Missha HGR01 and JBL01

Here are the two Misshas I picked up in Korea. I wanted to get more, but the other polishes in this series (same bottle shape/size) didn't impress me. There were some cute cremes in smaller bottles of the same shape, but I didn't want ones that didn't match ><

No humourous story to go with my Missha shopping trip. Well, other than DBF picking out a lipstick that looks terrible on me (be sure to see it on my next blog sale, LOL).

I also bought a pencil eyeliner and a liquid eyeliner at Missha, but both were a letdown. The pencil liner is not very opaque, and the liquid liner sticks to itself / flakes off (at least on my lids).

Missha HGR01 - I really like how this polish looks in pictures, but in real life, the blue duochrome doesn't appear that much on my nails. I'll need to give it a good test run, but that's my first impression of this polish.

Missha JBL01 - I saw several swatches of this as well, and it's quite interesting. There are green glints of this polish, that are very hard to photograph, but are much more apparent in real life. It's nice.

It's worth noting (if you haven't heard about these before) that these polishes:

a) have a ginormous paddle brush... I would say, even larger than the Sally Hansen CSM brushes which barely fit through the neck of the bottle,

b) have is a "rose" scent,

c) are in cute, slanty heart-shaped bottles, but they don't exactly line up very well in a drawer/box.

That's it from me now. Hope you guys have a great weekend. I really need some time to recoup; the two weeks back from vacation have been ridiculously busy at work!

The Face Shop holos

I'm about halfway through swatching my haul. I thought I would start off with posting The Face Shop holos I got! I'm not sure if these are available in the US stores and I'm also not sure if I got all of them. They came in pretty silver boxes, and I think cost about 6000 won (~$6USD). After a certain point, I stopped calculating how much I was spending in Korea... O_O

My experience at The Face Shop in Korea was much better than my experience at both the Manhattan and San Jose stores. I always feel unwelcome in the US stores and the SAs seem snobby, but they were so friendly and nice in all the Korean stores I went to (I went into about 5 stores). The girls at Tony Moly were the complete opposite, but I will save that story for when I post those swatches :)

The holo is actually a bit stronger than they appear in these photos, but not by much. As you know, I rarely take the time to photograph in real sunlight (my main defence is that in real life, I almost never see the light of day) so keep that in mind! :) Pictured are 2 coats and I quite like the bottles and brushes (wider than a ChG brush, but narrower than CND).

The Face Shop - RD301 - A real red holo? I guess so! It's a warmer red, leaning towards the orange side. This was the least holo out of the three.

The Face Shop - PP401

The Face Shop - BK901 - More charcoal-y than black. Somehow, I bought two polishes at TFS both with the "name" BK901. Not only are they too lazy to come up with real names, but they even re-use codes in Asia??? WTF?!

About a week before going on vacation, DBF and I decided we should watch some Korean dramas to get used to the sound of the language and maybe pick up a few words (as this is how we have come to know our Japanese vocab... tons of anime when we were in high school / college!!). We started watching Boys Over Flowers because I was familiar with the manga and it was available on Netflix. By the time we got to Seoul, we had watched the complete series.

The Face Shop was one of the first "road shops" I went to in Seoul on my trip. DBF and I were on our way to the Nfu Oh HQ and we stopped in here first. I hauled the polishes here and also picked up some black head removing clay. When I was checking out, DBF noticed a poster behind the cash register and said, "Isn't that Jihoo?" (one of the male leads in Boys Over Flowers). I said, "Oh my god, it is!" and the cashier turned around to see what we were looking at it. She went "Ohhh, Kim Hyun-joong!" and then said something in Korean (I only recognized the English word "poster". There were posters at the entrance, but we couldn't figure out if they were free). On the way out of the store, we looked up at the facade and noticed his huge face plastered everywhere! I kind of furrowed my eyebrows that a guy was advertising a cosmetics company... and that his skin looked amazing.

This isn't the exact store I went to, but I took a picture of another store later during the trip. Observe:

Anyways, I'm sad to be back, but vacation can't last forever, right?

