Top Coat Comparison

The key to prolong your nail polish and make your nails look smooth and shiny is to apply a top coat. It just helps to seal your nail polish and makes them look nice. I would use up all the base coat and top coat, so I don't mind spending more on them. I've tried Seche Vite, OPI top coat, Barielle, Poshe,  Revlon. Out of the five products, I would only recommend OPI top coat or Revlon if you are on a budget. Seche Vite used to be my HG top coat but I found out they are not 3 free, so I threw them away. OPI has pretty good quality and you can usually find deals if you buy it with the base coat. Revlon is a good drug store brand and can't go wrong with it either. I would not recommend Poshe because it peels after 2 or 3 days and none of the other ones does that. Barielle takes forever to dry, so don't bother spending extra $ on this one either.

The latest ones I'm using are Nails Inc Kensington Topcoat Caviar, Butter London Hardwear P.D. Quick Top Coat, and Deborah Lippmann's Addicted to Speed Top Coat. Here is my comparison. Hope you'll find it helpful.

Nails Inc Kensington Topcoat Caviar (10ml)

• $10; Available at Sephora
• Dries extremely fast. Take less than a minute and I love how fast it dries.
• Easy to apply. Glides on nails smoothly. Very glossy. Has a hint of pink but does not show on nails.
• I will buy it again. Probably will wait when Sephora has F&F sale later this year. ;)

Butter London Hardwear P.D. Quick Top Coat (17.5ml)

• $18; Available at Sephora, Ulta, Nordstrom or Butter London's website.
• High quality top coat. Does not peel. Dries rather fast but not as fast as Nails Inc. The polish is not thick and quite glossy; easy to apply.
• You can save some $ if you purchase it with the base coat for $25 instead of spending $18 for the top coat alone. Sometimes Ulta has deals for Butter London. This will be a repurchase item for me as well.

Deborah Lippmann Addicted to Speed (15ml)

• $20 for the full size bottle; Available at Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, HSN, Barney's, or other high end department stores.
• It's pretty expensive. I only purchased this from HSN because it came 1/2 size with 2 other nail polish. I can't remember exactly how much I paid; probably around $30 for the set. 
• It has a very glossy finish but the consistency is thick!! It feels like the nail polish has dried up a bit. Not easy to apply. Drying time is quite fast for what it is. I'm afraid later on when the top coat is used halfway, I may get bubbles on my nails because the polish will get thicker and thicker. Probably will not repurchase it. 

Integrate Eye Liner Pencil BK999

If you are like me who smudge most mascaras and eyeliners, you need to check this Integrate eye liner out. I got this from Adam Beauty for $14. It's one of my favorites eye liner products now.

It contains 0.28g of product, which is a lot less than other makeup brand. For instance, Mac eyeliner pencil has 1.2g product. I'm not sure if I will buy again but will decide when I'm done with this.

The liner is quite soft, easy to apply. I use this to tight line only because it's a bit difficult to draw sharper edges. And I made the pencil tip so flat and don't wanna waste any more product if I try to sharpen it. One down side about this product is you can't retract the pencil back. Just have to be careful not to twist too much out.

Here's a swatch. I let the product set for about 10 seconds. Once it's dried, it lasts all day long. No kidding. I highly recommend it!

Swatch: Essie Who Is the Boss

Hello Everyone. I haven't blogged for 2 months... It started during Lent when I stopped buying any beauty products for 40 days, and then my urge to spend on makeup had significantly decreased. I moved on and reorganized a lot of things at home. Only got a few beauty items since Easter.


Essie Wedding 2012 collection is quite nice. I got 2 from this collection but don't quite like Instant Hot. The white is quite overpowering though some friends said it looks nice on me. I really like Who Is the Boss. Not sure how Essie came up with the name. It just sounds hilarious. 

It is light pastel green with a blue tone. It looks more blue in the picture. Here's a pic of the original color with Nail's Inc Kensington  Topcoat Caviar and some nail art stickers. I think it looks good with white and yellow nail art. You can draw strips or polka dots. Just be creative!

I bought a bottle of Revlon Whimsical 430 at Walmart for $3.97. It's a sheer pastel green with pink and blue glitters. Many people associate this as a dupe with Deborah Lippman's Glitter In the Air. I'm not going to spend $18 so the Revlon one serves me well. It's sheer and you need a lot of coats to look a bit more opaque. I applied one coat to compliment Who's the Boss and like how it turns out. If you want more glitters, you need to put a few more coats. 

How to Organize Nail Polish

Out of all the beauty products, I spend the most is on nail polish. Ever since college, I've developed a habit of painting my nails. Mainly it's for stress relief because I have to be careful and paint every stroke patiently. Of coz in early days, I just didn't pay attention to the quality and only on colors. As I grow older, I am getting more picky about the things I use, so for nail polish, I only buy from certain brands like OPI, Essie, Butter London, and I start to accumulate a lot. Each polish will expire in about 2 years, so this year I look at my inventory and be reminded the colors I have and be careful when I buy another bottle of nail polish. But how can I possibly keep track all of them??? Let me show you what I've done. 

