Maya Cosmetics- It Can’t Rain All The Time & Almost Happy Hour

A few weeks ago, my friend Chris sent me a tweet telling me his good friend Kat had started a new nail polish line that had launched that morning and to “tell all [my] nail polish people.”  Then when we were in Antigua, he was asking what I thought of the line, and getting my opinion, like I’m an expert or something. Well, to be fair, this is probably the only thing on the planet where I know more about it than he does. So when I had some left over funds from my trip, I decided to purchase a few, and if I didn’t like them, I did my Good Friend Duty of The Year! Luckily, this was money well spent!!

Up first is It Can’t Rain All The Time. A sheer purple base with green, periwinkle, and lavender hex glitter, with lavender microglitter, It Can’t Rain All The Time is a great glitter on it’s own, but also great as a layering polish (see below!). Here I have 2 coats with a bit of visible nail line, but 3 coats eliminated that problem.  I also layered it over Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure’s Greige Gardens and it looked great then as well!

This will be a great polish for spring time and I will definitely be trying some of Kat’s other glitters. Also, props for the nod to The Crow.

The other polish I purchased was Almost Happy Hour. That’s a thought that runs through my mind at least 4 times a week. And as the “office appropriate” polish lover, this was definitely a “must have” polish for me. A taupe creme with a copper, silver, gold, and pink shimmer, this polish is office appropes with a dash of pizzazz. I used two coats here, but you can totally get away with just one! Those are the best kind! While a lot of my neutrals are in the pale pinks and mannequin hands category, this one will provide a bit of color in the office.

Maya Cosmetics are available their website for $8.50. Through the month of October, $1 from each bottle sold will be split between the Wounded Warriors Project and Fisher House. These are organizations that are close to my heart as I work for the Department of Veterans Affairs and have worked closely with people who work for, and benefited from, both WWP and Fisher House.

Hangin with Lil Jon at Ricky’s in Soho!

*Disclaimer: This post has pretty much nothing to do with nail polish, but it is full of awesome! To be fair, I had every intention of this being a “nail adventures” post, but patience was not on my side this morning and what is usually a quality polish turned into a blotchy mess, and well, it just wasn’t going to do it justice to post the polish. Hopefully all the pictures of the actual adventure make up for it!

When I got an email from Ricky’s earlier this week announcing that Lil Jon was going to be at their Soho location to promote his Halloween mask collaboration with the store, my first thought was “uh, heck yes”. Well, okay fine, it was “YYEEEAAAYYAHH, WHHHAATT” haha. I pretty much scheduled my whole Sunday around it.

And I wasn’t let down, it was a great event. I got a couple pictures with Lil Jon, got him to autograph a mask for my best friend Erin (who also visited this weekend!), got to shake THE Ricky’s hand (yeah, I’ll admit it, I was more awestruck meeting him than Lil Jon. I mean, come on, he’s RICKY), and got to meet the lovely LeAnna in person, which was quite the treat after basically being Ricky’s pen pals for the past year! (she’s the one that sends all the awesome Ricky’s blogger blasts, FYI) Pretty much the only thing that could have made it better would have been if Mel was in town to enjoy it with me 😉

Oh, and in case you were wondering, turns out Lil Jon likes a good “hello” haha. While being interviewed, he was asked if he was a little over people stealing his catch phrases. His answer: “Yeah, yeah I am. You know, you can just say ‘Hi’ you know, ya don’t have to scream at me!” Which made him seem really down to earth, but was then followed up with “It’s hard to be me” hahaha.

Jump below the cut for a gallery, or enjoy the slideshow below 🙂 If you want one of the Lil Jon masks, they are available at Ricky’s stores or online at Rickysnyc.com for $12!

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China Glaze- Elephant Walk & Sally Hansen- Glass Slipper

Just a quick post today as I’m still catching up from vacation (I had a blast, btw) and about to head to downtown DC for the DC United game and Soupapalooza!! Exciting stuff, I know.

China Glaze Elephant Walk is from the Fall 2012 Safari collection. I didn’t really “need” another gray, but I also never “need” a piece of tiramisu and that never stops me. So here we are. Besides, I love elephants, I would have bought this color no matter what shade. Anyways, Elephant Walk is a gray creme with a very subtle shimmer. I used 2 coats for full opacity, and the formula was excellent. I wore this on its own for 2 days without any tip wear. You can pick up China Glaze polishes at Sally Beauty, Ulta, and all over the interwebs, and they range from $4.50-$7 depending on where you buy.

After two days, I added a coat of Sally Hansen’s Glass Slipper to extend the manicure as I was quite busy. It’s a very classy flakie top coat that adds a bit of bling without going overboard. Again, work appropriate in my opinion. I love how it looks like snow flakes and will be a heavily use polish this coming winter. I picked this baby up for $3 at Walmart in February or March, and have used it multiple times since then. Definitely a diverse polish and I can’t wait to try it over a bunch of different colors.

Essie – Nice is Nice

So, a couple of weeks ago it was my bbbiirrfffddaaayyy and I made a trip home to MD to see my family and friends, including the lovely Melissa 🙂 The day before I left I also got a promotion (!!!) so I had a lot to celebrate. I ended up doing three different bday manis, haha, but this one wins the “blog official” bday mani.

Mel’s present to me was a basket of nail goodies and a rummage through her purge pile. Essie – Nice is Nice was in there, as well as Spoiled – Jewelry Heist, which I used as the accent. NiN is a nice jelly lavender that took two easy coats to full opacity. I think it’s actually going to go in my favorites pile! (Insert “one woman’s trash…” joke here, haha) I thought that Jewelry Heist’s color suited Nice is Nice really well, and that it gave it a look that could be classy or fun.

