2True Fast Dry Polish Shade 11 Swatches

Hi again!

Hope you're well today.

Here we have a surprise buy for me, a super-cheap £1.99 nude polish!  Now I'm not a big fan of nude polishes, despite loving my pastels, but this one caught my eye because I'm looking for an antique cream for a nail art look I've got in my head. 

I thought this might be the one I'm looking for. Unfortunately it wasn't, (not cream coloured enough) but I like it all the same:

It was streaky in one coat, and opaque in two, which is what's shown here.  The formula was a tiny bit runny, but nothing too awkward, and perhaps half a shade darker once on and dry than in the bottle.  It reminded me very much of the 'camel coats' we all used to wear, way back when...

It also reminded me very much of a bottle of concealer, and once I'd got that in my head I felt weird painting it on my nails haha!  Here's another pic:

And finally, here's a pic of the brush, partly because there's a flash on the packaging that says 'new flat brush' so I thought you might like to see it, and partly because I always want to show brushes on my polish review posts.  I'll include front view & side view to show that it is, indeed, flat:

And actually, the brush was the only thing that slightly let this polish down, the shape was actually fine, I did my little finger in more or less one stroke and pressed flat it went into a more slightly rounded shape, but it was just that little bit too stiff bristled to be perfect.  However, bear in mind I'm comparing it with Nails Inc and Jessica polishes that cost more than a tenner each.  No complaints on glossiness or coverage though!



Also not only are they £1.99 each, they're 3 for £5 in Superdrug, which is where I got mine, so they really are a bargain!  Thoroughly recommended.

Until next time...

MASPOOASE   X X X

~Wendy~

Seche Vite - is it worth it?

This is something I've been asked a few times on Twitter, and I always seem to take about 7 tweets to say everything I want to about it, so tonight I decided it would be much better to actually write a post about it.

Firstly, I took two pictures of the products I have, on different colour bases.  I couldn't decide which picture worked best, so I'm putting them both up.  Here's the first:

I bought the tiny bottle first to test it out, and then I went on to buy the regular sized bottle.  I now keep the small bottle in my nail art box, so if I forget to bring the big bottle out, I don't mess up my nails rooting through my top coats to find it.

The benefits to it:

1) It does dry super duper fast

2) It is exceptionally shiny

3) It is hardwearing

4) It doesn't smudge nail art

...All you could want from a topcoat, right?  But there are drawbacks.....

1) Seche goes gloopy pretty flippin quickly
If it does go gloopy, the fast dry benefits are lost, and then it dries on the surface and stays wet underneath, which makes it easy to dent

2) It smells REALLY strong, strong enough to give you a headache if you use if for too long

3) As it's drying it shrinks away from the tips of my nails, which means my tips wear faster than usual.  If I wrap the edges I've found it shrinks down from my cuticles, which makes my manicure look like it's prematurely growing out

4) When you get down to the last quarter of the bottle, you have to tip it sideways to get a decent coverage of polish on the brush, as it doesn't quite reach down far enough

So it's not all good.

Doing research to combat the gloopiness I discovered that Seche doesn't agree with regular thinner (I usually use the Mavala one), so I had to buy a bottle of Seche Restore.  It's a bit trial and error of how much to use, I like the addition of the pipette in the box, which makes it easier. I've been adding five drops, having a bit of a shake and checking it.  Apparently though if you add too much all you have to do is leave the lid off and keep checking it until it's evaporated a bit.

I bought all of mine off Amazon (I do alot of shopping there):
Regular Seche Vite £6.79
Seche Restore £10.95
Both with free delivery

I couldn't find the tiny bottle any more, perhaps they've stopped selling it, I have had it for a while.

Here's the other picture I took:

The clarity isn't as good in this picture, but the all white background looks cleaner, this is why I couldn't decide!  Which picture do you prefer?

So to sum up, even though Seche has it's drawbacks, I still always use it for over my nail art, as it's the only one I've found so far that doesn't drag my designs, but if I'm just painting over a plain manicure, especially one I'm planning to keep on for a few days, I'll use a different topcoat that doesn't have the shrinking issues.  I'm not sure you'd be able to use up your full bottle of Seche Vite without also having a bottle of Seche Restore.

