Sparkled Beauty

In the same occasion that I bought W7 In the Night palette, I also grabbed the Cheeky Trio palette.

Meant to be a bronzer, blusher & highlighter pressed powder palette, it has the same lightweight tin packaging as the In the Night palette, still no mirror, also no brush. As a result, there is quite a bit more product inside (see the end for details).

Shade names are also printed in the back - Dream Machine bronzer, 5th Avenue blush and Hot Stuff highlighter.

Instead of the purple tin with In the Night, the Cheeky Trio features a darker pink tin, still with gold lettering. I enjoy the tins as they feel sturdy but light, easy to tote around. However, with a tin case, you cannot peek through to see the shades inside.

As you might notice, there are wavy patterns on the powders, actual raised/ 3D waves. They are fun to look at but a tiny bit hard to swatch with a finger :)

The Cheeky Trio does carry a light herbal/ floral scent, which I find unnecessary. This can turn off some of you as well.

W7 says the trio blends easily (which I agreed) and works well with all skin tones (which I didn't agree).

Dream Machine is very close to my skin tone, works better as a transition eyeshadow than a bronzer for me. 5th Avenue is a light pink with a hint of coral, quite natural looking but builds up ok. Hot Stuff is very subtle as well, partly because it is matte. I opt to use it on the brow bone more.

Overall, the Cheeky Trio reminds me a lot of Wet n Wild MegaGlo contouring palette, with the same price point per oz, just with the blush as an extra colour option. It has 0.74oz/ 21g of product vs. 0.55oz/ 15.6g in In the Night for the same price - $9.99 at Winners (£9.95 on W7 website). I cannot recommend this palette to everyone, as it would depend on your colour preferences.

I have been curious about W7 makeup products since I tried their nail polish years ago but haven't made any purchase since they are a UK brand, not extremely accessible ... until I found a few things at Winners a few weeks ago.

Had told myself I did not need any more eyeshadow palettes but that did not work. Among a few colour options available, I decided on In the Night, a 12-colour smokey eye colour palette.

Packaging is cool and different - a lightweight tin on the outside, cardboard inside with no mirror and a dual-ended brush (a sponge tip and a tiny brush, to be exact).

I appreciate the fact that the brand does provide shade names in the back of the tin. The Winners price tag was put right on the front, blocking the beautiful name of the palette, but this is minor.

W7 claims that the eyeshadows are highly pigmented and provide little fallout with or without a primer. Swatches were done with a damp brush without primer, as usual.

The first 6 shades: Dusty is a shimmery highlight shade, Wonderland has fine glitters in the peachy coral base that shows up quite subtle, Summer is beautiful with a slightly metallic finish.

Atlanta has the weakest pigmentation in the palette, I use it to top off other eyeshadows for a pop of shine. Abracadabra is a shimmery lilac, and Top Hat has a hint of duochrome finish but needs to build up a bit more than others.

The second half of the palette is where the money at! Razzmataz looks very close to its neighbour on the left (Top Hat) but shows up more blue toned and with better pigmentation (no building up required). Lady Luck is glittery, and a very pretty and pigmented one at that. Laura E is metallic, also with very good pigmentation.

Party Pooper would be the brow bone highlight among the bunch but is shimmery and not matte. Gate Crash is a blue-toned grey, slightly metallic. Bologna looks almost like a matte black in the pan but swatches as a blackened navy with a sheen, builds up nicely after the second layer.

Needless to say, I have been having so much fun with these shades, more than I did with the first 6 but the two groups pair up nicely, which is a plus. Most go on pigmented, are easy to blend and last through the day with a base. A good palette to spice up your eye looks at night but does not have any neutral/ matte shades to stand alone.

The palette has a good amount of product - 0.55oz/ 15.6g, $9.99 at Winners (£9.95 on W7 website). I would say it is worth it. If you are not looking for smoky shades, there are other palettes from W7 - Lightly Toasted, In the Nude, etc.

It has been a while since I got a bunch of W7 shades in the Nail polish haul last August. Thought it was time to pull one out to try.

This is W7 Metallic Venus, a purple blue duochrome. I was feeling a dark mood one day, and this fulfilled it. Dark but with a coloured kick. The world needs more duochromes with gorgeous shimmers like this :) I feel bad neglecting these W7 colours, they are great, just a bit hard to come by.

