Sally Hansen Bittersweet

 
(1 coat)

Creamy and surprisingly dusty.  I have never been disappointed in the formula of Complete Salon Manicure polishes.

Gloss 'n Sparkle Above Deck and Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure

Like a lot of other people, I tend to gravitate towards the same colours - for polish, it's purple, red and green. But for some reason, the real stunners in my collection that I often unexpectedly fall in love with are blues. Gloss 'n Sparkle Above Deck is the latest blue I've been blown away by. Two coats:

One of the non-glitterbombs in the Gloss 'n Sparkle range, this is a rich teal shimmer with tiny blue and holo glitter. On the nail, the holo glitter is largely tinted teal by the base, but the occasional holo sparkle comes out in the light. It's perfectly named - it really reminds me of the sparkling surface of a Mediterranean sea as seen from the deck of a boat. If you can't tell, I'm just a bit in love with this shade!

I had to fiddle around with it, of course, so I layered my new (after a long period of lemming) Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure, a red/green multichrome flakie on top:

I quite liked this combo - it looked like land masses in the ocean!

I have good news for non-Aussie Gloss 'n Sparkle fans - Shoppe Eclecticco now stock them, and ship worldwide! So you overseas girls can finally get your hands on some of these beauties :)

What unexpected polishes have you fallen in love with?

Sally Hansen: Big Money with some Hit Polish: Precious Metal

About the same time Piff received her goody bag of SH Nail Strips, I received some polishes from Sally Hansen. I actually already owned most of them, one of them being Big Money from the Gem Crush collection. It's my favorite of the collection because 1) didn't seem to have dupes out there and 2) who doesn't love a nudish glitter???

I loved it on my nails, it was subtle indoors but glittery in the light. It wasn't an out there color, but the purple glitter that was scattered within the polish added a little something that made it a bit more interesting. Two coats gave full coverage. It even caught my roommate's eye (I'm trying to convert her to glitter) and she loved it, too!

in sunlight

overcast

After a couple of days of Big Money by itself, I added a indie glitter on top, by Hit Polish named Precious Metal.

indirect sunlight (shade)

sunlight

Precious Metal is a very densely packed glitter, filled with various sized hex glitters in gold, copper and silver, along with smaller orange glitters. It was super pretty! I loved the application, too. I think I only needed 1 full coat and some dabbing to get as much glitter as shown in the picture. I have a lot of her other polishes so hopefully I'll get around to those soon enough!

layers abound! purple jelly sandwich

I always love the look of jelly sandwiches :) there's a pretty depth to them that you can't get with regular polish!

This pretty layering combo is:

Sally Hansen: Purple Pizzazz (2 coats) +
OPI: Servin’ Up Sparkle +
China Glaze Snow Globe +
Sally Hansen: Purple Pizzazz (1 coat) +
Clarins 230

I took all these pictures and then realized I was just capturing the beauty of Clarins 230, but you can see the layers beneath, too :)

Zoya & Sally Hansen: turquoise, white and gold

I'm not especially great at picking favorites at anything, from type of food or color or beverage... but I think in terms of color family, turquoise may be my favorite. But of course, that depends on my mood.

Zoya always has great promos and I pick up the lemmings I have every chance I can when there is a deal or two... and one of the colors I got a little bit ago was Zoya Wednesday. I looove the color, but I can't just have a creme by itself, which is obvious in my NOTDs, haha.

When Sally Hansen: White Veil was released, I knew I wanted it, but when I found it at Walgreen's, I couldn't buy it then :( So I had to pass it by. And then it was gone! Fast forward a few weeks later, I run into CVS for Red Bull (staple of any student's study diet) and I find one! I grab it, perfect, love it, mine!

I have my newer polishes in a rack near my computer desk (where I spend most of my time when I'm home) and I stared at it after putting on Wednesday and saw it. And decided to combine it, and it was so pretty! I love white and translucent white glitter.

sunlight

shade

So so pretty! No problem with the Zoya formula, if I recall correctly, about 2-3 coats and 2 coats of White Veil. :) Gold always goes well with turquoise and the translucent glitter adds a bit of depth.

What colors do you like White Veil over?

More magnetic - Sally Hansen Red-y Response

I so enjoyed my little foray into the magnetic trend with Nails Inc Trafalgar Square, that I couldn't resist picking up one of the new Sally Hansen magnetic polishes! I tried Red-y Response - a warm plum pink/purple.