I hope this has helped anyone who's considering it, it's always best to know in advance the pro's and con's before you let go of your hard earned cash!

Until next time....

MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~

Revlon Top Speed 606 Stormy review and swatches

Hi everyone, sorry for making you wait until after the weekend for my regular post...

My blogging routine is all over the place, I had to work pretty much ALL DAY on Saturday, and then dash to the shops, by the time I got home it was late, and there's just no light left in the evenings now to take my pretty photos with, bah.   Sunday gets written off with visiting relatives each week, I took some polish to see if I could do some swatches, but I wasn't able to.

So, I've ordered a cheapie lighting photo set up thing from Amazon, hopefully that will mean I can do swatches in the evening and still get half decent colour accurate pictures, that way I'm not just stuck with blogging at weekends, I'll review it anyway when it comes, so you can see if it's worth getting or not.

But... it's not the weekend now, I hear you say?  Well, I've tried to be a bit cunning.  I painted my nails last night, took the photos in my car on my lunch break, and now I'm doing the post in the evening, so it's taken 24 hours to get to the point where I can actually write my post, and I have no idea yet if my photos will be any good.  If not I'll just have to do my best with the kitchen lighting.. sigh...

Anyway, let's get on with the swatches and review!

I bought this polish in store from Superdrug and paid £6.49 but I've looked and they don't have it on their website.  However I've seen it much cheaper than that when I just looked on Amazon, LINK here - isn't it always they way?

OK then, I've just looked at the photos I took today and they're awful, sigh....  off I go to try and take some half decent ones in indoor lighting, wish me luck!

Here's the first one:

The colour is warmer than it's showing here, think a taupe-y grey rather than just a flat grey.  As you can see I added some nail gems, I absolutely love the look of them against this polish, they remind me of drops of honey.  They're actually faceted, but I used so much top coat to try and keep them on that they've become cabouchons lol!  The topcoat I used was Sally Hansen Insta-dry, which is another polish I'm not so keen on, but it needs to be used up, which is why I used it.  I actually got alot of bubbling in my topcoat, which is why all my day time photos looked so awful but actually in real life they're not so noticeable.  You can see them around the gems in this next pic though:

However, with using so much topcoat, it's been 24 hours, I've washed my hair, peeled the potatoes, been typing all day, and I still have all my gems, and no chipping on my nails, so it has its benefits.

On to the review.  I love the colour, but I hate the formula!  It managed to be runny, patchy, floody and bumpy, worse on the first coat, and with another coat and a bit of clean up it was a half decent finish, but not as good as I would have liked.  The fact that I even bothered with a clean up and didn't just take it off is a testament to how much I like this colour, the photos really don't do it justice, so frustrating!  Dry time was medium to fast.

So here's a picture of the brush sitting on top of my glamorous (lol) pine tea caddy, it was a little bit too soft for my liking, and added to the application issues:

And finally, for completeness, here's a picture of the gems I bought.  I bought them from Amazon UK HERE is the link, I didn't have any problems with the speed of shipping etc, and they were less than a fiver, bargain! :

So, to sum up, if the formulation were better on this polish, I would wear it all the time!  Such a shame, but I will still struggle on with it, because when I'm wearing it, and I look at my nails, it makes me smile. 

And after all, that's rather the point, isn't it?

Until next time....

MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~

Estee Lauder Pure Colour - Smashed - Review & Swatches

Hi again!

I was in Boots today looking for a lipgloss, and I got talking to the Estee Lauder woman.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw some random blingy-ness, which turned out to be a range of their polishes I hadn't seen before.  This one caught my eye:

Well, I had a base coat already on my nails (I always go shopping with base coat on in case I want to try some), so I tried a few out.  They weren't all as brill as I thought they would be.  These are all just one coat:

The purple on my thumb I especially didn't like, it managed somehow to give me pink-finger when it wasn't even a red!  But the purple that had caught my eye in the first place still had potential, so I bought it.  It cost me £14.50:

It's worth bearing this very pretty packaging in mind, as it means it would make a brill xmas present which would be very easy to wrap indeed!

