Another aweome contest for y'all!

Perfection is Possible is having a fabulous giveaway to celebrate 10,000 views! Wow! Take a minute or two & stop by to enter before the September 1st deadline! Good Luck to you all! :-)

Oh...and I promise to be back with some non-contest posts that contain actual nail polish photos just as soon as I get new batteries for my camera. LOL! Pinkie swear!

Giveaways galore!

Catching up on some awesome giveaways in the nail polish blogosphere...

Glam Geek Chic is having a wonderful giveaway with polishes from the China Glaze Vintage Vixen collection and the OPI Swiss collection! Woot! Love those colors!

Lacquerized is having a Kiko giveaway! Those look like some awesome polishes!

Manicure Time is having their 1st giveaway! Here's your chance to try Catrice polishes if you are lucky enough to have them in your own country. :)

JenWebb702 is having a ""back to bloggig" giveaway where you can win some of OPI's Swiss collection or Couture Color by Opi for Ulta.

Nailstah mega-giveaway

Giveaway Alert:

Nailstah is having a mega-giveaway with three different ways to enter...blogging, Facebook, and Twitter. Stop by and put your name in the hat for these great prizes!

Models Own 50% off... part 2

Update: 

  
Good news! They've lowered the international order to a £20 minimum! Bad news! The £20 has to be before the 50% discount when/if it happens. Well, I guess it's not really bad news, per se. Just the downside. :)

Update 2! They've reached their goal and the coupon code is "FACEBOOK50" without the quotes. Enjoy!

Models Own 50% off...

Spread the word...if the Models Own Facebook page gets 10,000 fans by August 31st,  they're going to give all their FB fans a 50% off coupon for orders of £20 (~$32) or more! 
I've always wanted to try their nail polish but haven't been able to afford it.. :(  They're a British company that does ship internationally, but there's a minimum order amount of £30 £20 and shipping is £9.95. That should be relatively easy to do since they have a bunch of awesome looking shades that are £5 each. If you buy 3, you save £3 and if you buy 5, you save £7!

In other news...so sorry about the ever-changing blog look! I can't find one I'm happy with & can't figure out yet how to make my own from scratch. I can do the graphics easy peasy, but the coding has so far eluded me. *sigh* Any Blogger experts out there?

Please excuse the mess...

I'm currently trying out numerous blog designs, so please bear with me. I promise not to leave it a hideous mess! :)
Hope you're enjoying your Sunday! :)

Wedding mani/pedi decision...

So...my dress arrived on time today. I found some shoes at K-Mart of all places! They're white, not silver like I hoped. All the silver shoes I could find were very uncomfortable. :(

This is my dress... It looks much more... matronly on me than on the model in the picture. *groan* Not the look I was going for! *palm to forehead* Oh, well...too late now to find a new one, I think. Maybe my sisters-in-law can help prevent me from being a fashion disaster! *crosses fingers*
Now, I've got to decide on which polish for my toes & which for my fingers. I have so many blues & greens that it's going to be really hard to decide. Any thoughts?

I'm leaning toward For Audrey for my toes and What's With the Cattitude for my fingers. Or maybe Pretty Edgey for my toes and save For Audrey for my fingers. Or maybe Mint Candy Apple...*sigh* I know I have too many blues & greens when listing them all for you to help decide would take the better part of the evening! LOL! 

I just realized that I don't own any light pinks or anything more conservative! Ha ha! Green, blue, purple, orange, dark red & pink...that about sums up my polish collection thus far. Goodness...might need to branch out some.
Night all!

Giveaway at Oh My Polish!

So my new lemming is the Milani limited edition, Dressmaker, which is supposed to be the closest dupe out there for Chanel's Jade! I've seen the swatches & can't wait to get my hands on it. I've been doing the usual drugstore searches, but so far nothing. That's why I was totally psyched to see that it's one of the prizes in the 1st ever giveaway at Oh My Polish! Super easy entry, so don't forget to stop by and put yourself in the running to get this beauty as well as some other really awesome prizes!
Happy weekend everyone! :)

Enough mints?

I don't know if you know but American Apparel was offering free shipping on any order until today with coupon code FREESHIP0810...exciting news for me since I live a long way from an actual store.
I've been dying to try some of their polish & have been drooling over Office. So imagine my surprise when I placed an order last night for just Malibu Green! I have so many mints after my trip to Icing last weekend & I don't know how alike it is. Then today, I changed my mind & was going to order Office anyway along with Peacock, but after looking at some more swatches & reviews of Office, changed my mind back and just got Peacock. *sigh* I hope I don't regret it! Fifty minutes until the coupon expires. 
I'm going to skittle all my mints for my trip to St. Augustine for my cousin's wedding next week. They have an outlet mall with American Apparel, so...if Office is unique enough to warrant a purchase, I'll give in. LOL! Who am I kidding? I'm a mint freak...well, a blue/green freak which includes mint, right? I'll probably be weak and buy it regardless. LOL! Enough mints? Probably not yet. ;)

1st ever Sephora & Ulta shopping!

