Kiss My Acetone

Today’s been the first day in quite a while that it’s actually felt somewhat like here in So Cal. It’s bee unusually warm and sunny here for the past week or so and today is was grey and on the cooler side so I decided this was the perfect polish to wear for the cooler weather. Hard Candy Mushroom is a mushroomie, slightly grayed out milk chocolate brown. It reminds me of the color oh hot chocolate… of which I enjoyed a mug full of tonight while wearing this polish . I haven’t compared the two yet, but Mushroom reminds me a lot of Essie Mink Muffs which was released two Falls ago. I really like these types of colors.. they’re plain yet not so standard. And there’s a certain coziness to them that I can’t help but love.

~Dori

(this was sent to me for review)

If you’re looking for a quick, cheap, easily accessible, and fun last minute gift idea for the holiday, look no further cause this holiday season Hard Candy has released either mini nail polishes (None of which have names, by the way. Which I find odd.) that only coat a dollar. That’s right folks, just one dolla dolla bill, y’all. Plus, these polishes come with a heart shaped ring in a matching color that I’ve never seen Hard Candy mini polishes come with. Winner, winner chicken dinner.

A silver foil in a sheer silver base.

A sheer yellow jelly base with medium yellow-gold glitter.

An orange-red with gold foil shimmer.

A yellowed lime green jelly base filled with green, gold, and a little bit of blue glitter.

A medium purple shimmer with bits of pink and blue microglitter sparkle.

A hot pink filled with hot pink and silver glass fleck shimmer.

A medium blue foil-shimmer with silver and blue foil glitter flecks.

A black jelly with sparse medium silver glitter.

Overall, the formula on these were pretty good. The foils applied easier than the jellies. None of them seemed to have the same type of formula as the full sized Hard Candy polishes though. But for a buck rather than five, I guess you may expect that to happen. My favorites are the pink shimmer and the blue shimmer. These were all two coats.

These are available at Wal*Mart for $1 and only for a limited time for the holiday season.

~Dori

(these were sent to me for review.)

On my birthday I painted my nails with OPI Bubble Bath and layered Deborah Lippmann Happy Birthday on top and it ended up looking somewhat how I expected Deborah Lippmann Candy Shop, from this upcoming Holiday collection, to look. I then got the idea to layer Hard Candy Breakup over Essie Marshmallow in attempts to recreate what I imagine the new upcoming Deborah Lippmann polish Stairway To Heaven to look like.

Swatches to DL have not yet, to my knowledge, hit the internet yet so I’m not sure how close my mani is to the real deal but nonetheless, I quite like it. And as a bonus, if this does end up looking similar enough to Stairway To Heaven, it will end up saving me $18 and killing a lemming!!

~Dori

So I forgot to mention one of the coolest things about Hard Candy Gossaholic lip glosses during my last two posts on the gloss line. As you can see in the second picture, Hard Candy doesn’t test on animals. That’s a huge plus for me. There’s some beauty products I really, really love, but if I find out that they test on animals I’m immediately throw off the product. I love that Hard Candy supports not testing on animals and feels strongly enough about it to state so on their beauty product labeling. Mucho kudos to Hard Candy for that one. Onto the gloss review! Hard Candy Gossaholic in Tipsy is one of the 8 colored glosses from the Gossaholic line (my two previous reviews we’re on the only two clear glosses which were also the only two glosses infused with “mood altering elixir”). Tipsy is a bright, warm candy pink jam-packed with pink, golden, and orange iridescent flakies. Again, like with the other two Gossaholics, the flakies are evident (more so in real life than they are in the picture of it on my lips) but they’re not over the top crazy obnoxious like say, a 12 year old’s lip gloss would be. The pink base does show on the lips but it’s pretty sheer so you won;t get an opaque look with this unless you layer it over a lipstick. The smell is much like that of Hard Candy Gossaholic Chill Out Vanilla, yet more with sweet vanilla and less lavender. I really do love these glosses so much. They’re super gorgeous and unique and with all the product you get, this lip gloss gives you the most bang for your buck.. by far. I think I’m gonna end up collection them all.

Anybody else find these in their Wal*Mart? Like, dislike, or pass on them all together?

~Dori

Yesterday I did a review on Hard Candy Gossaholic Vanilla Chill Out which is one of the two new Gossaholic lip glosses that claims to contain mood altering elixir. This is Hard Candy Gossaholic Coffee Rise & Shine which is the second of the two Gossaholics in the collection that claim to contain mood altering elixir. This one claims to alter your mood by waking you up where as the other claims to relax you. Pretty cool concept except I’m not too sure that I believe these mood altering elixirs actually alter your mood.

