Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Fast Dry Nail Color in Bronze Ablaze

Do you ever have one of those moments when you're in a drugstore and you see a new polish display, a bottle catches your eye, you pick it up, look it over, and then go "Ehh... it's not that cool." and you put it back? But then you can't stop thinking about that color, so you decide to get it next time you're at the store, only to find that it's the only color missing from every display?

This one was one of those polishes for me. I thought it looked really cool at first glance, but then I thought it would be one of those deceptive drugstore colors where the duochrome effect in the bottle doesn't show up on the nail, leaving me with a plain, boring shimmer that I already have several versions of already. I probably picked this up and put it back four or five times before I decided that I had to have it just in case it was as interesting as it looked in the bottle. Of course, by the time I decided to get it, it was gone from every place I had seen it before. I did eventually find one last bottle of it and I'm glad I did!

Okay, that was a long and pointless story. But come on... don't tell me you can't relate to that.

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Fast Dry Nail Color in Bronze Ablaze. This is late fall in a bottle. It's a brown-based shimmer with lots and lots of hidden color in it. It shifts from neutral brown to golden brown like a duochrome, but it also has flashes and speckles of tons of other colors. Pink, red, gold, olive green and grass green, even a tiny tiny glimmer of purple here and there. Definitely one of my favorite drugstore polish purchases in recent years. Very complex and pretty.

The only thing I don't like about it is the brush. It's ridiculous. I go through phases of liking and hating the Insta-Dri brush. If you've never used a Sally Hansen Insta-Dri, you're in for a surprise. It doesn't have a brush in the traditional sense... It has a spatula. Well, okay, it is an actual brush, but it's absurdly wide and flat, has an unevenly cut rounded edge and is very stiff. The stiff, flat brush tends to create bald spots at the base of the nail and pooling at the edge. It's not fun to use. But, if you get a good one that's cut nice and smooth, and it's in a color that's suited for this type of brush (like a plain opaque creme), it's great because you can paint your entire nail in one stroke. It's rare, but sometimes this brush works really great. Other times, it's like trying to paint your nails with a shovel.

Wow, this post turned into one giant wall of text. Sorry about that. Cool color, though.

Physicians Formula Happy Booster Glow & Mood Boosting Lipstick Spring 2012 Swatches and Review

Much to my great excitement, Physicians Formula has added a handful of new items to their permanent Happy Booster line. If you recall, last year I was really ridiculously excited about the release of the Happy Booster collection, so I'm super happy to see this year's new products. Right now I only have the two new lipsticks, but I also saw a section for a couple of new bronzers and blushes on the display.


These are the two new Physicians Formula Happy Booster Mood and Glow Boosting Lipsticks. The shades are I ♥ Nude and I ♥ Rose.

They come in a shiny magenta-red chrome tube...


...And the caps are clear on the top so you can see the color and design.

Here's the product claims and the list of ingredients. You can enlarge them if you need to.

I Love Nude on the left, I Love Rose on the right.

If you take a closer look at the adorable heart design, you'll see that it is actually a little bit sloppy. It definitely looks cuter from a distance. Mine had some dents and dings, some funny oily spots and just an overall sloppy construction.



Swatched heavily, natural light. I Love Rose on the left, I Love Nude on the right.


I ♥ Nude


I ♥ Rose

What I liked:

• Cute packaging as always.
• Cute heart shaped layered design.
• Perfect for Valentine's Day.
• Not limited edition.
• Available at most drugstores.
• I love how bright and bold the colors are.
• Comfortable feeling formula.
  

What I didn't like:

• The colors are hard to wear because they look really dry and cakey on the lips, even if your lips don't seem dry before you apply them. They're kinda chalky/milky colors, too, which makes them settle into lip lines and look even more dry.
• The construction is pretty shoddy. The tubes are loose and they rattle, the caps don't fit tightly, the design is sloppy, and if you have the lipstick twisted up only a very little bit, it will get smashed in the cap.
• The violet scent is nice, but it smells pretty generic, reminds me of old Avon lipstick samples or something like that. It doesn't smell the same as the sweet and delicate violet that's in the Happy Booster powders.
• They're really expensive for drugstore lipstick. I paid nearly $10 each for these.
• The heart design gets ruined/smudged the first time you use them.
• The name I Love (heart?) Nude is a little deceptive as it's not nude, it's orange.
  

Overall, I like them, they're cute, they're fun, but they're not flawless. I'm really disappointed by the construction of the tubes and the sloppiness of the design. For $10+ each, depending on where you buy them, I expected a higher quality product. Plus, even though the formula isn't drying, it looks dry on my lips. Very cakey/chalky going on and it makes my lips look like they're chapped and flaky. But, I still like them for the novelty factor and I really do like the colors, so I'll probably stick to applying these over a lipliner or a lipstick primer to help ease the chalky looking finish. The heart design and the shiny package make these lipsticks irresistible to me, especially this time of year.

Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics Loose Colour Concentrate in Jubilee Swatches and Review

I'm a lover of all things duochrome and iridescent, so when Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics released Jubilee Loose Eye Colour Concentrate as part of their Pretty Boy collection, it was love at first sight.


OCC describes Jubilee as a "soft baby blue shimmer," but it's so much more than that. It does have a baby blue base, but it also has a green and turquoise duochrome shimmer. At some angles, it even shifts to a faint purple at the edges. It is magnificent.



Swatched over bare skin (no primer). Dry (left), wet (right), with flash and without. You can see how the tones shift with the angle and lighting. From a green-turquoise shade of blue to a sky blue with faint purple accents.

