Super shiny nails at the teeniest price!

Our favourite nail polishes are without doubt, The Complete Salon Manicure from Sally Hansen. You can see our review of their gorgeous Calypso Blue here. Containing a base coat, strengthener, growth treatment, colour and top coat in one, you only need to apply two coats for a really opaque, high shine finish. Despite all the typing we do, they always last for at least a week without chipping, which means they’re our go to polishes of the moment!

We thought it was about time to add to our collection, and as you can see we picked up eight new shades recently. The colours are really bright and cover fantastically well. Plus, they finish to such a high shine you can almost see your reflection in them! They translate really well from the bottle to your nail, so you can see exactly what they’ll come out like, just by looking at the colour in the bottle. 

Shades L-R: Pat on the Black, Gray by Gray, Shiny Penny, Madame

Shades L-R: Pat on the Black, Shiny Penny, Gray by Gray, Madame

Our favourite shades are Gray by Gray, a pale green/grey shade; Madame, a coral pink; Oxide, a black and silver glitter mix and Navy Baby, a deep shiny navy shade. 

Now we’ll let you into the biggest secret………We picked up these beauties in Poundland! Yes, we were shocked too, but we’re not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth. So we filled our basket and raced to the checkout before they decided they’d made a mistake!

From what our facebook and twitter followers have told us, not all Poundland stores stock Sally Hansen, so if you’re not lucky enough to have one near you, we’d suggest FragranceDirect.co.uk who have a large selection of shades priced at 99p plus delivery. 

Shades L-R: Anenome of Mine, Courtesan, Navy Baby, Oxide

Shades L-R: Anenome of Mine, Courtesan, Navy Baby, Oxide

Otherwise, Sally Hansen Complete Salon Manicure retail at around £6.99 each – and if we hadn’t picked up these great bargains, we’d be very happy to pay this for the great quality! 

Have you managed to pick up any bargains? Which is your favourite Sally Hansen shade?

Look what’s coming from OPI…..!

The Impossible

Stay the Night

Pink Yet Lavender

Those clever people at OPI have done it again with their latest collaboration with Mariah Carey! We’ve said it before, we’re not massive fans of celeb ranges, nor are we huge fans of Mariah herself for that matter, but we are lovers of OPI and we really can’t wait to get our mitts on these gorgeous new polishes for Spring 2013.

There are eight new shades in the range, four “studio” colours and four “stage” colours. The stage colours are part of OPI’s new Liquid Sand range, which is what it says on the bottle – glitter polish with a texture like sand. We said that textured nails would be even bigger this year, and it looks like we weren’t wrong!

These beauties are launching on ASOS.com in the first week of February, so keep your eyes peeled.

(Pssst, ASOS have a great deal on their ASOS Premier package – for £9.95 you can get free next day delivery, free collections on any returns, a monthly ASOS mag and early access to the sales and new arrivals – for a whole year! There’s no minimum order value either – we think this is going to be dangerous for our lunchtime shopping habits!)

Sprung

A Butterfly Moment

Get Your Number

#XmasNailTrend – Red & Gold

This look is the second of our H&M polish posts today, check out our GoldFinger post from this morning to find out more about the gold polish used on our accent nail. Everything we said about the packaging not being appealing is the same, but thankfully, so is everything about the great quality of their polishes. This sparkling red is called Je T’aime and was the bank-breaking price of £1.50! 

The red is slightly darker than it appears in the photo and the underlying sparkle is made up of tiny metallic gold particles. It applies smoothly to a high shine and it lasts very well. It’s ideal for any Christmas nail looks you want to rock this season. 

Again, another great polish from H&M. We can’t wait to try some more of their cosmetics range now! 

 

#NailTrend – Manicure in a bottle?

We were sent Sally Hansen’s Complete Salon Manicure in our October GlossyBox and have been meaning to try it ever since. It has swept across the blogosphere, so you may have already seen a review on this shade; Calypso Blue. We wouldn’t normally review something that’s been done so much already, but we really, really liked this polish and wanted to explain why!

Sally Hansen say that their little bottles contain all 5 steps of a salon manicure; Base Coat, Strengthener, Growth Treatment, Color and Top Coat. They also say it contains Vita-Care Technology for advanced wear, more shine and nourishing care.

The first thing we noticed was the colour, in the bottle Calypso Blue is a gorgeous aquamarine/turquoise colour with a slight shimmer, and it translated into exactly that with two coats to the nail as well. The brush is wide and rounded at the end, which makes applying really easy and the polish itself doesn’t streak or stick.

With two coats you can really notice the difference between this and other polishes. It finished to a high gloss, with an almost fake, plastic look. It didn’t require a top coat and it dried quickly considering it looks so thick.

We’ll let you know how long it lasts and in the meantime we’re going to try and get our hands on some more in-season colours! The RRP is £4.99 but we’ve found it on a number of sites including FragranceDirect at lower prices.

Shine Your Light

We love Temple Spa for their luxurious skincare but we’d not tried their cosmetics range before. We thought the gorgeous Shine Your Light set would be a good place to start, containing two nail treats and two cream eyeshadows in complementary colours, we thought they’d be perfect for the Christmas party season. As with all the Temple Spa sets, it comes presented in a lovely gift box, so it would make a great Christmas present, but we’re not giving it away!

Browns are a great colour for autumn/winter, so we thought we’d start with the Terra twighlight nail treat.

As you can see, three coats give a sumptuous, shimmering colour, and it lasted well for 4/5 days without chipping.

Ice/frost colours are also particularly apt for the cold weather we’re having at the moment, so the Azzuro silver/blue nail treat is great for adding some on trend sparkle. 

We like it with one coat alone, it gives a lovely pearlescent shimmer, which would make a great alternative for when you normally quickly pop on a coat of clear varnish.

With two coats the colour really comes into its own, and would be ideal for Christmas parties!

The two eyeshadows come in very similar shades to the nail treats; Imbrunire and Oceano. They’re cream shadows with sponge applicators and we love them! The colours are beautiful, and the cream formula is easy to apply and very easy to blend. It’s not quite a cream to powder formula, as it doesn’t dry to a matt, powdery finish, but once set they stay put for hours and there is no creasing. We used Oceano in the inner corners of the eye, with the darker Imbrunire in a V shape on the outer corners of the lid – gorgeous! 

Shine Your Light is available from Temple Spa for £25 and your can buy online here, or through one of their Spa to Go consultants at a Temple Spa skin class. 

#NailTrend – Terra Treat!

This gorgeous polish is Terra Nail Treat from Temple Spa’s Shine your light gift set. Brown and sparkling it’s a perfect colour for this season.
It applies really easily and you can leave it at one coat for a light shimmer, or build up the colour like we have with two/three thin coats.
Temple Spa’s nail treats contains Vitamin E and calcium panthothenate to nourish the nail. They’re free from formaldehyde, camphor, DBP, toulene and phthalate, unlike most other varnishes.

Take a look at Shine Your Light here.