nail inspiration

I've seen some amazing nails lately, and some of them even look do-able for a shaky-handed doofus like myself!

Emily Denise at Very Emily regularly posts mind-blowing nail photos, but this is a style that looks fantastic but would be pretty easy (albeit time-consuming) to achieve. There's a tutorial at Unicorn Parade-- a good trashy TV watching project!

 

Here's another great look from Emily Denise:  glitter over dark polish, but done in a really great way.

  

I am a big fan of Bronny's blog Fat Aus, and I've been lurking and reading her archives. I love these nails! There's a tutorial at The Dainty Squid. I'm really into triangles right now, and I really love the way this looks!

And back to the impossible: Emily Denise's butterfly nails. So beautiful!

nails: disco ball

 

I was so excited when I saw that my beloved Rimmel had brought out a glitter polish, Disco Ball! I have wanted to try one for a while but Rimmel is my go-to trusted brand so I snatched it up.

my favourite korean and japanese make-up names

Dear Darling Tint Gloss

Lovely Cookie Blusher

Kissful Lip Care

Peach Beam Blusher

Fairy Drops Mascara

Skin Food Choco Eye Line Jam

Happy Tea Cleansing Foam

Essential Donut Glo-Stick

Dolly Wink Eyeliner

Lip & Eye Remover

face it cosmetics: a follow up

Like most normal people, I don't enjoy confrontations and negativity. I thought hard before I posted my review of Face It Cosmetics, and before I left negative feedback on Etsy. I would normally leave it there, but my experience with Heather and FIC has been so unpleasant that I feel the need to write about it again.

As you may remember from my review (you can go here to read it before you carry on) I found that the products I purchased were of middling to poor quality. As well as that, one of the products (Sparrow eyeshadow) was very different to the product photo, and one (gold gel eyeliner) was misrepresented by its name and description.

I wrote my review, and left the following feedback:

Now, let me make this clear: I take feedback very seriously. There have been a couple of occasions on which the wrong item was accidentally sent, or an item had gone bad during travel. I contacted the seller and allowed them to rectify the problem, and then gave good feedback.

However, the Face It Cosmetics order wasn't a mistake. These were sub-par products, and some of them were actually misleading. I left 2 negative feedback reviews and one neutral feedback review as a service to my fellow Etsy buyers, who deserve an honest review. Buying make-up over the net is risky, and I personally rely on reviews to help me decide what to buy. I feel that not posting honest feedback would have been unethical.

After I posted my feedback, I received a message from Heather:

I was a surprised by her tone and felt uncomfortable, but tried to respond in a respectful but honest way.

She responded:

Now I was really unimpressed. It is very unprofessional to a) take a customer to task for being honest about your products and b) ignore the actual criticism and instead make up excuses unrelated to the actual problems. Once again, I tried to answer politely and explain my position:

She did not respond to this email. I assumed this was the end of the matter, until I saw that my feedback rating on Etsy had dropped from 100% positive to 98%. Heather had left me negative feedback (even giving me three negative reviews when I had given her two negative and one neutral):

I was flabbergasted. As a buyer, my responsibility is to a) pay promptly and b) leave honest feedback. I am not obligated to contact a seller before I leave feedback, although Etsy suggests that buyers should do this (and under other circumstances, I do).

I am particularly disgusted by the note that "If she was unsure of the color then you [sic] should have asked." It is in no way my responsibility to contact a seller to ask if her product photo is accurate! In fact, here is feedback from another unhappy buyer:

(Indeed, there is a growing number of negative comments on the FIC feedback page, although sadly some people are leaving neutral feedback although they have had a very negative experience.) This buyer mentions the very same product (Sparrow eyeshadow) which I had a problem with. And if that wasn't damning enough, Heather has changed the product photo.

Before:


Now:

I don't think that my long, carefully thought-out messages to Heather can be called "poor communication." What she means is, "I tried to get her to change her feedback by offering her free products, and she refused, so I am giving her back feedback out of spite."

Normally I wouldn't care less about this, but I have an Etsy store. And now customers of my store will see a lower feedback score.

This experience has made me wary of buying from indie companies. From now on, I will be sticking to companies for whom I have read good reviews, like Linnaeus or Shiro, rather than trying out new ones. And it has definitely made me wary of Heartsy. (Speaking of which, Face It Cosmetics just had a second Heartsy sale, about a month after the first one. I have no idea why this would be a good move for a business.)

Ah well. I've learnt my lesson!

nails: black cherry

This is Rimmel I ♥ Lasting Finish in Black Cherry. The name is perfect: it's a lovely dark reddy-purple. I've shied away from very dark colours before because they can look cheap and trashy. Not that that's always a bad thing: I spent much of my teenage years trying to look cheap and trashy. But I'm too old for chipped black nailpolish now, I think. Very dark colours really need to be worn carefully to look elegant.

