Coffee.

A month ago there was a small litter of newborn kittens that were abandoned in an army camp. A lovely friend of mine decided to adopt the runt of the litter & care for her; affectionately named 'Coffee', she required constant care & supervision, with her loud mews filling the room at odd hours of the night, it was incredibly draining for the both of them. Incredibly rambunctious for something that couldn't see, her favorite place would be snuggled up in someone's hair, or anywhere she could hook on to. 

When I received the news that she had passed, I was devastated, for the loss of Coffee & for the grieving of my friend. It was pretty clear to me that Coffee had been very loved from the beginning, for the kitten my friend dreamed of being a cat.

"A flower bloomed already wilting. Beginning it's life with an early ending."

                                                                                                                                     - R.J Gonzales

Today's nails are dedicated to the death of Coffee, even though it has been a few weeks since her passing.  Using QA40 & a couple of OPI polishes, I created this patch of art that does not resemble Coffee in any way but I hope it counts. Inexplicable things always happen in life, and this was just one of them. Wherever she is now, I hope she's a lot happier, and so much free-er.

Hold the ones you cherish close tonight folks!

xx

Holiday LUSH Haul.

Hi lovelies, I've just gotten back from a trip to Europe, & I've shopped non stop for 2 weeks. I'm going to start off with my mega large LUSH haul that I got from Regent Street in London. I'm a huge LUSH fan & I went a little crazy admittedly. 

It was my second trip to LUSH Regent Street, and I was served by this incredibly tall & gorgeous Amazonian lady that very patiently introduced different products that she felt were suited to me. She was incredibly detailed & was pulling products from the shelves at incredible speeds. I made my choices & put them in my already heavy basket. At this point I was a little nervous as I didn't bring too much cash with me & I was worried that I'd overshot my already strained budget. As she tallied the total, I took out Flying Fox, incredibly embarrassed & apologizing profusely. I went upstairs & when I went back down to pay, I took a glance inside my bag & I saw this bottle inside. I was so shocked & so incredibly touched, & she refused to even listen to me thanking her.

Turkish Delight is a shower smoothie infused with moisturizing cocoa butter, almond oils & rose. It works like a combination of body butter & soap, rubbed into the skin, then washed off. 

I love the heavy rose scent, it feels so delicate & girly, the scent is strong but not overbearing.

Fresh Farmacy is a facial cleanser with a delightful mix of lavender, rose, tea tree oil & calamine. If these ingredients seem familiar, they're commonly used for sensitive skin issues, lavender is used to moisturize, tea tree to clear up any blemishes & calamine to sooth.

This is my first time purchasing a bar soap for face cleansing. I really hope it works as my skin gets inflamed very easily.

My hair is dry. And when I say its dry, they're like bales of straw in the field, I've bleached it more than I would ever admit. Blousey is a shampoo supposed to be richly moisturizing & specially for damaged, bleached & fragile hair. Cocoa butter, cupuacu butter & bananas to moisturize & cloves, star anise & pimento berry for a healthy scalp. The smell is strong, reminding me of berries in summertime with a faint whiff of bananas.

Sure, it looks a little goopy but it's organic & fresh, I really can't wait to use it & finally try & do some restoration on my hair.

H'Suan Wen Hua is a hair mask made up of bay, watercress, balsamic vinegar, rosemary oil for shine & fresh eggs with soya lecithin to infuse the hair with protein. A swirl of lanolin helps to moisturize along with bananas & avocados. 

I've heard crazy things about this product, people have been raving up & down so this is one of those things I feel I need a lifetime supply for. 

A daily conditioner, Retread is supposed to be the most nourishing in the LUSH range. With a seaweed & lanolin base with added soya for protein, olive, jojoba & avocado oils for further moisturizing, Retread is more than enough for daily use.

My absolute first bath bomb even though I don't have a bathtub, Twilight will be sitting in my cupboard perfuming my clothes with it's heavy scent of lavender.

R&B stands for revive and balance, & is a leave in hair moisturizer for curly or dry hair types. With a heavy tropical flowery scent, this is one of my favorite products I have used. Rubbed onto damp hair for maximised results, it leaves my hair feeling so soft, silky & heavy, no longer the dry & damaged hair it once was. An amazing thing is that one drop of this product goes a long way, a small tub can be used for ages.