I have to say it. These are total copies of the Nails Inc - the bottle is the same, the cap is the same...and well, the formula is very similar as well! The price is very different, so I'm definitely not complaining. Unlike another Nails Inc I've tried (which you will see soon), Trafalgar Square and this Sally Hansen are both extremely smooth polishes, and the magnet works beautifully on them to create a design.

I'm still quite enamored with this trend - and because of the great price on these Sally Hansen magnetic polishes, I'm considering picking up another colour! Perhaps a copper/brown to look like tiger's eye?

kittytokaren

THEME WEEK - My Favorite Nude :)

My collection of nude polishes is quite... sad. Even with all the polishes I have! I did purchase a lot recently from the recent Zoya Earth Day promo because I feel as if I would need some more work safe polishes as I will foray deeper into the world of lawyers... But I do have a favorite! I think I discovered it from someone's recommendation many many moons ago. It's Sally Hansen Complete Manicure in Cafe au Lait. It used to be more mannequin hand on me but I like it anyway! 

I love the shimmer in it, too. Keeps it interesting :D

And of course, I added glitter on top. Lynnderella polishes are so beautiful but need to be layered on top... I had tried a black lace sort of look with a nude polish and black glitter (LA Girls Uninhibited) before, so I wanted to try the white version this time :)

This is 2 coats of Lynnderella Love, Lace and Lilacs on top of Sally Hansen Cafe au Lait. So delicate and pretty :D

Every try nudes below a glitter without an opaque base? Try it!

Introduction, with stripey nails!

Hi Polish or Perish readers! I'm Lab Muffin, and I'm stoked join the PoP ladies. Some of you might know me already from my beauty science blog, Lab Muffin.

A few things about me:

- I'm currently doing a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry - this means I wear a sexy labcoat covered in dirty chemicals, and desperately avoid getting acetone on my hands. I'm working on ways of making new drugs... hopefully it'll be useful in the future!

- Things I love: most food, anagrams, efficient public transport, holo, TV comedies, bunnies, my boyfriend (also a synthetic organic chemist), candles, green glitter, Stephen Fry, dancing, tea, cheesy kung fu movies, octopuses, cryptic crosswords, stationery, bunnies, cheap IKEA stuff, nerdy webcomics, HTC phones, lists, bunnehs.

- Things I hate: inconsistently formatted references, tipwear, mouth ulcers, science-illiterate politicians, distracting Powerpoint backgrounds, trying to buy just one thing from IKEA, frosts, crappy tweezers, liquorice, hangnails, losing my lab goggles, soggy bread.

- I'm from Australia, so I'll be using some different polishes from the other ladies. I love nail art... I can't wear a polish on its own without stamping or freehanding over it within a day.

I love bold patterns, so for my inaugural mani, I decided on some freehand stripes!

Colours used: ulta3 Sizzling Red (red), NOPI City-Pretty Rose (pink), Sally Hansen Sun Kissed (orange), ulta3 Honolulu (yellow).

I'm really happy with this colour combination - it's so cheerful and summery! It's probably going to be my final summer mani since we're halfway through autumn here, but the sun seems to be holding out, so who knows!

Some lovin' - Sally Hansen Salon Effects - Love Letter

I don't often wear the Sally Hansen Salon Effects nail sticker things, but I always seem to enjoy it when I do. I saw this new pattern at the drugstore (on sale, mind you - these things are pricey) and picked it up. It's called Love Letter.

I wish they made more neutral patterns. When I choose to wear these I want them on for a while, and some of the crazy colour patterns just don't go with everything. Heck, they just don't go with my life. Maybe their target audience is younger though, so I might be way off base! But I do find that they wear incredibly well and I'm consistently impressed by this product! I got quite a few compliments on this pattern, although one girl seemed extremely disappointed that I hadn't drawn on the words by hand...

Have you tried any nail stickers lately?

kittytokaren

A lot of big "meh": some LA Girl Glitter Addict swatches

I really love LA Girl polishes. They are generally inexpensive (especially if you catch a good Cherry Culture deal) and awesome (even if a little slow to dry sometimes). So I was ecstatic when I heard about the Glitter Addict collection. Ordered the whole thing on impulse before I saw many swatches. And I'm kind of annoyed at myself because now I just have a lot of new layering polishes (and I don't really like layering polishes). Without exception, all the glitters are suspended in clear jelly.

LA Girl Synergy over Orly Frisky

Gold hex glitter shows up as kind of holo in the bottle but is very sparse. And the holo doesn't really seem to show up unless in direct sunlight. Two layers. 

