Today's nail: KleanColor Charcoal and Silver Star

A trip to the local mall a couple of days ago meant (of course) a scoot around Postie Plus to peruse their cosmetics bargain bins, and joy of joys they are stocking KleanColor for NZ$4.00/bottle. This is another brand I've seen on American nail polish blogs but previously been unable to find here.

Here they are, all lined up like colourful little soldiers:



Back row left to right: Twinkly Love, Silver Star, Silver. Front row left to right: Charcoal, Jewelry Red, Covalt, Sheer Lilac.

Here is Charcoal on:




One coat to opaque (yay) although I did two just to be sure. Charcoal dries to a lovely satin like finish, with the faintest shimmer through it. But because I liked the finish so much I didn't put a top coat on, and prompty smudged it (of course). So I decided to try out Silver Star over the top.



As much fun as these clear glitter polishes can be, sometimes they're just such a pain aren't they? The small round glitters in this applied very sparsely, and the stars were almost impossible to get onto the brush, plus the polish itself was quite thick and hard to work with. In the end I did three coats, and in some cases I had to smoosh the polish around the nail a bit to get the stars to apply. Cute, but a lot of effort and I'm not entirely sure it's worth it.

A small haul, a broken nail and some swatches

A quick trip to the mall today, and a small haul from the sales bins at Postie Plus:



When I was last there I picked up a bottle of Orly Armor for NZ$8.00, and I have been so impressed with it that I stocked up on another bottle, plus an Orly ridge filler and quick dry top coat. Orly products normally retail for around NZ$20.00 a bottle, so NZ$8.00 is a bargain - I'm presuming it's because they're in the old-style bottles.

Below that is a NYC liquid eyeliner in plum, some Nailene nail glue and BYS polishes in Blue Buzz and Dark Teal. (Oh and a new cushion, which the haul is sitting on.)


At some stage during the shopping trip I broke the thumb nail on my left hand (oh noes!), hence the nail glue purchase. I read a post over at Helen and Sheenie's Nice Things a while ago ago about a nail repair trick that I got a chance to try out today.



Not the neatest repair job, but very effective. That papery stuff on my nail is the paper from a tea bag, believe it or not. When Helen repaired her nail break she painted her nails with a coat of Nail Envy and stuck the paper down over that, I painted the strips of paper with nail glue and stuck them down with the help of an orange stick and some tweezers. Helen's method is less fiddly, and less likely to result in stuff being glued to other stuff that it's not supposed to be glued to.

A quick buff of the edges to smooth them down a bit, and one repaired nail. I am really surprised at how strong it is, it's really not moving. I'll be interested to see how it holds up to my daily nail polish changes.

Once the glue had dried on my fabulous repair it was time for some polish. BYS Dark Teal to be precise:





Dark Teal is a jelly, and you can see from the photos how very, very sheer it is. This was four coats and there is still heaps of visible nail line. In fact, if you look closely you can see the white spots on some of my nails from where I bumped them. I don't know how many coats it would have taken to be opaque, more than I could be bothered doing.

Transparency aside, I love the colour. It makes me think of the deep dark depths of the sea. The Eccentric English Boyfriend says it reminds him of a gemstone, but he can't remember which one. It's funny though, I wasn't blown away by the blue/green of Barry M's Racing Green, yet this blue/green has me all excited. I'm a freak obviously.

Dark Teal did take forever to dry though, even with Seche Vite on top. Is it just me that finds jellies are consistently slower to dry than other polish types? Does anybody else have this problem, and if so do you have any tips or tricks?

Finally, here's a swatch of the NYC Liquid Eyeliner in Plum.



Very thickly pigmented, I do like this colour. It's plum with a brownish cast to it that makes it ideal for most colouring. It has a faint shimmer which doesn't show up in the photo and dries very matt. Very, very matt. It showed up every little wrinkle on my hand, so you wouldn't want to use this on wrinkly eyes! (Also, eewwwwww - yellow nails!)

What do you think of the new look my pretties? The background is from Background Fairy, who has some gorgeous vintage feel designs.