Review: China Glaze Bohemian Collection Part 2

Hello everyone!

Time to move on the part two of my review of China Glaze's Bohemian Collection. If you missed it, yesterday I showed Swanky Silk and Unpredictable; you can see that part of the review by clicking here.

Same rules as yesterday--all photos have 2 coats of polish whether they needed it or not (I'll say if they did).

So let's get to it--first up, Deviantly Daring:

China Glaze Deviantly Daring

China Glaze Deviantly Daring--Some green shift

China Glaze Deviantly Daring--Green shift

China Glaze Deviantly Daring--More subtle green shift

Deviantly Daring is a blue-green teal duochrome that comes down on the subtle side of duochrome. The colors here are bold, but the shift is gentle. The blue dominates and the green appears here and there, but never becomes the primary color. This polish covered completely in one coat; I used two only for the sake of consistency. I'm also intrigued by the possibility that this might be a good stamping polish, since it has such good coverage. I think these colors are beautiful--this polish reminds me of a serene day at the beach.

Next we have No Plain Jane.

China Glaze No Plain Jane--brown-gold on the edges

China Glaze No Plain Jane--brown-gold shift

China Glaze No Plain Jane--more brown-gold 

China Glaze No Plain Jane--brown-gold edges

China Glaze No Plain Jane--up close and personal

No Plain Jane's duochrome goes between a purple and a brown-gold, colors I never would have thought to put together in a duochrome. But, they work really well together. Something about these colors gives a feminine, antiqued feeling that makes me think of Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. This polish again is one of the more subtle duochromes in the collection, but the shift is clearly there. This polish definitely needed two coats for full coverage.

(BTW, I used China Glaze's Fast Forward Top Coat on these, and I don't think I waited long enough before putting it on, because as you can see, I got shrinkage!!! ARGH!)


Finally, here is Want My Bawdy:

China Glaze Want My Bawdy

China Glaze Want My Bawdy--purple flash

China Glaze--Want My Bawdy

China Glaze--Want To Bawdy

China Glaze Want My Bawdy

Want My Bawdy was, when I looked at it in the bottle, a polish that I believed was not meant to be a duochrome. And honestly, I didn't think that was really a problem, because it's a really pretty blue in its own right. Once I put it on, however, I did see a bit of purple flash, and a bit of purple at the edges. I've been alternating between thinking of this as a 'flash' of purple rather than a true duochrome. If it is a duochrome, it is an extremely subtle one, and you should be aware of that going in. This polish also needed two coats for full coverage. Oh, and I apologize for the bump on my middle finger--I'm not even sure what happened there! :)

There is one final polish in this collection, Rare & Radiant, which is a Chanel Peridot dupe, and possibly an OPI Just Spotted The Lizard dupe. Tomorrow I will do a post comparing it to the OPI, to finish up my review of the collection. Also, later today I will have a NOTD Before & After that I'll post. But for now I'll say that I really love this collection, even if some of the duochromes are a bit more subtle than others on the market. There are some unique combinations, and I'm not sorry I got them all.

So that's it for now...Thanks for stopping by! Hope you saw something you liked. :)

M.

(the products in this review were purchased with my own money.)

Review: China Glaze Bohemian Collection--Part I

Hello Everyone!

Today I got my China Glaze Bohemian polishes...I've been waiting to get my hands on this collection for months, and finally it's here!

I want to get these swatches up for you as soon as possible, but it became apparent quickly that one or two photos each of these beauties will not do a good enough job representing them. So, I'm going to show two of them here, and three of them in a post tomorrow. For the remaining polish in the collection, I'll do a Dupe Or No Dupe post; Rare & Radiant is supposedly a dupe for Chanel's Peridot, and so is OPI's Just Spotted The Lizard, which means Rare & Radiant and Just Spotted The Lizard should be dupes of one another. I'll compare them so you can decide if you need them both. This will hopefully help out any of you who are concerned about cruelty-free issues, since China Glaze does not test on animals, but OPI is owned by a parent company (Coty) that does.  :)

Okay, let's get to it! The Bohemian Collection consists of 6 polishes which have an ethereal type of feel. Most of them are duochromes/multichromes, although to my mind there is one that is clearly not intended to be (Want My Bawdy). I think it's really pretty in its own right, and I think it's getting short-shrift from people who think it should be a duochrome, but I'll let you make your own call on that. ;-)

All of the polishes have a good formula, typical China Glaze, although some clearly need two coats while others do not.