It isn't quite as nice to apply as the other Rimmel polishes I've tried; I don't know if that's because of the dark colour or the fact that it's Rimmel's cheapest line, but the polish is very thick and you need to wait a long time between coats to make sure it doesn't go gooey. Still, I wore this colour twice in a row, which I almost never do.

Note: this was taken in the late afternoon on a winter's day in June. I guess sometimes living in Perth isn't all bad.

nails: grurple

After seeing Michelle of Eat Paint Sniff Glue rave about Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure in 370: Commander in Chic in her Monday Manicure post, I had to try it! It's a really hard colour to describe: the closest I can come is a grey-mauve, which my husband dubbed "grurple."

It's kind of silly but the thing I really like about this colour is that it contains all colours and shades. It's got blue and red to make the purple; yellow to muddy it and add a little brown; and black and white for the grey. It looks a bit like a paint palette when you mix everything together before you wash it (not because you need to, just because it's fun).

The application was okay but not amazing, which was surprising; I thought that since Sally Hansen products are synonymous with nails it would be the best application ever, but it was a little more slow-drying than my beloved Rimmel polishes. Still miles better than cheapo brands, but for $16 (as opposed to Rimmel for less than $10) I was expecting a miracle.

I'll definitely be reapplying it, though. It's a lovely soft, chic colour for winter. Grurple!

review: face it cosmetics

This was my second Heartsy order (my first still has not arrived, and you had better believe I have a head of steam building up for a blog post about that). Face It Cosmetics are an Etsy store located in the US. This is their shop description:

Face It Cosmetics are fabulous healthy products that will help you put your best face forward no matter what life throws at you…FACE IT. Our Cosmetics will make you feel beautiful inside and out. All of our products contain a minimum number of ingredients (mostly natural ones) but still promise amazing products that really perform. The result is a professional product that is synthetic free. Makeup collections are perfectly pigmented products for eyes, lips, and face that are gentle and pure enough to use on all skin types. Indulge in something that is good for your skin and good for the environment.

I ordered five products: four eyeshadows and an eyeliner.



They arrived in a padded envelope: no note, no business card, no invoice, no samples. Here is where I think Face It made a big mistake. As I mentioned in my Heartsy post, this discount process only really works for a business if they manage to convert buyers into returning customers (which of course is what every business should be doing). For example, I recently bought some samples from Shiro Cosmetics (not through Heartsy). Even though I had only bought a bunch of samples, Caitlin included a business card, an invoice with a personal written note, two free samples, and two little Japanese candies. The whole lot was beautifully wrapped in a little gift bag inside the envelope. Now, I don't fault anyone for not adding more than I've paid for. However, what Caitlin managed to do was to turn opening that envelope into a fun, exciting, pleasurable experience. Even before I had tried the product, I was happy. As a result of that (and also the great quality of her product), I'm already planning my next purchase, and perhaps more importantly, I've been telling others about her.

Anyway, this is not a review of Shiro (although I will do one of those eventually). My point is that, perhaps because of the increased pressure that the Heartsy orders put them under, they did not manage to impress me with the package.



I swatched these onto my hand and was immediately disappointed. From the Etsy photos and descriptions, I had thought I was buying four very different colours; I had ended up with a white and three greys.



Photos taken outside, but not in direct light; I did no manipulation of the image. Colours were applied over Australis Eyeshadow Primer. (If you'd like to see a frighteningly large version of this photo, go here. Warning: it is freaky, and my apparently smooth arm skin is actually origami.)

All four colours had a LOT of fallout, as you can see in the photo, and were quite sheer-- I had to carefully dab them on to get them to look this pigmented.

First of all, I have no idea what possessed me to buy white eyeshadow, but Billowy Clouds was crazy with the fallout and very sheer. Sparrow was the biggest disappointment, because the product picture looks like this:



I was expecting the shadow to have a similar blue-pink colourshift effect, but all I can see is silver.

Sterling looks pretty much like the Etsy photo I guess, although poorly pigmented. Toasted Walnut is probably the prettiest of the colours, and I have worn it a couple of times, but it's not the intense party colour shown in the product photo, more of a work-safe colour.

The other big disappointment was the Gold Gel Eyeliner.



This is not a colour that I would describe as 'gold'. I imagined something akin to gold leaf; this is really more of a flat light tan or beige colour, with little to no shimmer. It's also not a gel by any stretch of the imagination, definitely a cream. The first stripe in the photo is with an eyeliner brush, the second a swatch with my finger.

