Happy Chinese New Year!

Today is the first day of Chinese New Year, year of the Dragon! I wanted to make my nails special for today so I tried my hand at making a variation of a french manicure.

This is my first attempt at nail art so it's pretty basic. I did this free-hand and afterwards I realized I could have used tape to keep the lines straight. As it is though, I think I did a satisfactory job. I used Sinful Colors Gogo Girl for the red, which is just your basic, almost tomato based red. I was expecting to need more coats since Sinful Colors is notorious for being sheer, but I only needed two. 

sunlight

For the gold strip, I used CoverGirl Bronze Beauty. This is much more of an "old gold" shade, with tiny sprinkles of bronze micro-glitter. I don't own a true gold  so I made do with this. Formula-wise, this isn't fabulous. It's very runny and tends to pool along the top of the brush, so you need to pay attention or you may get some accidental drips. It also dries really quickly so you have to be careful to apply the right amount the first time. 

CoverGirl Bronze Beauty

For tonight's festivities I am making a big dinner for my roommates/friends which is going to include dumplings and rice, along with curry chicken. Yummy! Is anyone doing anything special to celebrate the New Year? Even though I'm not Chinese and didn't grow up with Chinese customs I still really enjoy keeping this holiday. I'm really bad at remembering to do special things for other holidays (like Christmas, Halloween, etc) so I feel a little weird putting emphasis on this one, but that doesn't lessen my excitement!

Check back later for other reviews, I have a Butter London polish to show you (which I am pretty excited about) and a mascara review coming up!

OPI Steady as She Rose

First post of the semester!

I realize that I was very scanty on posting over the holiday, and I want to work on that. So expect to see more frequent posting on my part!

I had bit of a struggle trying to decide which polish to try out for the first day of classes and after much deliberation I finally settled on OPI's Steady As She Rose, a light, dusty lavender/pink.  It doesn't look fabulous with my olive skin-tone, but this is such a gorgeous shade of purple/pink that I can overlook the color clash. 

sunlight

shade

sunlight

I apologize for my ravaged cuticles, they look much better in real life. Out comes the Burt's Bees Lemon Butter!


I was pretty miffed to find that the polish had chipped before I took photos (the chip is on my index finger), but its not terribly noticeable so I'm not going to fix it. The second photo makes the polish look a little lighter and bluer than it is in real life, and the sunlight photos are much more color accurate. I've heard this called a pink, but I see lavender MUCH more strongly than I do pink. You really have to be in the right light to see pink. Concerning the formula, it was smooth, pigmented and not terribly streaky (two coats to even out bald spots). Pretty typical for OPI. 


In other news, today is my last first day of my undergrad studies. I haven't decided yet if I want to grad school/med school yet, and I'm content to just figure my life out at this point than scramble and make a decision that I'm not one-hundred percent behind.  It's rather bittersweet; I'm more than ready to be done with school, but the real world seems pretty terrifying.


I remember last summer at a barbecue I said to my friends, "I'm so ready to be finished with school and in the real world!" Ho, ho, was that a lie. I don't know what got into past-me, because I most certainly do not feel that way now.