Glitter french: Butter London Rosie Lee

This is my first go at a french manicure using something other than freehand. Since Rosie Lee takes three coats to opacity, I felt freehanding it would be a bit ambitious, so I used masking tape. Not ideal, since it gave me straight tips, but it did the job OK. I made a few screw ups when taking off the tape so please excuse the dings, but for a first try I'm pleased! Also, the eagle eyed amongst you may spot that righty makes an appearance in a few of these pictures since I got my technique down by the second hand. Man, it's hard using a DSLR left handed!

This is base coat, one of China Glaze Diva Bride, three of Rosie Lee and topcoat. I think this is a pretty twist on a regular french and I'll be doing it again. The CG is nothing to write home about (it's just a boring my-nails-but-better colour with average ease of application) but the glitter is lovely. I currently have it on my toes and it's very sparkly, very opaque, and a slightly unusual pink in that is has a rosy, champagne quality to it in the sunlight.

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Oodles o' purple: Butter London HRH & Nfu.Oh 51

OK, long pic-heavy post - so I'll try and keep it light on the text.

Butter London HRH. Nice standard royal purple, red-toned base. I did two coats but it could probably have done with three since the base is a little jelly-ish. Me being me and compelled to fiddle with things that ought not be fiddled with, I put Nfu.Oh 51 over the top and the result really wasn't pretty:



Urgh. Sooo, that lasted all of twelve hours before I took it off. But I wanted to try 51 over something else because the real draw is the amazing blurple jelly base colour, which was totally lost over HRH. So I swatched it over (L-R) Orly gogo, illamasqua wink, illamasqua force, and OPI dim sum plum. And the result was much prettier:



Orly Gogo is just a total PITA to apply and not worth the 7 coats of polish (4 orly, 3 of the flakies) but 51 looked lovely over any of the other three. Two coats on force and dim sum plum, three on wink. I will definitely give this a full outing soon, because I really like the duochrome pinky colours in the flakies (just not over HRH...dear God not over HRH). Do click to enlarge this one, it's a doozy.



As Borat would say: 'naaaaaaice. Vairry naice.'


Edit - the UK Nfu Oh retail site has now launched. It's at Nfuoh.co.uk. Enjoy!

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Trying pink victory! Butter London Fairy Lights

While I'm not usually a pink kinda girl, this one ticks all the boxes. I am obsessed with it. Not a surprise given that the merest hint of a metallic polish is guaranteed to drive me batshit...and this is a rich, pink chrome. Sorry in advance for picture overload. And any lemmings created.



It's fully opaque in two coats. You could even get away with one, but since chromes show imperfections, I use two with a coat of seche vite layered inbetween and lumos on top, which totally hides the fact that I have a couple of teabag patches right now. (You can tell my nails are bad if I'm willing to butcher my precious Whittard teabags to fix it). But rather than waffle on, I'm just going to show you pictures. Which are no-where near as pretty as the polish, so you'll have to use your imagination.


It's slightly blue but is so super shiny that it shifts colours in different lights. Right now indoors it looks baby pink. Outdoors it's darker and cool-toned. In the sunshine it glows white. Being a chrome it's also a whizz to apply and dries really quick.


I have bought a back up since this is limited edition and I tend to wear my chromes a lot. That doesn't count towards the no-buy, right?! (OK, so maybe the other three BLs I bought to make up the shipping do...) /guilt. Looks nice under red shatter, too:

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Butter London Henley Regatta

Butter London Henley Regatta is a gorgeous blue/green sparse glitter. It does nothing fancy - no holo, no multi-size glitter, and it's only two colours - but it is stunning nonetheless and so sparkly it practically goes *ping!* when the light hits it. Behold:

This has many many pros:

1. Just look at it! I spent ages twirling my hands and going 'ooh'.
2. Dries faster than I can say 'where's my topcoat'
3. Wears like iron (I took it off 8 days later with only tip wear)
4. Totally smooth with one coat of Seche Vite - you wouldn't know you were wearing glitter.

On the other hand,

1. Removal is a bitch, as you might expect
2. It's sparse, so requires at least three coats. I popped it on over my existing mani (BL Thames, which itself is sheer) so I had 9 coats in all. My nails were about an inch thick.
3. I failed my driving test while wearing it. (I blame the sparkliness for distracting me - definitely not my own fault for not indicating to move off, oh no).

Have another one for good measure. As an aside, the wear time is so awesome that I couldn't be bothered to take it off before the big conference I had to go to last week. So I rocked sparkly turquoise nails with my black suit in order to deliver a paper on public administration. The panel head said my nails were amazing (never mind the paper), so clearly a good choice if it took her attention off how nervous I was!

