Surprise Polish!

Today I have a whole load of surprise polish to show you!

Most weekends Mr. Pound Store Manicure visits a local Sunday market with his parents. It's a combination of a flea market and some regular stalls and there are always a few people selling discount cosmetics. Last weekend I sent him off with a two pound coin and instructions to buy a surprise polish or two for me if any caught his eye. I'm not quite sure what I expected, but the results of this experiment were rather hit and miss!

The hit is a rich dark browny-burgundy with a lovely shimmer to it. It is from the Rimmel Underground Play Fast range, which I believe was made for the U.S. market and was never sold in the U.K., and was discontinued about five years ago. The shade is called Rave and I really like it. It applies well, dries fast and is work-appropriate without being boring. It's probably not a polish I would have picked up for myself because it is far too sensible, but I think I will get quite a lot of wear out of it.

I used this polish on some false nails and used a dotting tool with Filthy Gorgeous in shade Breeze, because who wants plain nails?

The other polish he picked up is a truly ghastly miss. Mr Pound Store Manicure is usually very good at knowing my taste so I really don't know what he was thinking with this one! It's a Maybelline Express Finish polish in shade Lemon, which is a pale yellow with a frost finish. I'm not a fan of yellow and I rarely wear it because it does not suit my pale skin at all. I also hate frost finish polishes. Not only is this polish really streaky to apply, but it just will not dry! Maybe it's because it is quite an old polish, but I have another Maybelline Express Finish polish that is about twelve years old and that still dries quickly so I don't know why this shade doesn't. Even if it did dry properly I don't think I would ever wear this polish. Yuck!

Yesterday I received an even bigger nail polish surprise. My wonderful Mother-In-Law decided to donate all her old polish to me as she no longer paints her nails. Once I'd thrown away the few polishes that had dried out I was left with 25 hardly used bottles of polish. Most of them are Avon polishes or small ColourWorks bottles that look like they came as part of gift sets, but there was also a No. 7, a L'Oreal and quite a few mystery polishes without any labels at all. I swatched all of them this afternoon and there are some really nice shades.

The most exciting thing about the selection of polishes is that I don't own anything similar to most of the shades. My Mother-In-Law has always had a more feminine style than me so her polish collection was full of pinks, reds and nudes with shimmer and pearl finishes - much more girly than the shades I buy. My favourites of the lot are a metallic golden-bronze Avon shade, appropriately called Fabulous, that looks really luxe and L'Oreal Ruby Noir, which is a dark shimmery red-purple. I'm sure that many of these polishes will get used whenever I need my nails to look more subdued and grown-up as they are almost all work-appropriate shades.

I am so grateful to my Mother-In-Law for all this polish, particularly as I have just started a temporary self-imposed ban on polish buying. I have just started trying to give up smoking so I am bribing myself with the promise of lots of polish if and when I succeed. I have put together a little goody-box containing five new drool-worthy polishes which Mr. Pound Store Polish has hidden and is only allowed to give back to me once I have been smoke free for two weeks. Once I make it to a month as a non-smoker, I have promised myself that I can use the money that I'll have saved by not buying tobacco to buy all of the Makeup Revolution nail polish collections in one glorious splurge. If the promise of a parcel containing 50 bottles of polish doesn't get me to quit, I don't know what will!

Have you tried any of the Makeup Revolution polishes yet?

The Weekly Haul - Ooooh, All The Pretty Colours!

I've acquired quite a few new polishes in the last week. I'm not sure when I last managed to stick to my £2 weekly polish budget. Oops! As I have so much to show you this week, I've swatched everything on fake nails instead of my own fingernails. The pound shops are full of lovely polishes at the moment, so empty out your penny jar and treat yourself!

The most exciting purchases I made in the last week were three more Sally Hansen Sugar Coat polishes from Poundworld. If you love textured polishes, get to your nearest Poundworld as soon as you can! They are currently selling some unusual Sugar Coat shades I haven't seen in a pound store before, including some shimmery and glittery ones. I picked up Candy Corn which is a bright orange, Red Velvet which is a deep pinky-red raspberry shade with a shimmery finish, and Royal Icing, my favourite, which is a gorgeous cool pastel blue with holographic micro glitter. It is so sparkly and icy looking and I know that Royal Icing is going to be great for wintery nail art! Swatches are two coats of polish, as recommended on the bottles. Red Velvet and Royal Icing are both less opaque than most of the Sugar Coat shades so you might actually need to use three coats.

Candy Corn:

Red Velvet:

Royal Icing:

Both Poundland and Poundworld are also selling a lot of Rimmel 60 Seconds polishes in a wide range of shades at the moment. I picked up Jungle Fever, a forest green, from Poundworld and Captain Khaki, a dark khaki-brown from Poundland. I always find that the Rimmel 60 Seconds polishes need two coats for full opacity (even though they claim to be one-coaters on the bottle), but they do dry quickly and I love the wide, flat Rimmel brushes because they are so easy to use. Swatches are two coats.