Sometimes colors that look this interesting in the jar don't always look as good on the eye... this one does. I've used it a bunch of times and every time it still amazes me.

Two looks I've done with this color:


I used:
Too Faced Shadow Insurance Lemon Drop
NYX White Eyeshadow Base (lid only)
OCC Loose Colour Concentrate in Jubilee on lid and lower lashline
Ben Nye Cosmic Violet in crease
Ben Nye Amethyst in crease and on lower lashline
Urban Decay 24/7 Liquid Liner in Perversion

This was the first time I used the color and I was really happy with how it turned out. The blue and green tones mix perfectly with the purple Ben Nye colors. I used Jubilee over a sticky base (the NYX White) and it seemed to make the color shift stand out more.


For this one, I used:
Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion
NYX White Eyeshadow Base (lid and lower lashline)
OCC Loose Colour Concentrate in Jubilee on lid and lower lashline
Sugarpill Chromalust Loose Shadow in Royal Sugar in crease and on lower lashline
NYX Studio Liquid Liner in Extreme Purple
Make Up For Ever #92 on brows
Cover Girl Lash Blast Luxe in Black Royale

First off, Royal Sugar is insane. It is SUPER BLUE. Combined with the blue-green duochrome of Jubilee, it looks even more amazing. The green sparkles disappeared out of it when I blended it, but Jubilee added some of its own green sparkles, so I didn't miss them.

So. OCC Jubilee. Love it. The only downside to it is that it needs a sticky base or to be used wet if you want it to look extra duochrome. Otherwise it looks like a lightly duochrome turquoise shimmer. Both ways are nice. I, of course, prefer more duochrome, so lately I've been using it wet and it looks even cooler that way.

Obsessive Compulsive Loose Colour Concentrates are available directly from OCC and are $12 for 2.5 grams. They have a lot of cool looking colors and every single shade is vegan.

(This was sent for review.)

Finger Paints Special Effects Flake Glitter Topcoat Collection Swatches and Review

There's an epidemic spreading throughout the nail polish world. Flaky fever. It's highly contagious. And if you have flaky fever, the only cure is more cowbell flakes.

Flake glitter polishes (known colloquially as "flakies") are sprouting up everywhere lately, and that's a good thing. Flake glitter polishes are not all that common; most brands only have one or two, if they even have any at all. For a while, the only flaky polishes we could get were Nfu Oh, and those are pretty pricey. Despite being relatively rare/uncommon, they're incredibly popular and loved by polish fans everywhere. Now it seems that a lot of brands are realizing that we really love our flakies and we want more of them, so they're slowly adding more flake polishes to their lines. This most recent release, the Finger Paints Special Effects collection, is the créme de la créme of flakies.

I've swatched each of these over black because it's easier to see the different types of flakes that way. Each swatch is two coats of polish.

Finger Paints Asylum. Asylum is a clear base with red and blue flakes that shift to orange, yellow, green and purple. The flakes are all different shapes and sizes.



Finger Paints Flashy. Flashy is one of those red-orange-yellow-green types of flake polishes. It's not all that different from Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure/Essie Shine of the Times/Nubar 2010/et cetera, but it does seem to have brighter colors in the flakes. I haven't compared this side-by-side with any of those other polishes, but the red in this one just seems redder somehow.



Finger Paints Flecked. Flecked is the bright green-blue type of flake, but it has an extra strong color shift.


Finger Paints Motley. Motley is a little bit different. It's a mixture of green-blue flakes and blue-purple flakes. Some of the flakes even look purple on their own without changing colors. It's hard to see the purple color from these pictures, but it's obvious in real life. The blue flakes in this one are a lot bigger than most blue flake polishes I own so you get more blue tone than green in this polish, which I appreciate.



Finger Paints Twisted. The very best one. It's a mix of all the flakes. It has every color of the rainbow visible at all times and the shapes and sizes of the flakes are all really different. If I had to choose only one polish from this collection, this would be it. It rocks.

The formula on these was good. Like most flake polishes, they have a thick-textured base. These aren't as bad as most I've used, but they're still thicker than I'd like. Other than the texture of the base, the application was perfect. Great coverage. Reasonable dry time, but still longer than regular polish.

Honestly, this is the best collection of flakes I've seen to date. They're by far the most interesting ones I've used, but they also have the advantage of not being too sparse or having flakes that are too small.

Usually the type of flake glitters we see are the single-type ones, like Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure, where we only get one kind of flake in a clear or tinted base. They're either the red-orange-yellow-green ones (Hidden Treasure, Shine of the Times), the blue-green ones (Nails Inc. The Wyndham, Nfu Oh 56), and rarely, but still out there, the blue-purple ones (Nails Inc. The Old Vic). It's not as common to see the types of flakes mixed, but those are the ones I like the most. That's why I like these Finger Paints ones so much. Most of them are mixes of two or more flake types.

Another reason I like the Finger Paints Special Effects is that the flakes are large and there's a lot of them in the polish. I don't like flaky polishes that barely have any flakes and you have to do too many coats to get good coverage. These look good at one coat, but even more amazing at two. I haven't done three coats of any of these yet, but I can only imagine how cool that would look.

The only thing I don't like about this collection is that it's limited edition and only available in-store at Sally Beauty. Flake glitters this good need to be permanent and accessible to everyone! They got the price right, but they should have at least made them available online.

The Finger Paints Special Effects collection is available only at Sally Beauty stores through the month of January. They are limited edition and retail for $5.49 each.