Some places to visit!

I have been on a quest to find websites that sell OPI at discounted prices and so far I really haven't found much. It's hard to find websites that sell them at all, let alone at discounted rates. During my hunt though, I did find a ton of websites that sell China Glaze, Essie, and more. This did excite me and honestly this is why I own so much China Glaze now and why I prefer them over OPI.

In regular retail stores the cheapest I've found China Glaze is $5.99 at Sally's (with their club card). Online though I've found them around $3 a bottle, and factoring in shipping it averages to around $4 a bottle. Still way cheaper, and the selection is much more amazing!  In all my searching I have found two websites to be the best. I will describe each one. Some things are the same for each site, but there are some differences.

HEAD2TOEBEAUTY (click me!)

China Glaze averages for around $3.25/bottle. Some are a little more depending on the type of polish. INCREDIBLE selection....you can find polishes from collections from like 3 years ago. After shipping, bottles are about $4.00-$4.15/bottle. Does sell other brands such as Essie and Orly, but they are sold at regular retail rates. Able to sell collections as soon as they are released; almost always has them before stores. Sells manicure accessories for awesome prices as well as skin care and hair care. Has a continuous 5% off sale (it's not much, but it's something!); just type in the first three letters of the month you are in and then 05 after it. Ex. SEP05. Ships internationally. I experienced quick shipping.

TRANS DESIGN (click me!)

China Glaze averages for around $3.25/bottle. After shipping, bottles are about $4.00-$4.15/bottle. Some are a little more depending on the type of polish. Pretty good selection, but Head2ToeBeauty has a much wider, larger selection. Does sell other brands such as Essie and Orly, and they ARE sold at discounted rates. They sell Essie for $4.00 (retails for $8).  Orly sells at $4.25.  Able to sell collections as soon as they are released; almost always has them before stores. Shows previews of polish collections/items that are coming soon. This website seems to mostly sell nail polish/supplies with a few other products. Ships internationally. I experienced quick shipping.


I have a running wishlist of polishes that I want to get from these sites. The biggest thing about buying online is to make sure you are looking up swatches since you aren't able to see them in person. Another option is to go into a store and look at them. A great retail store to check out is Beauty Brands. They have the largest polish selection that I have found. I've gone in there a few times to look at them in person and then I was able to add it to my list or take it off if I didn't like it. But ya know...I'm also a little crazy because now since my collection is getting rather large I really have to take the time to figure out if I already have a shade close to what I'm looking at because the last thing I need is two colors that are like 1 shade apart. So you may just be able to buy and not worry about it, haha!  But really, at least looking at a swatch online will give you a better color representation to figure out if you want it or not.

Thanks for checking out my post! Much love and polish!

Know anyone in the Denver Metro Area that needs handyman, tradesman or A/V services? Have them check out www.tysdesign.com! Competitive pricing and customer service tailored specifically for you!

Disclaimer: All items shown were purchased with my own money. All opinions are my own and honest.

It's like I feel the beach on my nails!

I took these pictures this morning. Blue skies, warm weather; perfect day. Then mid-afternoon the clouds rolled in, the rain, wind, and hail came and it turned into a pain. We got 3 in. of rain in less than an hour. Flash floods, leaves everywhere and a flooded basement. Luckily Ty was able to pull a lot of the water up with a Rug Doctor. Now I'm doing my blog post because why not? Haha. It was a crazy day, that's for sure.

Since Sept. is my birth month Ulta sent me a $10 coupon. I strolled in and went straight to the nail polish. I REALLY REALLY want OPI's Alcatraz...Rocks (a liquid sand) from their new fall collection, but of course they didn't have it. I did decide though that I was going to purchase a liquid sand since the only liquid sands I have tried were Wet n Wild and they weren't the best. I've heard OPI has a great sand formula so I wanted to check it out. I decided to go with one called Tiffany Case which is a gorgeous light blue color with silver shimmer in it. 

I have to say that everyone is right. Fantastic formula. I wasn't sure if I was going to like a textured polish, but I think I do. Since it's textured, the polish was very thick which actually made it incredibly easy to apply. It dried pretty quickly too. The little tag on the bottle says not to apply a top coat. I did my mani last night and decided to leave as it with no top coat. The tag also said it would dry matte, and it did to an extent. Since it has silver glitter/shimmer/whatever it is, it was still fairly shiny. 