LA Girl Celebrate

Celebrate... what exactly? Sparse multicolored small and large hex glitter. The above is... I think it was five layers? At least it was interesting to look at and might be cute over a black or white polish. 

 Closeup of Celebrate

 LA Girl Euphoria over Sally Hansen Lavender Cloud

Lavender glitter with lavender and holo hex glitter. This one looked fabulous in the bottle: the combination of lavender and holo was stunning. On the nail, not so much. Four layers. 

LA Girl Flamboyant over Orly Fresh

I actually liked this one a lot. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because it looked like an ordinary orange glitter/orange hex glitter combo in the bottle and maybe because by this time, I had my expectations dialed down to zero. So when this came out looking as expected (two sizes of sparse orange glitter), I wasn't disappointed. Four layers.

Sally Hansen strobe light

A very dear friend of mine who moved to the US recently sent me a parcel. Rather than putting chocolate in the parcel as a throw in (I've been spoiled by the good stuff) she put some Sally Hansen nail polish in there. I squealed a lot when I opened the package! I've never tried SH, so I was keen to put this on ASAP.

I love the colour. The only difficulty I had was knowing what to put it over, since it's sheer. Here I used two coats of OPI Skull & Glossbones underneath, and I would in retrospect have chosen something different for the basecoat. Over that is three coats of glitter and one of Seche Vite.

The only difficulty I had is that the coverage is quite sheer (I assume it's meant for layering, rather than opaque colour) and the base is thick, so I used a lot of the bottle on one mani. I hope I don't use it up before I work out the perfect base coat colour!

*tapping on the mic*

*tap tap*

Hello, Polish or Perish! Remember moi? Long golden locks, a small waist, a lovely singing voice and the demeanor and cuticles of an angel? No? No one? Okay, that was all a lie. No matter.

Anyway, yes, it's been forever thanks to a shifting of priorities in many areas of my life (other than buying massive amounts of polish, *ahem*) but for now, I am back, just maybe in a little lesser capacity than before The posts might be a little shorter, but I'm going to try and make them a little more frequent, so I hope that sits well with all of you. For what it's worth, I've missed all of you, both Polish or Perish team members and all of you lovely readers!

I do have some good news, though! I'm hoping to jump back in not only with new colors, but a new love for konad nail art that I am slowly but surely trying to improve upon. Here's a nice little something-something I threw together last night, I hope you like it.

SH Pacific Blue with konad special white polish and the bundle monster plate BM20

Do you see that nice little claw I made for you? Do you see how it looks like I am fashionably modeling my manicure yet it also covers up my jacked-up middle finger nail? Yeah, let's just leave it at that.

Anyway, good to be bac, friends! Happy polishing!

Sally Hansen Oxide and Green Tea (Tracy Reece, Fall 2011)

I'm warming up to the Sally Hansen Complete line. I find that I really like the ones that I like (and I just don't buy the rest). I'm getting used to the ginormous brush and I've learned to save up my CVS ExtraCare coupons for the price.

Sally Hansen Green Tea

Some things don't change. Like my love of minty greens. I have a thousand of them but I'm still buyin'. Three coats. Wish it was glossier but it applies fine. :) 

Sally Hansen Oxide

This one blew my mind. This is one freakishly shimmering gunmetal. So, so good. Also three coats, a bit thinner than I thought it would be but turned out very, very nice. The shimmer is slightly iridescent so it does mostly look like silver but it glistens a bit purple and a bit blue as well. 

Closeup of Oxide

Sally Hansen Problem Child: Happy Mother's Day!

Look, I'm alive... and have polished nails. Who knew? (I've barely known. I think I've changed my nails three times in the last three weeks.)

In honor of Mother's Day...

Sally Hansen Problem Child

I'm not the biggest fan of the SH Complete line: the brush can be a bit too thick and the pastels never go over well (too streaky). But I love their dark shimmery colors. They apply so perfectly. If you apply thick coats, you can get away with one coat but this mani was two coats. It looks like a generic dark purple shimmer until you look really closely: it's actually chock full of blue and pink microglitter (or maybe just very bright shimmer) with coppery flakies! I wouldn't have thought it'd make a good combination, but it was lovely. Also, this manicure dried completely in less than ten minutes... and then lasted over eight days without chipping.

Close-up of Problem Child

But wearing a mani for eight days gets boring. So then I decided to layer Clarins 230 over it to see if any magic would occur. (Eh, it did not. Hence, no picture.) But I did have a bottle of China Glaze Broken Hearted crackle polish near me so on it went:

China Glaze Broken Hearted over Sally Hansen Problem Child (and Clarins 230)

If you click for a closeup, the cracks in the polish look a bit like sparkly lava. Sort of.