Coffee Rise & Shine has a sweet coffee scent to it which is possibly what it meant to wake you up. I have coffee almost every single morning to wake me up so a coffee smell definitely makes me feel a bit more awake. Other than that, I don’t really think the gloss contains much more that would alter my mood or wake me up.

Looks wise, Coffee Rise & Shine is a clear gloss base just like Vanilla Chill Out but the flakie glitter in this one is a totally different color. The flakie glitter pieces in Coffee Rise & Shine are iridescent pink, orange and golden. The glitter shows up really well in the tube and like with Vanilla Chill Out, the flakies show up pretty obvious on the lips but they’re not over the top obvious and obnoxious. I love glitter so I like the look of the flakies on the lips but if you’re not a glitter lip gloss fan, you probably want to pass on this gloss.

Application and staying power for this gloss are the same as with Vanilla Chill Out. Lots of product comes out on the huge doe foot so one swipe is enough for both lips. This gloss isn’t sticky which I like and it has pretty good staying power. The flakies do last on the lips much longer than the actual gloss itself. The feel of the flakies on the lips isn’t as noticeable with Rise & Shine for me as it was for Chill Out. With Chill Out I could feel the flakies a bit on my lips when I rubbed them together; with Rise & Shine I didn’t feel that at all and couldn’t even feel the flakies on my lips.

Overall, I love this lip gloss. I’m very pleased so far with the Hard Candy Gossaholic lip glosses I’ve tried thus far. They’re so pretty and unique and a great cheap buy for how much product you get.

~Dori

Hey all! So on a trip to Wal*Mart two days ago I was walking through the cosmetic aisles and stumbled upon the brand new Hard Candy Gossaholic lip gloss line. I had heard about these glosses a few weeks ago on MUA and heard that they were basically lip gloss versions of Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure. I actually forgot about them until I saw them in the Hard Candy section and freaked freaked out and how cool these glosses look in person. The Gossaholic line consists of six or seven colored glosses with flakie glitter and two clear glosses with flakie glitter. The two clear glosses, Vanilla (Chill Out) and Coffee (Rise & Shine) claim to have “mood altering elixir”.

Vanilla Chill Out is the first of the Gossaholics that I picked up. The tube claims that this gloss will relax you. I’m not too sure about that, and I’m not too sure exactly what is in the gloss that is meant to relax you. Perhaps the sweet vanilla and lavender smell? I like vanilla and I like lavender and I know both those scents are supposed to be relaxing so in my opinion, the scent is about the extent of what relaxes you. I highly doubt there’s anything in the gloss that is supposed to chemically relax you but I guess maybe the scent could relax you a bit? I don’t know. I like the vanilla scent and it’s not too sweet or over powering so thumbs up for the scent of the gloss.

Now for the look. The name gossaholic says it all. This is an over the top glittery gloss. It’s clear packed with micro, small, medium, and somewhat large iridescent purple glitter flakies that duochrome a bright orange when the observation angle switches. I have never seen a gloss anything similar to this. I looooove glitter and I love flakies so this is a true winner for me. I think the glitter is pretty noticeable if you’re close or looking straight at the lips but it’s not crazy over the tip and obnoxious. However, if you don’t like glitter on your lips, this isn’t for you.

On to application.. the applicator for this brush is HUGE. I mean huge.. like twice as big as any other doe foot applicator. I forgot to take a picture to show how big the wand and applicator are but I have more of these glosses to review so I’ll make sure to take a picture for the next one. The huge wand makes this gloss super easy to apply. The wand is big enough to cover your entire bottom lip in one swipe, which is all you need considering enough product gets on your lips in that one swipe to cover both lips. The gloss is I would say about medium thickness. It’s not thin and runny but it’s not thick and goopey either. I think the consistancy of this gloss is just perfect. And it’s not sticky at all which is almost unheard of for a drug store lip gloss! I do have to say though that I can feel the flakie glitter somewhat on my lips. It wasn’t annoying or super noticeable but I could feel that the gloss didn’t feel completely smooth on my lips, especially when I rubbed my lips together. It really wasn’t so bad though and definitely not enough or a bother to keep me from wearing the gloss again.

Now for staying power. These flakies wear like iron. The gloss itself wears off within an hour or so with all the lip licking and so on. Usually the thicker and stickier the gloss, the longer the wear. Long after the gloss is gone though the flakies are still on my lips which I like.