On to the polishes! First up is Swanky Silk:

China Glaze Bohemian Collection--Swanky Silk

China Glaze Swanky Silk--note the shift froms rose to gold

China Glaze Swanky Silk--goes to darker gold at the edges

China Glaze Swanky Silk in direct sunlight

 Swanky silk is a rose-gold duochrome. It shows more rose that I was able to pick up in the pictures--the second picture is closest in that respect. The color shifts through a rose gold to a gold gold to a more bronze-y gold. The shift is very clear and strong, but the color itself is subtle. With my skin it actually functioned as a neutral, but you couldn't want a more feminine, beautiful neutral. I don't have anything like this, nor have I seen anything like this anywhere, and I love it.

Swanky Silk definitely needed two coats for full coverage.


Next is Unpredictable:

China Glaze Bohemian Collection--Unpredictable

China Glaze Unpredictable--blue blue blue

China Glaze Unpredictable--subtle shift from gold to green to blue

China Glaze Unpredictable--lit from the side, the shift deepens

China Glaze Unpredictable--Lit from the side, now there is a brown/gold note

Even in direct sunlight some shift remains.

Unpredictable is well-named in that even for a duochrome, you get more and different shift when the light hits it at different angles. This polish is a blue-green duochrome that goes from full blue to full green, and also shows flashes of gold and brown. When the light hits it more directly, the blues and greens stay more true; when the light hits it from the side, you get more of the brown and gold. And while direct light kills most duochromes to some degree, this one still shows a shift. albeit a more subtle one. Again I have nothing like this in my collection and can't recall seeing anything like this.

I have two coats here, but possibly could have gotten away with only one if I'd been careful.

These two are my favorites in the collection. I love the range of colors in both, and while Unpredictable is a bit bolder and fun, Swanky Silk is more elegant and subdued. They are both gems that I recommend highly! :)

Thanks for stopping by,

M.

(The products in this review were purchased with my own money.)

NOTD: Deck Chairs Challenge

Hello!

Today I hope to have two posts for you. This is the first, and it will be a quick one; it's the manicure I did for today's PFC challenge. Today's challenge was 'Deck Chairs', and I have to admit I wasn't quite sure what to do for that. So I googled some inspiration, and decided I liked this:

I decided to have my index and pinkie fingers be the deck, and the two inside fingers be the chairs:

In retrospect, I think it would have been better to have all four nails be different colored 'chairs', cause this just doesn't look right somehow, lol! But I do like the middle nails alone, and will definitely do that again in summer colors over white. :)

Anyway, here's how I did it:

'Deck' Nails: China Glaze Desert Sun for the base, stamped China Glaze Mahogany Magic with Bundle Monster plate BM-309

'Chair' Nails: Sally Hansen White On for the base, stamped Pure Ice Scream! and Wild Thing using plate Mash-43 for the stripes, and Sally Hansen Orange Impulse using Bundle Monster plate BM-313 for the flowers. I looked everywhere in my plates for my smaller hibiscus flower pattern, and couldn't find it...only to realize after the fact that it's also on Mash-43. >.<

One tips for stamping stripes. I completely ruined this once trying to roll the image on from side-to-side. Finally I figured out it was better to roll it from the bottom of the nail to the top. Probably everyone in the world but me knows this already, but in case there is someone else out there who doesn't know to do that yet, there you go! :)

Thanks for looking, and please check out the other bloggers who did Deck Chair manicures today, linked via thumbnails below. :)

M.

NOTD Before & After: a-England Tristam

Hello everyone!

So today's challenge in PFC was to do a manicure using straws. I wasn't sure what that meant, but since the previous challenge was the splatter mani where you blow through the straw, I figured it wasn't supposed to mean that.