There is an important appearance/ hidden review of Wet n Wild Fergie nail polish in this post as well, stay tuned!

Here I did two thicker coats of Metallic Venus for full opacity, 3 thin coats would do as well. No application issue, and the brush is just the right size.

Talking about application and brush, Wet n Wild Fergie nail polish offers a totally different story.

I was excited when the WnW wall display at Walmart has these and bought Dutchess by the way it looked. It is a beautiful teal blue with different sizes of glitters (fine, round, hex) in blue, teal and hot pink.

Right? It looks super gorgeous in the bottle. When swatched, it was sheer, so I layered two coats of it on top of Metallic Venus on the ring finger.

It dried semi matte, which I didn't expect but I loved a surprise anyway. It would have been a perfect pairing between Metallic Venus and Dutchess (well, they looked awesome together here) if the brush did not give me such a hard time.

The bottle of the Fergie line is taller than normal WnW design, and someone decided that a wide brush is needed for that. Wide brushes do offer faster application but when they are too wide to fit through the bottle neck, we have a problem!

Yes, there is the solution to decant this into a different bottle with a good brush, but I shouldn't need to.

Here are the 2 brushes side by side - W7 on the left (same size as China Glaze brushes) and WnW Fergie on the right.

The WnW Fergie brush was huge! It was too wide and thick, makes it hard to not touch your cuticles while painting your nails (mess #1), and hard to dip the brush back in the bottle for the next swipe without flaring it or a few bristles getting caught by the bottle neck (mess #2).

I can't imagine the shape of this brush after about 3-4 mani, if it doesn't fall apart, at least it would look like a dog had gone at it (not that a dog would eat a nail polish brush, but you get my point). I love Dutchess as a colour but it is probably not worth fighting with the brush for.

So Metallic Venus is a good nail polish, and Dutchess is a so so. Have a safe day out there fighting with travelling after a snow storm, Haligonians.

As a follow up from the big huge Nail polish haul yesterday, I am showing you the swatches of W7 Mosaic today.

Like I mentioned, Mosaic is the confirmed dupe of Nails Inc. Pudding Lane, just in case anybody is wondering.

However, I think it's fair to just review it the way it is, not in comparison with Nails Inc. I don't own Pudding Lane anyway, and don't plan to purchase it. $11 is a lot, especially when I already own Mosaic. Just saying!

First off, Mosaic is a complete beauty. Just that blue/ aqua shade alone is totally summer appropriate, though I would still wear it all year round.

And then the glitters are the icing on the gorgeous cake. Navy and gold "icing", to be exact. They aren't too fine, not too chunky either.

This is 3 coats of Mosaic by itself, no colour base, as I wanted to test its opacity and colour payoff. But to conserve the goodness and easy removal afterward, I'd suggest using a light blue nail polish underneath.
And one more shot of it, I couldn't decide which pic to leave out lol. Mosaic wore pretty well on my nails - 2-3 days on average. The brush was a little wider, easy to work with.

I'm complete smitten with Mosaic, if you haven't figured that out by now already. Totally worth the £1.95 price tag. Maybe even worth coming back to the site if W7 has more shades like this, even with the communication issue Nail Polish Direct had. That's how much I love Mosaic.

A few more days and my favorite month of the year is over. The month I spent $$$ lol. Have a great day, everyone!

This is a huge collective haul from different places at different points of time. I was waiting on things to come in the mail to post them all together :)

I jumped on the W7 bandwagon in a heart beat as soon as I saw all 3 shades I wanted were in stock on Nail Polish Direct.

I didn't know much about this UK brand other than the fact that they made cheaper Nails Inc Sprinkles alternatives, only £1.95 a piece vs $11.

From L-R: Mosaic (dupe of Nails Inc. Pudding Lane), Salt n Pepper (close to Nails Inc. Sugar House Lane) and Lava Flow.

The brand only has these 3 shades with this type of glitter mix so far that I know of.

W7 is also known for some cool duochrome shades, I took full advantage of the cheap shipping - £2.95 for 9 bottles.