Well, my mother is finally coming back to the States from Taipei tomorrow (now that ALL the funerary ceremonies are done... you know... a month after my grandfather's passing) so I have no one to call for mother's day. I'm sending her a "Welcome Home" bouquet of flowers though to be delivered on Tuesday.

The past two weeks since I got back from Taipei have been such a blur. I seemed to have gotten a lot of nail polish. (More sparklies from Taipei, picked up a lot of Anna Sui at Duty Free, did the Zoya Exchange, ordered off of an etailer, bought Chanel Mimosa, and splurged on some Diors -- haven't decided whether I want the whole Pirates of the Caribbean collection. Probably not. Just a couple of colors. I REALLY want the Serena Williams Glam Slam France set.) This is just pathological because I don't have time to even really do my nails this quarter.

Hey, I needed something to do while procrastinating from making a poster for a grad school research symposium that I only had two days to prepare for. The "leaving it to last minute" thing was real smart of me.

Now til the end of the quarter is going to be hell.

• TA-wise: one more midterm, five more homework assignments, three more worksheets, three more sections, a couple more pop quizzes, and a final exam. TA hell will be largely over by June 2nd.
• Psychonomics 2011 abstract is due June 1st. My advisor and I hope to submit my newest study, whose results are very promising. I should start writing that today.
• Analyze the results of Exp 2 (currently running) for the June 1st deadline.
• Create and run Exp 3 and have preliminary results for the June 1st deadline.
• Do preliminary corpus analysis for another, completely separate experiment.
• Find an RA for the summer.
• Revise/resubmit a paper on the research I did the first two years of grad school to a journal before their imposed (90 day) July deadline. This is going to involve many hours of recoding and reanalyzing data. Not looking forward to it.

I just want to go back to sleep.

Stick It On! - Sally Hansen Nail Effects in Cut It Out

There's been huge buzz about the Sally Hansen Nail Effects polish strips lately - they've been popping up in drugstores all over the country and nail-obsessed people and 'civilians' alike have been quizzing me about them!

I purchased 3 - Laced Up (black lace on a nude background), Girl Flower (multi-colored flowers), and Cut It Out (black and white flowers). Initially I was going to go for Laced Up, but I went with my gut feeling at the moment - Cut It Out. extraH just made it look so good in her initial post about these!

Unfortunately I was so mesmerized by these, I forgot to take a photo on Day 1!! I was so busy staring at them, that I didn't take a photo until...

Day 3

I have to say, I adored the pattern. I'm not a big nail art person, but this was neutral enough for me to handle. I kept staring at it. Other people did too! I got so many compliments from random strangers.

However what was really important for me was wear time. I managed to keep them on/stay sane until...

Day 7

Looks pretty good except for some growth right? I did get a little chip on my index finger...which was enough to drive me over the edge to remove it. I was also pretty antsy to change my polish!

My take on these? FAB. I have the Girl Flower ones on my toes right now and I'm really loving them. I don't want to subject you to my grotesque foot digits, but suffice to say that after a couple days, they still look great! I think these are a perfect alternative to Minx. To be honest, my Minx experience was short-lived and highly negative. These are cheaper, easier, and last longer. The one downside? There aren't enough patterns that I would feel happy wearing on a daily basis. Sally Hansen - call me up. I have some great ideas for work-appropriate strips!

Speaking of designing your own nail strips...(imagine me wiggling my eyebrows at you right now)...check out our Inque nail design contest!! Aren't finding a pattern you like? Design your own, get them sold by Inque! I can't wait to try the winning design!!

Have you tried nail strips yet? Love it or leave it?

kittytokaren

Sally Hansen Grey Area layered with Integrate BL321

The glitter continues...

Sally Hansen Grey Area layered with Integrate BL321

Another one of my drugstore finds from Taipei. I'm pretty sure this is a Japanese company (may be a subsidiary of Shiseido -- I should check on that). I love the idea of the mix of blue, silver, gold and purple glitter (both hex and square glitter)... but somehow, this one falls a bit flat on me. Don't get me wrong: it was a total glitterbomb! And it got pretty opaque quickly. So opaque that my using Sally Hansen XTreme Wear Grey Area felt like a waste at the end. Two coats Grey Area (which was fantastic but I don't have an individual pic for it), two coats BL321.

Sally Hansen Grey Area layered with Integrate BL321