Eyeko Vintage NOTD

I don't have many green polishes. Eyeko Vintage fills a conspicuous gap in my collection.

I really like this shade a lot, it looks like turquoise stones. It's not incredibly flattering on me, I don't think, but I'll wear it anyway. That's how much I like it.

There's not too much to say about it - it's a regular creme, reasonably opaque. Took me two coats for opacity, but depending on the thickness of your coats you might need three. It's not a one-coater like my first Eyeko polish, Eyeko Rain, but it isn't bad.

It's just a really nice color!

Too lazy to remove hex glitter polish?

Hex glitter. It's beautiful, flashy, different. When you wear it, your nails get noticed - and that's great! But all good things come to an end, and when it comes time to remove that chunky glitter... It isn't fun.

In fact, when I tried to remove my Christmas manicure, my acetone-based nail polish remover ate through two thick layers of Seche Vite, three layers of polish, and a basecoat... leaving nothing but the glitter behind. It removed everything around the glitter, but couldn't remove the glitter itself.

Awful, right? There are methods for getting rid of these glitters, but this time I decided to just roll with it. What's the harm, I figured, in wearing these glitters another day? So here's what I did.

I took my absolute favorite layering polish, Revlon Sweet Nothings in Satin Sheets, and put two layers over the glitter. The result was a milky white base filled with golden flakie-ish glitter, and chunks of gold hex glitter buried underneath. In passing you could mistake them for naked nails, but then the hex glitter catches your eye, and you look at it, and you see the delicate play of even more glitter...

For something I just slapped on because I was too lazy to scrub the glitter away, I think this was a very cool outcome. I'd do it again.

Nailgirl

Review: Eyeko Cream

First things first: This is not a skin cream. Not even a little bit. Do not attempt to put it all over your face, unless you're going to a rave or dressing up as a fairy. You will look like a sparkly hot mess.

Eyeko's website says: "Skip foundation and use Eyeko Cream all over focusing on the eye and cheek area for lit from within skin." I would never do this with Eyeko cream.
However, that's not saying at all that Eyeko Cream is not a worthwhile product. As a matter of fact, I think it's pretty awesome, because it has several versatile uses. Just not as a face cream.

Lucky for me, I knew this going in - any quick search, on Makeupalley or anywhere else, will tell you this. The stuff is packed with shimmer. Look at it...

If you put it all over your face, you would probably look ridiculous. It's a shade of light cotton-candy pink, to boot. Once rubbed in, it's a decent, if glittery, highlighter.

Someone on MUA also suggested it as a cream eyeshadow, so I tried that too. I like it - it's not super pigmented, but if you lay it thick enough then it's a pleasing light pinky color with shimmer.

So, bottom line - not, not, not a face cream. A good highlighter in small doses. A good cream eyeshadow. I've been using it nearly every day since I got it, in one way or another. But NOT as a face cream! :)

Nailgirl

Another Eyeko order, hooray!

I got a new order from Eyeko recently. It's small, but it's all good stuff.

I got two polishes, a fat balm, and a jar of Eyeko Cream.* I'm really pleased with them all!
*The cream was free with purchase as part of a promotion, but accidentally got left out of my order. After emailing them, they sent it off straightaway and I ♥ it, but that's why it's not in the pictures.

I got these two cool-toned polishes, Eyeko Vintage and Eyeko Pastel (shown here with Eyeko Rain, the other Eyeko polish in my collection). I was really wavering whether to get Pastel or not, but they sold out of the other ones I wanted, so I ended up getting it and was pleasantly surprised. On the website, it looks really similar to Eyeko Rain, which I already have (and love). After all, they're both light blues. In person, they are COMPLETELY TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Not even close. Here, look at the nail wheels.

Rain is grey-tinged, with hidden shimmer. Pastel is bright baby blue, with a true blue duochrome shimmer. They're totally different colors, though I can see how they might photograph similarly. Also, Rain is a one-coater dream to apply. Pastel is much more sheer, and would take 3 to 4 coats for full opacity. They're very different beasts.

Vintage is a really awesome polish too, but you'll hear all about it when I do the NOTD post. It's a true greeny turquoise, very pretty indeed. Less opaque than Rain, sadly, but I think I got away with 2 coats.

The fat balm is nice, too. It's Eyeko Fat Balm in toffee, a moisturizing lipstick in a fat little tube. It's meant to have a toffee scent, but it just smells lipsticky to me. It's a browny tan color, and I like it quite a bit. I've worn it several times and it seems to have good staying power.

Eyeko Cream is really versatile -- I'll post a full review soon -- and I'm finding myself using it almost every day. It's not a real skin cream, to be sure, but it's a great highlighter cum cream eyeshadow.

More Eyeko posts to come, as I start using these products!

Nailgirl

Retro nails for a day

A found a 1940s tutorial for a manicure. It seemed so ingenious, I just had to try it out!

It's pretty simple: basically a half-moon manicure with french tips, over almond-shaped nails. You leave the moons and tips bare and paint the remainder red.

The genius of this technique is that it would really stretch out your wear: bare tips means no tipwear, obviously, and bare moons means that the gap from your nails growing out would be less evident. You could probably wear a manicure like this for a week or longer if you were careful.

Now my tips aren't very white and I don't even have moons, so I played with this look a little bit. I filed my nails into almond shapes (which took forever), and started with a base of sheer white - in this case, a doubled-up coat of my sheer white basecoat.

Since I was wearing polish under the red, I couldn't take advantage of the trick the article offers for perfect tips: simply wipe away the red polish in a neat line. Instead, I had to freehand it. I'm not very good at this, as you can tell. To boot, if you examine the pictures you'll notice that a second person is meant to be painting your nails, not you yourself. So my lines didn't come out great.

Ashamed at my shoddy drawing skills, I put a layer of sparkly white over it to distract (Satin Sheets from Revlon's Sweet Nothings collection)

So I didn't love this manicure. It would probably have looked better if I had steadier hands, my nails were longer and not stained, and if the red weren't so bright. But still, it was fun and fascinating to do the kind of manicure my grandmother might have done. What a clever technique to extend the wear of your polish.

Nailgirl

Blue Christmas

I got two polishes as gifts this Christmas, and they're the first polishes I've gotten in several weeks since I've been on a no-buy for most of December. They were from two different people but, by coincidence, both blue. So what better way to show them off than to wear them together?

The first is Avon Nailwear Pro in Splendid Blue. And how splendid it is! It's a deep blue shot with blue, purple, and aqua glitter. It doesn't feel chunky at all. It really packs a punch when it hits the light.

It was also a one-coater, which is great and surprising for a glitter polish like this. It's totally opaque.

The second is Barry M Nail Paint in Cobalt. This wouldn't be something I would buy for myself, but now that I have it, I like it. It dries a bit darker than the bottle. Application is to the same high standard of my other Barry M polishes, a nice thick one-coater. I did get some bubbling unfortunately.

Nailgirl

Starry starry franken

No, it's not a dupe for Essie Starry Starry Night - but it is pretty, and it does remind me of stars.

It's a new franken, from my latest batch.

It's made of blue and black eyeshadow with some silver foil/glitter added in. The silver is super-tiny, giving the look of pinpricks of starlight against the sky. I really, really love this franken.

The materials were cheap so it did chip really quick, but it was so fun to wear. I bet it would look really cool mattified too, because when I started taking the polish off I got this neat satin effect:


Nailgirl