So lets get on to the swatches, I took quite a few pictures.  These are all 2 coats with no top coat.  I wish I'd done one more coat really.  Formulation was quite thin and workable and highly pigmented.  I found the brush ever so slightly too bendy.  It's a little bit self deleting if you go over the same spot too many times.

First one's at the window:

Next we have under the craft (l.e.d.) lighting:

Next we have under the kitchen lights:

And then, the obligatory bottle shot, which I took while I was in the window:

I'm starting to wonder if I should put a watermark on my pictures, what do you think, is picture theft a big problem these days?  Anyway, I digress.....

All in all, I loved this, the pink microglitter showed up even in low light, and under most lighting it looked like a blackberry colour foil.  I don't own anything like this, and although I don't wear dark colours alot I think this will be this winters party colour for me!  What do you think of it?

Until next time...

MASPOOASE x x x
~Wendy~

Russian Doll Manicure

Hello again!

Well, despite telling myself that I wouldn't make my blog a nail blog, it seems a disproportionate amount of my posts involve manicures, well it is my current love, so I forgive myself!  I've been planning a manicure this week which I'm calling "a reflection of me".  Like all of us I think of myself as an onion (or a Kinder Egg), lots of layers, and each of those layers are significant and different. 

I had the terrible feeling that this weeks manicure was going to go the same way as last weeks, which was a total fail, but after an hour or 3 of experimenting (dotting, striping, acrylic paints etc etc) I finally got a result I'm pleased with!  I've called it a russian doll manicure as it's a colour inside a colour, inside a colour.  Heres what I ended up with:

The polishes I used were (from cuticle to tip)

Base coat: Sally Hansen Miracle Cure

Pink: Nails Inc Bruton Street

Dark Red: Leighton Denny Saturn Seduction

Black: L'Oreal Color Riche Black Swan

White: OPI Alpine Snow

Pink: again Bruton Street

I love the fact that it looks like an elongated bullseye, and its much more punchy in real life.  Have had to post a day early this week as I'm off down home this weekend, am super excited to be spending the whole weekend with my family and besties, should be lots of music, dancing and feasting!

Hope you have a fab weekend, please feel free to comment, and see you soon!

Take care

MASPOOASE X X X

Nails - Getting Even

Hello again!

I hope you have all been well this week, the weather has finally calmed down here over the weekend.  It wasn't my intention to blog about nails this week, but as you can see from the pictures below they were starting to get a bit out of control and scraggy looking.  Also I have some dark polishes I want to try and personally I prefer dark polishes on short nails.


  









So then, time for a cut! Not using those scissors obviously, I have some small nail scissors and a file.  I like the Leighton Denny crystal file because it files down my nails quite quickly, I can file in both directions, and I can rinse it under the tap when I've finished using it:

Yes, somehow I managed to get nail polish on my scissors at some point, no idea what I was doing to manage that...

Anyway! I'm not very good at judging where to make the first cut in my nails to get them all even, so I had to devise another way to do it - I decided french tip nail guides would be a good idea!  I don't know if alot of people do this, or if no-one does it, but it works for me so I thought I'd share.  Simple really, just place the french tip on your nail so that you have covered the amount of nail you want to keep - like so:

I then use the small scissors to cut close to (not not right next to) the guide, and file the last little bit.  This is because sometimes when I cut my nails the top layer of nail peels back and I end up having to cut a bit shorter than I want. 

Also if you hold your nail up to the light and look from behind, it helps to get the tip on straight, you can judge it against the curve of your finger like so, and keep repositioning until you find the length you're happy with:

So there we go, repeat this process for each nail, and you're done!  This is what I ended up with:

Much neater and nicer than the nails in the 'before' shot, and all ready for a nice coat of dark colour...   ooooh, which to pick!

I hope this helps you if you have trouble getting your nails an even length like I did before I thought of this.  If you have a different way to do it I'd love to hear about it!

Until next time, take care and have fun,

- MASPOOASE X