Illlamasqua Load

I am in love. Absolutely in love. This has got to be one of the best nail varnishes that I’ve bought. Not only is it my first Illamasqua purchase but it is also my first cream coloured nail varnish.

Illamasqua is a brand that I’ve heard of plenty of times but never really paid much attention to. No idea why really but I suppose you can’t go wild for every single make-up brand you hear about! Anyways, one of my friends really started getting into Illamasqua and was constantly telling me about it and then she produced a bottle of the nail varnish she had bought. Load. I looked. I hesitated. I pondered. I swooned. I bought. It arrived, I applied and now I’ve been wearing it for 5 days.

If you don’t own this, I highly suggest that you consider getting it. I was unsure at first but the colour really is beautiful. It’s cream but it also veers towards being a very light primrose yellow. It’s bright but not stark. Application was smooth. The photos show 2 coats but they could have done with 3 just to be completely opaque. Wear time was fantastic, 5 days in and no chips. Very very slight tipwear but it’s not noticeable at all unless you examine it very closely. Two nails are dented but that is completely my fault as I didn’t give them enough time to dry.

Overall I am so impressed with this nail varnish. It was pricy enough, around €13 from Asos, but on this occasion it was well worth it!

Have you ever used Illamasqua nail varnish? Any recommendations for me to try? 

E.O.T.D. feat. Urban Decay 15 Anniversary Palette

I have had so much fun with this palette. There really is so many different looks that you can create using this palette alone.

The first eye look that I'm going to be featuring is one that predominantly uses the neutral colours in the palette. I wanted to try them out to see how I liked them compared to the neutrals in the Naked palette. 

To get this look I used: 

• Urban Decay Primer Potion in Eden
• Mac Paintpot in Bare Study
• Midnight 15 applied from lid to brow
• Flow in the outer lid
• Chase in the crease
• Deeper smudged on the lower lash line
• Evidence used with Mac's Fix+ on the upper lash line
• Lancome Hypnose Mascara 

I was really pleased with this look. I found all the neutral shadows to be of good pigmentation and of the same quality as the ones in the Naked palette. There is fallout from them but it doesn't put me off them. 

The next look will feature more colours!

Barry M - Raspberry

Happy Friday everyone! I'm so so excited for this weekend. I'm going to see Breaking Dawn tonight and have a massive night out planned for tomorrow night. And I'm off all weekend! Going to get a load of blog posts prepared as well and make a start on my Christmas shopping:) Busy busy!

Today's post is just going to be a quick nail post. It's one of the nail polishes that was featured in this post about my A/W 11 nail polish picks.

I've really gotten to love Barry M nail varnishes the last while. They have a great colour selection and are so cheap! I've found that they apply well and I don't think I've come across an overly sheer one yet, they all seem to be opaque very quick.

Raspberry is a beautiful deep pinky red, with no glitter or shimmer in it, just a solid creme finish.

Urban Decay 15 Year Anniversary Palette (Swatches)

I was so excited to get this from my fabulous friends for my birthday in September. It is such a fantastic palette with a brilliant mixture of bright and neutral shades. It comes in a glorious, shiny, mirrored packaging which is beautiful but very prone to finger prints! 

This is going to be a very picture heavy post so I've decided to just have the pictures of the palette and swatches in this post and I'll do some follow up posts which will include eye looks I've created with the palette.

                         
                            

                          

Sorry for the reflection of my camera in all of the pictures!

Swatches

 

L-R Midnight Rodeo, Midnight 15, Vanilla, Flow, Chase.

L-R Tainted, Junkshow, Omen, Evidence, Deep End.

L-R Deeper, M.I.A., Ace, Blackout, Half-Truth.

This is a great palette. I love the mixture of neutrals and brights which ensure you have countless options no matter what the occasion. All the colours are very pigmented. Some colours are very glittery and have a lot of fallout such as Midnight 15.

My favourite colours from this palette have to be Omen, which has a nearly duochrome effect and Evidence which is a beautiful navy type colour.

 

Looks like some one else is after the palette!

I'll be posting a few of my favourite eye looks that I've created with this palette over the next few days:)

Graduation Make-up and Nails

I didn't fall!!! Yay! That was such a relief :D

Graduation was such a great day, it was brilliant to see all my college friends and hard to believe that it had been 4 years since we all started out in college together.

Make-up

I wore a greeny teal dress with silver accesories. I didn't want my make-up to be too over done, nor did I want it to match or clash with my outfit. Normally that would mean I would go for a neutral brown eye (i.e. UD Naked palette) but that would mean using a lot of golds and I was wearing silver accessories and I wanted to keep my outfit cool-toned and the gold would have been way too warm-toned.
Eventually I decided to go for slight purple eye with silver/grey hightlights. I was really happy with how it turned out and it lasted all day and all night.

