Illamasqua Speckled Nail Varnish

 I am awful on my nails. I'm impatient when I paint them and I constantly chip them and peel polish off and generally make a mess of my nails. It does not help that I work in a file room and deal with dusty files and other nail unfriendly things. I also do not like to spend alot of money on nail polish for all of those reasons.

 

I had seen the Illamasqua Speckled Nail Varnish on multiple blogs and just couldn't get it off my mind. At $16 a bottle, it seemed a bit rich for my blood, but in a spark of naughty impulsiveness, I purchased one in Mottled.

 

 

 This nail varnish is AMAZING. I read many reviews about the quality and was honestly not expecting much, nail varnish is nail varnish is nail varnish, you know? But the formula for this varnish is wonderful and goes on smooth, which is a big issue for me when painting my nails. Most polishes tend to be slightly goopy and my impatience just makes it worse. I was amazed at how the varnish would actually fill in spaces on my nails and basically even itself out.

 

 

 

The color is incredibly pigmented and although it is quite pastel, it doesn't look like it should be in a nursery. I've had my nails painted for 3 days (did a bit of touch up work last night) and they look great with only the slightest little chip here and there. This, for me, is unheard of. I usually start picking off polish a day in because it gets chipped so bad.

 

 

I do have one problem with this varnish though. The bottle and cap. As you can tell from the picture below, when the cap is screwed on tightly, it does not line up with the bottle. This drives me insane. I would love to have this out on a cabinet or something to show off how gorgeous it is, but that damn cap will forever haunt me. So it looks like it will just have to find a home with all my other nail polishes in a drawer.

 

I have already scouted out several more Illamasqua varnishes and when I'm feeling impulsive I plan to get a few. I almost wish I wasn't so in love with the formula due to the price, but I guess I can always just wait and pick one or two up whenever I need to splurge on myself.

Zoya Nail Polish

I love a good deal, so when I saw a coupon floating around the web for three free bottles of nail polish, I jumped at the chance. I had never used Zoya before, but I had heard about it on various blogs and YouTube beauty videos.

After searching through all of the color choices, I finally decided on Rina, Tao, and Meadow.I ended up paying ten dollars for shipping, but seeing as each bottle is eight bucks, that is still a good deal and well worth the price. 

I've spoken before about my love of gray and Tao is the prettiest gray that I've found so far. Its got a slight blue tinge that I was a little worried about before seeing it on, but it is gorgeous. The shimmer is not overwhelming and the polish is SO shiny.

 

 

I ended up painting over Tao with Rina, which is a clear polish with two different types of green glitter and a few blue-ish pieces of glitter mixed in. The confetti glitter is what attracted me to this polish. I love glitter in general, but sometimes its nice to see it changed up from the normal small glitter particles. This color is to die for. It's a very Christmas green, but I can see myself wearing it all year round.

 

Meadow is a lovely orangeish-pink with gold shimmer. I started to paint my nails with this color, but after smearing a few nails because I wasn't paying attention, the gray of Tao and the green of  Rina wrangled me in and I had to go with those. I am planning to paint my toenails in Meadow tonight. I love pink polish, which seems odd because I'm honestly not a big fan of the color pink. Its has a tendency to wash me out and make me look sickly. I am a little more adventurous with my nails since it's so easy to change if I really don't like it.

 

I will definitely be purchasing more colors from Zoya in the (near) future. With my polish I received a little booklet with all of the colors (which is so much easier to get a feel for the colors than browsing on the website) and I've already got about 10 marked that I need.