Materials I've used:

• 2 Acrylic Shoe Drawers from the Container Store - $7.99/each 
• Nail Wheels from Sally's - $5.39 with beauty club card 
• Round color coding labels from Daiso - $1.50
• A fine sharpie pen

Step 1: Color code all your nail polish.

I grouped them by the same color scheme or at least in the shades that made sense to me. I painted the lightest shades starting from the left of the nail wheel and darker towards to the right. Nail wheels are great because they help you to decide what color to use if you want to color coordinate with your outfit. And you don't need to open the nail polish bottle and test it, so helps to prolong your nail polish from drying out. 

Step 2: Make labels

I used label stickers from Daiso and used a fine sharpie pen to label them and sticked to the back of the nail wheel.

To make it easier to look up a nail polish after looking at the nail wheel, I also placed a label to the brush head. Tedious process but you will not regret it once you are all done. It's easy for me now to cross reference the nail wheel to the nail polish without taking it out of the drawer. Depending on how you store your nail polish, you may place the labels differently. 

Step 3: Store them

I bought 2 women shoe drawers from the container store. They also carry a bigger size for men's shoes but this works just fine as they are stackable. The acrylic is quite sturdy, so I don't have a problem pulling them in and out. If you own Essie nail polish, it holds about 45 of them. For OPI, it's about 32. I just store them based on the color scheme instead of sorting them by brands. It's just all based on how you like to sort them.

The shoe drawers are so compact and I like how they can stack on top of each other. I thought about using those nail polish racks used in the nail salons. But I have to find a wall to hang them and it doesn't look great in the bedroom. They aren't cheap either. The ones I saw on ebay or Amazon are around $30-40 plus shipping. Yikes. I only spent $18 on this and can hold all of them.  

If you've seen my earlier nail polish organization by using a spice rack, I still use it for storing the most frequently use shades, base and top coat, and glitter nail polish.

I hope this inspires you to organize your nail polish collection. Have a great week, everyone!

Project: Nail Polish Organization

It's almost time for Spring cleaning. I've been reorganizing my office, bathroom, and kitchen... so much work!!! I looked at my nail polishes and my collection is getting bigger and bigger. Need a better way to organize them. I'm half way through the project but want to share with you first on my nail color wheels. Still have 2 more wheels to go. Once I'm done, I will share with you how I organize my nail polishes and how I store them.

DIY Nails

I was resting at home all day yesterday and read Ting's blog. Her nails look so pretty,  so I had an urge to do a similar look on my nails. She did a step by step demo, you can try it as well.

Here are the products I used:

• Seche Clear base coat
• Butter London top coat
• OPI Otherwise Engaged
• OPI Over the Taupe
• Essie Lady Like
• OPI Skull & Gloss Bones
• Canmake Nail Glitter 02

Shu Uemura Creamy Dome Blusher - Sunlight Peach

Hello Everyone! Sorry for not posting lately. Thanks to those who occasionally stopped by my blog. My laptop was out of commission for awhile and took me sometime to ship it back to the manufacturer for repair. I got quite busy lately with work and my blog pics have been accumulating, so I hope to write some when I get a chance.

Starting this year, my goal is to limit myself on makeup purchase. If I buy something new, they need to be things I don't have. I have 2 Urban Decay Naked Palettes and their 15th anniversary one, plus my other Japanese palettes, so probably cannot spend on any other neutral palettes unless they are unique. 

Let me share the new Shu Uemura creamy dome blush with you. This blush is part of their Spring 2012 Celestial Garden collection and comes in 2 colors; one in pink and one in coral. I got the one in sunlight peach (coral) and purchased from the Shu Uemura's website directly. They are no longer available for retail in the US. I got it when the site was having free shipping, so I only paid $25 for this but I noticed a foreign transaction fee was charged to my credit card, so... 

Here's the description from the bottom:

The packaging is small and made of plastic. Doesn't feel flimsy. The cap is closed tight to avoid the cream blush from drying out, so it's not very easy to open it. The product has a 24 month expiration date and will last forever. It is made in Korea.

The size of the blush is good for application. Not difficult to hold it and apply on to my cheeks. If the cream blush is running low, all I need to do is to turn the container to the right and more products will come up. It will be awhile before I need to do that though. I can always use a brush or finger or sponge to apply if need be.

The bottom swatch was applied once and the top one was applied twice. This cream blush is highly pigmented, so I wouldn't want to apply a lot on my cheeks. The blush feels quite solid, not soft or creamy but glides on smoothly. It looks quite natural when I blend it out. A little goes a long way.

