Sea Siren Cosmetics–Yellow Submarine

Why hello there!

How are you all? Can you believe it? Another blog post from me. Aren’t you lucky? Turns out having full weekends off for the first time in a few years is agreeing with me! Plenty of things to do to keep myself busy, that’s for sure.

 

Sea Siren Cosmetics is a new Aussie indie who put the call out on their Facebook page for swatchers not long ago. It took me a while, but I jumped at the chance to review some pretties. When Deborah, the owner and creator of Sea Siren, asked me what kind of polishes I’d like to review, can you guess what I said? CREMES! GIVE ME CREMEEEEEEEES! When you ask most nail fanatics what their favourite polish finish is, they usually say holo, glitter, duochrome … it’s not often that you get someone who says creme. But ladies, that’s me! I love cremes. I love them so much that I never have any new ones to try because I always try them as soon as I buy them So I was chuffed when my Sea Siren parcel arrived.

 

Let’s take a moment to talk about Sea Siren’s branding and packaging. Anyone who knows me knows that these things are very important to me. Having a bit of a background in graphic design and pursuing this field more recently, good packaging leaps out at me. Similarly, poor packaging really turns me off. It can be a make or break for some.

Firstly, Sea Siren wrapped the polishes and other goodies so beautifully in blue tissue paper with her own branded labels on them. She included flyers with information about her products.

Take a look:

Sorry for the dodgy phone pic, but I was at work and there was no way I was waiting until I got home where my camera was to rip into these bad boys. But just look how pretty it all is! It was a shame to destroy such lovingly wrapped parcels.

 

Inside …

AHHH MY GOD! SO CUTE! These boxes are stunning! The bottom ones are the big ‘bubbles’, as Deb calls them. They are a huge 15mL. The top are the Wanderlust minis and they are an ADORABLE 5mLs. I posted them together so you could see the size difference. The itty bitty boxes are so adorable!

Deb sent me Tranquility (a pastel purple), Motion of the Ocean (pastel mint), Pamper Me Pink (pastel pink, duh) in the full size. The minis are Yellow Submarine (pastel yellow), Beachy Peachy (pastel peach) and Sea Mist (pastel blue). All delicious cremes

 

She also sent me something completely and utterly amazing.

MONT BLEU CRYSTAL FILES!!!!!!!!! I squealed when I saw these, I really did. It’s lucky I was by myself at work because I can imagine how silly I looked. She sent a hard cased one (the blue) which is GENIUS. I can keep it in my bag and not worry about it snapping and a gorgeous travel sized blue file with sparkly Swarovski crystals on it. Oh so beautiful. I had heard such good things about these files. I had only used cheap glass files in the past and was not impressed, but I’d heard these were different.

 

I was NOT disappointed. I used them for the first time this morning and holy moley they work a treat! They are so smooth and SHARP! They take off a decent amount of length but they are not harsh on the nail at all. Usually I HATE the feeling of my nails after I’ve filed them but I didn’t after using Sea Siren’s file I am completely in love. So completely in love. I think I need more of these products. Deb also stocks a cute little travel kit which has a travel sized Swarovski crystal file, a pair of nail scissors and some Swarovski encrusted tweezers all in a little case. LOVE!!

 

I’m going to stop babbling now and show you the first of the Sea Siren polishes I used. This is Yellow Submarine:

A beautiful, glossy pastel yellow creme which is actually quite bright! This was two easy coats. Usually yellows are a pain in the rear to apply but this one was fine! It actually flattered my skin tone really well and looked so fresh.

 

You can buy Sea Siren Cosmetics from the website and make sure you ‘like’ the Facebook page too!

 

Em

Cult Nails–Untamed with OPI Teenage Dream and Cult Nails–Time Traveller with China Glaze White Cap

I’ve been loving Cult Nails lately. The creator of Cult Nails, Maria, has done such a fantastic job at producing unique and wonderful colours.

I was feeling creative so I applied two coats of Cult Nails Untamed:

This is a gorgeous Barbie pink with a lovely micro-shimmer throughout. Two coats gave me great coverage and it wasn’t uneven or patchy at all.

 

I then blinged it up:

I lightly painted some OPI Teenage Dream on the tips in a gradient pattern and stuck rhinestones in a half moon design on my thumbs. I loved it! I felt so, so girly.

 

Next up is Time Traveller:

Such a lovely deep midnight blue creme. Unfortunately the formula was a tad thick and gloopy, but I get the feeling my bottle could have done with some thinner.

 

I couldn’t leave this alone so I added a few things:

With one coat of China Glaze White Cap a gorgeous gold shimmer top coat. Lovely! I stamped some stars from the Cheeky plates on in Konad Yellow.

 

What do you think? Are you as much of a Cultie as I am?

 

Em

essie–Nice is Nice Easter mani

I kind of did my Easter mani at the last minute (ie Easter Sunday morning). I wasn’t going to do one because generally I’m pretty damn lazy when it comes to doing holiday themed manis … but this was so easy I didn’t have much of an excuse not to do it!

 

Here it is:

This is two coats of essie Nice is Nice, a gorgeous pastel purple. Beautiful formula and such a lovely colour. The dots and zig zags are Ulta3 Lemon Tart from their Gelato collection. Horrid formula, as I’ve heard. The zig zags were way harder to do than they should have been!!!

