Guest reviewing Clinique Anti-Blemish over at Vex in the City

I trialled Clinique Anti-Blemish Solutions Liquid Makeup as a guest reviewer for Vex in the City over the past week or so. If you want to know what I thought, you can see my review here

Illamasqua Nail Polish in Ruthless

I know, I’m a bit late to the Illamasqua party but Illamasqua polish was on my wishlist, so when I saw that this colour was £8.50 on ASOS (and I had a £5 voucher) and they were doing free delivery I went for it!

“Ruthless” is what I’d call a true red – a bright, classic, jelly colour more on the orange side of red than the pink, as I think the first pic shows.

Application was lovely, the formula isn’t too wet or too gloopy and the brush is firm enough for you not to end up with polish everywhere, but not so stiff that it causes drag. I didn’t have a problem with the square lid of the brush when I was painting either, which I've read is a problem for some people - they just remove the square part of the lid and use the smaller bit underneath. It dries in a reasonable amount of time (note to self: find Seche Vite, AWOL since I moved house!) and lasted 2 days on without chipping, this is without a topcoat though since without a fast-drying one available I’m too lazy to put it on.

This pic is after the 2 days and you can see the tip wear, particularly on my index finger - again, I must stress that this is without topcoat.

Diamond Cosmetics Nail Polish in Chainmail Charm (310)

After seeing amazing pics of this polish on a few blogs (which you’ve probably already seen too), I thought I’d give it a go – I bought it for £5 including postage from Funky Nails and it arrived the next day.

When I first started applying it, I was like “hmm.” It seemed very watery, thin and not like it would actually reach any sort of decent pigmentation no matter the number of coats at all. And the glitter just looked silver. After 3 coats I was still a bit disheartened as it looked a bit of a greyish black with lots of fine silver glitter. Um, why in everyone elses pics did it look an amazing multicoloured holo and mine looked like this? But I then found that under bright light – artificial I’m afraid as I live in crappy old grey England – the gorgeous holo effect comes out as you can see in the pics.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again…WHERE’S THE SUN?!

For £3 plus postage, I can’t argue with this. I’m love black polishes with glitter, and multicoloured glitter? Count me in! I’d definitely buy this again. I used Stickey basecoat and Seche Vite topcoat. The polish lasted 4 sparkly holo days before chipping.

"Women turned to nail polish during the recession"...

...I don't mean that women all over the US were turning into bottles of polish, but they were definately buying them!

According to this piece of research by Kline Group , US nail polish sales grew by 14.3% in 2009 "due to the return of nail color in the fashion world, as well as the shift from nail salons to at-home application as economic instability motivated consumers to forego salon visits. Nail industry marketers also responded well to consumer demand and focused on new launches, offering a wide range of new products to engage the recession-stricken consumer."

Sales of lipsticks and glosses declined by 5.3% and perfumes considerably more. Other toiletries and personal care items (the every day stuff like deodorants, shaving stuff etc) suffered the least.

God if my business degree was about this kind of thing, I'd enjoy writing the damn essays!

Pixi Lip Blush in Youth

I used this product previously a few years ago but I bought “Happiness” and “Love” (pink and red, respectively) and was a bit surprised at how bright the colours were, especially compared to the swatches on Pixi’s website, so didn’t really wear them.

Anyway, I had wanted this for a while but didn’t really want to pay £12 plus postage from their website and hadn’t seen it anywhere else. I was just browsing around Boots one morning on the way to drop some keys off and I noticed they had a Pixi stand, I raced over, swatched a few and came away with this (and paid using my Boots points so essentially this was free – I’m aware that’s not quite true but still…). Just to go off track a minute, has anyone noticed that Boots has gotten way better? I did during this visit, they have Ardell lashes, Pixi, Butter London and loads of other great new stuff I hadn’t seen there before.

Back to the lip blush - it’s a really nice sheer, light pink that gives a hint of colour to my lips (mine are quite pale) so it looks like I’ve got something on but isn’t too OTT like the other colours of this I had. All of the lips blushes are matte and this is no exception. I didn’t realise until just now that a stray hair has stuck itself to my lip in the pic either!

Application is reasonably easy – the nib is like a felt tip pen so you basically just draw on your lips, it’s not hard on the lips or anything though but does feel a bit weird. One thing I will say is there is a bit of a strange smell to this, it isn’t strong, but it smells really vaguely of marker pen. Also, you need to make sure your lips are in tip top condition as this really shows up any dryness, I would imagine the formula might be a bit drying on the lips too if you were wearing it all the time. Pixi Lip Blush is pretty long lasting (maybe 4-6 hours) and because the colour is light, I don’t experience that horrible thing where you eat/drink something and the colour wears off in the middle and leaves you with a gross feathery lipliner look.

To summarise (can you tell I’ve been writing essays a lot at the moment?), I like this product and would buy again, I like it as an everyday lip colour – however I think it’s a little overpriced for what it is so I might look for an alternative. This is much easier and neater to apply than the Bourjois Rouge Hi-Tec lip stains though (between £3-8, depending on where you get them from)

If your Boots doesn’t stock Pixi, these lip blushes are available from http://www.pixibeauty.com/

How nice are these false nails by Urban Rebel!

Midnight Graffiti
Leopard French

Feline French

Boudoir French

Black Lace

Pics all taken from ASOS.com

I just spied these and whilst I'm not generally a false nail wearer, I think these are LOVELY! And they look (to me anyway) like a cheaper version of Minx. And since I can't do konad to save my life...

They're £5 and are available from http://www.missselfridge.com/ and http://www.asos.com/ - there are a few other designs but I wasn't so keen on them.

So, what do you think? Do you wear false nails? Any recommendations for fancy falsies (I'm not keen on the french mani ones, I can do that on my own nails)?