Summer Days

Oh my poor neglected blog. So post-transfer applications and transcrip request insanity, I decided to go seasonal and do a beachy manicure inspired by a Reddit lacquerista Colieshark. I also thought it would be the ideal opportunity to try out a water marble (but only on 2 nails, I wasn't about to overextend myself).

 Right Hand: Zoya Zuza on pinkie and index.
Marble with Zuza, Zoya Wednesday, American Apparel The Valley, Diamond Cosmetics Head Over Teals, and Zoya Purity.
Accent Nail: Essence Irreplaceable, Butter London WestEnd Wonderland, Butter London Tart with a Heart

 Left hand. Same colors!
Tart with a Heart + WestEnd Wonderland combo blew me away. It ended up looking like a holo, but a holo with scattered glitter bits and specs of tiny black glitter. It was the perfect sand!

Close up for glittery sand goodness! In the sun.

And in the shade, either way, it was stunning!

Okay, but my absolute favorite part of this manicure was this:

Tiny nail surf on a tiny nail beach! I got quite the kick out of it because I'm easily amused.

When Life Snaps Your Nails...

You buy nail art wheels!
Just in time to swatch the new Diamond Cosmetics Spring 2012 collection!

Diamond Cosmetics Cherry Blossom, Tiger Lily, I Love Iris, and Cactus Flower

Diamond Cosmetics Cherry Blossom (2 coats, natural light)

Pale cool-toned pink creme. In the bottle it looked very similar to OPI Pink Friday and as you can see, its just a shade lighter. I'm curious as to how this would compare with Ciate's Strawberry milkshake. Formula was easy to work with. I haven't been big on pinks until recently, so I'm glad to have this to close the pink gap in my collection.

Diamond Cosmetics Tiger Lily (2 coats, natural light)

Creamy orange with a silvery micro-shimmer. I thought I would love this more than I actually did. I think the silvery shimmer puts me off a bit, silver and orange aren't my favorite of color combinations. 

Bottle shot! Looks really close to Butter London Bossy Boots. Threw the minty ORLY in just for fun

Diamond Cosmetics I Love Lily Comparison (Natural light 2 coats on each swatch)

Warmer and slightly darker than bossy boots. Jealous, Much? is just in there to show how non-minty these colors are. I do love pale greens of all kinds!

Diamond Cosmetics Cactus Flower Comparison

Look at this gorgeous microshimmer!

Cactus flower is in the same color family as Caitlin and Grape Gumball. Zoya Lotus was much darker and less blue toned. Cactus flower pulls the most blue of them all.

I couldn't capture the microshimmer very well. In person it's still fairly subtle but far more noticeable than in these pictures.

Macro to see the beautiful shimmer! Gah, I love shimmery cremes so much!

I forgot to do a non-macro bottle shot for this. But it is part of the Diamond Cosmetics Fall 2011 collection. Head Over Teals. Natural lighting

Indoor lighting, varied coats (2 and 1). This polish is so thick, I'd recommend only using 1 coat. 2 makes it really lumpy and the creme is too thick to let the glitter really shine through.

Indoor lighting (1 coat with 2 coats Seche Vite)

Indoors, this teal pulls more green. In natural lighting, it's bluer. Gorgeous teal!

Stellar Customer Service and Fierce Brand Loyalty

After seeing a post on Polish or Perish recommending Diamond Cosmetics, I decided to try the brand out with small fear of it harming my miniscule pocket book. There was a small mix-up with my order and the customer service was so stellar. Fixed immediately and a free polish thrown in to bribe me into being forever in love with their brand because of how nice they were.

Another company that has bought my shameless affection is Zoya, currently giving away 2 free nail polishes for just the cost of shipping. I love this brand. I love their constant color selection and availability, saving me the trouble of hunting down rares on Ebay or polish swapping sites. I love their packaging, I love their adorable Facebook messages to their frequently disgruntled fans. Both of these brands rock my socks. NOTE: I have in no way been officially bribed or sponsored to talk up their products on my little blog.

Now, onto the swatches: Diamond Cosmetics Fall/Winter Collections 2011!

L: Whisper Softly R: Falling in Love
Whisper softly is GORGEOUS. A soft jade green flecked with iridescent flakes. Bottle close up!

Seriously, check out this flake action. Its much more subdued on the nail however.

Indoor, natural lighting. 2 coats

Formula was thick but smooth and easy to apply. I do wish the color was a bit less opaque to let the flakes shine through more. But simultaneously, I love how subtle it is. Easily my favorite of the collection so far.

 Indoor lighting 2 coats. 

I am not big on reds. It is easily the most under-represented of colors in my collection. However, I really like this pinkish red. Rather unique for fall, as it is neither berry nor vampy. Muted and subdued but with a nice shimmer that glows in the light. Formula was buttery smooth and opaque in 2 coats.

 Check out how dry my hands look. This is the result of non-acetone remover, it leaves this odd dry looking film on my hands after I use it.

Up close you can see the pink, silver and a hint of lavender shimmer.

