Happy Belated Easter! :o)

It's Easter Monday, so it still counts, right?

Hello all.  No, I have not disappeared off the face of the earth.  Yes, as usual I'm behind on posting stuff and have a whole backload of NOTDs to show you, plus my TD haul.  I promise I'll try and get it out there, in the interest of Not Sucking.

But for now, wanna see my cutesy-poo Easter mani?  Suuuure you do :)
Left hand:

Right hand:

Yes, the pictures are watermarked wrong.  It's my MUA label, but you can ignore that, right?  I actually kind of like my right hand better than my left - the chickie looks better, and the bunny came out cuter (I swear his teeth don't look that smudgy in real life...).  Except for the dots.  Those just look stupid.

Polishes I used: Sparitual Reveal Yourself, Joe Fresh Coral, China Glaze Peachy Keen, Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Expres-so Yellow, OPI Gargantuan Green Grape, China Glaze For Audrey, Color Club Blue Light, China Glaze Secret Peri-Wink-Le, and Crush Hustle.  I think that's it.  Oh, and Art Club nail art pens in Satin White and Black.  And a dotting tool.

And just for S&Gs, here's a random tape mani I did:

I used OPI DS Magic and Glow.  I love both of these polishes.  Ah, foils :)  Glow looks pretty good on me, for a bronzy gold.  Bronzy golds tend to look much better on me than champagne-y golds.  I have such a weird skin tone :s  I'm pale, yet all the colours that are supposed to look good on pale skin make me look washed out.  Bah.

Anyway, enough grumbling.  I'm gonna go work on the seemingly daunting task of posting the giant backlog of crap I have to show you :) 

Oh yeah, I started a spreadsheet.  Or rather, I started working on the spreadsheet I started over a year ago again  :s  It's not even close to finished.  Not even remotely.  What's on there is a small smidgen of what I own (except for Color Club and Sinfuls!  Those are up to date - yay me! :p)  but in case anyone cares here it is :)

'Til later.

Massively Hugely Enormously Massive Haul Post

Okay, so this started out as just a post of what I've hauled this past week, but then I thought, what the hell - I'm going to do a post of every single thing I've bought this year so far.  Wanna stop reading?  I don't blame you :p

I don't know if I should do most recent to oldest, or....?  I guess I'll do it from oldest to most recent.  Keep in mind, those of you thinking I'm some spendaholic freak, that this is for this entire year so far.  Some of these are swaps, as well.  Oh, I'm just going to stop making excuses for myself - you know you're all just as bad as I am ;p

Ready?  Grab some chips and turn the TV to something boring :)

Sephora by OPI Read My Palm and Just A Little Dangerous.  Two I'd been lemming for a while - I only had a mini of RMP.

From Forever 21, Love & Beauty scented polishes in Peppermint and Kiwi, and a regular polish in Lime.  These do smell, although not very good - the scent reminds me of those scented fat felt pens we had when we were kids.

Boring stuff - Barielle Camo and Mani Extender, found at Winner's for $5 each.  After I bought these, I walked into Eterna Skin Care on Robson and saw Camo for $18!  D:

But oooh, this is exciting - the Dare To Wear Disco Tech collection!  Hee.  I like glitter.  I just noticed that my older polishes from this brand are spelled "Dare 2 Wear".  Huh.

See?  See?  I told you!  This is Hunter Green x2, Billie Purple Haze (awesome neon purple with subtle shimmer, and only a buck!) and some little butterfly decals I found - which are sitting on top of a Hello Kitty fauxnad plate :)

Aren't these adorable?  I got these so I could copy this mani that I saw on Chloe's Nails.  It's so simple, but so adorable - one of my favorite manis of all time :)

Anna Sui 101, 103 and 011.  011 has flakies!

Some old discontinued China Glazes.  L-R: Stone Age, Sunset Glow, Channelesque, FYI and Drama Queen.

More old discontinued China Glazes.  L-R: Subtle, Beatnik, another Channelesque ;p

Now, we move on to our OPI part of the presentation:

OPI Texas collection. L-R: Y'all Come Back Now Ya Hear?, Big Hair..Big Nails, Guy Meets Gal-veston, That's Hot! Pink, Do You Think I'm Tex-y?, Houston We Have A Purple, Austin-tacious Turquoise and You Don't Mess With OPI!  These names get worse with every collection :p

More (yes, more) random OPIs - Skinny Dip'N In Lake Michg'n, Tickle My France-y, Barefoot In Barcelona, Over the Taupe (I needed neutrals, lol), Just Groovy and Simply Smashing.

And dusty finds!  Awesome dusty finds!  L-R:  Mad As A Hatter, Sapphire In The Snow, Smitten With Mittens, Merry Midnight.  I already own all these, but backups, swaps, you know how it goes... :)

And that concludes our OPI portion of the evening, now how about some Daiso finds?