Poundland is currently full of bottles of polish by a brand I'd never heard of called Filthy Gorgeous. After a quick google I discovered that the polishes were launched a few years ago by a company that ran Debenhams in-store beauty salons. Apparently they are professional quality polishes and were sold in Debenhams for £9 a bottle. I'm assuming the company is no longer trading as their website has vanished, their social media accounts fell silent about a year ago and there is no longer any mention of them on the Debenhams website. I picked up Breeze, a light grey shade, and it does feel like a quality polish. It's a two-coater that applies very smoothly and comes in a cute round bottle with a lace design and plectrum charm on the cap. They have other shades available too and at £1 they are a bargain. Swatch is two coats.

I also picked up a new Jess shade. Bolton Poundland has finally got a few of the shimmery and iridescent shades in stock, although they have flown off the shelves and there were only one or two bottles left by the time I found them. I picked up Hot Date, a shimmery rich red. It's less opaque than the Jess cremes and is really stinky, unlike the cremes. It really is the smelliest polish I own, but it applies smoothly and dries quickly to a lovely finish. I do hope they get another delivery of Jess polishes soon because I keep seeing such gorgeous shades swatched online and they never seem to get any of them at my local Poundland. Swatch is three coats on the left, two coats on the right.

I spent my Easter Sunday afternoon swatching and labelling all the polishes in my collection on plastic nail wheels and discovered that I own just over three and a half wheels worth of polish, which is 74 shades. It seems like such a measly amount of polish when I compare it to most nail bloggers. This can only mean that I need more polish! Bwahahaha!

How many bottles of polish do you own?

The Weekly Haul - Pretty glitters and P.S. Matte Top Coat

Today I'm going to do some reviews and swatches of my new polishes. It's almost as if this is a proper nail blog! I'm planning to make this a weekly feature, but this week I went over my usual £2 polish budget and had a bit of a splurge (I found three forgotten pound coins in a jeans pocket when I was loading the washing machine, woohoo!) so I'm going to split the polishes over two posts.

I was excited to discover that my local Poundland has relocated to bigger premises and now has a whole aisle of nail stuff. The selection of discounted big-brand polishes was uninspiring this week (it seems every brand has its own discontinued shades of sickly pale yellow and drab olive) but I did spot a whole rack of polishes by a budget brand called Pretty. I've seen this brand in pound shops before but never such a wide selection. Most of them were special effect polishes (concrete, denim, crackle, matte) and there were some sets containing polish and caviar or flocking powder, but what really caught my eye were the weird and wonderful glitters.

The first bottle I picked up was Graffiti Effect in Blue. It is a glitter topper containing a generous mix of medium sized red and turquoise-blue hex glitter and small gold and red bar glitter. Here I have swatched it over Rimmel Blue Vogue:

Wow! I really like how this polish looks. I've been lusting after Rocket from the Models Own Fireworks collection for quite a while but this just satisfied that glitter craving for a fraction of the price. The consistency is a bit goopy and it dries quite slowly, but there is plenty of glitter in this polish so no fishing around for bits.

My second Pretty purchase was Scatter Effect in shade Purple/Multi which is a very pale greyish lilac jelly base with red, pink and turquoise-blue medium sized hex glitter. In the bottle it looked a bit like an untextured version of White Barry M Sequins with different coloured glitter. My thumb, middle and little fingers have four coats of the Pretty polish, on my index and ring fingers I used three coats over Technic Pretty Pastels in Mr Blue Sky (a very pale grey-blue available for £1 at Bodycare).

At first I didn't really I like this polish on my nails. It looked like they were covered in gloopy white glue and glitter like a nursery school craft project. The first thing I noticed when applying it was the smell. The other Pretty polish smelled a bit strong, but this one is really offensive, worse than any other polish I own. At least the ingredients lists show that both of the Pretty polishes are 3-free.

I soldiered on through the smell and found that the base of this polish is very sheer. For the first two coats I didn't think that it was going to change the colour of my nails at all, but after a thicker third and fourth coat my nail line was only just visible. If you don't have a spare few hours to wait for layers of polish to dry I'd definitely suggest layering fewer coats over a pale colour instead. There is a good amount of glitter in the polish, but it does require a bit of smooshing around the nail to get an even distribution.

The thing that changed my mind about this Scatter Effect polish was actually my third purchase of the week. My local Primark doesn't sell many polishes, but I had heard that the larger branches do, so I had a look in the huge Manchester store. I'm so glad I did because alongside some rather lovely looking £1 polishes I finally found what I had thought was just a mythical creature, a £1 matte top coat! For months I have been trying to find such a thing with no success.

I tried out this P.S. Matte Top Coat over the Scatter Effect and have decided that this is the best £1 polish purchase I have ever made. I love this top coat - it has turned a polish I didn't like into magic space candy! This top coat makes bad polish look good! It's a miracle!

Next post I will review some more P.S. polishes from Primark.

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