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Butter London Victoriana: when good polish goes bad

Urgh...ever have those manicures when nothing goes right? This is one of those. Nice polish, gorgeous colour...crap manicure. Figured I should post it anyway because it doesn't look that bad in the pictures despite the awful inception.

This one was doomed from the start, since it was done on Eurovision night. For anyone who's not come across Eurovision - lucky you - it's an annual knees up where tragically awful acts from European countries get to perform, and then every country votes. Usually for their neighbour. Hence why Azerbaijan (where?) won this year. It's a cherished cultural institution in Europe, because it's wonderfully naff and usually involves parties where everyone gets dressed up as a country and then proceeds to get blind drunk. Can you see why this was a bad idea?

As it happens I wasn't at a party last night - we stayed in with friends over - and I decided to do a mani/pedi to keep me occupied, because I'm a fidget who can't sit still in front of the television. So I did my toes first, whilst knocking back the ale (the pedi was even worse, by the way - I took Illamasqua Alarm off which stained my toes tomato, and then tried to put a nude over the top. Result: hot mess). By the time I got to the tips I was polishing with the kind of exaggerated comedy concentration normally only seen in five year olds. I did two coats, and then the takeaway arrived, whereupon I dinged them to hell and lost the bottle cap. Epic fail.

The next day, cracking hangover in tow, I tried to tidy it with a third coat and topcoat. This was the point at which Neurotic Cat had a minor breakdown and decided that if I didn't give her a cuddle that very moment, she would leave home. Then Kamikaze Kitten got jealous of the attention and jumped on my lap too. They then had a fight. Meanwhile, I'm holding my hands in the air like I'm directing traffic. Finally I kick them off and go to put topcoat on, but my seche vite has set like jelly and makes it even worse. I give up.

This is the result. The Polish is a gorgeous colour - a kind of dingy teal-blue with silver microglitter. It would probably be fine with two coats if those two coats hadn't been applied through beer goggles. I find the BL brushes a little fiddly because they're narrow, and the glitter in this means that the polish doesn't move very far, so thick coats are necessary. But it's lovely and I will definitely be trying it again under more auspicious circumstances.

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Butter London Thames & Illamasqua Viridian

So, remember in the last post where I said you could have first dibs on which Butter London I swatched first? I, er, lied, apparently. This parcel turned up two days later and as I was unwrapping it, my mum (who took delivery for me) was looking over my shoulder as I admired Thames and said 'Oooh! That's amazing! You must wear that!'. I decided it would be rude to disappoint my mother. Plus, I really liked the colour. However, it did look a bit familiar: I was wondering if it would be a dupe for Illamasqua Viridian. And they do look very similar in the bottle. There's a bit of extra navy swirly-ness in the Illamasqua, but it's very close.

On the nail, though? Definitely not dupes. Below is one coat of each. Yes, that's ONE coat of Viridian, no top coat, no voodoo...it just is that awesome.

Three coats of Thames, one of Viridian. Thames is lighter, and feels like tonnes of shimmer packed in a sheer grey base. Viridian's base is darker, bluer, and much more intense. There's also more duochrome swirly shinyness (not sure what's happened to my command of English...).

Three coats. (Sorry it's a bit rough and ready - I had to dash and forgot to do clean-up). Dry time is average and wear seems good. It is a really nice colour, and I can't find a ready dupe in my collection, so I can happily justify owning both this and Viridian (especially given my sick problem concerning shiny blue-greens). But if I only had $14? I'd get the Illamasqua.

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A right royal haul: Butter London

…In which I discover Butter London, and my wallet weeps.

One of our lovely readers asked if I could get hold of Butter London's 'No More Waity Katie' to swatch. The answer was that yes, I could, but only if I was prepared to surrender fifteen of my Great British Pounds (about $25) for the privilege. Fifteen! Plus postage! That's almost enough to buy you a house in some of the less salubrious parts of Birmingham*. Ironically it's much cheaper to buy over the pond - it's available to US and Canadian customers for the much more reasonable sum of $14.

Anyway, incredulous cheapness aside, my interest in the brand was piqued. I decided to try a few of the more 'me' polishes available (their regular polishes are also quite a bit cheaper than NMWK at around the £9.50-£12 mark, which is a little less than an Illamasqua polish). So I put in an order from powderrooms.com (I've not tried them before), and prepared to pounce on my nice postlady. We've had four bank holidays the space of 11 days here, so all the nation's post is sitting in some mighty pile at Royal Mail HQ while the posties top up their tans in the unseasonably good weather we're having. Just as I was starting to sweat that I would have nothing to show you, the package turned up! And what a package it is:

The little envelope one? SWEETS. With 'powder rooms' piped in the centre. Greedy squee!