I'm back! Bottle pics of my haul for now!

Hey guys! I just got back last night from my Japan/Korea trip and have been sleeping irregular hours in between running errands today getting ready to go back to normal life. I unpacked my polish haul just now and took a few bottle shots to show you my bounty.

Some of these are gifts or CPs, so I may not get to swatch them, but I will definitely be swatching the ones for myself when I have time (hopefully by next week)!

I actually did not buy any polish in Japan (I did not see anything that really interested me or the price was too high... the USD was really weak against the yen just in time for my trip :P), so all the polish I got was from my 3 days in Seoul. I purchased some makeup and skin care that I'll probably post up here too later! I also bought a lot of stickers and stationary... because I cannot resist, and I may post a few of those too :)

Anyways, I am pooped right now and am really sad I have to go to work tomorrow :'( Why can't every day be a vacation??









p.s. I have to reply to a few pms on MUA still! Don't worry, I've read your messages, just haven't had time to respond yet!!

p.p.s. Thanks for sticking around while I was gone for two weeks ^_^

Illamasqua Fern

*staggers in* These last two weeks have been super busy for me! Trying to get as much work as possible done before we leave for our vacation this weekend, and we had to attend a wedding in Nevada last weekend!

First, I'll show you a polish, then I will bore you with details of the wedding trip.

Illamasqua Fern - 2 coats. I ordered this from the 5GBP Illamasqua sale. I love this much more than expected! I think it's what I wished Essie Coat Azure would be - they are completely different though. Sorry I did not do any comparisons yet :( Any suggestions? I don't have a lot of blues like this!



Here's a pic With a snack I had a couple weekends ago. Mmmm.


Ok, boring details from my weekend: flying out of EWR was a huge hassle, since "Hurricane" Irene was about to blow through the tri-state area. As far as I can tell, there was no immediate damage from the storm, but now a lot of NJ is flooded! Thankfully, my area is okay, but I know a lot of people at work who are not so lucky. Anyway, our flight out of EWR was delayed for around 2 hours, causing us to miss our connection. We got to our hotel 7 hours later than initially planned, and had to drive through a mountain pass area in the dark. Yay! Our flight back was also delayed, since there were 150 people on standby to get back to NYC. Insane.

My huge annoyance of the trip was that prior to returning our rental car to the airport, we filled up the tank, but it turns out there were still 2 gallons unfilled when we pulled into the return area. The gas nozzle definitely 'clicked' though, so I don't know what happened. We should have double checked before returning the car (we filled up at the airport gas station, about 10 seconds from the return area), but we were both really tired and forgot. Hertz charged us about $10 per GALLON as a fuel surcharge! Can you believe it?! Man, I was livid. Has this ever happened to you?

Anyways, we had a couple hours before the wedding to walk around the area. Here's a little lake we went to (near Lake Tahoe, but not actually Lake Tahoe).



The wedding was for our friend from college (actually, DBF's classmate) who we lived with for a semester. He is the most easy going guy I know! I found a stray cat in our neighbourhood that semester we lived together, and he offered to drive me to the local vet to see if it was microchipped, and then later drove me to the Humane Society about 40 minutes away! He met his wife after we graduated, so it was the first time I met her... she seems very nice :) DBF and I were disappointed in his other friends from college... we were the only two (other than the groom's 2 friends from school who were in the wedding party) that flew out for his wedding! And he invited around 20 people from our college... I mean, what the heck?? I hope people come to my wedding :/!!

This is my NOTWedding: Illamasqua Raindrops



Ok, we fly out on Saturday! Supposedly, there is some kind of storm going over Japan right now... which is kind of bad timing... but hopefully it will have passed by the time we land. We're going to Tokyo, Kyoto, Miyajima Island (near Hiroshima), Nikko (outside of Tokyo), then Seoul. Hopefully I can post a bit while I'm gone! They will be haul posts, though, since I am actually going NAKED ON MY TIPS!!! :D

Hope you guys have a great long weekend (Labour Day)!