First row: Metallic Mercury, Metallic Jupiter and Metallic Neptune

Second row: Metallic Mars, Metallic Venus, Metallic Saturn and Diamond top coat (free with purchase of 5 W7 nail polish).

Shipping took a bit more than 2 weeks. My Metallic Saturn came without a name sticker, I tried to email and FB them with no answer. This turned me away from ordering more from them (was lemming some Barry M), so be warned.

With Shoppers' very first BOGO event on nail polish about 2 weeks ago, I got:

- Quo Center of Attention (from a LE display)

- Nicole by OPI Back to Reality... TV (Kardashian Kolor 2012 collection), Coral Denominator (One Less Lonely Girl collection, supposed to be a Canada exclusive originally), and A Million Sparkles (a 2012 shade).

I was glad to see Shoppers starting to offer some great sales like this. The key point to success is to pick the location with good stock level.

From the Cult Nails birthday sale near beginning of the month for $7 a bottle (reg. $10), I got:

- Annalicious, Feelin' Froggy, Manipulative (all are to be discontinued soon), and

- I Got Distracted. I've been eyeing this one for a while now, glad to finally own it.

Shipping for 4 bottles was $8 to Canada. I am already looking into another order, cause Cult Nails is coming out with the colour changing top coats, hard to resist.

Killed 2 long time lemmings via Ninja Polish: Floam and Sticks 'n Stones, $9 each.

These weren't on sale or anything, but they were really really hard to catch whenever they were back in stock on the site. They sold like hot cakes, I was just lucky that day.

Floam was originally from Nail Venturous but now is bottled under Ninja Polish brand, I'm not sure what the story is, doesn't really matter though.

Canada shipping starts at $3.50 for the first bottle, then $1 for each additional bottle.

I heard about Candy Lacquer over at a few nail blogs and loved the shades they offered. The day their etsy store opened, great shades were sold out within 5 minutes. Craziness!

I missed out on the great LE shades, only got Honey Bee, City Girl and Argyle, $8 each. These are glitters with interesting shapes and combination, definitely stand out to me.

Canada shipping was $5 + $1 for each additional bottle. A little higher than I wanted, but it was worth it to splurge on these.

A CP from the US, thanks to a blogger friend, for some shades that I couldn't get here at the time.

- Revlon Moon Candy in Supernova and Cosmic. These have showed up at our Walmart now :)

- Sinful Colors in Why Not, Dressed to Kill, Let's Meet, Leap Flog and Cinderella.
This wish list was before the drama that Sinful had with nail bloggers. I'm glad to have these colours now, but probably won't buy anymore until I hear some good settlement.

I did really well at Sally this month. These are from 2 different trips - one when I first heard the China Glaze Summer Neons collection was on clearance for $3.29, and one when clearance items were extra 50% off (last weekend).

First row: Beach Cruise-R, Under the Boardwalk, Ride the Waves

Second row: Hang Ten-Toes, Love's a Beach, Surfin' for Boys, and Orange You Hot.

Still missing the green and yellow :(

Other random shades on clearance, also at Sally.

First row: Finger Paints Go Van Gogh; and Late Night Rendezvous (Summer in the City collection)

Second row: Orly Forever Crimson; Sterling Silver Rose; After Party and Dayglow (Feel the Vibe collection).

No sign of the great bright shades from Feel the Vibe nor the Orly Glam Fx :( If you can find them, you'd be one of the luckiest people in the world.

This last bunch was a surprise, as I thought they were long gone. Crackle fever might be over, but I couldn't resist the shimmers, especially when they were $1.50 each.

So here are China Glaze Glam-more, Luminous Lavender, Gleam Me Up and Jade-D.

It's always a good idea to call your store before heading over, as I found Sally's sale isn't necessarily the same across provinces. I had one fail trip where a sale hosted at my friend's store was not at mine.

Layla is on 30% off at Lawtons this week, the best sale I have seen on it so far. The price came out to be around $11 after discount.

Lawtons only has the shades from the first release, so I only got Flash Black and Ultra Violet (which, by taking picture, I realized that I grabbed a tester of, lol).

The OPI Spiderman collection was on clearance, $3.49 a piece. I got Number One Nemesis and My Boyfriend Scales Walls.

Phewww, that is all, for now :) Hope this is a fun read for you on a Monday.