Review and swatch: Arcane Lacquer Vast & Vague

All the Australian indies bursting onto the scenes with nail polish certainly make ME happy. My wallet not so much. Sometimes it's hard to keep up! I ummed and ahhed for ages when it came to ordering from Arcane Lacquer - this brand is extra special because it's made by Nail Gun XS, a blogger whose stunning swatches are used by many other indie brands. In the end I went with Vast & Vague for my first purchase, as tiny neon squares in a dusty pastel base wasn't something I had in my collection.

Review and swatches: Geek Chic Cosmetics eyeshadows!

For my birthday (several months ago now, haha) a friend gave me a ThinkGeek voucher. Sadly for us Australians, a ThinkGeek purchase is a special occasion only deal, or a group purchase, because the only shipping options they do are expedited international. It's stupidly fast and also stupidly expensive. On a whim at the end of May, I visited their website and wishfully filled my cart with Geek Chic eyeshadows - they had a small range, but they had two of the colours I REALLY wanted. Imagine my surprise and delight when I checked the shipping options and saw they'd added economy for international shipping! Instead of paying $40+ to get my order within the week, I could pay $9 and wait a bit longer! So I got 3 Geek Chic eyeshadows and a little heart hand warmer for stupidly cheap, since my gift certificate covered nearly everything.

Excuse the glitter on the bottom jar!

Review and swatches: Zoya Harlow

This was gifted to me, which is excellent because I never would have bought it myself and I LOVE it! The Zoya matte velvet range come in a frosted version of their regular bottles.

Swatch: Illamasqua Bacterium

I cannot TELL you how excited I am about Illamasqua lowering their prices in Australia. But let me put it in perspective for you: there's no counter in Perth, so I'd have to order from Myer interstate. To order from Illamasqua in the U.K. AND pay for shipping would have still been cheaper than ordering from Myer in Australia. And that's without shipping included in the Aussie price!

Orly swatches, part 1

Seen here in my Orly haul post, now some swatches!

Scarlet is a bold red with gold shimmer in the bottle.

On the nail it becomes a stunning, metallic red, unfortunately with no gold shimmer. It's still an incredibly beautiful polish, though. This is two coats.

Walk Down the Aisle is a mint green jelly with superfine minty/aqua shimmer.

Three coats, probably not going to become opaque any time soon! So I decided to put it over Mode Cool As, which is a bright mint creme. I can't believe I haven't blogged this before, it's one of my favourite colours! Two coats here.

Less greyed/pastel than this 

More green than this!

Then with a coat of Walk Down the Aisle over the top.

The shimmer is really subtle and pretty. I'll definitely have to try this over some other colours.

That's all for now, I'll do the other three sometime this week.