So I improvised.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I stared with a base of A-England's Tristam, which I wore for a day. Tristam is one of the a-England scattered holos that are quickly winning me over to the scattered holo team. I use to *far* prefer linear holos to scattered holos, until I got Dragon. Then when a-England had their sale, I decided to see if it was a one-time thing, so I got Tristam. This is a dark blue scattered holo that has also quickly won my heart:

a-England Tristam in the shade

a-England Tristam in the sun

I'm on a Color Club holos kick, so I decided to use Worth The Risque to play around with. I took a straw and cut two bits off. One bit I left in a chunk that you could use as a mini-straw, and the other I cut in half by splitting it down lengthwise, so I was left with two things that looked a bit like gutters (two long U-shaped half tubes). I took one of the gutters and turned it so the two edges of the U were downwards, and dipped it into the polish (which I had placed on a piece of plastic). Then I laid the U down over my nail so that the curve of the U roughly mapped on to the curve of my nail (if that makes sense) and squooshed it down onto the nail. This caused the polish on the edges of the straw to squoosh inwards in swirly shapes. Then I took the mini-straw, dipped one end in polish, and touched it to my nails; where there was no polish already, this left silver cirlcles, and where there was already some polish, it etched a circle design in it.

It made an interesting background, but was not cute on its own. So, of course I stamped over it! I used Color Club's Wild At Heart and Konad stamping plate m63 to stamp some purple swirls over it.

Here's what I ended up with:

Smooshy squooshy girly swirly

If you look closely you can see the smooshes and the circles, lol

Better perspective on how it looks

Oh yes, gotta love that holo!

 I'm on the fence about it. I like it as a method of putting down a swooshy background, but I don't think I'd do the cirlcles again. I also only liked it with something stamped on top of it. So I think I would use the technique again, but with a small change. I also love these colors together; Tristam and Wild At Heart look so pretty together, but never would have shown up on each other without the silver holo in between. So I'm going to remember that color combination in the future, as well.

I hope you enjoyed it, and that it inspires you to do your own straw manicures. Link them to me if you do!

Thanks for reading, and please check out the other bloggers' straw manicure creations, lined below via thumbnail. :)

M.

NOTD Before & After: Risque Niasi Besouro

Hello!!!

Today I have a very simple before & after for you, showcasing another of the amazing Brazilian polishes I got in my swap. Today I have the unique and stunning Risque Niasi Besouro.

Janaina tells me that 'Besouro' translates to 'Beetle', and that's a perfect name for this polish. If you've ever seen one of those black scarab-type beetles that has the dark purple-black color with the rainbow sheen at the edges, you'll be able to see that in this polish. It's a silver-black-purple that flashes a more true purple and a soft teal. This is a more subtle duochrome than Hit's Dreamer was; the color flashes are less pronounced and play off of the steelish-black, but are no less beautiful because of it. The duochrome shows more in indirect light, but it does show in the sunlight more than you see here (I'm starting with the sunlight pictures first so I can show the least duochrome-y shots at the start). Also, there are flecks of teal and purple in the polish that show through in all lights:

Risque Besouro in the sunlight

Risque Besouro: Check out those little flecks of teal and purple

Risque Besouro in the shade: flecks and slight duochrome

Risque Besouro: Note the soft purple and teal duochromes

Risque Besouro: Pretty duochrome makes me happy

Rique Besouro: Note the subtle color shift within the purple and teal

Risque Besouro: To show you it isn't just one position that give the effect :)

I was not able to take this off for several days, I loved it that much. Finally because I was going up to the Napa wine country, I decided to do a subtle stamp on it in the wine theme. But, purple would have been too easy, so I played up the teal instead, by stamping it with Color Club's Pure Energy, using Bundle Monster plate BM05:

Risque Besouro stamped with Color Club's Pure Energy

As I was picking my jewelry for the trip, I tried it on with this ring, and fell in love with how well they went together; you can't see the range in this picture, but the abalone insert flashes the same shades of purple and teal as the polish much of the time:

Risque Besouro: How perfectly does it go with that ring?!

Another shot because I loved it so much I couldn't just choose one.

I can't say enough good things about this polish. All total, I ended up wearing it for about 4 days, and only the last day did I have any chipping. And that was through two trips in a jacuzzi! So it also wears pretty well.

If you can get your hands on this through a swap or another way, I highly recommend it. Why wear a regular steel-black when you can wear this stunner???!!

Hope you enjoyed seeing it; thanks for reading. :)

M.

NOTD: Summer Splatter Mani!

Hello!!

I am so excited about today's mani. I love it, and can't wait to show it to you!!!

