Review: BPS teardrop rhinestones and BATS!!!

Hello all! Today I'm posting the final two products I recieved for review in my recent nail mail from the Born Pretty Store. To those just joining us now, the BPS is a great source of a huge selection of affordable beauty products, with free worldwide shipping. They have a particularly robust nail art selection, from which they sent me a number of lovely items to review.

The first item is a wheel of teardrop shaped pastel rhinestones. They were a lot bigger than I expected, but I managed to work them into some nail art!

Because of their size, I recommend using nail glue to fasten these, rather than just wet polish and sealing them in with top coat. I also recommend using them over a light base, when I tried them out over black they kind of got washed out and the different colors all looked the same. Still, these have a lovely pearly finish and can make a great accent to a delicate manicure. These can be purchased here

The second item is the thing I was most looking forward to receiving of all of the items- BATS! I love, love, love bats. I don't know what it is about them, but they are my favorite animal, Most people would want bats as a Halloween aesthetic, but honestly I'm happy to wear them all year round!

Once again, I recommend using nail art glue for these, because they are rigid and a little thick for normal nail art glitter. But it is absOLUTELY WORTH IT. They are mainly white with an iridescent pink/teal coating, and they are very sharply detailed. You'll probably see a lot of bats in my upcoming nail art :D The bats can be purchased in a variety of colors here.

If you purchase from the Born Pretty Store, I invite you to use my 10% off code:

Thank you for reading!

NOTD: Glitter and marbles

A while back a friend of mine brought me some polish from the USA, and among the polishes she brought was Sally Hansen Grape Shifter. It's a gorgeous glitterbomb composed mostly of fuschia hexes, bright teal shimmer, and larger silver holo hexes. To showcase the glitter, I decided to create a matching water marble. Water marble accents are the best, because you get the cool effect but since you're just doing a few fingers it takes far less time!

I put two coats of Grape Shifter over a fuchsia base (the same fuchsia that I used in the marble, but I can't remember what it was), but I think it would be fully opaque in three coats. It already was very nearly opaque here!

Review: Born Pretty Store stamping plate QA88

I have another cute Born Pretty Store product to show you today, this time a stamping plate!

I love this one because the entire plate is covered in designs, so you can make something unique every time. This design would also probably be really great as a stamp decal, but for today I decided to showcase a simple black stamp of it. That's not to say the nail art is simple though! I created a vertical gradient as the background for this, inspired by art done by A Different Shade of Polish.

The stamping plate was great- the grooves were just right, not too deep and not too shallow, so it created a crisp and even look across my nails. The plate I used to create this look can be found here.

The Born Pretty Store has a huge selection of affordable and cute nail art products, as well as nail polish and other cosmetic related stuff, plus they ship free worldwide! You can also use my discount code -SMBQ10- to receive a 10% discount on all of your purchases:

Disclaimer: These items were provided to me by the Born Pretty Store for my unbiased review

Swatched: Ga-de Designs collection

Ga-de has done it again! They are definitely scoping the market, because they just released a collection (called Designs from what I've been able to ascertain) that is similar to a lot of the glitter bombs put out by some of the more well know indies out there.

This series has four polishes, each composed of two different sizes of hexes plus one larger type of glitter. For two of them the larger glitters are flowers, and for the other two they are stars.

A note on the formula: They all have the same application- it's very easy to apply the hexes, and you have to do a little fishing around and placement to get the larger glitters out. Still, it's not very hard to 'catch' the larger glitters, they're fairly cooperative. And that's more or less the standard application for particles that size. I noticed that the stars were slightly easier than the flowers, possibly because the pointy tips get caught in the brush more easily. Then again, it was really a very slight difference, so I could be imagining it.

Pink Daisy (60)

Daisy Bloom (61)

Blue Star (63)

Rising Star (64) (aka why did Ga-de make a Captain America polish? Not that I'm complaining)

Each of these polishes can be purchased at Superpharm for around 15 shekel, unless they're not 'on sale' (really they're usually 15 shekel or so and occasionally they 'end the sale' to show us what a good deal we're getting paying 15). Sometimes you can get Ga-de polishes at Hamasbir too, but they usually have a smaller selection, and not so much new stuff.

Which one of these do you want?