Two Award/Tags!

Olivia of Maquillage Obscura and Sharlene of I-Lashes have tagged me for the Best Blog Award and the I Love Your Blog Award respectively. Thank you Olivia and Sharlene!

Edited to add: Looks like Nea of Fashioned in Finland has tagged me for the best Blog Award too! Aww thanks Nea!

Edited to add again: Looks like Dani M of Let Them Wear Gloss has tagged me for the Best Blog Award as well! Thank you Dani!

Edited to add yet again: Kaylena of Makeup by Kaylena has tagged me for the I Love Your Blog Award as well! Thanks Kaylena!

As always, tags come with rules:
1. Post the award on your blog
2. Link the person who has given you the award
3. Pass the award to 10(Olivia) or 15(Sharlene) other blogs that you've newly discovered
4. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they've been nominated

Wow. That's really involved. 15 other blogs?! My small brain can't think of 5, let alone 15! I'm going to open this post to everyone! Let me know if you want to do this award, and I'll edit this post to include your link!

Asos Paints by Ciate: Agyness, Flakiefied and Mattified

I know I should stop posting NOTDs when my skills are le suckage, but sometimes, I just can't help it. Especially when a pretty purple comes along! We all know what a sucker I am for pretty purples, so Agyness, part of the Asos Paints by Ciate Winter Collection for 09, comes along.

Here we have Agyness in natural light. She's a really pretty deep violet purple colour, a little blackened, with that lit-from-within glow.



Pretty, isn't she? She's equally good in indoors lighting, and it really brings out her shimmer.



I couldn't really get a good pic of the shimmer, so I took this picture for you, since3 it does show the shimmer very well. It's very pretty blue and pink shimmer.



And then, because I got bored, I decided to add a flakie over it. This was Maybelline's Pink Pinata. I think it's been discontinued.

This is the flakie-fied Agyness in the sun:



And in indoor lighting:



And, because I was STILL bored, I added RBL's Matte topcoat over it. And then I was satisfied. The results were truly stunning, although I have to say the matte-ness of the whole thing made the purple base look black.

It really changes colour with different angles. Sometimes it flashes red, orange or yellow:





While other times it looks green, or even blue-ish:





And sometimes, it just looks like a little bit of everything! This is so pretty - it's when it really looks like a rainbow!



While I thought Agyness was pretty, I really liked it better when it was oomphed up a bit more with the flakie and the matte topcoats. As with the other Ciates in the Asos Paints Winter 09 Collection, Agyness, like Pixie and Mary-Kate, has been quite smooth to apply. Not as smooth as the other two, but better than you'd expect for the price point. As usual, the formulation was good, but the brush was a bit draggy. I wish ASOS would change the brushes on these, so as not to ruin the awesome formulation of the polishes.

Another thing I noticed when I matted and flakiefied my mani - the RBL Matte topcoate didn't stay on for very long. It started showing tipwear after day 2...Which made me kind of sad. So after the second day, the tips of my nails started looking glossy, while the rest of my nail was matte. Of course this is easily rectified by applying another layer of topcoat, but I thought I'd just put it out there for my readers. I'm not sure if this is due to it being matte, and thus more chippy (like matte and suede polishes), or whether it's just this polish. I suspect it's the former.

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this photo-spam of a post, I certainly had fun trying to peer at the flakies to see that I got all colour spectrums down on film for you guys :)

OPI Jade is the New Black Dupe? Asos Paints by Ciate Pixie

Of course, we've all been looking at pictures of OPI's upcoming Hong Kong collection that will be released in Spring, and while I was browsing the gorgeous pictures of many a beautiful finger, a thought suddenly struck me - Jade is the New Black looked hauntingly familiar. In fact, it kind of looked like something I already had in my stash, and that was released in Winter!

Ooh. Just goes to show you that these types of emerald-jade slightly dustied jewel greens are awesome and chic year round, be it Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall. Anyway, regular readers of this blog will probably be able to guess what I was talking about, because awhile back, I posted bottle pics of potential-dupe-in-question here. But of course bottle pictures are inconclusive. And as it so happens, I've actually used it for a mani since then!

Behold, a potential dupe-or-not for OPI's Jade is the New Black. Maybe it's not a dupe, but it's definitely in the same family, or if not, a close neighbour. From what I could tell based on other bloggers' swatches, the main difference is that Pixie is a little more blue-toned, while the OPI is more yellow-based. I do think they are close though. I only wish I had the actual OPI colour so I could do a side-by-side comparison. But anyways, this maybe-it's-a-dupe-maybe-it's-not isn't too shabby either. It's cheaper (for the UK ladies, that is), it's beautiful and creamy, it covers in one coat (although I used two out of habit) and it's none other than Pixie, from the Asos Paints by Ciate Winter Collection!

Observe it's beauty, in natural light:



And here it is indoors:



Of course, I couldn't leave well enough alone, so I had to pair it with $OPI's Run With It, a beautiful, albeit streaky and sheer, silvery grey, and I konaded over the ring finger with Pixie, using Konad plate M57 (I think. I'm bad at remembering which plates I used).

Anyway, can I just sing the praises of Pixie again? Oh Asos and Ciate, you have done it again. Beautiful, pigmented, creamy, good texture, and very smooth creme. Unfortunately, it's let down by a brush that likes to skip and make application not as great as it could be. Which is really unfortunate, because the formulation of this was near perfect, and it was a shame that it was let down by the brush.

I also really liked Pixie, because it is something of a chameleon, colour-wise. Indoors it leans a little blue, and sometimes I swore it looked rather teal on my fingers. But outdoors, it looks most mostly green. And this isn't a wimpy mint-jade green (haven't we had enough of those already?) but it's a much sexier, much more sophisticated, much more chic older sister of those green wannabes. It's deep, but not too deep, and it's a mix of emerald and jade colours, and is bright but still a little dusty, making it eyecatching but still very wearable. And of course it likes to tease me by being bluish and teal sometimes.

So OPI, don't say I didn't warn ya, but you have competition! I only wish I could get my hands on OPI Jade is the New Black to do a side-by-side comparison!