Today's challenge in PFC was 'summer splatter'. I've never done a splatter manicure before, even though I like the look, because it looked kinda messy. But that's why I love doing these challenges, because they get me to try things I wouldn't try otherwise. So, I picked my colors, grabbed my straw, and got down to it.

If you don't know, a splatter mani is a manicure where you blow polish onto your nails using a straw. Here's how mine came out:

Summer Splatter Manicure

Pay no attention to that band-aid

Look at those holos shine in the sun!

Linear holos unite!

I wanted to do something a little special and sparkly, so I decided to do the splatter over a gradient, and I thought I'd use holographic polishes to make it look extra pretty in the sun. And thankfully, the sun cooperated! My original idea was to splat the light purple over the dark part of the gradient, and the dark purple over the light part of the gradient, but I soon found out that precision is not a big part of splatter manicures, at least when  you're a beginner, lol.


Here's how I did it:
Step 1: Color Club Worth The Risque for my base color.
Step 2: Created a gradient with Color Club Revvvolution and Worth The Risque, using the method created by www.nailasaurus.com.
Step 3: Using a straw, I dipped into a pool of polish that I had put down onto a piece of plastic, and then blew through the straw to get the polish to splat onto the nail. I did this first using Color Club Fashion Addict (the light purple; hard to see in some pictures), and then Wild At Heart (the dark purple).
Step 4: Cleaned up the cuticles and covered in Seche Vite.

Some things I learned along the way:
1) This is messy! Make sure you have your work surface well covered.
2) The closer the end of the straw is to the nail, the easier it is to target your nail, but the bigger your splats will be.
3) I found that this worked best when I got a layer of polish that stretched across the whole opening of the straw, like you do when trying to blow bubbles through a bubble wand, rather than just one side--this resulted in more of a splatter than a splotch.
4) If you cut your straw down, make sure you use the end of the straw that you didn't cut, otherwise you'll likely be working with an uneven end. Or at least, that's what happened to me, lol.
5) Next time I may try dipping directly into the polish bottle rather than putting polish onto plastic first. I'm not sure if that will be better or worse, but I did notice that as the polish got thicker on the plastic, the harder it was to get a layer of polish over the whole end of the straw.

I really love this look, and I'm sure I'll do it again, although probably not often because it's a bit messy, and if you miss a lot (like I did) it uses a fair amount of polish. I don't ever want to take this manicure off...It's going to break my heart to change it!

Thanks for looking! Please check out the manicures done by the other challenge participants, linked via thumbnails below. :)

M.

100 Follower Giveaway: WINNER!!

Hello everyone!!

First, I want to thank you all again for following my blog. I feel so honored to have people who actually read and enjoy my blog, I can't even tell you--I never thought I'd see the day when I had 20 followers, let alone 100. Thank you thank you thank you for supporting me!

Second, from the feedback I got, it seems like the Dupe-Or-No-Dupe posts and the Before & After posts, particularly the ones that feature stamping, are what people enjoy most about the blog. So I'll definitely be keeping those up, and will try to do more comparison posts than I have been doing. People also asked about tutorials, and information about nail care, so I will do a post outlining how I care for my nails, and I will try to do either video or still-photo tutorials when I can. If you see a post that you'd like to see a tutorial for, let me know and I'll make that my priority. :)

Third, just to review the prize: The winner will be able to choose a $25 gift certificate EITHER from www.ninjapolish.com OR from shop.llarowe.com. :)

And finally, what everyone has been waiting for...the winner!! To choose the winner, I created an excel spreadsheet, and first listed all of my followers by the order that they appear. Then I entered the name of everyone who left a comment, in the order that the comment appeared. That resulted in a total of 198 entries. I used www.random.org to generate a random number between 1 and 198:

You can see that the number generator picked #183. So then I went into the excel spreadsheet to see who #183 was: 

And it turns out it's Jessica!!!

Congratulations, Jessica! You have until Sunday 5 August 2012 at 11:59pm to contact me at lacquerorleaveher@gmail.com to claim your prize. If I don't hear from you by then, I will use the random generator to pick another winner. :)

Thank you everyone for leaving your feedback and following the blog. I hope to have another giveaway or contest sometime very soon!!

Love to you all,

M.