With ingredients such as avocado butter, cupuacu butter & candelilla wax, R&B moisturizes the toughest of hairs.

A shampoo bar which I bought to try out, Ultimate Shine is for a mild cleansing. There is a very soft scent which I can't put my finger on, but I dearly want to try out a bar of shampoo on my hair!

xx

Misa The Great Green Whatsit

Today I have one of the Misa's I bought from my previous haul at BeautyAsia. The Great Green Whatsit is a sea foam green duochrome with gold flakes. The formula is sheer, buildable & squishy, & because it's probably going to look nicer layered over a darker polish, I layered it over my favorite dark blue, China Glaze's Calypso Blue.

I love this polish. It's amazing, a subtle duochrome, along with the gorgeous speckled gold flakes. I need to use this again! The name is hilarious even though I don't get it. Could someone explain?

KBShimmer Glowstick

I'm currently so in love with neons & digging through my newly packed drawers, I really wanted to show you guys how lovely this polish is. One of my few KBShimmers, Glowstick is a neon glitter jelly & the best part, IT GLOWS IN THE DARK. 

I think this is one of the polishes that has everything & it isn't overdone. I know many polishes that have too many things & it turns into this big muddy mess. Yes the formula is a little too squishy & watery but when layered over a white polish, it immediately becomes a beautiful highlighter yellow. In the swirl, there are stars, diamonds, hexes & bars, basically an explosion of silver glitters.

Glowstick is no longer listed in both KBShimmer & Harlow sites but I'm sure you can get it in swaps, or people selling their extra bottles, or even second hand. This polish is so worth getting!

Incredible glow in the dark polish!

Dollish Polish Super Mario Bros. Collection- My Picks

I know I'm super late to the party but packing out my cupboard recently & I found my picks from Dollish Polish Super Mario Bros. Collection (If only that could happen more often right?). I got 6 from the 8 polish set collection & I really truly adore them.

These were one of those collections where I first laid eyes on them & immediately knew I had to have them! They're also my first Dollish Polish & I am so so so in love.

I love Mario & I think it's great that someone came out with an entire collection dedicated to a legendary game. I had so much fun with these polishes, I hope y'all like them!

Lavender & Lilac Ombré- Crazy Colours Review

I recently decided to try out Crazy Colours because La Riche has been such a huge disappointment so far & being on this huge pastel kick lately I picked out a number of pastel Crazy Colours to try. To start off I did a lavender to lilac ombré with slight blue tips, colours used are in the picture below.

As lavender & lilac are pastel colours, a lot of bleaching may be needed to get your intended hair colour. On the other hand Bubblegum Blue isn't as pastel colored & through much testing I can confirm with one bleach the colour should show on your hair! Of course, every hair is unique & to each his own so results may vary.

My thoughts on Crazy Colour: I'm a convert. I'm not saying that La Riche is terrible, I think many people would disagree but I find that Crazy Colour 'sticks' to my hair quite a bit faster as compared to the pastel colours in La Riche which drove me up the wall.

For the dyes that I used, the colours looked so vibrant in the bottle, I couldn't believe they were pastel colours! For some reason the lilac dye was a little more watery than the rest but that might've been a fluke, it didn't affect the quality of the colour in any way so I'm pretty alright with that.

So recently my friend & I decided to start out The Tinted Mane, where we offer a selection of Crazy Colours & La Riche dyes. Readers can quote 'SND' for SGD$1 off per bottle & purchase of 5 bottles or more are eligible for free registered mail! Happy shopping <3

  

A mini LUSH haul!

Hello lovelies! I've spent the past week being bombarded by the terrible haze & it was terrible, an acrid smell wafting into my room whether the windows were closed or not that left me feeling quite sick. We've had a short respite since Saturday with most of the haze blanketing our northern neighbor & I took a short shopping trip yesterday to lift my sickly spirits & to try and forget about the haze.

