Forsythe Black Walnut

My last post of 2011. I should probably make it a good one. To say goodbye to 2011, I'd like to show you something special. One of my most prized and cherished polishes: Forsythe Black Walnut.


Forsythe Black Walnut. This is a blackened burgundy base with lots of red and gold shimmer. It's that super smooth type of shimmer that I love so much, the kind that makes the polish look bright/glowing in the center and dark around the edges. The formula is an absolute dream. It's super opaque, smooth, even, goes exactly where you want it to. It's perfect in every single aspect.

This one is pre-Color Club. I have a handful of old Forsythe polishes and they're pretty nice, but this one is my favorite of all of them. I think this one was made into a Color Club shade, but I've never been able to find it in the Color Club bottle. I'd love to have a backup, but they're both long gone. So I'll just have to ration my precious bottle and hope that they re-release it one day.

So, there we go. Last post of 2011. Can't say that it was a particularly good year for me, but, I suppose it could have been worse. There were a few highlights and hopefully 2012 will be a little brighter. How about you guys? Have any new year's resolutions or wishes for 2012? Thanks for sticking with me for another year... Glad you're all here :)

A few more looks with my new Sugarpill stuff!

I think I'm officially obsessed with Sugarpill. I've been using all my new shadows and Chromalusts a lot since they arrived... here's a few of the ways I've worn them so far.


Black and red. Always black and red. Gotta love it. This was:
Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion
Sugarpill Chromalust in Asylum over NYX White Eyeshadow Base on lid
Wet n Wild black shade from one of the 3-shadow palettes, can't remember which one
Urban Decay 24/7 Liquid Liner in Perversion

The red sparkles mixed with the black shadow when I blended them and made it look even cooler than just plain matte black.

This was:
Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion
Sugarpill Chromalust in Asylum on lid
MAC Pigment in Push The Edge in crease and on lower lashline
NYX Studio Liquid Liner in Extreme Purple as liner

Kinda love purple and red together.... Especially how the red and purple shimmers mix together to make the purple shade even more purple.




This one didn't really come out as well as I'd hoped, but it was still pretty vivid looking. Top picture is with fluorescent light to get the blue color to come out truer, flash kinda kills it for some reason. This was:
Too Faced Shadow Insurance Lemon Drop
Sugarpill Chromalust in Goldilux wet on lid
Sugarpill Pressed Eyeshadow in Midori wet in crease
Sugarpill Chromalust in Royal Sugar wet as liner
Too Faced Glitter Liner in... that blue one with the Smurf on it... over Royal Sugar

And a neon-y one with only a little Sugarpill:

This was:
Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion
NYX White Eyeshadow Base on lid only
Sugarpill Tako on inner corner
Make Up For Ever #75 on inner third of lid and center of lower lashline
Sugarpill Dollipop on center of lid
MAC Pigment in Push The Edge in crease
Make Up For Ever #92 to darken crease and on outer lower lashline
Make Up For Ever #18 on inner third of lower lashline
NYX Studio Liquid Liner in Extreme Purple as liner

That NYX White Eyeshadow base is awesome for neons. It hasn't creased on me yet, but every time I've used it has been over primer and with powder shadow on top. It even works for those super sheer Kryolan UV pressed powders. I hate that it comes in a jar, and I only chose the jar one because Ulta is always out of the Milk jumbo pencil. I'm assuming the base in the jar is the same as the white pencil, but if not then I might just have to order Milk online.

Sugarpill... so awesome...

Cool new duochrome collection from Ludurana!

I just got a press release about this awesome-looking new collection from Brazilian nail polish brand Ludurana. I'll copy and paste it in its original language below, but have a look at these gorgeous pictures:

"A Ludurana foi pioneira no Brasil com a coleção Aurora Boreal, composta de 6 holográficos e 6 multi-chromes.

Após as coleções Color Block e Solar, sua busca por novas cores continua e para finalizar este ano com chave de ouro, agora está lançando no mercado a coleção DUOCHROME, com mais 10 lindas cores para você arrasar.


São elas: Yellow-Green, Blue-Pink, Violet-Blue, Magenta-Gold, Orange-Blue, Green-Gold, Orange-Cyan, Turquesa-Red, Red-Pink e Red-Orange.


Previsão para encontrá-los no mercado: Janeiro
Preço para consumidor final: Não divulgado.


Lembrando que TODAS as linhas dos Esmaltes Ludurana não possuem Toluene, Formaldeide e Dibutyl Phtalate, porque a sua saúde é nossa maior preocupação. "

Looks pretty awesome to me!

Ozotic 533 Swatches and Review

I mentioned in my post about Ozotic 507 that Ozotic also has holographic multichromes. Yes, you read that right. It is both holographic and color shifting at the same time. Picture Polish calls the finish "Mish Mash". You may have already seen these, but for those of you who haven't, here's one of the shades: 533.


Ozotic 533 (three coats). I tried to hard to capture both the duochrome and the holographic effect at the same time but it was more challenging to get them to both come out at once than I thought it would be! Anyway, this is a blue hazy base with a purple/red/golden duochrome shift and a fairly strong scattered holographic effect. The holo tends to only come out in bright light in this shade, otherwise the hologram foil particles just look like regular shimmer. The color-flip duochrome effect in this one is not as strong as in the other three shades, so I tried layering it over black to see if that encouraged it to shift more:



Ozotic 533 (two coats) over black. Layering it over black does make it 'pop' more, but the polish also loses its depth and jelly-like finish that way. So, it's a trade off. More duochrome or more depth. I personally prefer this one all by itself, but it's really not bad over black. I may try layering it over a less dense color to see if that helps retain some of the jelly look of it.

