Gaga, oh la la.

Last fall I ordered Deborah Lippman Bad Romance during Nordstrom's beauty preview sale. Nordstrom canceled the order for some reason and I never bothered to re-order.

Also, I'm not usually one to blanket boycott something just because the personality behind it occasionally acts like a jackass, but Deborah Lippman's "explanation" of Funky Chunky (a disaster of a polish in my opinion) turned me off. It is patently ridiculous to say that a big fat fail of a nail polish is designed to be worn "in a new way." Worn how, on your eyelids? It's nail polish, you only wear it one way. It's insulting for someone to tell me that *I* need to "put away [my] OLD ideas of how polish should look." Just admit that Funky Chunky looks like a melted tire on the nail and be done with it.

/rant

In any event, I saw some pictures of Bad Romance last week and decided to order it again, this time from WhatSheBuys.com. It arrived lightning fast and when I sat down to do my nails on Monday evening, I decided I couldn't wait to give it a try.

The base of the polish is black, but it's not an opaque black so I applied Bad Romance over OPI Louvre Me, Louvre Me Not.

I. Love. It.

I'm admittedly not the biggest fan of glitter polishes and in particular chunky glitters, but the varying sizes of glitter in this polish appeals to me.

Based on Bad Romance, I'm definitely going to get some more Lippman polishes and SOON. Just not the melted tire one.

Revlon Top Speed

I mentioned earlier that Revlon nail polishes are on sale at CVS this week. Here are some colors if you have any last-minute shopping in mind! One nice thing about the Top Speed line is that several of the colors are delicious squishy jellies.

Chili (a jelly!)

Jelly (perhaps unsurprisingly...a jelly)

Royal (jelly jelly jelly)

Emerald (not a jelly)

Top Speed display...there are many more colors in this line, but you get the idea.

Happy hunting. :)

CVS sale, new summer colors

This past week has been a bit of a nail polish bonanza here at Nonsense HQ. For one thing, CVS is having a crazy sale on Revlon polishes, which are marked down to $4.99. If you have a CVS card you get $4 back, so essentially you're paying $.99 for the polish. If you have other coupons, you can actually make money on the deal. And you can buy up to six, which would give you $24 Extra Bucks!

Then, if you are like me and truly crazy, you can reinvest those free dollars into 1/2 price Essies and 75%-off Sally Hansens and Revlons (you won't get $4 back for the sale Revlons but...they come to $1.37 so you're still getting quite the deal).

I only bought two Revlons but I did grab the Essies that were half price. It's only the French Affair collection, but you really never see Essie discounted that deeply so I jumped at the opportunity to pick up two colors I've been wanting.

Anyway. I have some pictures for you!

Essie Absolutely Shore, from the summer collection. I love this polish...the formula was very nice for a pastel and the green is so, so, so subtle.

Absolutely Shore, Mint Candy Apple, Greenport. This picture is a good example of having "a lot of the same color" that are not at all the same color. U needz them all.

Sally Hansen Barracuda. Another great pastel with a nice formula. You still have that crazily wide CSM brush but, I don't have any problems with it.

American Apparel Neon Red. I am bananas and coconuts for this polish. Just crazy in love with it. Highly recommend, A+, would do business with again.

I'm a little embarrassed to post this next one because the macro setting on the camera reveals the many many imperfections, but we're all friends here right? Anyway, I love a nice nontraditional French manicure and here is one I did with Essie Blushing Bride (essentially, a clear polish, though it builds nicely) and Chanel Black Satin.

I'll continue to work on my technique with this because I like the look.

That's all for now!

Oops.

Haven't I told you, internet, that whenever I say "I'm not really buying much nail polish right now," something happens in my brain and I go crazy and buy one millionty nail polishes?

It happened again.

I've had a shopping list in mind for Transdesign involving a couple of the OPI Pirates of the Caribbean collection, the two new OPI Serena duos and some New York Summer colors. Cookbook mentioned she was looking at RBL Bikini Bottom and I suggested NYS Hot Baby Blue as a (much) cheaper alternative, which got me thinking that I would like HBB as well and perhaps also Super Violet.

Well, Transdesign is out of everything. Out of the Pirate colors I want, out of the Serena duos and out of Hot Baby Blue and Super Violet.

So I set my list aside and thought I would just wait until Transdesign restocked, oh, EVERYTHING and until then I'd just continue my nail polish diet.

Except...I had some PayPal money and I really did want OPI Not Like The Movies...so I bought it...and then I also bought OPI Mamma Mia and Movin' Out.

Then today at lunch I couldn't stand not having the American Apparel neons anymore. I work close to an AA store so I went there and made them mine.

I got Neon Red and Neon Purple and, for some reason that I still can't explain, Dynasty. It's not that it isn't a nice color but whuh...whut was I thinking? I should have bought Neon Orange instead. Temporary insanity.

