Color Club The Lime Starts Here

This is another of the scented polishes from the New Wicked Sweet collection. And the novelty of fruity smelling polishes has still not worn off on me.

Color Club The Lime Starts Here - White Light

This is actually quite a nice neon lime green. It has the right balance of blue and yellow and it is totally wearable. The lime scent is a nice one as well. It is more of a lime lolly smell than actual limes. This is three coats and the polish has a nice creme finish. I like the fact that even with a top coat you can still smell the lime.

Lots of Love
Lisa

This polish was sent to me for review

Spotted in NZ: Glitter Gal

Glitter Gal now has a distributor in New Zealand.

You can buy these polishes on trade me or send an email to the seller at polishqueennz@gmail.com to buy straight through the seller.

Lots of Love
Lisa

Spotted in NZ: Orly Birds of a Feather

The Orly Birds of a Feather collection has made it to New Zealand

Finally New Zealand is starting to get polishes not long after they release over seas - (unlike the six months we normally wait) Although as I am typing this I realise we still haven't had the Orly Cosmic FX collection here.

Orly Birds as a Feather Collection

• Fowl Play (purple sparkle)
• Lucky Duck (green creme)
• Nite Owl (beige shimmer)
• Peachy Parrot (coral shimmer)
• Sea Gurl (grey shimmer)
• Sweet Peacock (blue shimmer)

I saw these in Farmers yesterday. They had a full untouched display. I think these sell for about $23 each. I like to wait until Farmers had buy one get on free on Orly - which they some times do, unlike the meager 15% the have off OPI.

I didn't pick any up myself. Fowl play looks like a pretty close match to OPI Merry midnight, but as I own this already I didn't think I needed two. None of the other really stood out to me.

I was hoping that New Zealand would be getting Orly's Pin-up and Happy Go Lucky mini collections as these are much more my colours, that a bright and glittery.

Lots of Love
Lisa

Color Club Resort to Red

Color Club Resort to Red is from my 7 piece Untamed Luxury Diamond Collection.

Color Club Resort to Red - sunshine

Color Club Resort to Red - shade

This is a dark fuchsia/red colour. This is two coats. It is super pretty. The formula was great.

This is not a unique colour. Before I spread my polish wings to other brands I owned a bunch of OPI polishes just like this. I was a sucker for anything dark pink and shimmery.

This was the only polish in the Diamond collection that is not full of glitter, so I thought I would try out with the flakey top coat - Covered in Diamonds.

Color Club Covered in Diamonds over Resort to Red - sunshine

To be honest I am not a huge fan of covered in Diamonds. It is thick and goopy and I feel that the oddly shaped glitter particles are too big. I feel that Nfu Oh flakies are much easier to work with.

Lots of Love
Lisa

OPI The One That Got Away

First up a recap on my wedding dress shopping......

It was awesome!!!!
First of we went to Astra Bridal. I really really love the look of Maggie Sottero dresses. They look so great in the pictures and are made of great fabric. But after trying on about 8 of these dresses I knew they weren't the dresses for me. :(

Next up was brides on Thorndon. By this stage I had more of a picture in my head of what I did and didn't want. I knew I wanted white (my mum kept saying no to white but I knew it was fine on me and everyone else agreed white was great on me), I knew I didn't want lace, or too many sparkles. I wanted big and poofy.

The ladies at Brides on Thorndon were really nice. They picked out about 7 dresses for me to try on. Turns out the first dress I tried on was perfect. They made me try on 3 others, but I still liked the first one. An hour later I left the shop with the first dress in a bag and all mine. It fits perfectly now, is the right colour and size and is discontinued so is no longer available so that it was on sale. I never thought it would be that easy at all.

I'm not going to say to much about what it looks like in case some one who isn't supposed to see it sees what it looks like. So if you want me to send you a link of what I got email me.

Anywho onto the polish you came here for....

My mum came over the other day and started doing her nails with this polish and ended up taking it home with her. I kind of cringe every time she does her nails because she is so terrible at it and ends up with polish everywhere.