OMGHOLOsqueeeeeeeee!  <--- iz what I did when I found these in the store.  These are the "Rainbow" line of polishes, they are pretty holo, and they are fantastic!  The three in the middle look like they're the same, but they're actually three seperate colours.  But aren't these just the FUGliest bottles you've ever seen?  Daiso has some seriously ugly bottles, man.

Like check THIS out.  These are all very pretty - a chunky silver and holo hex glitter, iridescent hex glitter, a blue that looks really frosty and horrible here but it's actually very silvery and pretty, and the one on the end is called Aurora Lights and it's basically an exact dupe of CND Crimson Sparkle.  But those first two bottles are seriously some of the most ridiculous-looking things I've ever seen in my life...

SEE?!?  Like, seriously?  What the hell is that thing?  A nail polish bottle or the frickin Empire State Building?  I think the folks at the Winmax must've just done this for a laugh  :p

And look at this!

Aren't these cool?  Anyone know how to read Japanese?  :D  The pictures are SO awesome though.  I'm going to pick a couple of pages and try to scan them like Wan does with Nail Up! magazine over at I Love Nail Polish - a fellow Vancouver blogger, btw :)  And that concludes my Daiso finds!  Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

American Apparel polishes in (L-R): African Violet, Cameo Blue, Army Jacket and MacArthur Park.  Now I just need Passport Blue, Dynasty, Echo and a couple more  :p

Some randoms. L-R:  Nox Twilight Disco Darling and Citrus, unnamed LA Colors yellow gold, Claire's Poison Apple and Zoya Jade.

Wet N Wild Teal Of Fortune and Blue Wants To Be A Millionaire?  TOF looks like another Charla dupe, and BWTBAM looks similar to the Justin Beiber Nicole polish Me + Blue, although they're not dupes.

China Glaze mood polishes that - blast it all - have no labels!! :(  Anyone have any idea what these might be?  The one on the left is baby blue with a pinky-gold flash, and the one on the right is slightly darker with blue glitter.

CND Effects - all for a swap :)  Aren't they pretty?  I love these, they're so fun to play with.

And some Essies - Coat Azure, Beach Bum Blu (frosty and horrible - I dunno why I bought it :-/) and French Affair.

And last, I know no one cares, but some non-nail-polish stuff that I got for cheap:

I got my makeup done by a Smashbox artist at SDM, and since I had a gift card I bought two products - the Halo powder and Peony cream cheek colour duo, and the MU artist ended up throwing in all this stuff for free!  She threw in a full-size lipgloss, lip pencil and concealer for free, as well as a travel-size mascara and a billion other little samples.  I was blown away!  Usually they're just trying to get you to spend money and even when you do, make you feel like you're not spending enough, but she was extremely generous!  Thanks Smashbox!  Oh, and the In Bloom eyeshadow palette I bought at Sephora a few weeks back - happened to grab the last one :)

I started composing this post about a week and a half ago, so I've bought a couple of things since then.  I'll take some photos and get an updated haul post up as soon as I can :)  I've been working lots lately, which I really need.

Crappy Monday :)

Summery NsOTD That I Took Before My Camera Died - Because I Need To Post Something :S Part One: Pinks, Corals and Konad

I feel bad about not putting anything up for the past little while, although I know no one's exactly all broken up about it but me.... but what the hell - this is supposed to be at least an excuse for a blog, so I'll act like a blogger and post already.

Hmmm.... more like act like a Blogger and STOP WORKING already..... why can't I upload some of my pics?!?!  Okay, it seems to only want to let me upload a certain amount right now and the rest are all just little annoying red x's, so looks like this post is going to be broken up into bits again.  I'm destructive like that.  Also, I have nothing to do today  :p  Literally. 

So I shall start off with something simple...

This is Maybelline Coral Cabana, from the Salsa Sun collection.  Pretty standard coral creme.  I was looking for a dupe to MAC Scorcher, since I don't wanna pay so much for a colour that doesn't seem all that unique... 

Needless to say, this was not it.  Not even remotely close.  I don't think I left this on for very long...

This is a Sally Hansen Insta-Dri in Mango Motion.  It's a salmon pink creme.  I like these Insta-Dris a lot more than most people, I think - I LOVE the opaqueness of the cremes, and the formula does dry super-quick on most of them.  It's the wide, flat brush that people hate the most (along with the flat, rectangular brush handle that's hard to wipe off and always seems to have globs of polish dripping down it - yeah, it's kind of annoying...), but I can deal with it.  That said, I didn't really care for this particular colour on me at all.  I'll probably reserve it for konading.  It's from what I believe is the newest collection of Insta-Dris - all pastel cremes.  I'll take a pic of the ones I have from it - I say I believe it's the newest collection because, well, I'm in Canada, and our new is everyone else's six months ago  :p

Next, this is CM Hot Spring:

I looooved this one, about a thousand times more than I thought I would.  It was only about a dollar, too :)  Yay frugality!  Indoor pic:

It's a bright pink shimmer with a gold flash.  I HATE pink shimmers, unless it's something pretty like CC Electro Candy.  This definitely qualifies as pretty.  It comes out looking much more peachy on the nails than in the bottle...