L:  Plum Crazy for You  R: Snowflake Scandal

I love purples. I can't have enough of them. I'm not into pinks or reds and blues/greens tend to make my hands look like the cheeks of a drunken Irishman, so purples are my happy medium. Plum is a lovely purple with a delicate silver shimmer. The formula on this, like the rest of the collection was wonderful. The longer dry times I'm used to from Diamond were surprisingly a non-issue for this collection.

Direct sunlight. 2 coats.

My indoors shot for this color turned out really blah. So natural light outside. 

Up close for the shimmer! 

Up close for the glitter details! Its a bit hard to discern but there is a size variance with this glitter that allows for much better coverage. I frankened a glitter like this and it turned out very poorly because of the uniform grain. 

 Snowflake Scandal over Whisper Softly (1 coat), bare nail (2 coats), Plum Crazy (1 coat), and Falling (1 coat) with natural lighting.

New Year, New Posts

Now that finals and holidays are over, time to post! Starting with my New Years mani :D 

 Illamasqua-Scorn (black) Glitter accents: gold glitter, Pa-Lame Grande, and Love and Beauty-Disco

Up close! I loved this mani but it took foreverrrr to dry, resulting in a smudged thumb on my right hand :\
For Christmas, my best friend bought me a bunch of Diamond Cosmetics. So pretty!

 I decided to do a swatch comparison of Love Letter with Zoya-Jules and Essence-Irreplaceable.

Love Letter is darker and the shimmer is more gold, whereas Jules is a multi-tonal shimmer. Irreplaceable has more obvious bright gold shimmer (similar finish to China Glaze-Ice Cap). All are gorgeous and my camera doesn't capture the differences too well. I'd say they are pretty different enough to justify all three if you love these muted gold taupes like I do.

Close of of Love Letter to show the shimmer better, this color is super awesome!

Quick Giveaway Update and New Diamond Cosmetics Collection

My SD card reader broke, which is why I haven't been able to post all the new awesome Zoya's I got in their last 2 promotions, OR the wonderous muted yellow Catwalk Queen I purchased via this blogsale: The Insomniac's Sale.

However, two awesome new nail blogs have been added to my massive list of nail blog bookmarks (I just like reading them that way instead of the RSS feed).
I'm Feeling Nail-Venturous is having a fantastic giveaway. I've been reading through her posts instead of doing derivatives :D. Check out the giveaway here!

Gems in a Bottle is making me salivate once again over Deborah Lippmann and Lynderella polishes. She's doing a China Glaze Holiday Collection giveaway. Enter here!

Diamond Cosmetics has two new fall collections out!

I've been searching for months for this exact pumpkin shade. And I'm a sucker for unique yellows. Unfortunately, I have so many shimmery browns from Diamond that I already don't have the wardrobe to pair with (I'm more of cool blacks, charcoal, navy, and white kind of girl when it comes to neutrals). I'm still excited though, maybe I can grab the collection and do a tiny, VERY exclusive giveaway for my brand new followers. More than 2 is reason enough to celebrate for me :D

Ciate Cupcake Queen Comparisons

So I decided to combine posts and do my Ciate swatches and comparisons at the same time. 

Ulta is currently having a 2 for 1 sale on Zoya, and you can use the $5 off coupon towards the purchase. Sweet deal, I bought the Mod Matte collection.  It may be slightly obvious that I'm going through a hot pink trend...the Sally Hansen and Sinful Colors are bottles that I don't have in my polish drawer, so I kind of forgot about them until today. Oops!

If you haven't heard of Diamond Cosmetics,  you're in for some excitement because this company is AMAZING. Beautiful colors and wonderful formulas for just $2.50. I used to be a brand snob, but I mended my ways after buying 10 or so of these babies. It's a small company, but the costumer service is stellar. I cannot recommend them enough. I've yet to wear any of these as a full manicure, as I ordered them in the summer and my summer wardrobe did not have anything close to these hues. On to the comparisons!

Indoors with natural light

Indoors with more direct sunlight.

Please excuse the smidgen of Strictly Legal on my ring finger! I found it hard to tell the difference between these. Sally Hansen's Hot! Frost is a shimmer, although my camera didn't pick up on it very well. It is also hard to see the blue iridescence in Cupcake Queen. I would like to note that formula-wise these are all dramatically different. Cupcake Queen is swatched at 1 coat on my peely horrible index nail. Sinful Colors, I believe is at 4 and still has a VNL, this polish is VERY sheer. Zoya's Lolly is a matte with a topcoat and like most mattes, needs 2-3 coats to even out streakiness.

Indoors, cool light.

Indoors, warmer light

Indoors direct sunlight.

All of these come alive in the light (Cherry Tobacco, you gorgeous thing). The purple hues of Strictly Legal are more obvious out of the bottle to me. I had to label Joust and Decadence because they look exactly the same in bottle. Weird how strikingly different they are on the nail. To me, the closest match to Ciate was Joust. Here's a better comparison of the two next to each other in the same light:

Still pretty different though. I cannot wait to wear all of these gorgeous fall shades once Vegas decides to stop being so insufferably hot.