OPI The one that got away - natural light

This is three coats. It is a pretty dark fuchsia with the glass effect finish.

OPI Black Shatter over The one that got away - natural light

I think I like this one better with out the shatter on top. I have a huge soft spot for fuchsia pink polishes, and this one is really pretty. Plus my shatter is still really goopy and thick.

Hope you are all having a great weekend.
Lots of Love
Lisa

Rubi Shoes Disco Nights

Rubi Shoes and Cotton On in New Zealand and Australia have bought out nail polishes to add to their clothing and shoe lines.

I have only seen about 5 colours in total. In New Zealand and Australia these polishes are retailing for $4.95 (this is pretty much the cheapest polish in the whole country). This one I actually found on sale for $2!!!! It was the only shimmer and the only one they had on sale so I bought a couple of them as extras for swaps aswell.

The bottles are exactly the same size and shape as OPI's bottles, but the label on the back says that these are 18mls. And based on the smell I can pretty much garuntee that they are not B3 Free.

Rubi Shoes Disco Night - Sunshine

Rubi Shoes Disco Night - White Light

This one appears more colour accurate to real life than the photo in the sun, but the photo in the sun shows the texture better. Turns out this polish is a foil. It is a silver that leans towards a pinky/bronzy colour. Two coats is perfect as this polish is almost a one coater with good coverage.

I am going wedding dress shopping tomorrow! I am so excited I can not wait! We have been engaged for a year and a half now so it seems like we are finally getting there being able to finally get the dress! I have no idea what will suit me yet. I have a feeling I am not going to get any sleep at all tonight!

Lots of Love
Lisa

Zoya Apple

This is one of last weekend purchases from the New Zealand Beauty Expo.

I am quite fond of green polishes, I think because they are rare here and arent something everyone wears on their nails.

Apple is from this years sunshine collection which was made up of six glass effect polishes.

Zoya Apple - Outside natural light

This is outside in natural light, it was cloudy, but at least there was no thunder storms and hail like yesterday. It is a beautiful medium green glass fleck polish. It shimmers golden yellow in the right light and various shades of green. This was 3 coats, but 2 would be ok - I think I've developed a habit of always doing three no matter what now.

Lots of Love
Lisa

NZ Beauty Expo Part 2

Beauty Expo Part 2 continues from the Color Club booth


Here Color Club were debuting their Fractured collection which is due to arrive on the ship from America at the end of the month. They were also selling their new summer collection Wicked Sweet, which is the fruity scented polishes, their Untamed Luxury winter collection in the 7 piece packs, as well as all the polishes from their large standard colour range.

I picked up the rest of the Wicked Sweet polishes I was missing from my collection, as well as some older polishes from the Femme Fatal and Catwalk Queen collections.

Unfortunately I didn't get any of the Fractured polishes, but Steph got Tattered in Gold and you can check out her post on that here.

There was a couple of blokes selling Jessica polishes along with their salon supplies. They seemed like a hard case, and were completely unsure about selling these polishes. I picked up a dark blue shimmer called Midnight Moonlight and a pearl shimmer called Chic. I have never seen Jessica polishes in New Zealand before. If you are interested in getting any of these send me an email and I can pass it on to the suppliers.

That was about it in the way of Nail Polishes. Lots of companies were selling gel polishes and were aiming these at salon owners.

What was notably missing from this expo was Global Beauty who are the New Zealand distributors of OPI. To be honest this doesn't stand the company in good steed in my opinion. I think they should have been there. Especially as the expo is aimed at beauty salon owners, who may stock OPI. It just seems a little arrogant to me.

Also missing from the expo but available in New Zealand was Orly, Essie and Butter London.

All in all I had a great time. I loved meeting Steph and her mum, as well as the great people (you know who you are!) at the Color Club booth, who I ended up helping out on the second day while I waited for my flight back home.

I cant wait for the next expo.