 

Did you do an Easter themed mani?

Em

China Glaze–Starboard with Konad

This is the second mani I did while I had yucky ruond nails. I think there’s only one more after this, phew!

 

As you may have been able to tell, I’ve been on a real blue and green kick lately. I didn’t realise until I started catching up on my blog posts but I seriously need some colour variety I’m promising myself that my next mani will not be blue or green!

 

This is China Glaze Starboard, a pretty medium green creme:

Two coats, great formula. But I needed to do something to jazz it up a bit:

 

Wow, these look like total Aussie nails! I didn’t even realise until I looked at the photos how Aussie these were.

I quite like this Konad image. I think it would look awesome stamped with silver. It reminds me of barbed wire!

 

Have you done any accidental themed manis lately?
Em

NYC Color–Lemon

Alert, alert, problem polish ahead!!! This polish was a pain in the bum to apply and would not even out no matter what I did!
The colour was not good enough to make it worth the trouble!
What is the culprit?

NYC Color’s Lemon:

The photos flatter it, trust me. This was two thick, unmanageable coats. Blurgh. Never again! I’m wondering if this is the same polish as the Ulta3 in their new Gelato collection. I have that one too and it looks very much the same and all the reviews I’ve read say the formula is terrible.

 

I tried to jazz it up a bit but it was just a fail:

I freehanded some french tips with an unnamed Asian bright yellow glitter polish. Looks pretty revolting!

 

Oh well, I tried Have you had any disappointments lately?
Em

Water Marble nails using Ulta3 Spring Collection

Beware: Messy nails ahead.
I tried water marbling for the first time last weekend. While I have a lot of improvements to make, I am actually weirdly proud of what I did and can’t wait to try again.

I used some colours from the Ulta3 Spring Collection for this marble pattern:

I used Blue Marlin, Tahitian Lime, Tangelo and Frangipani.
I used room temperature tap water in a plastic cup and toothpicks to swirl the polish into patterns. I used scotch tape to tape around my nails to protect them.

Here is my left hand:

You can really tell this was the first hand I did. Note the thumb: this is a result of sticking the sticky tape too close to the nail and when I ripped it off, I wrinkled half the polish. I also felt like part of the design wasn’t dark enough, so I dipped it again. That’s what that ugly murky colour is. Note to self: Never double dip!
The pointer finger was poor placement on my part. It made me realise I needed to make better designs.
My middle finger got smudged while I pulled the tape off. Note to self: Pull the tape AWAY from your nail, not towards! And it’s much easier to cut the tape off rather than rip.
I love the design on my little fingernail. This was the kind of thing I wanted to achieve on all my fingers!

And here’s my right hand:

Love the thumb, although the blue is a little washed out. I’ll need to make sure I use more highly pigmented colours next time.
My pointer finger, again, was poor placement and not enough colours. My middle finger wasn’t great either.
The ding in my ring finger was because I didn’t let my white base coat dry enough and I smudged it while marbling my other hand. I had to paint over it and it dried funny Love the design, though!
And my little finger also got a ding in it because I was too sloppy pulling the tape off.

I learnt a few things while water marbling which should help so much in my next attempt:

• Make sure you let your base coat dry properly.
• Make sure you get your tape close enough to your cuticles/edges of your nail but not ON the nail
• Cut the tape off carefully to avoid smudging
• Use highly pigmented colours or it could look washed out

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed seeing my first attempt at water marbling. I promise the next attempts will be better!

Em

BYS Sunshine with Cheetah and Stripe Konad

This was another one of the polishes I chose when I won Cat’s Birthday Giveaway. This is BYS Sunshine:

 

This is two coats of Sunshine. Two painful coats of Sunshine. It was streaky and thick and I had a wonky brush so that made it harder.

A friend recommended this polish to me and said it was so bright and cheerful and made her happy.

Well, it’s bright, alright!

I could barely stand to look at it because I wasn’t used to wearing such a bright colour. And then something weird happened … it started to grow on me.

I really did not expect that to happen! But I still felt rather conspicuous so I stamped a new (to me) design on them:

 

Cute, right? Apart from the smudginess, I mean. This is stamped in the Konad Princess Special Nail Polish in Eggplant. I really like this colour because it’s dark enough to pass as brown for animal print.

 

I wore this for two full days without chips or tip wear. Go BYS! Continually proving themselves as a reliable and inexpensive nail polish brand . Buy BYS at Fashion Addict.

 

Em

BYS Matte Deep Purple with spotties!

This is one of my favourite BYS colours, Matte Deep Purple.

 

This is two coats with a coat of SV for shinies. It applies beautifully and is a gorgeous purple. Not sure I’d call it dark purple but more of a mid-purple.

 

And of course, I had to practice my Konad-ing!

This is the full nail polka dot design from my new large nail design plate from APM Express. I stamped it in the yellow Konad Princess Special Polish.

Not my best attempt, but not too bad! It’s a fun, bright mani anyway and will hopefully get me in the mood for summer!

What’s your favourite colour combo with polka dots? I have to say, anything with white dotties is my favourite, especially red base with white dots!

 

Em