2011 Favorite Products

Hello Everyone! Hope you had a wonderful Christmas! I sure ate a lot... As I look into putting together my favorites this year, there are a few things I keep in mind as I pick the items. They need to be something I have no hesitation in selecting them and things I use frequently.

My Favorite Base Products:

• Missha Perfect Cover BB Cream #21- I use this only for my nose to control oil. This is my 2nd bottle and cannot live without this.
• Lancome Teint Miracle Foundation - I've been searching for a new foundation this year but cannot find anything like this. Really hydrating and has nice coverage that lasts for hours.

My Favorite Eye Makeup Products:

• NARS Pro-Prime Smudge Proof EyeShadow Base - I use this everytime I wear eye makeup. My HG eye shadow primer.
• Lunasol Sheer Gold Beige Brown EX01 - This is a limited edition from Kanebo Lunasol's Christmas Coffret 2010. It's just very versatile, neutral palette. I use this the most out of the 5 Lunasol palettes I own. 
• Urban Decay Naked Palette - I know some people keep seeing this UD Naked Palette on many people's favorite lists. The colors I use all the time are Naked, Sidecar, Smog, Darkhorse, Toasted, and Hustle. 
• Urban Decay Naked 2 - Wait a minute. Some of you may wonder this just came out. How can this possibly be on my 2011 list?? This palette compliments the Naked Palette a lot because it has lighter, neutral shades. I've been using this with the Naked Palette. I use pretty much all the colors except Half Baked and Blackout. 

My Favorite Lip Products:

• Dior Addict Ultra-Gloss Reflect 127 - This shade is no longer available for purchase. What a bummer. I've enjoyed using this in the past year and put on top of a lip stick. It's very moisturizing.
• Mac - Hug Me - I've finished the entire tube before getting a new one. This is in Lustre finish and in flesh pink color. Can't go wrong with this shade.

My Favorite Blush:

• Lunasol EX01 Sheer Gold Beige Pink - This is also from the 2010 Christmas Coffret. It just gives a sheer glow to my face. Love it!

My Favorite Body Lotion:

• Korres Body Butter in Vanilla Guava - I love Korres Body Butter and got one next to my bed. It's very moisturizing and I use this every night before I go to bed. 

My Favorite Hair Styling Product:

• Lucido-L Designing Aqua Hair Curl Lotion - I use this before curling my hair and this is my 3rd or 4th bottle. It helps to protect my hair from the heat and helps my curls to stay.

My Favorite Nail Polishes:
If you are my regular reader, probably won't be too hard to guess what I like.

• Butter London - Toff
• OPI - Planks a Lot
• OPI - Steady as She Rose
• Spa Ritual - Native Rock
• Essie - Lady Like

Hope you enjoy reading this long list. Let me know what you like too!

Le Métier de Beauté 'Rock 'n' Romance' Mini Nail Lacquer Set

Merry Christmas!! Wish you enjoy a good time with friends and family!


I got this Le Métier de Beauté 'Rock 'n' Romance' mini nail polish set from Nordstrom for $25. It's probably the most expensive nail polish set I've spent based on the amount of product I get. Regular price for a mini polish is $10 and so $25 for 4 nail polish is considered a deal and this set is exclusive to Nordstrom.

Here's the description taken from Nordstrom's website:

• Heat of the Night: a passionate black cherry
• Midnight Rendezvous: a shimmery, steely midnight blue
• Chrome Passion: a chocolate charcoal with sultry shimmer
• True Romance: a delicate pale rose with a subtle metallic nude finish

Depending on the lighting, the colors may vary.

Heat of the Night can look as dark as black but it has some hints of red and shimmers. It looks more red in the bottle but when you apply, it's an intense dark red color. Midnight Rendezvous is gorgeous and I don't own a blue like this and like it. And Chrome Passion is a charcoal grey color with holographic effects.

True Romance is pretty much a light gold color and it's not anything special. The color may vary depending on the lighting. But the other three are unique in their own way. The consistency is rather thick compared to OPI or Butter London. Drying time takes longer than my other nail polishes but they are much more opaque. I would still apply 2 coats to achieve the best result. And here's a pic of me wearing Chrome Passion:

Holiday Nails

Christmas is near and it's a great time to gather with friends and family. Thought to paint my nails with glitter nail polish to make it more festive. I am in a love hate relationship with glittery nail polishes. They look so nice on nails but such a pain to remove. My nails end up peeling if I rub them too much with nail polish remover. Oh well... I found this new Revlon Nail polish in Sparkling (261) and it consists of both fine and small pink glitters. I tried them on and had removed them once and they don't take as much effort to remove compared to the other glitter nail polishes I own. Probably because the glitters are much smaller.

