying admiration. I just feel like theres no time to do anything.
Also, because I'm working on the Saturday, I can't have my usual swatch-a-thon on Friday night.... so all in all it's a right royal pain in the behind.
Well, here's two fingers up to fate, because I've managed to do it anyway! You may know that I'm craving a dark brown nail polish right now, but with the aforementioned problems I've had to resort to just mooning over web swatches and wishing for things to get back to normal.
I decided to look through my polishes to check what browns I actually do have, in case I already had one (I didn't but you never know until you look!), but I did find two mid brown polishes which were virtually identical, and similarly priced, so I thought you might be interested in seeing a comparison. They are, as the post title suggests, Nails Inc Ganton Street and Jessica's Guilty Pleasures. For a change I will start with the brush & bottle shot:
There you see, pretty similar, right? The Jessica is a tad warmer, but very similar all the same. Apologies about the dark corner on the picture, with Autumn setting in it's getting harder and harder to find bright places to put things...
So onto the swatches, I found the best place to show the difference was under the trusty LED craft light. All pics are two coats with no topcoat. Nails Inc on left 2 fingers:
Then, amazingly, the sun came out for a moment:
Then it went back in. So here's a pic in shaded light:
Application wise, there's hardly anything to pick between them either. If you've used Nails Inc before, this is their usual creme formula, which I like as it's got good coverage and is pretty quick drying. The Jessica was a teeny tiny bit more sheer on first coat, but by coat two they looked the same coverage-wise. I preferred the Nails Inc brush, because the Jessica one was a tad softer so therefore not quite as easy to work with, but I really am splitting hairs (LOL) here.
Out of the two, it was the Nails Inc I chose to put on afterwards, it's a Malteser brown, and somehow for a darker colour it seems quite work appropriate, which is good. Unless of course, you do what I did and put nail art all over it haha. It didn't exactly work, but I liked the colour scheme:
The Jessica has 14.8ml in and the Nails Inc has 10ml in. Nails Inc polishes cost £11 and Jessica Polishes cost around a tenner, but I have seen both cheaper on Ebay. So mil for mil the Jessica is probably better value, but if you're willing to spend more than £10 on a polish that doesn't really matter so much to you.
So there you go! Formulation and application are both pretty much the same so it just comes down to the tint you like the best. Hopefully this will prove helpful to someone!
Until next time.....
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
Hiya again!
Today has been a day of excesses for me. I stayed in bed too late, went shopping and spent too much, came home and ate too much junk food, and didn't get any housework done. Slapped hands.
Well, never mind, on the positive side, I've FINALLY bought myself a pair of work shoes that actually fit me, rather than struggling on with the ones I bought before Christmas that are way too narrow, and making my toes swell up. I just didn't want to think I'd wasted my money as they cost me £40, but I've finally admitted defeat and thrown them in the bin.
Also, it's impossible for me not to buy polish at the moment, as spring is coming and all the pretty pastels are in the shops. I adore pastels, and I bought 3 from Marks & Spencer which I'll swatch for you another day, they're so pretty in the bottle I hope they don't let me down. I've also ordered Essie's Borrowed and Blue, as it looks like the perfect powder blue I've been looking for, fingers crossed!
Anyway, on to business. Recently A-England had a fab sale where all their polishes were reduced to £6 each. Two of them I bought straight away, Princess Tears and Princess Sabra, and three, Tristram, Dragon and Lady of the Lake I ordered later. Princess Tears and Princess Sabra were delivered on Friday, so I swatched Princess Sabra yesterday.
A-England have a lovely way of creating a background story for all their polishes, Princess Sabra's story on the website is "The heart-stoppingly beautiful daughter of the king, whose misfortune it was to have her name drawn as the next sacrificial victim of the dragon". The founder of A-England, Adina, has based the colour of this polish on the eyes of her cat, Tristam. She describes it thus: Alluringly feline golden olive bronzite, the sacrificial Princess constantly shifts with her elusive, myriad hues.
So let's get on with the swatches. Here's how it looks out in the garden. Yesterday was cloudy and overcast:
It looks to me like a greenish toned antique gold. This is two coats over basecoat with no topcoat. The formula was nice, and has seemed pretty consistent across all the A-Englands I've tried so far. Dry time was medium/fast.