I wanted to see how the polish would change with different top coats so this morning I applied Seche Vite on my pinky and OPI Matte Top coat on my ring finger. I like the finish the best without any top coat. The Matte really just dulled everything and muted the silver shimmer and the Seche Vite made the silver much more noticeable and obviously made the whole nail very shiny. The top coats also made the nails feel a little smoother and not as rough. 

It's hard to see the differences in the picture, but they are much more noticeable in real life. 

My nails feel like sandpaper. I'd have to say that the only thing I'm really not liking about this is that since it is rough my polish does get caught on things which is slightly annoying. Outside of that though, I think it's great! At least now I'm not scared to purchase polishes like this. 

 Thanks for checking out my post! Much love and polish!

Know anyone in the Denver Metro Area that needs handyman, tradesman or A/V services? Have them check out www.tysdesign.com! Competitive pricing and customer service tailored specifically for you!

Disclaimer: All items shown were purchased with my own money. All opinions are my own and honest.

Shop your discount stores!

I really can't believe that my last post was three weeks ago....I've been pretty busy with my mom coming into town a lot and then I had my LA trip, but now that's all over I can get myself into a routine (hopefully)! Time is flying by right now. My ultimate goal is to get to two posts a week. Right now I'm aiming for once a week and once I can get that down then I want to get another post in. Writing the post itself isn't hard, but taking all the pics, the editing, painting my nails or anything I have to do is what takes all the time. I just need to find a balance that works for me.

Anywho.....

Go check out discount stores!! I've seen OPI, China Glaze, Orly, drugstore, and many other random brands at these places for great deals! I honestly never thought to check there for polish and/or makeup items, but they do have them! Sorry if you are thinking, "uh, duh Katie!!" and you have known this forever, but I am just joining the loop!!  Some places I've checked are Ross, TJMaxx, Big Lots, Marshall's and Gordman's. Marshall's and Gordman's selection though was pretty limited. However, you can find some great polishes at these places. Some places sell the polishes individually and other places you buy them in a pack. I'd say the only cons to shopping at discount stores is that they have very limited selection and if they are in a pack you may only like 2 colors in that set and don't want the rest. But I still think it's worth it to look into it.

And before we get into the pics, I have sad news to tell you. I broke a nail. :( Rather I bent my nail (on Brendan's head of course) and it bent so far back that some of nail came apart from my skin. Aaaaaand it had to happen the day I was planning on doing my swatches for this post (which was a little over a week ago). I did my swatches anyway but I didn't paint any on that nail because putting polish/remover on an open wound would not have been a great idea!! So you will see a really really short nail in these pics! Also, I have two tutorials I really want to do, but I'm gonna have to wait a few weeks till my nail grows back. I'm sure I'll find something to blog about until then!

All polishes have 2 coats except for one which I will mention. Overall, I loved the formulas, colors, and variety that I got in this set!

Man, I'm rambling today, see what happens when I don't post in forever, haha. :) Onto the swatches......

This is obviously what the package looks like. I loved that I could get a wide variety of the different lines! And how can you beat $5.99 for 5 bottles of polish?  You could spent $5.99 on just one of these bottles at full retail value. Great deal!

I love that Let's Dance is in a clear base, makes it much more versatile. Pretty light blue and silver chunky glitter. While I personally would never wear Duchesse Lace on it's own (since it doesn't look very good with my skin tone), I love the sandy nude color for nail designs.

I LOVE the bright green in B-right On! It's not a neon, just an in-your-face bright color. Very unique in my opinion!  While LCD is pretty, you can see how sheer it is, which was disappointing. For this swatch I used 4 coats and still didn't get much build up in color. HOWEVER, the blue duo-chrome in this polish is so pretty that it totally makes up for the sheerness. The pictures really do not do it justice. I'm not sure if you can find the HD polishes anywhere? I haven't seen them much, but also never really looked for them either. 

This is such a pretty color! Chocolate shimmery brown is the best way to describe it. With fall coming up too, I think this would be a great color to wear. Loved the formula on this and may have to try some more from the insta-dri line. My only complaint is that the brush is wide and the neck of the bottle is narrow (see pic). I felt like I didn't have much room to move the brush around.

 Thanks for checking out my post! Much love and polish!

Know anyone in the Denver Metro Area that needs handyman, tradesman or A/V services? Have them check out www.tysdesign.com! Competitive pricing and customer service tailored specifically for you!

Disclaimer: All items shown were purchased with my own money. All opinions are my own and honest.

Pop Art Craze!

