Bourjois Bleu Water Swatch

15th August, 2012

Today I have a swatch for you of this gorgeous pale blue by Bourjois. It’s called Bleu Water (yes b-l-e-u, the French spelling!). I received this polish as a prize in a Facebook contest Bourjois held a few months ago, called Make My Holiday. The first 1000 people to get 10 likes would each receive a prize pack, I joined the same contest last year and received a fabulous prize so I knew I had to join in again this year. Last time I picked a prize pack without nail polish and this year I decided I wanted to try some Bourjois varnish!

When it arrived I eagerly grabbed the polish to paint my nails and to my surprise I found… no brush! Where the bristles of the brush should be, there was… nothing! I had seen pictures of this happening before, with other brands, but this was a first for me. I e-mailed Bourjois to let them know and two days later I had a brand new bottle of Bleu Water, luckily this time not missing a brush!

I used two coats for the swatch you see above, the formula is absolutely flawless and glides on like butter! I really love this shade, it’s a sort of muted dusty pale blue, it’s slightly darker in person than in my swatch. I do not like the brush however, it’s cut perfectly and rounded to fit the curve of your cuticles but I personally prefer slim brushes. To each his own! I personally don’t buy Bourjois often as they are priced higher than what I usually like to spend on nail polish. And also because they are too tall to stand up straight in my Helmer drawers, haha!

As for the polish without brush, I poured the varnish into an empty polish bottle, I think I will add some polish of a different shade and create my very own frankenpolish! Oh the possibilities!

By the way, my giveaway ends tonight (15 August) at midnight so if you still want to enter, make sure to do it NOW! :)

Posted by Emily - 8 Comments

Lucky streak!

15th February, 2012

All of what you see above I won in the past month! I’ve had a very very lucky streak, I was lucky enough to win three giveaways and be one of the lucky 1000 to receive a set of make-up through a Facebook contest. I’ve never won a lot of giveaways in the past, only about two or three, and then all of a sudden there’s four things at once! I guess with things like this you really do have to be lucky! :D I by no means want to brag by posting this giveaway, I just want to hugely thank everyone for the opportunity and for being so kind!

The first thing I won was a $50 gift certificate from Too Faced which I won from the lovely Soo who owns the blog MU-Tokki. I urge you to check out her beauty blog, she does some of the most stunning photography I have seen in a long time and she is a total sweetheart! With some help from her I chose the Smokey Eyeshadow palette and the Perfect Eyes waterproof eyeliner pencil in Perfect Black.

I’ve been so impressed with both items, the eyeshadow palette is really gorgeous, I had been looking for a dark blue matte eyeshadow and Smolder is such a beautiful colour, exactly what I was looking for! The quality of the shadows impressed me a lot, I actually like them a lot better than my Urban Decay shadows. The eyeliner pencil is also really wonderful, it gives off so much pigment! Finally an eyeliner pencil that doesn’t hurt my eyes or smudge.

Her giveaway was US-only which I only saw after I entered so I tweeted her to let her know she could discard my entry, she said she would send it to me if I won and as luck would have it, I did. So I am very grateful of her kindness! She also threw in a lot of samples for me to try which you can see in the image above next to the eyeshadow palette. Too Faced Eyeshadow Insurance, Argan Oil, Kate Somerville ExfoliKate and a perfume sample from Michael Kors. Thanks a million Soo, you are the best!

The second giveaway I won was one of the Dazzling Days giveaways at Suzanne’s blog, DeltaCephei. I won one of the Deborah Milano mascaras! It’s a brand that is unfamiliar to me so I’m very excited to try it. I really love the packaging. I’ve only been able to try it once very quickly as it arrived today but it looks very promising! In any case a huge thanks to Suzanne for doing so many awesome giveaways, she made so many people happy during the Dazzling Days! You’re the best! If you are from Belgium or the Netherlands check out her blog if you don’t know it already. :D

Remember my ikat nails? If yes the design of these nail wraps should look very familiar as this is THE original design I based my ikat nails on! NCLA, the company that does them found my blogpost and sent me such nice comments through Facebook and Twitter. I had been following them for a little while when they tweeted about a quick giveaway they were doing, giving away a set of their Secession Strike nail wraps to 10 lucky followers so I jumped in! I cannot wait to try them, they look absolutely gorgeous! I was really surprised to see so many too, I’ve tried nail wraps before and usually you only get 20 odd nail wraps but NCLA includes 44 which gives you so much value for money. It also came with one of the best emery board files I have tried, it’s already become my go-to nail shaping file! Thanks NCLA!

A friend on facebook, Ilke, shared a link to the Bourjois Facebook-page. They were doing a contest where you had to get 10 unique likes from friends to be one of 1000 lucky winners to receive one of four different sets of make-up! When I saw the prizes I got so excited since Bourjois is usually on the pricier side of the scale at the drugstore and they were giving away four items in each set. It looked too good to be true but I decided to join in anyway! I chose the smoky set and received these items about two weeks later. I absolutely love them! My favourite item is the lipstick, it’s the perfect colour for me! It’s one of those, “your lips but better” type of colour which I love. The mascara is really great too, the first coat isn’t that impressive but once you put on a second coat – amazing lashes! The eyeshadow palette I haven’t been able to try yet, the eyeshadows are absolutely tiny (1cm diameter) but I look forward to trying them. Thanks so much Bourjois for this great contest!

Have you ever won any giveaways? If yes what did you win? Let me know in the comments!

Posted by Emily - 10 Comments

Christmas nails

7th January, 2010

As I’m waiting for my order to come through to do new nailart designs I’ll show you a few pictures of stuff I did a while back. It’s just the designs without a tutorial but I will be putting those up in the future!

This design I did during the holidays:

christmas nails

I used the Konad plate M15 for this and applied the same design twice to create a pattern. The nailpolish used is a 1 second nailpolish by Bourjois (application with the brush is great! it looks big but is very easy to use)

summer nails

Using the Hawaiian Konad plate M29 and a tiny orange (though it’s got more of a red shine on the picture) nailpolish I got from a discount basket for 50 eurocent at Hema.

Posted by Emily - No Comments