Heading to Turquoise & Caicos

G'day!!!  How are you lovely Ladies.  First, apologies for being away for so long... life has taken over I suppose. But now I'm back, to let you know, I could really paint them down.... (what a loser I am... didn't make sense but you see where I was going with that LOL).  I have a pretty little swatch to show you today.  Courtesy of Essie ~ Turquoise & Caicos... Essie, take me away!!!!!

I had heard so much about this color, when I found it I decided to jump on the bandwagon, tried it on my fingers & toes (note to self:  no Turquoise & Caicos for my lil' piggies, it just looked weird on my feet).  But cute on my nails.  My skin is quite pinky in some of these pics (THANKS INDOOR LIGHTING!!), but the color is pretty true to what you see.  I was able to wear polish - flat color on it's own for a total of 24 hours.  I'm finding more & more I MUST MUST MUST add some sort of something to a mani now.  Flakies, glitter, tape, more than one color.  I don't know if that's a good or bad thing... we shall see I suppose. 

Indoor lighting... It is truly unbelievable how my skin looks like piglet skin.  WTF? 

Different angle, appeared a bit darker than the first one

Thumb:  Deborah Lippmann - Boom Boom Pow
Index:  Nails Inc. - Wyndham Overglaze Top Coat
Middle:  Essie - Shine of the Times
Ring:  Sinful Colors - Pearl Harbor
Pinky:  Essie - Pure Pearlfection

And of course... I can't leave a flakie/glitter untouched.  Ya gotta mattify it!  I used Essie Matte About You

This was 2 coats of Turquoise & Caicos. Topped w/ Seche Vite, now, onto the review...

1st up - APPLICATION:  I thought it was a little on the thick side.  But I fought through :).  
2nd - COVERAGE:  Very good.  This was a 2 coater for me! Very easy to get opaque on account of thickness 
3rd - WEAR:  This was only on me for one day before I added swatched the topcoats above... but good news is there was no chipping in a day LOL.  I topped it off with a coat of Poshe & all was good with the world.

As you can see I used various topcoats to see how they'd get along with Turquoise & Caicos.  They got along magnificently :) Hope you enjoyed!

Revisiting Sexy Divide with Shine of the Times

Hello!!!  Hope all is well... It is D-I-S-G-U-S-T-I-N-G-L-Y hot here in NJ/NY which does not make Athena happy... I HATE the Summer.  I like all the things that come with it, but I don't like feeling like I have to crawl out of my skin in order to cool off.  Add in a dash of some people that don't believe in deodorant, it's not a good day.  You get the point... LOL So to cheer myself up from the 94+ degrees we're sure to hit today I have a pretty, pretty mani to show you. 

I posted about Essie's Sexy Divide a little while ago & since I itch to paint my nails every 2-3 days I decided to jazz this one up instead of doing a new mani.  I went with some Essie ~ Shine of the Times from the Holiday 2012 collection.  Jazz indeed...

How GAWGEOUS is this?!

FLAKIES!!!!

Gaaaaahhhh... cannot take it.  Look at that green!!!!!!

Green, red, gold, orange FLAKIES!!!!!

I mean seriously... how friggin' gorgeous is this?!  It's so amazing how dark colors can bring out the beauty in a topcoat.  It's like it took on another life.  I LOVED this!!!  As you can see Shine of the Times is certainly the shining star of this mani... such pretty flakies, red, gold mostly... the green & orange comes out at certain angles.  When you zig, it zags.  What do you think?