- - Julep | Alexandra & Cynthia - -

Hi everyone!

Ever since my Julep subscription I seem to have developed a habit of doing my nails at night. This, on the one hand, is great because I've finally attained a steady flow of creativity. On the other hand, doing your nails at night is pretty bad because, depending on how much nail polish you layer on, you may wake up the next morning with a completely ruined manicure.

In any case, this time I decided to experiment a bit further with Alexandra & Cynthia - two of the nail polishes from Julep's "Right At Home" collection (November 2013). After trying my best to sleep all night with both my hands off of my bed, I'm happy to announce that my manicure has survived long enough for me to tell the tale!

As a quick reminder:

Cynthia is a light brown nail polish with incredible micro glitter.

Alexandra is described by Julep as "Blonde crème." This colour reminds me of vanilla ice cream & the cream filling of éclairs.

Cynthia (left) & Alexandra (right)

It's amazing - I've almost used up half of Cynthia and it hasn't even been two weeks! Haha, you can definitely tell how excited I've been about this nail polish. I'm sure that the other factor of this is that Cynthia is quite thick - very possibly because of all the glitter - and because of this, I find that I'm using quite a bit of it to achieve the effect of two coats.

Moving on - this time around I also decided to try out a nail art set that I got from Chapters a few months ago:

The end result:

Left hand.

Right hand.

Basically, the idea behind these colours was to capture the essence of autumn. The red stars remind me of leaves, and when they are matched with a cream base, this reminds me of Canada (probably because of our flag). The orange stars on the gold base remind me even more so of autumn because of the fallen golden leaves on the ground everywhere. Having said that, Cynthia wasn't really a necessary addition - I simply added it for fun. I could've easily used Alexandra for all of my nails. 

As you can see in some of the pictures - as well as kind of in the picture below - the stars aren't really true to their colour. All the stars have a kind of holographic shine that can be seen differently depending on the lighting. Sometimes this interferes with the colour scheme that I was trying to achieve, but at other times it's actually a benefit. There are certain moments when the orange stars on Cynthia look like they are exactly the colour of Alexandra.

I'm not sure if anyone else has this same problem, but I find that whenever I have a clear base coat I seem to be able to peel the nail polish off the very next day. I didn't add a clear base coat prior to painting my nails this time, so hopefully this manicure lasts me a while!

Thank you kindly for reading! Best wishes to you all :)