Category Archives: illamasqua

Illamasqua Stance

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First off, some business: I am here to announce the winner of my necklace giveaway. Congrats to…

Tilly!

As for her dream polish jewelry, she replied: “My dream polish jewelry would probably be a pendant made from NerdLacquer Cyance Friction.”

Hopefully Carbon Allotrope is a good replacement for Cyance Friction and that you enjoy the necklace! GG!

Okay, now for polish time. Here is one I thoroughly enjoyed wearing.

What is with all this fuzz?! I blame my cat. It is totally my cotton squares, but my cat is being a total butthead right now and scratching the back of my office chair because she wants all my attention all of the time. ARGH CAT!

This is two coats of Illamasqua Stance. You may have remembered this as the base color for my Cheshire glitter gradient. The actual color is very close to the bottle in this photo; for some reason, my camera decided to warm up my fingers a little and make them a little more pink than necessary!

I don’t know what it is about Illamasqua cremes, but all the ones I own (okay okay, aside from Load) apply like Nutella (well, the way I apply actual Nutella, anyway). I guess butter would be a better metaphor. I may or may not be craving Nutella a lot lately.

Illamasqua cremes are way illin.

(WOW, that was pretty horrible. I tried, really. I did try.)

Thanks for reading (and playing)!

Crowstoes I Make The Path. + Illamasqua Milf

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I am so ready for summer to be over, mainly because I want to wear all the cool things I want to knit. Well, one I have finished knitting (and joined at the ends rather sloppily, I may add), anyway. But still! Is it bad that I want like 1908231908875 side projects? I feel like I will never be productive if I keep starting and stopping things. I’m trying to limit myself, though!

Here’s another gradient, which would probably be more suited for spring.

This is two coats of Illamasqua Milf under a glitter gradient using Crowstoes I Make The Path. I Make The Path contains glitters in gold and various shades of blue (my favorite ones are the light blue square ones).

What’s weird with this one (compared to, say, Cheshire), is that despite the fact that this doesn’t have as much large, chunky glitter, this one was more difficult to sponge on. In the bottle, it was less chunky and goopy than Cheshire, and even had smaller pieces of glitter.

I didn’t think I would like this glitter, but I do. It’s beautiful and reminds me of spring in Long Beach. The sun shining over the water in the Harbor, the race cars zooming past with their beautiful paint in forest green and royal blue, the baked goods at the Taiwanese bakery coming out of the back room piping hot and ready to be consumed.

The last gradient will be shown on Friday (I decided to post them in reverse, because I wanted to be a rebel and all that). Thanks for reading!

Illamasqua Stance + Crowstoes Cheshire

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I loooooooooooove gradients. I love glitter gradients even more. I have wanted to try them ever since I first laid eyes on them. Kinda like when I had my first Red Bull, just without the caffeine shakes. Or that one trip to the Student Health Center because I had one too many while studying for finals. Er. That’s another story for another time.

I am a sucker for Red Bull. (Regular, ofc. Don’t bring that sugar-free nonsense around me. I’m allergic, first off, and second it’s just not the same ;_;)

I had a bunch of Crowstoes sitting in my drawer, all untried and the like, and I wanted to do something special with them because they are all way cool. I had bought some simple makeup sponges on a Sally’s run a month or so ago, and I have been itching to try them out.

This is two coats of Illamasqua Stance under Crowstoes Cheshire. Cheshire is a beautiful purple glitter with various sizes of purple and silver holo glitter & large gold glitter. Stance is a bright, not-quite-neon purple creme.

I bought Cheshire somewhat sentimentally. (I had to look that word up to see if I wasn’t making words up again. I’m not. :D) The first “big kid” book I ever read was Alice in Wonderland, so I hold the book in a very special place in my heart. If I could own every full-sized bottle from BPAL’s Mad Tea Party section, I totally would.

Crowstoes polishes are pretty thick. I mean, hella thick. (So thick that I just used the word hella like someone from northern CA, which is laaaaaaaaaaame because I am such a L.A. girl.) Yeah, you’re probably gonna need thinner. Don’t whine. I’ll call the wahhhhhhhhh-mbulance on you. These bottles are packed with glitter (hence the thickness). One coat should be more than enough, though. Save the earth…preserve the pretties.

One thing I’ve learned about glitter gradients is that cleanup is a pain in the ass if you don’t brush some cuticle oil around your nails. I learned this lesson the hard way (and on my first glitter gradient, which I will show on Friday). Make sure you have some Nail Matrix on hand or something!

Thanks for reading!

Illamasqua Nomad

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Illamasqua draws me in like a moth to light. Or fly to fly paper. They’re sticky and smell good and I’m hungry and I just want a taste. OOH SHINY.

I think it was the fact that the day before I bought this, I saw something at my office in this exact color and I knew deep down I had to have Nomad. I suppose a Sephora credit that popped out of nowhere gave me more of an excuse to buy the bottle. (I also bought Dior Bikini while I was at it; hey, if I was gonna buy something at Sephora, it might as well be reasonably expensive yet amazingly enjoyable.)

This is three coats of Illamasqua Nomad, a bright-but-not-neon-bright green. Application was so-so; the polish is kinda thick, and on my second coat it dragged the bottom of my first coat. You can probably see where I didn’t apply polish evenly (probably because I sucked at nail polish-ing myself that day and just didn’t care after a while…it happens to all of us). I bet if I waited an extra few minutes in between coats like a good girl, I wouldn’t have made such a mess.

The outside cap was a royal pain in the ass to remove. The grooves were too tight for the inner cap and I was so nervous that I was going to break the neck off. Fortunately, after a few bite marks and rubbing my hands on my pants to get rid of the Lush Smitten Hand Cream I just put on, it popped off.

The color reminds me of pistachio ice cream with too much food coloring. Or even radioactive avocados. You can pick whichever you like best. I’d probably say radioactive avocados, only if they gave me super strength and endurance so I could do P90X all day (because all I want to do is beat Tony Horton’s game). But I also love pistachio ice cream (or pistachios in general, tbh), and I remember chowing down on the cheap Ralph’s pistachio ice cream as a kid. Good times.

This is easily one of my 2012 favorites. I don’t even have to think about it. Yes it’s a creme and yes knowing Illamasqua’s QC track record it may possibly fade, but I might as well love the crap out of it while it’s still “fresh.”

Thanks for reading!

Illamasqua Milf

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Quick post for today. I hadn’t worn this out yet because it was all streaky the first few times I swatched it. Then I saw this post from Cilucia, and need to make this work! I figure if she could get it even and without any bald spots, I should try it again.

Do you see those swirly things in my bottle? I hope it’s not a sign of fading. They do go away when I shake my bottle, so maybe it’s just some separation that can be easily remedied.

This is two coats of Illamasqua Milf. I figured out that I had to be slow and somewhat methodical when applying this. I waited about 5 minutes before adding my second coat, and everything was fine.

I decided to wear this because it reminds me of the meat of an avocado. I’ve been eating a ton of avocados lately. It’s filling & has enough fat to keep me going for a few hours. It also tastes great on a slice of toast with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. I have my BF to thank for getting me hooked onto those. I would eat a lot more of them, but I’m trying to cut back on my caloric intake until next month.

Thanks for reading!