Run To Home Base Fundraiser Raffle

This post is more of a personal nature, but I think it'll be of particular interest to my fellow polish lovers...

My friend Christine is running in the Run To Home Base 9K race. It's not just a race, it's a fundraiser for the Massachusetts General Hospital in order to provide clinical treatment to veterans with combat stress and traumatic brain injuries and also to provide assistance and support to their families.

So far, she's raised just under half of her $1,000 donation goal, and now I'm asking for a little of your help.

What's in it for you, you ask? Besides the warmth and satisfaction of knowing you've done something to help your fellow man? How about a chance to win a bottle of the discontinued and coveted holographic beauty, China Glaze Kaleidoscope Him Out?

China Glaze Kaleidoscope Him Out was part of the epic Kaleidoscope collection of hologram polishes that China Glaze released a few years back. All the shades are now discontinued and getting rather hard to find. This particular shade is a soft silvered blue with a strong chunky hologram effect. Pardon the ancient picture, but I haven't had enough natural light to take a new one.

And how about something to keep that Kaleidoscope Him Out company? Something like...

A bottle of Scrangie by Rescue Beauty Lounge, signed by me? You will be the only person on the planet with a signed bottle! Like the China Glaze polish, this shade is also sold out and becoming hard to find.



HOW TO ENTER:

1. For $2, you get one raffle entry. $4 for two entries, $6 for 3 entries, and so on.

2. To donate your $2 (or whichever amount you choose to donate) and enter the raffle, visit http://www.runtohomebase.org/runtohomebase/ChristineBatchelder and click "Make A Donation."

3. After you've made a donation to Run To Home Base, send an email to redsoxrun@gmail.com
that includes "kaleidoscope" in the subject line along with the name you donated under. Christine will keep a tally and assign you a number for each ticket/raffle entry based on the amount donated.

4. All donations must be in by 11:59pm, May 12th 2011 and a winner will be drawn at random on May 13th. The winner will receive one bottle of China Glaze Kaleidoscope Him Out and one signed bottle of Rescue Beauty Lounge Scrangie.

This raffle is open to everyone!

For more information on the Home Base program, please visit http://www.runtohomebase.org/

Thanks, everyone :)

Givenchy Limited Edition Vernis Please! 159 Dandy Moiré

Recently I felt the urge to wear something I haven't worn in a long time... And while digging through my stash, this one caught my eye. Givenchy Dandy Moiré. It was originally released in 2008 and I haven't worn it since then.




Givenchy Vernis Please! 159 Dandy Moiré. This shade is a dark midnight blue with green, glue, yellow, red and silver iridescent shimmer. Click on the flash pictures and look in the bottle. The shimmer particles look holographic, but when you look closely, they don't seem to shift colors, they are actually all different colors. The bottle also shows a bit of green duochrome around the edges, but it doesn't show up on the nail. This polish looks incredible in the bottle, but on the nail it's really bland. It looks great with flash and in really bright sunlight, but in normal daylight and indoors, it just looks black despite all that gorgeous colorful shimmer. The shimmer in the bottle is unbelievable, I just wish it sparkled as much on the nail.

That might be why I haven't worn it since 2008. That, or because the bottle is FREAKIN' TINY, (.18fl oz!) so I was subconsciously trying to conserve.

The formula isn't that great, either. It's incredibly thick and it doesn't flow nicely on the nail. The brush is hard to maneuver and the drying time is rather long. It's not because it's a few years old, it's been like this since the day I bought it. Another weird formula quirk is that it doesn't seem very shiny with topcoat. With a polish that costs $80 an ounce, you'd think the formula would be nicer!

The polish looks unbelievably gorgeous in the bottle, and the bottle itself is pretty cool as well... It just doesn't look blue and rainbow-sparkly on the nail. Maybe it's better that way, because if it did look the same on the nail as it did in the bottle, I'd be tempted to wear it all the time and I only have .18 oz of it!

It was fun to wear this for a couple days, but now it's going back in its box (the Vernis Please! box has polka dots on the inside!) until I feel like wearing it again three years from now.

MAC Bad Fairy Nail Polish

I never got a chance to review this while it was still relevant. It sold out before it was even released! I ordered online and by the time the collection was fully added to the website, it was long gone. I hate that about MAC. There's such a rush for the limited edition items that they're usually sold out before we can order them :(

Nevertheless, it's still gorgeous so it's worth posting:

MAC Bad Fairy nail lacquer (Venomous Villains collection)

It has a sparkly glass-fleck finish (think Orly Cosmic FX) and it reflects coral, gold, burgundy magenta and a little bit of green. It's not a match anything I have in my collection; it's a little similar in theme to OPI The Show Must Go On but definitely not a duplicate.

Cover Girl IceSlicks Anti-Freeze Layered

Now that the Rescue Beauty Lounge spring collection is posted, I can post this! I'm sure it's some sort of crime to layer an old, cheap, chemical filled drugstore glitter over an $18 polish, but that's how I roll.


This is two coats of Cover Girl IceSlicks in Anti-Freeze over one coat of Rescue Beauty Lounge Iconoclast. Feel free to enlarge those. There's this incredibly gorgeous blue glitter in there that you just have to see. Eat your heart out, Starry Starry Night! This is what a real galaxy of stars looks like.