The formula is just about the same as any other Ozotic duochrome. Thick, gooey/drippy, oily or airy feeling and pretty hard to control. It's not horrible or impossible to apply, but it's not nice enough for me to call it a good formula. I've found that the easiest way to apply these is to do a very thin coat, wait about five minutes, and then do another very thin coat and repeat until you reached your desired level of opacity. I did three coats and thought it looked fine, four would be even better but it may take 576 years to dry. Drying time on these is long.

I believe that there are only four shades with the holographic-multichrome finish- 531, 532, 533, and 534. My favorite of them is 531 by far because the holo and color shift are the strongest in it. But they're all pretty cool.

This is available from Llarowe (US), Harlow and Co. (Canada) and Picture Polish (Australia).

(This was sent for review.)

Three looks using Illamasqua Havoc Precision Ink Eyeliner

Illamasqua released a new Precision Ink liquid liner with their Theatre of the Nameless collection and it quickly became my favorite. It's a brownish-burgundy shade and it's called Havoc. I wear it at least once a week now. I've had a few people ask me what colors I wear with it, so I thought I'd post a few of the ways I've worn it.


This was:
LORAC TantalEYES palette (gold shade on lid, green shade in crease and on lower lashline)
Illamasqua Precision Ink in Havoc as liner

This is my favorite way to wear Havoc. Against the green and gold, it tends to look more brown than pure burgundy. This has become my new "I'm in a hurry" look.


I can not for the life of me remember what eyeshadow I used here. It *might* be the Anastasia eyeshadow duo in My Bedford, but I'm not really certain about that. But the liner is Illamasqua Havoc. Against purple it takes on a bit of an aubergine color.



This was:
MAC Spiced Chocolate quad (Nanogold on lid, Brash on outer crease, Sweet Chestnut in crease and on lower lashline)
Illamasqua Precision Ink in Havoc as liner.

I love this quad but it never photographs right. As soon as the flash hits it it turns super brassy and makes my skin look freakishly orange. You probably can't tell from the grossly orange pictures, but Havoc goes *perfectly* with this. It looks more natural than black against the copper shades in the quad so it blends together more instead of standing out as a stark black line.

So, that's how I've been wearing Havoc.

Revlon Color Illusion Lilac Beam

Another one of my favorite old discontinued Revlon colors... Lilac Beam, from the Color Illusion collection.


Revlon Color Illusion in Lilac Beam. This looks like it's bubbled, but it's not. Those are little chunks of metallic glitter that didn't poke through the base polish. This is a light purple base with a heavy green/turquoise/blue duochrome shimmer and a bunch of little silver metallic glitter flecks. The shimmer has a lot of visual texture compared to normal shimmer; it looks rough but it doesn't feel rough on the nail. Formula isn't the nicest to apply and the drying time is long, but I still think the color is fabulous and I'm willing to deal with the flaws for it.

Nina Ultra Pro Glam Rock over OPI Siberian Nights

Random nail-of-the-day post! Except it's technically not my current nail of the day... That's still the Incoco Tis The Season appliques. This one's from the fall and I really liked it.

Nina Ultra Pro in Glam Rock (one coat) over OPI Siberian Nights (two coats).

More Christmas nails and makeup

Here's what I ended up wearing on my nails on Christmas day:

These are the Incoco Nail Appliques in Tis The Season that I posted about here. These turned out so well, I may not take them off until they start wearing at the tips so bad that they look nasty. I am really thrilled with these. They applied easier than any strips I've ever used, including other Incoco strips. I didn't tear any of the tips like I usually do and they didn't hang over the sidewall/cuticle area as much as I expected. I didn't even put topcoat on them to smooth them because they're already glassy smooth. Perfection.


Speaking of nail appliques, look what happened when I started removing my Sally Hansen Salon Effects from the other day:
Peppermint skeletons! How cool is that? I was trying to think of some way to incorporate this into a nail design, but I couldn't think of anything so I just removed it all the way. These wore pretty well until I removed them; no chipping or peeling and only minor tipwear. They still looked wrinkled and bubbled after three days, though. Can't figure out what I did wrong.


These were my Christmas Eve eyes. I did a really crappy job, especially on the liner, but I loved the way the red pigment mixed in with my mascara to create a copper color with red tips. It was an accident but it looked interesting enough that I want to try it again on purpose!
This was:
Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion
NYX White Eyeshadow Base (on lid only)
Kryolan UV Green pressed powder on lid
MAC Emerald Green pigment wet in crease, dry on lower lashline
Sugarpill Chromalust in Asylum wet as liner
Aromaleigh red loose glitter (can't remember the name) over Asylum
Hourglass Film Noir Full Spectrum Mascara


These were my eyes on Christmas day. My friend said it looked like a Victorian Christmas present. I was going more for frosted glass Christmas ornaments, but I think I like his description better.
This was:
Too Faced Shadow Insurance Lemon Drop
Sugarpill Chromalust in Asylum wet on lid
Ben Nye Amethyst in crease
MAC Emerald Green pigment on lower lash line
Stila Smudge Stick in Koi as liner
Hourglass Film Noir Full Spectrum Mascara

I love Asylum so much. I've been using it practically every day since it came in the mail and I can't get enough of it. It looks especially awesome to me when paired with purple. I love that Stila liner, too. It's the nicest, richest looking antique gold liner I have ad it applies so smoothly with crazy good pigmentation.

I had a great Christmas, but I'm very sad that there wasn't any snow. It just doesn't feel like Christmas until there's snow. I'm still really happy that I got to spend a lot of time with my family, and that our gingerbread house didn't collapse this year. Plus, I got a TARDIS cookie jar! Woot!

(The nail appliques were sent for review.)