Here's the bottle:

Sid, admiring it through the window:

Oh, the poor, opressed life of a spoiled indoor kitteh...  :p

But yes - I really like CM Hot Spring.  I thought it looked pretty good on me :)  And you can't beat that price.

Last (for right now) I have some nail art fun!  I was bored one afternoon, and decided to play around with striping different colours on as a base and then stamping overtop...  You might have seen this type of look lately on sayanythingbr00ke's channel on Youtube, xsparkage's website, and about a billion other places, cuz, well, it looks so freakin cool and is relatively easy to do.  That said, I didn't copy the design exactly, more like did my own, not-as-cool interpretation of it, and my skills are nowhere near as good as either of theirs... that's why they are Youtube nail queens and I sit here blogging away in obscurity, lol.  I also saw a look like this on the nail board done with holos and the BM leaf pattern in black... the possibilities are endless.

Anyway, I got lots of compliments on this look :)  One girl at the checkout at Superstore was like, "Whoa! Your nails!"  I had already complimented her on the shiny blurple polish she was wearing (Joe Grape, she informed me, pointing to the cosmetics section :)

Left hand:

Right hand:

I used konad plate m64, and Color Club Where's The Soiree? to stamp.  For the base I used a whole whack of Color Club neons (and one Misa).

Here's the base, left hand:

Let's see if I can remember what colours I used here: Color Club Lazer Pink, Chelsea Girl, Misa A Sunny Smile Makes Me Go Wild, CC Warhol, Blue Light, Limelight, Rebel Debutante, Wham! Pow! and Puccilicious

Right hand:

I think I used all the same colours on both hands.  And as you can see, I wasn't going for a solid stripe pattern... more like random swipes of colour wherever I felt like it or could fit it.  More so on my left hand, though... with the right I was just trying to get each nail colorful without screwing it up, although the base doesn't have to be perfect at all...  This took forever, btw, and a lot more patience than I knew I had...  but the end result definitely got noticed!  I will probably be playing around with this look a lot more this summer, and I'll probably end up copying the actual "Lisa Frank" look that the Youtubers came up with above.... it's like an easy way to almost get that colourful, rainbowy marbled look without having to actually do a water marble.  Which I'm still gonna try one of these days soon... 

Okay, that's all blogger will let me do for now  :p  I'll be back later with more, though, including my haul from last week :)

Konad Attempts: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Mainly the Latter Two.

I warned you this was coming.  If you don't want to see ugliness and horror, look away. 

Don't say I didn't warn you.

So let me say again, I really love konad.  It's really fun - it gives you a lot more freedom to be creative than just nail polish on its own, and is easier to get neat-looking results with than nail art pens.

That being said, while its not the most impossible thing on earth to use, it comes close.  It's a bit dificult to get the full-nail designs on properly and without smudging.  It is for me, anyway.  I even consider myself somewhat artistic, and I originally got this set from someone who became frustrated with it and decided not to bother with it at all anymore, thinking that surely I'd have better luck than she did.  Well.... let's just say that I am still getting used to it.

I refuse to give up.  I refuse.  Gorgeous breathtaking detailed konadicures will be MINE.  I swear.  So from now on, anytime I can get a decent pic of a half-decent konad I did, expect to see it with much fanfare :p  After this post, that is.

Oh, and did I mention my BundleMonster plates came in today?  :D :D  How fast was that?!  I didn't get a pic of them, because I know you've all seen them by now, but between my ocnailart order and these, I think I'm set for plates for a while :).  And yes, I heard about the BM plates after I had already placed my ocnailart order.  I'm slow  :p

So here are some of my past FKAs (Failed Konad Attempts):

I think this is one of the first ones I ever attempted.  This is a base of Orly Glitz, with China Glaze Unplugged for the spots, using plate m57.  It was messy-looking, it would have looked MUCH better with a darker, creme brown, and I had to double-stamp some nails, which was clearly a bad idea.  It looked cute enough for my boyfriend to notice, though, so I would classfiy this as simply BAD.  One I must retry.

This one I actually liked.  This is a base of Sally Hansen CSM Thinking Of Blue, stamped with China Glaze Cherish and Emotion.  I used a Fauxnad plate - don't recall which one.  I said before this reminded me of cloisonne.  I thought it came out pretty, epsecially since I was just playing around.  This is the sole GOOD for me.

