China Glaze Hunger Games - Smoke and Ashes

Happy Friday!! Did any one go out and watch the Hunger Games last night or throughout the day today!? OMG Im super excited to go watch it this weekend!!
Okay so today I have the last of the four polishes I got from the CG Hunger Games collection! This is Smoke and Ashes which is a MATTE!! Usually I have seen companies put out matte polishes as their own collection of a few matte colors. I totally did not expect for them to sneak in a matte but I am so happy they did cause this polish is awesome!!
Smoke and Ashes is a dark charcoal grey with a fine metallic silver shimmer that dries completely matte. For the most part I know mattes can be pretty thick. I have worn this twice and did not have any issues with the consistency. I mean it is thicker than normal polish but I didn’t find it to be as thick as other mattes I have. It is completely opaque with one coat! I love it when that happens (:



MORE PICS BELOW THE JUMP!!

China Glaze Hunger Games - Riveting

Hope you all are doing well! Two posts in one day, sure does feel good to be off a couple days in a row LOL! So this is the third polish out of the four that I got from the Hunger Games collection! Check it out (:





Riveting is a super awesome red-orange with a stunning gold shimmer running throughout. (Can you tell I have been really pleased with the polishes I got from this collection haha!) I have always been a sucker for cremes but when I get a shimmer like this that just looks so amazing… kinda makes me wonder of what all I have been missing!It applied like butter and is completely opaque at two coats. I think this going to be my go to red for whenever I want to wear red but feel like something more than my usual red cremes that I love (:

China Glaze Hunger Games - Electrify

Okay so this is the second polish from the Hunger Games collection that I have to share with you guys!! I sported this amazing glitter last week when I went to the Houston Rodeo and actually ran into a fellow polish lover standing in line at a carnival ride that was wearing the same exact one! Its such a small world (:

Electrify is an absolutely gorgeous opaque glitter. Its a mix of fine gold glitter and red hex glitter. I really love that one color doesn’t over power the other and instead compliment each other so nicely!




So one thing about application >> make sure to mix the bottle well before starting to apply. When I initially starting putting it on my nails, I didn’t really mix the bottle and so it was coming out really sheer and sparse. Once I gave it a good roll, it applied nearly opaque with one coat! This here is two coats with a coat of Seche Vite over top. The colors remind me of the exact colors used on the cover of the second Hunger Games book, Catching Fire. I could totally picture Katniss wearing this polish with her “girl on fire” costume before the Games! Ahh, Im so excited for the movie (nerd.)!!

China Glaze Hunger Games – Luxe and Lush

Hi everyone! As promised, here is the first post that will cover the four polishes that I picked up from the China Glaze Hunger Games collection!!
Luxe and Lush is the fabulous flakie out of the whole bunch. Its a mylar texture flakie which is a lot thicker and chunkier than most flakie polishes out there. Keeping that in mind, if you put this polish over a polish that is not entirely dry, the flakies can look like they sink in or embed into the polish. I personally don’t have the patience, and in many cases time, to let polish completely dry I guess anytime I use this it will look this way. I don’t mind though, I think it looks cool like that! As for the color pay off, its just so pretty! The colors are definitely cool hues that range from blue, pink, purple, and green.


The application was easy and the flakie pieces did spread out nicely. To be honest, the most difficult thing for me was picking a color to put it over to really show off the awesome colors. I ended up applying two coats of Luxe and Lush over an opaque white (Sally Hansen White on White). Im sure there are a lot of other colors that could look really interesting too! This does definitely need a generous application of top coat to minimize the bumpy feeling once it dries unless you don’t mind it.
I do really like this polish! I think it so unique compared to other flakies I have seen or have in my stash. The flakies look like little pieces of shattered glass in the bottle. I recently wore it as an accent nail over Sally Hansen Pacific Blue (click here for swatches of Pacific Blue) and got a lot of compliments (: I really look forward to trying it over other colors too!

China Glaze Hunger Games

I am so super excited to share these new polishes I have with you guys! I am a big fan of the Hunger Games books and I am really looking forward to the movie coming out later this week!!

From left to right: Luxe and Lush, Electrify, Riveting, Smoke and Ashes

The entire collection is a variety of 12 shades that correspond to each one of the districts from the book. There are some shimmers, cremes, a glitter, a flakie, and a matte! These four are the ones that really caught my eye (:
So over the next couple of days, I will be posting pics and a review of each shade so make sure to keep checking back!!!

Update!

Happy St. Patty’s!! Hope everyone is having a good weekend so far!! I have to work tomorrow so my weekend was only one day ): I just wanted to take this opportunity to update you on my lack of posts for the past week and a half or so. So as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, my mom had surgery about three weeks ago. Unfortunately, she had a bit of a complication and had to be readmitted to the hospital to take care of the problem. Thankfully, she is finally doing really well and everything is in the clear. So as you guys can imagine, the stress of being worried and making sure she is okay and helping her out on top of trying to settle into my new job which is pretty stressful to begin with too… well that pretty much sums up not having a whole lot of time for much of anything.

With all that being said, I have been working on some stuff here and there and will have new posts coming up later next week (like Tues or Wed). I have also picked up some new polishes that I am SUPER excited to share with you guys!! So STAY TUNED!! (:

- Monica

Revlon Whimsical

Hey there! Hope everyone is having a good week! Today I have a polish that I had been wanting for a while but was never in stock in any store I went to. If you guys follow more nail polish blogs then Im sure you have seen it before. I thought I would write a post on it anyways to share how I wore it and my personal take on it (:
Whimsical is known across the nail polish world as the dupe for Deborah Lippmann’s Up in the Air. From what I can tell in photos, its pretty dead on.


So this polish is a relatively sparse multi glitter in a sheer light blue jelly like base. Don’t let the pictures fool you, its is definitely sheer! I think if I had not used a base color, I would have been there for hours trying to get it to be opaque. For this mani I used 2 coats of Whimsical over 2 coats of China Glaze Kinetic Candy (which you can see what it looks like alone here). This definitely needed at least 2 coats to get the pretty pink and light blue hex glitters to look more spread out. There is also some small green and sliver round glitter that you may or may not be able to see in the photos.
Im sure you could layer this over different colors to get some interesting effects. Personally though, I don’t think this is a glitter I will be reaching for very often. I think the concept of glitter not being in a base that’s the same color as the glitter is pretty cool but I guess I would have liked for the glitter itself to be more opaque on the nail.
What’s your take on this? Would you go for this $5 dupe or for the $16 real deal?