Belated Monday Makeup Madness: NYX Sale + NOTD

In case you didn't know, NYX Cosmetics is having a $1 sale on a few of their items through the 25th...mostly select colors of certain products, but I noticed that the entire range of their Ultimate Pearl Eyeshadows are part of the sale! (See Karla Sugar's swatches here.) No affiliation, I'm just a NYX fan. :)

And here's a picture of my nails from the other week: a coat of $OPI Absinthe Makes the Heart over 2 coats of OPI Here Today...Aragon Tomorrow. Pardon the tipwear as this was taken five days in. Also pardon my really dry hands, ack. But I wanted to show you the color. I initially planned on only wearing Aragon, but I fell asleep before it dried...so I fixed it with Absinthe. I have yet to try Absinthe by itself, but I heard it was on the sheer side. Since this is layered over a dark green, I'm thinking it would look slightly different layered over black. From a distance, this looked like a nice shimmery army green.

Monday Makeup Madness: Still Kind of New to This Nail Polish Thing

I have quite a few bottles of nail polish in my collection, but I still feel like a novice when it comes to applying the stuff. But lately I've been doing it more frequently, so I think I'm getting better. Kind of. Most of the time I stick to the safe neutral-ish stuff, but I do love color, and since my work setting is pretty casual I can get away with whatever color I choose...so I'm starting to venture outside the box.

I recently broke down and got Sephora by OPI's Dark Room knowing the actual color wasn't even close to what was displayed on Sephora's site (Scrangie and The Nailphile have posts that shows the color much more accurately). On a side note, I find it hard to trust swatches on Sephora's site. I remember buying an Urban Decay nail enamel way back in the day in the color "Perversion" because I thought it was navy blue (IIRC they only had the color swatches and not brief descriptions of the colors). Surprise! It was black. :P I kept it, though I only used it a few times. I actually like black nail polish, not because of my inner goth (which existed then and now), but because it reminds me of Russian lacquer boxes. /tangent

Er, back to Dark Room. I thought I'd like it from the way people were describing the color, plus I had a Sephora coupon, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I was going to wait until fall to try it out, but tonight I was in a dark-nail-polish sort of mood, so on it went! I like the color, it's not quite black, seems to have a green / blue / gray hint to it...it kind of reminds me of a blackboard (the slate type). However, I felt like I needed to add something to it, so I then used China Glaze Wireless Holographic Top Coat. ...Oh my. The combination seems to say--nay, scream "Outer Space Princess". I have not yet decided if this is good or bad. I'm so curious to see what it looks like in natural light...I'll take a pic tomorrow and update this post so you all can see too. :)

[update 8/18: Here we go--it was overcast in the morning (left), so I took another picture on my afternoon break at work when the sun was out. Click to see a larger version, and kindly ignore my cuticles.]