My parents took me to Renn Fest while I was down, and my nails looks fabulous toting around my cider and raspberry wine 🙂

Btw, these were the other contenders for bday mani, the second of which was done by my best friend Erin (with help from Antony!)

Color Club Birchbox Exclusive- Put a Pin In It

So, occasionally, we come across a polish we don’t love. This is one of those polishes for me. I HATE THIS POLISH. HATE. IT. I like Color Club polishes a lot. And I love Birchbox. And I love the other colors in this collection. I really wanted to like this polish, because I love rose gold. But I just can’t. Metallic polishes have tricky formulas, and this is one showed every flaw in my nails. It was a PITA to clean up as you can see from the shimmer around my fingers. And it’s not quite rosy enough to look good on my skin tone. It also required 3 coats for full opacity. I’m just so blah on this 😦 Jess really liked it though, so hopefully she can provide a different point of view on it.

You can pick up the Birchbox and Color Club Custom Collection on the Birchbox website for $8.00.

Essie- Your Hut Or Mine

Essie’s Your Hut or Mine is part of the 2011 Resort Collection. After stalking occasionally checking my TJ Maxx for the $3.99 Essies I kept hearing about, I finally came across them last week while running errands on my day off. Naturally, I sat down and painted my nails with it immediately, rocking it for On Wednesdays We Wear Pink. I used two coats for this manicure as I could still see visible nail line after one coat. If I’m staring really closely, you can still see it after two coats as well, but it’s not nearly as noticeable. It’s a great formula as Essies normally are. I love the pink shimmer!! This is a great all-purpose color. Great for work, great for fancy events, great to wear because you feel like wearing pink!

Essie is available pretty much everywhere, retailing between $7.50-$8.50, and for less on many e-tailers, such as Trans Design.

A-England – Jane Eyre

As soon as I saw the press release for the new A-England Gothic Beauties collection, I know Jane Eyre had to be mine. I love A-England polishes so I ordered it through Llarowe as soon as it was available, and the rest is history. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, is one of my favorite stories. I’m a bit weird about it. I’m not a huge fan of the book itself, but I love the movie. That could have something to do with Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester. He’s perfect, isn’t he?  But I digress. Jane Eyre was the one polish in this collection where I went “OH OH!!!”

Jane Eyre is described as an “intensely smouldering crimson embers, imprisoned in a veil of sombre black.” That, my friends, is a description! The formula is amazing, a one coater if you do a thick coat, but this is two thin coats. The shimmer is outstanding and I couldn’t stop staring at my nails. This polish was one where I made an effort to get a photo in the sunlight, which meant I had to stop on a street corner on my way home from work. I definitely got some looks. But it’s so worth it! I wore this for FIVE DAYS and experienced very little tip wear. I see this color getting A LOT of wear this winter. I bet it makes an amazing pedicure.

As this post goes live, I’m on my way to Antigua for 9 days!! I have several posts scheduled while I’m gone, and Jess is stepping up and doing a few extra posts. I’m going for the USA World Cup Qualifier so naturally there will be special manicure happening, including one very special one! I can’t wait to share them!

Wet N Wild- Poison Ivy

I’m not going to go on and on about Wet N Wild’s Poison Ivy, because you have eyes. You can see how gorgeous it is. I really love the formula on WNW’s Megalast polishes, this is 2 coats, but you can get away with one. Poison Ivy has that “glow from within” quality that I am loving right now. A small word of warning, the brush on this is not my favorite. I like a wider, stiffer brush, but this brush seems stiffer than normal, and it’s too wide for my pinky finger 😦 I shall deal with it.

Poison Ivy is part of the limited edition Pick Your Poison collection, and retails for $1.99. I picked up several polishes from this collection during CVS Wet N Wild BOGOFREE sale earlier this week. Good luck finding these, the WNW limited edition collections are notoriously hard to find, but eventually they start popping up. Definitely pick this one up!

Obama Polish by Richard Blanch of Le Métier de Beauté

A couple weeks ago I posted that I had discovered that the Obama campaign was selling nail polish, and that I needed it. Wellll yesterday it arrived and I had to give it a try. Disclaimer: This post is not a review of his person, campaign, or politics. But it is a review of this polish. I suppose a more fair way to review it is to call it Richard Blanch of Le Métier de Beauté’s polish, seeing as he is the designer behind it.

The perks? The bag it came in is great. (My boss almost stole it haha) The bottles, while tiny, are a cute mini cube shape. The colors themselves are classics. And with the logo on them, they’re gonna look cute sitting on my desk at work, right next to my framed picture of Washington Capitals Captain Alexander Ovechkin sitting in the oval office. (I’m special, I’m aware) And the mani I did with it ended up pretty cute, I felt very patriotic and chuckled with coworkers a couple times about it being Obama polish. All the colors are glossy, and I have pictures of them without topcoat below the cut, but I used Butter London’s matte topcoat for today’s look.

 

L’Oreal Rainy Piccadilly w/ Zoya- Fei Fei

The only reason I picked up Rainy Piccadilly was because I had a coupon. That’s how many of my nail polish purchases happen. I can preach how I’m on a no-buy but I see a sale and I just can’t resist. I’m really glad I picked this up though. It’s named after one of my favorite places in London, so it’s extra special. The formula is excellent, opaque in two coats. To add a little bling, I did an accent nail is Zoya Fei Fei (photos below the jump), from their Fall 2012 collection. Expect a full review on that in the future, because it’s awesome!

Rainy Piccadilly is part of the British Invasion collection and can be found at Target, Walgreens, Walmart, and other major drugstores. It can retail between $4.50-$6 depending on where you purchase it.