As soon as I entered the LUSH store I became a little girl again, squealing at the smells & at all the different soaps. Gosh I love LUSH so. The salesgirl was super tolerant of me, she introduced me to a ton of new smells, some I liked, some not so much. Anyway this is the small amount I bought which also happens to be the most I ever spent in a LUSH store!

This is my second time purchasing Flying Fox, first time being in Kazakhstan & being the complete doofus that I am, I had left it there. Flying Fox consists of all sorts of honey madness jammed into one bottle and given a beautiful douse of perfumes & essential oils that leaves a heavy raw scent. I love that it doesn't smell too sweet & sugary, it's a raw & natural & it shows. 

It was only after getting this bottle that I realized it could be used on my hair too! I haven't made the jump to washing my hair with it yet but it leaves my skin feeling so moisturized, & I just can't imagine how my hair would feel like after.

After looking through numerous reviews on LUSH's UK site, I concluded that I needed You Snap The Whip, a charcoal infused body butter. Imagine to my delight when at the store I realize it had the same scent as Sweetie Pie, a shower jelly that I had purchased before & loved!I would've purchased a million bars but they seem to soften really quickly in the heat & I'm worried it'd turn my bathroom cupboard into a complete mess.

You Snap The Whip is a half scrub/ half moisturising bit of heaven in a bar. It leaves my skin with little scrubby black bits & lots of charcoal but a quick wash & my skin feels really soft & moisturised. The smell is on the sweeter, fruitier side, but it also has a slight edge that leaves the overall scent just right. 

This is one of my favorite bars of soap ever! Honey I Washed The Kids is not only a fun play on words but a gorgeous scent infused into a pretty bar of soap. I love how there's a honeycomb at the front of it, in case anyone forgets its honey flavored even though you can smell the bar from a mile away! 

Honey I Washed The Kids is (obviously) a honey infused scent of bar soap. There also seems to be an almost milky scent to it that rounds the whole thing up. The milk & honey combination makes me think of Cleopatra's secret youth ritual which was supposedly a bath with the simple combination of the two!

I'm going to have to save up quite a bit of money for my next trip to LUSH!

xx

Lacquer Lust Bow Chika Wow Wow

Hi guys! I was in the mood for something holographic after filing my nails down to nubbity nubs. Picked out my one Lacquer Lust polish, a gorgeous royal blue holo that never fails to cheer me up after a grumpy day.

Swatch is at 3 coats, which is enough to build it to full opacity. Bow Chika Wow Wow is one of those squishy holos that have an easy to apply formula that dries quickly :D I've worn this mani on countless days when I encountered a mental block, nail polish wise. The holographic is definitely less obvious in my lightbox, many people have told me it may be a dupe to OPI's DS Glamour but I definitely don't have that. How about an easier to find alternative? ;)

I don't usually buy indies very often but this is amazing.

Retails at SGD$18.50 from Shoppe Eclecticco! (Ships internationally)

Ming Vase Nails

It's been ages since I did stamping, partly because I felt my old stamping plate designs are becoming a little stale. When I got my new stamping plates from Taobao, I thought they were so beautiful & I hadn't yet seen anything like it so I was really excited to post this to show you guys!

Using the plate QA-7, & China Glaze's Calypso Blue with a base coat of OPI's My Boyfriend Scales The Walls, I utilized the entire stamping plate and I think it's looking pretty good. 

Taobao is an amazing website if you're willing to maneuver through all the Chinese with the help of Google translate :P Each plate without shipping was about SGD$0.60 & that is pretty damn cheap if you ask me. They were good quality stamping plates, which honestly surprised me. The stamping selection can be found here. 

Nails Inc. Leather Effect in Noho

 Just filed down my nails to cute little nubs & applied Nails Inc. Leather Effect in Noho, which is supposed to mimic the leathery texture. This is my first textured polish & also my first Nails Inc :) I really liked it on both counts.

The formula was easy to apply, unlike other mattes, it didn't dry too fast so that it becomes streaky but it dried fast enough for me to just apply it & head out after. I love the gritty texture of the polish but it doesn't resemble leather... more of a stone path. 

I loved the Nails Inc. brush, it fits perfectly & fans out just right enough to get perfect cuticle lines, I have to get more from this brand. 

Swatches are at 3 coats.