Then - because once you're in the rabbit hole you might as well go all the way down the rabbit hole - I went to Walgreens. I don't live close to a Walgreens anymore so I haven't been to one in months, and it was like Walgreens pulled out all the stops for me. They had the Sally Hansen crackles, the new Hard As Nails colors, new Complete Salon Manicure line, the new Revlon that's a supposed dupe for Chanel Black Pearl (and the Wet 'n' Wild eight-pan eyeshadow palettes, but that's a post for another day) - just everything that could possibly tempt a nail polish, um, collector like myself.

I did practice some restraint, however. I chose the red crackle (Cherry Smash) and a light blue, called Barracuda, from the CSM line.

Ooooooooh, Barracuda.

I also have a tale to tell you about some long-lost Milani colors, but I'll save that for another post, too.

Cover Girl Lipslicks vs. Cover Girl NatureLuxe Gloss Balm

In the mid-to-late 1990s I spent a lot of time wearing inappropriately dark lipstick (Revlon Vixen to be precise), as was the way of young women everywhere. After that, I went through sort of a no-makeup phase where inappropriately dark lipstick looked...well, inappropriate, and I happened to discover Cover Girl Lipslicks Lipgloss in Hipster. Since that time, I've bought untold tubes of this product, sometimes buying two or three tubes at a time in case it was suddenly discontinued.

Cover Girl Lipslicks Lipgloss in Hipster.

For years, I tried to buy other lipsticks and lip glosses, but none came close to winning my heart the way Hipster did (aside from the faintly dolt-y name). Everything about it is perfect. The color is like my regular lips but just slightly darker. It goes with everything and, like mascara, just makes me feel "finished." And it costs about $5. I tried a couple of other products once in a while but kept returning to my beloved Hipster while other glosses and stains languished in my makeup drawer. (Sorry, almost-forgotten $18 tube of sticky, gummy Make Up For Ever gloss.)

Recently I branched out again and I've discovered a few things I like. I love Chanel Rouge Coco in Mademoiselle almost as much as I love Hipster, and I'm pretty happy with my MAC Captive lipstick and Hue lip glaze. I'm a fan of those Milani Buzzworthy glosses I bought a few months ago, too.

But I keep buying Hipster. It's just such a solid product for me. Last week I realized I was running pretty low and made a mental note to pick some up at Target. Sadly, Target was out of the Hipster color (grrr) so I decided to try their new NatureLuxe Gloss Balm, which sounded similar. I chose the color Pinot as it looked similar to Hipster.

Cover Girl NatureLuxe Gloss Balm in Pinot.

Well. I don't like it.

First of all, I realize it's a different product line and is said to contain "decadent mango and shea butter", but the NatureLuxe Gloss Balm is $2 more than the Lipslicks. The color I selected also has way too much "sparkle" in it and the effect is kind of borderline 80s frosty. For some reason - whether it's the sparkle or some other ingredient - it also feels kind of scratchy on my lips, instead of moisturizing as I would like. I do not recommend, sadly.

Side by side comparison...no comparison!

So, I bought another tube of Hipster. What products are you hopelessly devoted to?

Some recent NOTDs

Oh my, I haven't posted in forever. But I am still having a blog sale! I will bump that post up in the next day or so. 'Cause everything is still for sale.

I have a couple of posts brewing, one about lipstick and one about Wet n Wild eyeshadow palettes, but I managed to finally take a couple of nail polish pictures recently so I'll do those first.

OPI Not Like the Movies was the only color I wanted from the Katy Perry collection (aside from Black Shatter anyway), but the whole collection sold out on Transdesign before I could order it. Then there was such a frenzy on the MUA nail board about fruitless searches at Ulta and other stores that I just figured why bother because I'd never get it. Of course, the furor died down and now it's pretty widely available online, so last week I ordered it from eBay.

There are, supposedly, two versions of this color: the original and the second or "dud." I thought I had the so-called dud, but a couple of women on MUA thought perhaps not, and anyway I really like it.

NLTM is a silvery sage and lavender duochrome with silver microglitter. It's very smooth on the nail, not gritty like a full-on glitter. The purple in the duochrome is not as strong on the nail as it looks in the bottle, but it is there. This is a very unusual color and I've received a couple of compliments on it.

Pretty.

I'm in a place with my Nail Polish Museum right now where I really want to winnow it down to colors I really like, aren't a pain in the ass to apply, and that I want to go back to again and again. It's fun to have lots and lots of polish but if I wear it once and then it sits in a drawer, what's the point? Hence the blog sale. I've also started returning to colors that I love, like Mmm...Vould You Like a Lick-tenstein?, which is the very first OPI that I ever bought.

It's more of a fall color, I think, but old formula OPI applies so marvelously. It's like a dream! A chemical-laden, semi-poisonous dream.