So, I've left my first ever negative Etsy feedback. I felt pretty uncomfortable doing this; there is such a supportive tea-and-hugs ethos to Etsy, and bad feedback is taken very seriously. But I was disappointed in the product, and it wasn't due to an accident, it was due to poor product. While Suzanne has had some success with FIC's facial products, I will not be ordering from them again.

nails: teal

This is one of my favourite shades, Rimmel 60 Seconds in Sky High. This isn't a great light (winter makes blog photography difficult!) but it's a perfect teal: it looks blue against green and green against blue. A beautiful and suprisingly wearable colour. I bought it because it looked so pretty on my friend Liz, who was also the person who recommended Rimmel polish.

And let me pass on the recommendation to you! Rimmel is absolutely the best nailpolish brand I have used. It goes on thick and nearly-opaque (I never need more than two coats) and wears well. (The photo above is after several days' wear). They're really cheap, too: 60 Seconds is around AUD $8 in Priceline (and there's a 2 for $10 sale on now).

Note: Rimmel didn't pay me any money to say nice things about their nailpolish, although I wish they would.

nails: light blue

This is Scene Queen from Chi Chi. I thought I'd give this cheap and cheerful brand a go when I saw it in Myer, but it's absolutely crap. The colour is cute but the application was a nightmare. It went on chalky and streaky, and although I left it to dry for nearly half an hour between coats it still ended up with a horrible finish. I would never buy anything from this brand again, and will probably never use this bottle again. I hate you, Chi Chi!



A much more successful buy was this pair of tights, also from Myer (department store sales = excellent time to buy hosiery). They're Jonathon Aston Luxury tights in Lipstick Pink. This photo doesn't even do justice to their brightness-- today was cloudy and gloomy and my legs seemed to be glowing. I heartily recommend Jonathon Aston, especially for chubby girls-- they actually make a larger size that is comfortable and come in lots of fun colours. I'm glad I bought two pairs!

nails: gold

I recently started painting my nails, and it made me really happy. So I thought I would take photos and share them here, for some reason.

This is a Revlon polish in 'Gold Get 'Em', a seriously terrible name but I guess in this stage of human history they have used up all the good names. I picked this up in the Myer sale for $3.45. It's a really lovely, subdued shade of gold, if you can imagine such a thing. I had to load on three coats to get it opaque, and it would also look pretty and soft with one or two coats. It's my first Revlon polish (as recommended by Suzanne) and I really liked it. It went on easy and dried quickly. It didn't last as long as my favourite, Rimmel, but it was about 5 days before it started to chip at the top edge. It actually made me realise how yellow my skin is, because at a certain angle it looked like a nude shade. Anyway, high marks and one of my favourite shades so far.

being a girl

I am so easily influenced. Since Suzanne (blogger and Sexy Librarian) has been blogging about beauty products, I have been thinking more about make-up and skincare and all the other Lady Stuff I have mostly ignored throughout my adult life. Lucky she isn't blogging about how to firebomb French restaurants! (Although since her message seems to be "buy yourself presents and look pretty" I guess it's easy to allow myself to be persuaded.)

Anyway, I've been thinking about how much nicer and healthier I look when my lips are nearly chapped. Not when they actually get to the chapped stage, but when they're all red and rosy. I hate the feeling of lipstick, all greasy and thick, and I really don't want something coming off on my coffee cup/water bottle/husband. So I asked Suzanne whether there was anything that would feel like nothing but would make me look like I'd been eating red lollies.

She told me about a magical thing called lip stains. I've been looking at various products in make-up shops (man, I never noticed all these make-up shops around! They're everywhere!) but I didn't see anything that fit.

Today I went into a very cute store called Kit in Enex100 and found this magic stuff (pictured above). I know, it looks insanely dark and purple, but a little bit makes you look like you've been eating mulberries: just a subtle stain. (I can't imagine putting it on my cheeks though, what the hell?) It was $22, which seems like an inordinate amount of money for a little tube of coloured goo but it should last for ages because a) I only used a tiny bit and b) I will probably keep forgetting to put it on and lose interest in being a Fancy Lady and get excited about hula-hooping or something.

The girl in the shop was very sweet and insisted on painting it onto my lips with a teeny tiny brush while I perched on a teeny tiny chair. She was horrified when I told her that I didn't even own foundation and tried to get me to sign up for a make-up lesson. I said I'd think about it, but I probably won't. What if she makes me look so beautiful I have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of stuff and spend half an hour every day painting it on? That's money I could be spending on books! And time I could be spending on naps! And books!

Are you a Fancy Lady? Can you give me any tips?