The Cover Girl polish is a sheer blue-green base with some very fine gold-green microglitter and some larger pure blue glitter. It looks fine alone, but when you layer it over something dark, the blue glitter pops out and looks incredible.

It does have the curse of the old-formula polish, though. It doesn't get along well with new-formula (3-free) polishes or treatments and can take an extremely long time to dry fully. It took two whole days for this to dry completely. I didn't use the right topcoat. I should have used Seche Vite but I didn't have it with me. The manicure was set and hard on the top, but the bottom layer was still wet enough that I could put marks on it if I pressed hard enough. Even in spite of this, I still love my old formula polishes. They just don't make colors like this anymore. I haven't seen a polish like this come out at all in the past few years- can you not get this shade of blue glitter anymore? Does it have something to do with the formula change?

One of these days I'm going to swatch more of my old polishes. There used to be so many great colors available at the drugstore... I think we're starting to see a return to less-conservative shades in the mainstream market now, which is awesome. But still, where are my duochromes?! No one has filled the hole that the discontinuation of Nail Prisms has left in my heart...

Swatching My China Glaze Collection, Part Two

Ready for more? I'll pick up where I left off alphabetically. I still don't know how to organize the rest of the swatches once I finish them. I probably won't be able to get sunlight swatches like these again until spring, so I might have to put the project on hold for a couple months. I want them all to match!

Lady Sings The Hues. Another neat duochrome in the 'hue' series.


Liquid Leather.


Mer-Made In The Shade. Extremely sheer, this is five coats.


Modern Elegance.


Mr. And Mrs, Mr. And Mrs. over black. Very sheer. Cool duochrome, though.




No Name Yet. (That is actually the name of this polish.)


Orchid Shadow.


Patent Leather.


Pink Underground.




Pin Prick. (Backstory: I only bought this because it was listed as "Pink Prick" on TransDesign's website, and while I was disappointed that the name is actually Pin Prick, the color is completely awesome.)


Pla-Toes.




Primavera.




Princess Grace.


Pure Torture.




Purple Rain. (Note: It's not purple.)



Reggae To Riches. SO COOL OMG



Revolution.



Royal Tease.



Secrect Peri-Wink-Le. (It is actually spelled S-E-C-R-E-C-T on the label, I didn't typo that.)




Secrets. The secret is that it's frosty!



Sex On The Beach.


Sophistication.


Still more to come!

NARS: Old Zulu versus New Zulu

You know... I don't know if I've ever reviewed Zulu all by itself! I suppose that will have to wait until I'm done with this post!

As you all may know by now, NARS has listened to all of us begging them to bring back the beloved green polish and has re-released Zulu along with a few others that were discontinued around the same time (like Mash and Midnight Express).

My first thought when I heard that was "WOOHOO!", but my second thought was "Oh no, I hope it's still the same."

So, I grabbed my original bottle of Zulu and compared:

With flash
Left: Original Zulu, three coats
Right: New Zulu, three coats


Different angle. You can see a bit of a difference in the bottle color.



Left: New Zulu
Right: Old Zulu

Flash shows a slight shade difference.
Left: New Zulu
Right: Old Zulu

The question is, "are they different?" Yes and no. For one, the new version has received a formula update and is more opaque and less streaky than the original. But, color-wise, I detect a small deviation from the original color. It's most apparent on the first coat, but the original is a more saturated color and has a touch more blue. You can see in the bottles that the original looks slightly richer and more jelly-like. The new one isn't quite as jelly-like or as rich of a green.

Is it totally different? No. They're nearly spot on with only minor differences. And, unless you're like me and can see the difference between nail polishes that seem identical to 'normal' people, you probably won't even notice a difference. Especially not at three coats.

And just for fun, here's a really old picture of me wearing the original Zulu, two coats I believe:

You can really see the rich green base color here. At three coats it's near-black, which I love, but at two it's quite green. And yes, a bit streaky, but if you're careful and don't rush (like me, I rush, patience? What's that?) you can get a smooth even coat each time.


Very happy to see one of my favorite colors of all time return. I know everyone's been looking forward to this, myself included. And it still amazes me how almost no company has been able to duplicate this color. I've seen two that are close, but one is already discontinued and very hard to find. I supposed that's irrelevant now that it's actually back!

(The new Zulu was sent to me for review.)

More Aromaleigh Swatches

I think these are the last swatches I'll be able to do before Aromaleigh closes for good (which is in about two days), so if you're thinking of ordering I hope these will help!

So sad.

Anyway. Here's Bette Noire (Bête Noire). Cool name. Even better shades.

Sabine, Solange, Viviane, Jolie, Lisette.


Colette, Mirielle, Bette, Chantal, Ambre, Aurelie, Darcelle, Amarante.

And some random Elemental Lustres and a random Gothic Lolita:


Flash, Blast, Psyche, Teddy Wisp.

Don't forget to click the images to enlarge and view more detail. Lots of cool blue, purple, copper, gold and pink sparkles in these.

I'm also currently working on these:

So stay tuned for that :D