I did use quite a lot of eyeshadows, I always tend to do that when it's for a big event, like the more shadows I use the more important the event, haha!

Here's more photos of the eye look, they're not as good as I wanted but I really was rushing when I took these. All the same it gives the general idea of how my make-up looked.

To achieve this I used: 
Urban Decay Primer Potion in Original
Mac Paintpot in Nubile
Mac e/s Yoghurt from lid to brow
Mac Quarry all over lid
Mac Fig 1. on the outer lid and 'v'
Mac Club on 'v', crease and lower lash line
Wet n Wild's 'Blue Had Me at Hello' Silver eyelid colour on inner lid and tear duct
Mac Smut on upper and lower lash line
Lightly patted all over lid was Mac Wedge
Mac Brule was used on brow
Mac Phloof! was placed just under the arch of the brow
The eyeliner used was Maybelline's Gel Eyeliner
Lancome Hypnose mascara
Dior Diorshow mascara
L'oreal Volume Million Lashes for Hazel eyes
Mac Chromographic pencil on waterline.

Nails

I contemplated going for a nude or pale pink on my nails but eventually I decided to go for grey. I felt it worked perfectly with my cool-toned theme, was still subtle enough not to be in your face but yet was not 'the usual'. My chosen grey was Dove by Zoya. It applied beautifully and is still looking good on my nails (applied Thursday night and this is Sunday afternoon) The photo I'm using is actually from a couple of weeks back, I didn't have glitter remains around my finger-tips on Friday!

Anybody else have Graduation coming up?

OPI Sweetheart

I'm graduating today!! I'm so excited and I can't wait to see all my college friends again. This is actually a scheduled post because at the moment I am probably racing around the house trying to get ready!:D I might even be tweeting:) 

I wanted to post something today anyway (and because I had the chance to schedule a post at 11:11 on the 11/11/11 :D)

Here we have Sweetheart by OPI. It's a beautiful kind of milky pink. Very classy, very neutral and very elegant. I see this as an 'appropriate' colour. I feel having this shade in my collection is like having a good white t-shirt, it's a basic that will always have a place. 

                            

Funnily enough though I'm not even going to be wearing this on my fingers! I have it on my toes (I'm wearing peep-toe shoes) I like it on my toes too but I thought I'd spare you a picture of my toes and just go with a run of the mill hand post!  

I'm going to do a graduation post after today as well, showing my eye-makeup and what colour I am wearing on my (finger!) nails. 

Hope everybody has a great weekend! All going well, my graduation post won't start with 'well I managed to go flying across the stage after tripping myself up.....'

Snow, Already?!

I was sorting through all my photos on the laptop and I came across these photos that I took last December of the snow. Although the snow and subsequent icy weather has caused havoc the last couple of years, there's no denying how pretty it all is! 

I thought I'd post these few pictures (out of a lot) before I end up taking this year's batch of ones :D 

Wet n Wild Trio: I Dream of Greenie

This is my last post/review of my Wet n Wild palettes. Today's one is 'I Dream of Greenie' which consists of surprise, surprise, green shades. I love green, I really do. All kinds of greens. But this palette is bright. Very bright. In particular the eyelid shade. It's like acid. On crack.

 

L-R Browbone, Crease, Eyelid.

 

To create this look I used:

• Urban Decay Primer Potion in Original
• The Palette as intended
• Maybelline Gel Eyeliner on upper lash line and to tightline
• Mascara was Lancome Hypnose

My thoughts on this? Pigmentation is obviously fantastic. I love the look I created with it but it is very very bright. And I like bright but it was the first time in a long time that I was conscious of the eye make-up I was wearing. It just felt a little bit....too loud for daytime I think. (God I feel like a boring old person:( ) 

Overall, I can't fault the actual palette itself, it's just me being afraid of the brightness haha! That said, this is probably my favourite of the 3 trios I bought.

MAC Paint Pot - Genuine Treasure

This was the paintpot that I was worried about. I had read a lot of reviews that it was patchy and difficult to work with but because it was so pretty I couldn't resist getting it anyways and hoped for the best. When I swatched it in this post, it was indeed patchy. But how did it work out on the eye?

The first three photos show Genuine Treasure only on the lid. No primer, nothing. As you can see, it also applied patchy to the eye. Not only that, it left quite a messy residue underneath the eye as well.

But fear not, it is salvageable. 

                           

To get this look I:

• Over the base of Genuine Treasure -
• I packed on Smog from the Urban Decay Naked Palette
• Placed Virgin from the Naked Palette on brow
• Maybelline Gel Eyeliner on upper and lower lash line and to tightline
• Mascara was Lancome Hypnose

I really like the effect that I was able to create with Genuine Treasure. It was very simple and did not require too many different eye shadows to produce the look. I'm looking forward to playing around with it a bit more. 

I took loads of photos of this eye look so here's a few more to have a look at:)