Overall, I love this product. I already bought three Gossaholic lip glosses and I plan to back and snatch up the rest. These glosses only cost five bucks, they’re amazingly gorgeous and unique, and you get a ton of product in the tube!!! These tubes have 10.8 grams which is over double the products you get in Bare Escentuals and MAC lip gloss tubes.. not to mention that you can get the Gossaholics for about a quarter of the price tag.

Winner winner chicken dinner!!

~Dori

Hey, folks! So last week when I did my second cupcake mani I got a ton of requests on the MUA nail board for a tutorial on how to make them so here it is!:
First you need to start off with a base color.. any color works. In the past I’ve used a creme or a creme topped with glitter but today since I was doing the same cupcake on all my nails I decided to do a background that was a bit crazier. This is three coats of Sally Hansen Hidden Treasure, one coat of China Glaze Fairy Dust, and one coat of Hard Candy Breakup.

Next, you need to pick the main base color for the cupcake’s cake. Here I used Orly Pixi Stix. Make a box (by no means does it have to be perfect.. the top half will be covered up by the icing anyway) on the tip of your nails with the polish. You’re aiming for the polish to be fairly close to each side of your nail but you don’t want it to be all the way across. You want a tiny gap of background polish showing on the sides of the cupcake. Usually I do two coats of the cupcake cake polish but today I did three coats since the hexagon glitter in Breakup showed through a bit after two coats.

Wait about two to three mins to let the cupcake base color dry. Next, with a dotting tool paint five vertical stripes down your cupcake bottom with a different color. I have a double sided dotting tool where the dotter on one side is small and the other side is a bit larger. For these stripes I use the smallest end of the dotting tool. I usually use a color that is a few shades lighter for the cupcake stripes. In this case, I used Orly Cotton candy. Start by making a line down the center, and then follow by making to more lines on each side of that middle line so that you have five lines total.

Like how uneven my lines are? Well, it doesn’t much matter since the next step it to put the frosting on top of the cupcakes! I waited about five minutes for the whole cupcake base to (hopefully) dry completely before adding on the polish for the frosting. I used Essie Mink Muffs because I wanted my cupcakes to have chocolate frosting. For this step I use the larger side of the dotting tool to make three little upside down hills about midway up my cake base, then make an arch connecting the sides of the cupcake to make the dome of the frosting. Then I fill it in like so.

I wait for the frosting to dry about ten minutes in the hopes that it is almost completely dry and will not smudge when I go to ass my heart and sprinkles on top. Next I use Klean Color Twinkly Hearts, which is a clear polish filled with pink, silver, and blue holo glitter hearts to add the heart on top of the cupcake. I usually don;t have to heard a time getting the hearts out of the bottle. Sometimes I have to drunk the brush back in the bottle a few times in order to get the heart color I want on the wand and then I use the small end of my dotting tool to pick the heart off the brush and place it on the center top of each of my cupcakes.

Immediately after each cupcake is topped with a glitter heart decal I add the sprinkles. I decided to have rainbow sprinkles this time around and used Maybelline Sophisticated Pink, Maybelline Goody Plum Drop, Maybelline Minty, and China Glaze For Audrey. I use the small end of the dotting tool to get a very tiny amount of polish on the dotter (tiny sprinkles are much cuter than huge blob sprinkles!) and simply dot the sprinkle on the the frosting around the heart. I do two dots of one color on each nail, then two dots of the next color each nail and so on. It’s much easier to do one color at a time then do four different colors of sprinkles on a nail before moving on to the next nail.

Next, I wait ten to fifteen minutes before adding Seche Vite top coat. I know it may seem like a long wait time but it really sucks when you’ve done this perfectly gorgeous mani and you don’t wait long enough before adding top coat so your images get smeared and ruined.. trust me, I’ve had it happen. Nothings worse than watching amazing nail art that took forever to do get ruined and smeared by top coat cause you’re too anxious to finish. I know it sucks to wait, but it’s worth it. To prove it, here’s the end result!:
And there you go! Hope you all enjoyed this first tutorial. If you’re interested in seeing more tutorials on the blog, please let me know! And if there’s anything else you’re interest in seeing on the blog (or more often) please let me know that too! I do this blog because I enjoy it but I do it for my readers too and I want you to enjoy the blog as well so feedback is always appreciated so that I can cater to the wants of my readers :0)!

Have a fabulous rest of your weekend!

~Dori