Here's my haul. L-R: Henley Regatta, West End Wonderland, Victoriana, Rosie Lee. Confectionary, blogger's own

I'm really stoked about the glitters. I mean, it doesn't take much to get me fired up where glitters are concerned, but these are So. Pretty. West End Wonderland looks to me like a finer, sparser version of OPI Gift of Gold (which I have been stalking on ebay since Christmas, but I can't quite bring myself to drop £17 or so on it). Henley Regatta is a little like China Glaze Atlantis in the bottle, except that the colour in Henley is glitter in a clear base, whereas atlantis is silver holo in a coloured base. Same hue family, though. Victoriana is paler than I was expecting, probably as a result of all the pearly silver shimmer/micro-glitter. It's only a wee bit deeper than Illamasqua Caress, although I'm expecting it'll dry darker, so I'm looking forward to trying it. Rosie Lee I have nothing even vaguely alike - not a surprise since I don't wear pink (on which more later) but it's just oodles of awesome.

Which one do you want to see first?

I may have already put in another order. Happy wedding day, Royal people! If you'll excuse me, I'm off to coat my mitts in glitter.

*Not really. I'm allowed to make that joke because I live there.

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Butter LONDON All Hail McQueen

When I bought my first Butter LONDON polishes from an Ulta in Chicago, they were out of it so I wasn't able to post it when I posted swatches of other colors from this collection. But it found its way to me and now it is mine mine mine!

Butter LONDON All Hail McQueen

Tanned beige holo prettiness! This was three coats, it went on very easily and though it isn't a super holo glitter bomb, it's a very nice neutral... with a glittery twist. Something you can wear to work (IMO) and not have it be too showy... but then you can stick your fingers in a stray ray of sunlight and watch the holo come to life. Like I said, it's not crazy holo but it's a nice little pop of rainbow. :)

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Butter LONDON Fall 2010 swatches: Bumster, Victoriana and Marrow

After hearing about all sorts of bad application problems people had with the somewhat costly ($14 a pop, I think) brand Butter LONDON, I avoided buying any for the longest time. But then I saw swatches of these online and fell hard... and then found myself staying at a hotel right across the street from a huge ULTA that carried Butter LONDON after I had won $150 for my research at the conference...

The Universe conspired to get me to buy Butter LONDON. And I am so glad! (Though they were out of All Hail McQueen... sad.)

Butter LONDON Bumster

I love this muted saffron yellow. This is officially the easiest yellow I've ever applied: two coats! (Wow!!) Well, two coats on most fingers. My index finger needed three. So smooth and easy to control. As many readers undoubtedly know about me, I love yellows and this was certainly worth the $14 to me, as it is such a well-made yellow.

Butter LONDON Marrow

This is maybe not the most unique polish but it does have a nice twist: the very subtle (but still noticeable) silvery shimmer that actually seems to be more of an iridescent shimmer (click on the second pic for a closeup). Again, two coats, super easy application.

Butter LONDON Victoriana

This one is a stunner. Teal blue with intense silver shimmer. It's like they took Essie Sew Psyched (or RBL Diddy Mow) and punched up the saturation and multiplied the shimmer by a thousand. I rarely ever do a mani with polishes I've swatched right after swatching a bunch: it just feels like a waste with so many untrieds. But this one... this one I wore as an NOTD right after. It takes two coats. A word about the application though: you have to use thin coats on this one or else it gloops up a little bit. I did my swatch with thin coats but then did my NOTD with thick coats -- by the time I'm done swatching, I'm pretty impatient to get on with my day -- and my NOTD was kind of rough and bumpy prior to applying topcoat. (FYI, it also dried fast and well with Diamont tc and unlike some polishes that are topped off with Diamont, I have no shrinkage.)

So I tallied up my working out from last month (which was a bit under par, since I decided not to exercise properly while away in Chicago and I skipped out on about a week because of either exhaustion from Chicago or just feeling discouraged by this dumb wrist brace). According to the scheme I laid out at the end of July, in the month of September, I can buy:

6 nail polishes that cost $2 (or under)

3 nail polishes that cost $4 (or under)

6 nail polishes that cost $8 (or under)

5 nail polishes that cost $14 (or under)

0 nail polishes that cost $14 or over.

Okay, that's not a bad start. :)

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