New Konad Review

Something you won't see very often here are sponsored product reviews.  A company really has to interest me in order to get a reply to their email.  Michelle from http://www.nailpolishcanada.com/ contacted me and asked me to review one of the new Konad plates.  I had actually been on their website before which I found through another blog and had planned on placing an order through them eventually because they carry Nubar and Butter London which are hard to find in Canada.

So she sent me Konad plate m84:

Not my usual style but I was more interested in the bow design since I don't have one in any of my 75+ image plates.  Having bought nothing but knock off plates lately I had forgotten about the amazing quality of the original Konad plates.  Great clean and precision-cut images.

I stamped the images using Wet and Wild Black Creme except the pinky finger.  These Konad plates typically have finer lines and so nothing beats the Konad polish for picking up all the details.  Konad Dark Purple was used on the pinky and you can really tell the difference.

Before I stamped the second hand I decided to do a quick and dirty swatch of my newest acquisition - Cosmetic Arts unnamed polish (why don't these bottles have names on them??!!).  A quick Google search tells me this is called Silver Belles.  But you can see that this bottle obviously contains Color Club's coveted Worth the Risque.  For anyone who doesn't already know - Color Club/Studio M/Cosmetic Arts = Forsythe, and they often share colours between them. In any case, a good score at Winners for $3.

And back to the Konad plate using Konad Polish in Dark Purple.  Nice crisp, clean stamping.  I think I'll get some use out of a few of the images.

As I said before, this plate was sent to me for review by Nail Polish Canada and it was shipped to me in a standard #10 envelope and took 8 days to arrive.  I have not yet placed an actual paid order with them but I hope to do so in the future.  Their Konad plates are reasonably priced and so are most of their polishes. 

If they carried soak off gels I probably would have ordered from them already. Now if I could get more of you Canadian girls into doing your own soak offs then maybe retailers would make them more available to us!

Later
P

Busy Busy

With this being such a busy time of year I guess posts will be few and far between until the new year.  So this weeks posts will be packed into today.

On my Nfu Oh water layered mani I did a quick stamp of what I thought were snowflakes but people are telling me they are flowers...hmm, ah who gives a shit, close enough.  I used Billie French White and konad plate m20.

And here's a reminder of what my base Gelish mani looks like.  This was at Day 7 and after removal of the above:

Isn't it awesome how perfect and shiny it stays after scrubbing it with non-acetone remover?  I cannot get enough of the soak off gels, seriously.

Here is 2 coats of Cosmetic Arts All The Trimmings.  Sheer Green base with an irridescent/duochrome glitter.  Sometimes it flashes blue like above...

But most of the time it flashes pink.  You can occasionally see a gold flash in it as well.  It's one of the most unique polishes I own.

This shot is more colour accurate as far as the green base goes and you can see a bit of the gold in it here too.

For the nail art I just did a simple stamp in Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Titanium Rose and konad plate m5.

So that's it for this week.  I will be taking a shopping trip to both Toronto and Buffalo within the next week so I should have some awesome polish hauls to post soon.  Even if I had time to actually paint my nails right now there just is not enough time to post them...ah holidays :)

Later
P

Hauls: the good and the bad and the ugly

So I did a bit of hauling this week.  From L-R:
Maybelline Express Finish in Plum Intense, Snow Bunny and Demin Dash ($2 clearance at Zehrs)
Rimmel in Rags to Riches
I was so excited when I saw those Hard Candy polishes at Walmart for $1.  DO NOT BUY THEM!!!  They are Hard Candy polish bottles, but what's inside them is terrifying.  They smell like a Kleancolor polish that crawled up my dog's asshole and died, seriously.  The brushes are like straw and the polishes just plain suck.  These can't possibly be real Hard Candy polishes, they are nothing like my full size bottles!

And here's the good haul, from Winners of course.  From L-R:
Color Club Beyond the Mistletoe mini's
Cosmetic Arts All The Trimmings
Seche Vite for $3!

The Cosmetics Arts polish was $5 and I normally wouldn't buy an unknown polish for that much BUT....

Whoa.  How awesome is that?  It's slightly sheer so I decided to wear the Rimmel first.  Something seemed fishy about this polish brand so I went googling and found that it's made by the manufacturer of Color Club, which explains the Studio M bottle as well.  They are also only available at Fred Meyer which I gather is a 'western' version of Meijers (where Studio M is available).

So this is 2 coats of Rimmel's Rags to Riches.  This polish has a brush like the Sally Hansen Salon Manicures - love it!

I stamped it with Wet and Wild Black Creme and Konad plate M71, then freehanded the black tips and added a top coat.  Unfortunately I ended up picking at this...along with my holo glitter gel manicure underneath, wahhhh!

Later
P