Miss Sporty - Dr Balm - Gossip Kiss 03

I picked this up in Boots today to try, it's a lightly tinted watermelon flavoured lip balm.  It looks similar to a lot of the translucent bullet style balms and treatments that are being talked about at the moment, Maybelline Color Sensational Pop Sticks being one of them, so I decided to give this budget (£1.99) version a go and see if I could rid myself of the need for a more expensive version.

It is quite highly scented but it's a pleasant enough, fruity, sweet smell so I quite like it.  On the lips it leaves a very subtle hint of colour which is nice but not very obvious.  It seems moisturising enough although not fantastically so, I would definitely stick to my trusty Carmex or Blistex for proper dry lip days.  All in all for only £1.99 it's a nice little tinted lip balm, but I'm not sure it's nice enough to bother trying the other colours in the range.

This is 03 - Gossip Kiss, there were two other lighter colours in Boots today and I think there might be another couple in the range although I haven't seen them in person yet.

China Glaze - Full Spectrum

Today I am wearing China Glaze Full Spectrum, it came as a free gift with an order I placed recently and although I probably wouldn't have chosen it myself it's really nice.

It's a pale lilac polish packed full of rainbow, multi coloured glitter.  This is three coats but it was pretty much opaque in two.

It has some lovely colour shifting properties and both the base polish and the glitters seem to change colour depending on the light.

 It also has the added benefit of being really smooth for a glitter polish.

 

Marks and Spencer - Lip and Cheek Tint

I picked up these two lip & cheek tints when I was in M&S the other day.  I've developed a mild addiction to cream blushers of late and these looked like rather pretty colours with an almost gel like consistancy, so for £4 each I couldn't pass them up.

The names make no sense, the darker is called coral when it's more of a berry and the coral one is called peach when really it's more coral but aside from the odd naming I am pretty pleased with these.  They give a soft glowy flush when applied and a dewy sort of finish.

Although they aren't particularly long lasting they do leave a nice subtle glow to the cheeks and seem ideal for every day wear.  Over all for £4 I can't fault them, I plan on wearing them on days when I want a lighter more natural look to my cheeks.

They are only avaliable in two colurs, a soft berry red type shade and a paler peachy coral tone.

L'Oreal Rouge Caresse Lipstick - Aphrodite Scarlet & Dating Coral

After falling for the Revlon Lip Butters recently, which I blogged about here and here, I decided to try a couple of the new L'Oreal Rouge Caresse Lipsticks too as they have been described as a similar sort of product.  Superdrug had a Buy 1 Get 1 Half Price deal on so I picked up Aphrodite Scarlet and Dating Coral to try.

The packaging is great, sturdy and easy to handle and with the added bonus of having colour coordinated packaging based on the shades, I hate lipsticks which all look the same until you take the lid off.

Aphrodite Scarlet is a pinky red and Dating Coral is, as you would expect, a soft coral shade. Here are a couple of quick swatches on my arm to show the colours.

Unfortunately I've not had a chance to properly try these out yet as I am sporting a massive cold sore at present but I can't wait to give them a proper test drive as soon as it's healed up.

Hundreds & Thousands of fish eggs

Here is my attempt at a manicure using fish eggs / nail art beads.  I quite like how it looks, although it's definitely more Hundreds & Thousands than fish eggs due to the colours

I found this manicure really simple to do, just paint a layer of polish on and then press on some of the little beads I bought from eBay - details in this post

Then wait for the beads to dry and you're all done.

Which is fine, until you try and do anything, the minute I moved around or used my hands at all the little beads started to escape.

Which is a shame becasue while they lasted they were really quite cute and unusual!

I'd definitely consider doing this type of manicure again for a night out or a special event, although I'd be prepared for losing balls everywhere over the course of the night.

But unfortunately for every day wear, where you might want to do things like wash your hands, it just wasn't practical.

Particularly for someone who is as picky as I am, an hour of watching TV and I had pretty much removed 50% of the beads without even trying to, another 5 minutes of trying and they were all gone.  Which left my nails looking like this:

So, a cute idea and something I would consider doing for a party maybe but just not wearable for me on a practical level.

Kiko 332

I chose this Kiko nail varnish (332) to wear at the weekend as it matched the little flower detail on a playsuit I was wearing.

Why I'll never buy Ciate Caviar Kits.

Ciate have recently launched their Caviar Manicure sets, I mentioned them here, they retail at £18 for a bottle of polish and a bottle of the beads.  In my previous post I wrote that I had bought some of the little fish egg style beads on eBay and was going to try out the manicure for myself for a fraction of the cost of Ciate's kit.

While researching other similar manicures I came across this post on Pretty Digits blog, Ciate have been in touch with a number of bloggers to tell them not to use the term 'Caviar Manicure' or 'Caviar Nails' as it's in the process of being trademarked.  Nice move Ciate, now you not only look like you're massively overcharging your customers for a product which is readily avaliable elswehere to anyone who bothers to look you're also keen to build up a load of bad publicity by contacting any blogger who uses a term you don't even have copyright for yet? 

Even if you ignore the fact that these types of manicures have been about for a while before Ciate's kit came on the market it just doesn't seem to make sense to contact bloggers, surely it's obvious it's only going to generate negative publicity for the company?

So, in short, rather than be ripped off by a company who are not very nice to bloggers - who are also their customers - I'll stick with my cheapo eBay alternative for a fraction of the cost. For anyone considering trying this look I would urge you not to give Ciate your hard earned cash, just use a bottle of your regular polish and some beads from eBay, I got mine here.  They arrived fast, well packaged and in a great selection of colours, for £1.20.

Neon Prints

I decided to add a quick Bundle Monster stamp over the top of my neon nails so I could wear it for another day before changing colours. 

It's not the most subtle nail design ever but I quite like it.

Neon Nails!

I decided to give a gradient manicure a shot, so after painting my nails with white nail polish to provide a base I used a make up sponge to add different shades of neon polish from  collection of Primark nail polish that I bought recently.

 I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out:

The gradient isn't quite as seamless as I would have liked but I think the general effect is pretty good and I'll definitely be trying it with other colours in the future:

I'm also looking forward to trying these polishes on their own as they are very bright and have a lovely glittery shimmer through them.  I think they definitely benefit from the white base layer to make them show up better.

The one downside of this sort of manicure?  The length of time it took me to get the polish off my fingers and cuticles after the sponging, it was a pretty long job!

Mia Secret Nail Tints

I first became aware of these Mia Secret nail tints when a photograph of them being worn popped up on Google, which led me to this blog - Another bottle of polish!?

After seeing the effects created with them I decided I had to try and hunt them down. I eventually found them for sale on City Nails Supplies so I decided to order one of each to try them out. My order arrived pretty quickly considering it was coming from America and was really well wrapped, so I will definitely be using hem again for some US polish purchases.

The nail tints are made to be worn either alone to leave a light tint on your nail or can be used over polish to give your original polish colour different tints, that's how I am planning on using them, they look particularly good over silver glitter from what I can tell from online photos. Here are some quick bottle shots:

And a couple of swatches on my nails, over a pale gold shade:

I definitely think these will come into their own over patterned nails and different colours of varnish, as seen in the pictures on the blog I linked to above, alone they don't look very impressive but I am looking forward to trying them out as they obviously have a lot of potential.