Here's what I used with this nail polish:

• Seche Vite Base Coat
• OPI - Steady As She Rose
• Revlon Sparkling
• Butter London - HardwearP.D Quick Topcoat

I just went with a lighter shade and used as a base. You can try a darker color like plum or burgundy or dark blue. That will make them stand out even more.

Review: Revlon Lip Butters

I've watched a number of videos and swatches about the new Revlon Colorburst Lip Butters. From what I've read, people are very excited about them and bought a ton of them. There are 20 colors and incredibly difficult to find. I don't see them at Rite Aid and Target. For the ones I found at the stores, some people just opened and swatched or tried them on. Doesn't that bother you when people just open brand new drugstore products and try them on?? And when they find them not working for them, they just leave them there. They are not testers and are meant for purchase, you know.


Revlon's website have online shopping feature and would take you to drugstore.com for a purchase but they are not in stock when I write this entry. They will eventually be in stock at the stores or online I suppose.


Let me show you what I bought after carefully browsed through them.

I just happened to see them at Walgreens for $7.49 each. Accidentially found them in a small plastic bin and surprisingly they have all the colors I was looking for. This was really a treasure hunt. hahaha From left to right:

• 050 Berry Smoothie
• 090 Sweet Tart
• 025 Peach Parfait

They are called lip butters for a reason and remind me of Giorgio Armani sheer lip stick. This is nowhere close to a regular lip stick. Revlon calls this "sheer to medium color with buttery shine". I don't know how many times some people had applied these lip butters on their lips to get the pigmentation but for me, apply it once only gives a sheer finish. I like this sheer finish though. It's good for some who just want a pop of color on their lips without having to wear a ton of makeup. Another plus is they don't taste or smell.


Here are the swatches after applied it once:

I find them to be moisturizing but am not estastic about it. There are many other more moisturizing lip sticks. All these lip butters contain mango, shea, and coconut butters to give you that hydration if you just wear it alone. If your lips are dry and chapped like mine, you may find them not moisturized enough after 2 hours or so. It shows more fine lines on my lips than my other lip sticks. I would apply a lip balm beforehand to avoid chapped lips and minimize fine lines.


Out of the 3 I got, I like Sweet Tart at first but the more I wear Berry Smoothie, the more I like it because it matches my skin tone pretty well. Would I repurchase? Probably just one or two after I'm done and when there's a sale. Definitely not gonna haul a bunch of them.

Swatches: Givenchy Gloss Interdit

I own 3 Givenchy Gloss Interdit now. 2 of which I got from Costco awhile back. Only used one of them and the other remains in the box. And just the other day, a friend of mine gave me another one as a gift. So, I thought to put them together for a swatch review. :)

These are scented lip gloss; highly pigmented and super glossy. It's not a sheer lip gloss like some of the Dior ones and I really like them. The scent is not too strong and smells sort of sweet, so it's tolerable. It's composed of top notes of bergamot, litchi, and red fruit; middle notes of rose, jasmine, and lily of the valley; and base notes of sandalwood, vanilla, amber, and musk. Each product contains 0.21g and is at retail for $26.50.

From left to right:

03 Coral Frenzy (soft coral)

02 Impertinent Nude (light neutral pink)

01 Capricious Pink (vibrant pink)

The colors are opague and make my lips look pretty smooth. They have a hint of shimmers. The lip gloss has some ingredients that make your lips pumped. I don't care about the pumping effect though. Here are the swatches (03, 02 and 01 starting from left to right):

Review: Creer Beaute La Rose de Versailles Eyeliner

Hello Everyone. It's been pretty cloudy and dark here, so taking nice swatch pictures have been quite challenging. And my computer is acting weird lately, so I think I need to send it back for a fix. Have been limiting myself not to buy beauty products, so stopped buying for like awhile... but there are quite a number of exciting products released just within the past month, so got a few and will share with you later. ;)

I got this Creer Beaute eyeliner from my trip in HK for about $11. I think you can buy from Sasa or other websites for around $12 or $13. Just opened it like a month ago and have been loving it.

I never like liquid eyeliner because some are very watery or dispense too much and I don't quite like the feeling of putting something wet on my eye lids. This really surprises me because it dries quite quickly.

This particular eyeliner is rated #1 by Cosme for 2011. I always read their ranking before buying certain Japanese products coz it's quite helpful to know what works. For Cosme ranking in English, check here . And for Chinese version, please check here. It's nice they have English and Chinese now because it takes me awhile to read Katagana...

The eyeliner has a fine point tip and can draw very fine line if you like. I can now draw a line starting from the inner corner without worry about smudging.

The eyeliner is waterproof and smudgeproof. A lot of the waterproof eyeliner pencils would smudge on me and this does not do a bit. And this can be removed easily with makeup remover. This is my HG liquid eyeliner. Highly Recommend it!!