Alright, here's one of the reasons I felt the need to warn you.  This is just fugly beyond belief.  All of these are perfectly nice polishes on their own, but I piled them all together into this hideous combination.  Plus there's a massive chip on my thumb.  Man, I suck.  This is Essence Pool Party, topped with Pure Ice Heartbreaker on the middle nail and CND Raspberry Sparkle on the ring.  I then stamped on Fauxnad flowers with China Glaze Metallic Muse, and got through two vines stamped with Orly Glitz before I discovered that a.) Glitz is not the best stamping polish, and b.) it looked horrible.  This mani is just a giant mess.  It gets a big heaping UGLY from me, with a hefty side of FAIL.

Remember I told you I effed up Orly Cotton Candy with a tacky konad?  Feast your eyes  :p  Sorry for these pics, too - I was never going to post these, but I figure I've put enough warnings on this post that I don'thave to feel bad.  And I'm also aware the polish looks two different colours in these pics.  Thank my crappy camera and try to ignore it  :p  I used another Fauxnad plate (I get these at the beauty supply place, btw) and an old L'Oreal Steel Colour in French Tip White for the flowers.  This is the best white polish for stamping, I find - whites that are intended for french mani tips.  But I just got Konad's White polish, so I'll have to compare.  And I used an Art Club pen in yellow for the dots, which I clearly suck at.  I wanted this to look cute, but it just looked oh so tacky.  Verdict: UGLY!

And last, and perhaps least, this is what I have on my nails at this very moment.  Why I've left it on so long, I do not know.  Probably because I've been busy and I've been able to get away with it.  This is OPI What's With The Cattitude, with Sally Hansen CSM Thinking Of Blue (yes, again) stamped overtop with the argyle pattern from plate m60. The sad thing is, I would have liked this if I didn't SUCK at konad so bad and could actually do it neatly.  I could not, for the life of me, get the argyle pattern to go on straight, especially on my thumbs, and I smudged the polish while transferring it on almost all my nails.  It was so bloody frustrating.  I'll have to try again, with different polishes, because I really like this pattern.  Verdict: BAD!  But how cute would this look with a baby pink or pale yellow base, and the pattern stamped in ChG Recycle?  I just love pastels and greys together...

Okay, that's it.  You've suffered enough.  I promise I'll do my best to only bring you nice konads from now on  :p  If I collect enough material for another konad FAIL post, I'll consider swapping it away  :p

In other news, like I mentioned, I got my BM plates  :)  Man, they have some cute patterns.  I can't wait to start playing with mine  :D  Also, I saw some new Nicoles the other day at SDM.  I passed at the time because Nicoles are a ripoff, and none of the shades seemeds that unique, but there were three (Nail Ya Azalea, A New Kind Of Blue and Traffic Cone) that sort of caught my eye.  I saw bottle pics on some blog, but I've yet to see swatches...

Also, in depressing news:

1. I have a feeling Canadians might never see Hidden Treasure.
2. I'm scared we might not even see the new Sally Hansen HDs (DVD, Byte, etc.)
3. Sinfuls seem to have the same CRAP selection at all London Drugs' stores.  I've been to three now and they have the same ones at all of them.  And I visibly cringe whenever I see the $5.99 - Low Price Everyday! sticker displayed beneath them  :(  I want Bali Mist (the only one I don't already own that looks even half-interesting) but paying that much for them makes me feel like such a fool when there are things like Cherryculture in the universe...

On the other, not-as-depressing hand, I found some polishes that are "Twilight" brand...?  That's what they said on the bottle, and they had some weird metal disc on the side of the bottle.  It looked really cool.  Still, I've never seen Twilight, and although the first book was given to me when they very first came out and came highy recommended, I was only able to get through about a chapter and a half of it before gagging and gifting it to my boyfriend's 12-year-old niece.  So I have no idea if these have anything to do with the movie, nor do I particularly care.  There were a couple that looked interesting, a pink with gold shimmer, a shimmery beige, an opaque-looking baby pink creme, and a blackened-blue shimmer... but my boyfriend was doing the huffy slouch dance, and I didn't have time to look at the price before I was ushered out of London Drugs  :p  I'm already planning when I can sneak back to the mall by myself and pick them up, muahahaha....

I find myself getting bored with the existing polish supply in this city.  I SO wish drugstores in Canada got collections in at the same rate as the US, and I SO wish we had Dollar Tree here  :( 

Anyway, I sound so mopey.  Time to go play with my BM plates and cheer myself up!

I'll try to swatch some of the new Icing polishes for you next... I haven't seen those on any blogs yet.  Also, I want to swatch my Princessas!  :)  In the meantime, what new polishes has everyone got lately that they're really excited about?  I need inspiration!