Lots of Love
Lisa

P.S. I burnt my hand really bad on some steam whilst helping my mum cook dinner today, so I am typing this one handed and an in a tonne of pain. It is also the finger tips of my left hand so there will be no swatches (maybe even posts) for a while, while I recover from blisters and huge amounts of pain. Ive had ice on it for 2 hours already and it still hurts heaps!!!!

NZ Beauty Expo Part 1

The past two days I spent in Auckland at the New Zealand Beauty Expo. It was amazing!

On the Saturday morning I met up with Steph from Nail Juice and her mum and we went to check out the expo together. I love the fact that her mum loves nail polish as well.

Our first stop was the Nfu Oh booth. For those who are still wondering how to say this - its N fu Oh (said like kung fu).

Steph's mum went nuts over the polishes they were selling cheaply - I'm not going to say how much we paid for all of our polishes as it may make some of you a tad jealous. But I am going to say we brought LOTS here. I brought 9 Nfu Oh polishes (48, 50, 124, 90, 29, 93, 68, 80 and 69) and some heart shaped diamantes. We had to visit this booth again at the end of the day so that Steph's mum could buy even more polishes here.

The ladies at this booth were really nice to talk to as well. They come from the New Zealand Nail Academy based in Tauranga.

They are also the suppliers of Sheekee nail wraps. These have some great patterns and everyone has been commenting on this one finger all yesterday at the expo and today at work.

This is how it looks after three days. It isn't lasting two well on my fingers, but they have had a lot of use of the last three days. They do however look super cool and apparently last a lot longer if you do a gel top coat over the top. These are stuck on the nail like a sticker, heated up and stretched over the nail and filed down to fit. It seems a relatively easy process, but I am not sure I would be able to do this myself to my right hand.

I also got one finger done with the new colours from the Entity Colour Couture Collection of Gel Soak Off Gel polishes.
This is a beautiful red glitter called "All made up" after 3 days of wear. This is just like other gel polishes, where the polishes is cured under a special light and dries immediately. They had some nice new colours coming out as well.

Next up was the Zoya booth. I have never seen such a big supply of Zoya polishes in such a small space before.

Zoya is only really sold in Salons in New Zealand (well at least Wellington anyway) so it was great to be able to actually see the polishes in person before buying them. They also had all the collections in sets here, which is such a bad temptation for my wallet. After the experience of the Nfu Oh booth I was thinking OMG I have to control my spending but it was soooo hard.

I picked up Mitzi and Phoebe from the summer 2011 Mod Matte collection, Mimi and Ivanka from the summer 2010 Sparkle collection and Apple from this years summer Sunshine collection.

Nothing was bought by any of us at the Creative (CND) booth. These polishes were still super expensive in New Zealand. I am sure their booth was great for those who own salons and are interested in Shellac, but we kind of just passed straight by it.

Nail Systems NZ Ltd are the suppliers of China Glaze in New Zealand. I was surprised to find out that China Glaze was in New Zealand, as I have never seen it here. Turns out it is available in some salons, but to be honest, once the lady in charge there found out we were just bloggers and didnt have a salon we were kind of brushed aside and ignored. They also did not have many polishes on sale here and really were only selling sets of the new collections. I would have loved to have been able to get some of the Island Escape polishes.

Young Nails is an acrylic and gel nail systems with glitter and colour powders.

This is the one finger I got done with the Young Nails system, and it seems like something I would get done again. It is a clear gel polish that stimulates healthy nail growth, followed by a black coat and then any combination, pattern or colour of glitter you can think of. This is super thick on the nails once it is complete, I think its about 5 layers and takes a while to do with curing under a special light. Some ladies were getting their whole hands done like this and they looked great. They were even doing it on toes. I am going to endeavor to find a place near me that does this.

Ok this is getting super long so I am going to stop here and continue tomorrow.

Lots of Love (and although it is not celebrated here - happy 4th of July for all my international followers)
Lisa

Update

Hi all,

I am in Auckland this weekend at the New Zealand Beauty Expo.

It is totally awesome!

I can't wait to get home and tell you all about it.

Lots of Love

Lisa