I have been wanting to do this post for like two weeks now and I was so worried that you wouldn't be able to buy these anymore, but I've still seen them at Walgreens, so yay! If you want to go buy them you can. While I was in NM visiting my parents my mom and I went to K-Mart and I was scoping out the nail polish and makeup and then just randomly saw these babies and was so excited to see them! These are the Wet n Wild Limited Edition Pop Art Craze nail polishes. They came out with 6 polishes and 6 eye shadow trios. I picked up some of the eye shadows too (but got those when I got back into town at Walgreens) they are really bright colors and Wet n Wild has AMAZING eye shadows and they are so inexpensive. I picked up 4 different nail polish colors at K-Mart.. One color was already sold out and the last color was white, and I didn't feel like it was anything special (not too keen on white polishes). Luckily for me though when I came back to town they had the other color so I picked up 5 out of the 6 colors. (The last color is at the bottom of the pics since I had already taken pics while I was in NM.) They only cost $.99/ea (and sometimes cheaper if they are on sale!) so there is no reason you shouldn't go get you some! :)

I want to start by saying how AMAZINGLY AMAZING the formulas are on these polishes. The polishes themselves are the Wild Shine line and I have previously never tried this line from WnW.  It's hard to believe that these are only $1 a piece because the quality is so amazing. The formula is so creamy, forgiving, easy to apply and fun to work with. The formula was the same for all polishes. I was so impressed with them that I went a purchased a few from their permanent line and the formula is just as amazing. You can check out the different colors from the Wild Shine line HERE but the color swatches aren't very true to color. You can go to Wal-Mart, Walgreens or K-Mart to check out the regular line in person. Don't think Wal-Mart ever gets the LE stuff, I would start with Walgreens. I've found them at multiple locations.

All colors have 2 coats and no top coat. It is incredible how shiny these are on their own. There is one pic I took in the shade and my nails are so shiny you can see my reflection in them! I was very impressed with how these look with no top coat.

Also, I have to say how in love I am with the pics that come from my camcorder. The pic below shows you the same pic taken with my digital camera and my camcorder. Neither picture has ANY editing done to it except for adding the text. The digital does okay, but you can really see how much brighter and vibrant (and truer to color) the camcorder pic is. You can even see how beautiful the reflection of light showed up!  Pretty sure I'll hardly be using my regular camera at all anymore. The ONLY downfall to using the camcorder is that since it's HD and designed for video it's all in 16:9 format which can be a little awkward for taking pics, but I'll figure it out.

I love these colors!

After painting these I thought they might be good colors to try with my white crackle. I really had to play with the crackle to figure out the best way to apply it, but I think they turned out somewhat okay with these colors. I'm still not a fan at all of the white crackle from China Glaze and it was a nightmare to get it to crackle right and look good. I don't think I'll use that polish much. Formula is lumpy and it still gets two big thumbs down from me! I am so glad I only paid like $1.30 for the bottle....

Not sure why the light/sky blue color is called TEAL Slowly and See since it's not teal at all, but whatevs.... I guess they figure they can call it whatever they want! This light blue though is my favorite out of all the colors. It's so pretty on my nails!

Thanks for checking out my post! Much love and polish!

Know anyone in the Denver Metro Area that needs handyman, tradesman or A/V services? Have them check out www.tysdesign.com! Competitive pricing and customer service tailored specifically for you!

Disclaimer: All items shown were purchased with my own money. All opinions are my own and honest.

Hot & Spicy

I have been so busy and haven't posted anything! Shame on me! I've taken tons of pics and have lots of posts to do, but haven't sat down to do any of them. I need to fix that!

Today is just a quick post about a color that I am in love with. I feel it deserves it's own post because I think the color is really unique and would compliment most people.

This particular mani I did while I was out of town and I think I took literally 30+ pictures of this color. My camera would NOT pick the color up right. It kept showing more red or more orange or darker and I was getting quite frustrated. A random thought popped in my head and I remembered that I could take pictures with my camcorder. I then also remembered that Ty had told me that the camera had X.V. color (which is just fancy words for saying that the camera has a wider color spectrum so it will pick up images truer to color). I took it outside and BINGO! almost perfect color. I'm so glad I know that now!  My digital camera does pretty good most of the time, but I do have to say that I think these pictures came out so much better! I may just start using my camcorder all the time.

So by the time that amazing thought came to me I had already had my mani on for about 5 days so I have tip wear and it doesn't look so fresh, but you can still see how pretty the color is!

Formula on this polish was awesome. Smooth, easy to work with application and a creamy texture. Color was opaque with one coat, but two really smoothed out the polish. OPI did a great job with this polish!

Disclaimer: All items shown were purchased with my own money. All opinions are my own and honest.