There is some scattered holo in this, but don't buy it expecting a holo fest, or you'll be disappointed. However the best thing about it was that it's kind of metallic, and no brush strokes! I hate brush strokes, I think it completely ruins any look of sophistication a polish might have.
It doesn't completely do my skintone justice at the moment, but I think in the summer when I get a bit of colour it will be perfect. Here's another outdoor pic:
Try as I might, I couldn't really get the holo to show in my pics. Here's the nearest I got, you can kind of see it up near my cuticles:
To jazz it up a bit I used some small circle stickers to mask off an area of my nail, then stamped using the snakeskin effect on Bundle Monster plate BM-215, and an Elf polish called Chocolate, along with NYC polish Canal Street blobbed randomly. As it was I needn't have bothered doing that as the mottled effect I had planned didn't really show, but hey-ho it was worth experimenting because you never know:
In my impatience I smudged my index (pointer) finger with my SV topcoat, but it's not too noticeable, so I didn't bother to re-do. Here's a final pic, taken under the kitchen lights. Again, the holo allllmost comes out to play:
All in all, I like this polish. I don't own anything like it, and I think it's going to make a versatile neutral-ish base for a lot of looks. I can also see this coming out alot around Christmas time (I know it's a long way away, but planning ahead), and already I'm wondering what it might look like with Nubar Black Polka Dot over it, also safari/animal prints... and so on.....
It's available with free international shipping for £9 on the A-England Website HERE.
What do you think? Are you a fan of gold toned colours? I am, even though they don't do me any justice haha, I keep at them!
Until next time...
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
Hi there everyone,
Back to normal with a proper weekend, YAY! Also my car is booked into the garage on Tuesday to hopefully get mended, so it's all looking up!
Today I'm reviewing a nail polish that I wouldn't usually pick up. I'm not really one for dark polishes, and I only have owned one NYC polish up to now, and that one I wasn't really keen on, but this one caught my eye as I was on my internet 'looking for browns' spree. As it happens, when it came, it turned out to only be brown in certain lights, but that doesn't matter because I love it!
Feast your eyes on this beauty:
Gorgeous, right? I took so many pictures of this, but as it's so overcast now when I get home from work, it's hard to get a good shot. Here's one I took in the garden:
The bottle colour in this shot is very representative of the 'actual' real life colour, kind of a rich burgundy wine colour with lots of copper shimmer going though it. These pictures are two coats, with no topcoat.
The formula is an absolute dream, first coat no VNL, and you could probably get away with one careful coat, but I did two, and it pretty much covered the ridges on my nails and gave a great finish. It seemed quite thin, but managed to be opaque, a win-win.
Dry time, about two minutes for the first coat, five minutes for two coats to get touch dry, and fifteen to 20 minutes to get completely hard, thats pretty good going. I would say, yes, fast drying.
Here's a close up of the beauteousness of the polish in the bottle under the craft light:
No photoshop here, I just put it on a jiffy bag and took the pic, and this is what I got, lovely! I love my camera, I do
Speaking of which, showing you this perfect autum nail colour, it reminds me, I went for a walk last weekend and I took some nice pictures, I thought I'd share some with you
I thought this one came out nicely, the way the light is catching the leaves:
And this one, which made me a bit hungry on my walk!
And I don't know what this plant is, but it's pretty:
Anyway, I digress big time, back to the polish! Here's the brush shot. The brush was a flat style brush, not too wide and was quite firm. It worked well with the formulation of the polish, no blobbing:
So anyway, as you might be able to tell, I really like this polish. And do you want to know the most amazing, jaw dropping, supercalafragislisticexpialadocious thing about it?
YOU CAN GET IT RIGHT NOW ON THE SUPERDRUG WEBSITE FOR £1.79 WITH FREE SHIPPING !!!!
Hurry though, you've got (I think) until the 24th October to take advantage of the free shipping, after that they charge £3.00, but even then it's not so bad. Or of course you could always do it the old fashioned way and actually go to the shop using your body...
If I'd paid £10 for this I would be perfectly happy with it, and not feel hard done by, but to get it at this price is an absolute steal - BUY BUY BUY!!!
Until next time, when I might have calmed down a bit.....
MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~
.jpg "Jessica Guilty Pleasures vs nails inc ganton street")