Went shopping at The Mall of Georgia for a dress to wear to my cousin's wedding. I didn't find one, but had fun anyway & managed to get dresses and shoes for both nieces. No small feat that!
The night before, I made a list of the stores where I wanted to shop for polish because the mall is massive & I knew I'd forgot while looking at the overwhelming directory of stores.
H&M was a bust. They didn't have any polish. Neither did Charlotte Russe. :( Claire's had a ton of polish, but no Dreamcatcher, one I'm hunting high & low for. There was a mini pack on the clearance rack with a green that could have been Dreamcatcher, but it didn't have a label and I had no interest in the other colors. I decided to pass because I didn't want to pay $3.25 basically for that one little bottle. When I asked if they had any bigger bottles, the cashier said they didn't but that Icing had tons. They did!
None was Dreamcatcher, of course, but there were so many gorgeous ones I couldn't decide. I bought 4 after seeing they were buy 1, get 1 half off. I was trying to conserve funds for Sephora & Ulta or I would have bought some of their blues & purples. *sigh* I wish Icing was at our local mall!
Directly across from Icing is Hot Topic. I'd read that one of their colors was a close dupe to MAC's Peppermint Pattie, so I ran in and got that and an iridescent blue-green.
On to Sephora! I was so excited to shop there for the first time, but after oohhing & aahhing with my SIL & nieces, I realized I couldn't find the Illamasqua anywhere. The cashier had no idea what I was talking about. She'd never heard of the brand (seriously?!) even though I spelled it in case I wasn't pronouncing it correctly. She said it was a small Sephora! (that seems amazing to me! LOL!) and for me to check some other Atlanta stores.
I saw a few of the Sephora OPIs that I liked but not $9/bottle like. I ended up leaving empty handed. My nieces, however, have a new favorite store. Once they realized they could try all the products on...they did! It was hilarious! We had to drag them away.
Ulta was our last store & we were so ready to be done after ~8 hours of shopping! It was a little disappointing, too, though. They were renovating the store and there were a lot of empty shelves. I did manage to find one bottle I'd gone there to nab, Essence Surfer Babe: The World's Coolest. Annoyingly, posted prices were a rarity. I would have bought a few bottles if I'd realize it was only $1.99! Same for the Piggy Polish Poet Tree I was ecstatic to find. $1.99 on clearance! (I didn't see the price on the receipt until we got back in the car & didn't feel up to going back in. LOL!)
My SIL found the clearance section for me and I was psyched to find Orly's Enchanted Forest (woot!) and Pixie Dust for $2.99 each! I made myself stop at 6 bottles of polish and some CND Stickey, which I'm dying to try!
So Ulta was a little more successful than Sephora even though I overpaid for CG's Lemon Fizz. I knew I should have bought at SBS when I saw it earlier in the year!
All in all a great day and I wish we lived closer! Kind of regret not getting the minis in Claire's now.  Really hoping I can talk my SIL to going to another Sephora if I find one with the Illamasqua! Wish me luck!


(pictures to come!)

Nubar sale & dentist visit

First, the good news... Nubar is having a 2 day sale for 20% off retail orders of $30 or more with code AUG2030 August 6 through August 7. They're offering free shipping on orders of $75 or more after the discount is applied. By Nubar


Now, the craptastic day I had...I have 4 cavities which are going to cost in excess of $630 to fill in addition to the $85 today for office visit and X-rays. And...to replace the crown is going to require surgery for a dental implant to the tune of more than $4000! Oh, joy! There is no way on Earth I can afford this! Sheesh!

The only 2 bright notes in the day... I was a winner in the contest at Short and Sweet Nails ! Thank you so very much, Dionela! This truly made my day! *hugs*

2nd...will be going this weekend to the Mall of Georgia shopping for something to wear to my cousin's wedding. I hate clothes shopping, but...there is a Sephora and an Ulta there! I've never been to either and I'm praying to find some to-die-for polish haulage! *crosses fingers*

Hoping your day was better than mine! :)

name change!

After finding out there was already a polisholic, spelled differently, but still... I had to come up with a new name for the blog. I like the polish*haulic and wanted to keep it if I could. A day or two of brainstorming and finding other blogs with similar names to my ideas and I finally landed on this one. *sigh* We'll see if it sticks.
Off to the dentist in a few hours. Joy! There might not be any money left for polish hauls for a very long time afterward. Luckily, I went overboard on my birthday and will have tons of polish to see me through the drought! LOL!
Have a great day, polish*haulics! :-)

Allure's Essie giveaway

 Essie is giving away 500 bottles of Splash of Grenadine at 6 P.M. EST here! Hurry! And good luck to you all!

One of those days...

Have you ever had one of those days (week, really) when it seems like life really loves to kick you when you're down?
I had a tiny enamel chip off one of my back molars that I was intending to see the dentist about & for him to reattach my crown which had come uncemented from another tooth. So last night around midnight, I'm eating a banana when it started crunching. Obviously, that was wrong! Realized my tooth had started breaking off in little pieces. Great! Gotta make an appointment 1st thing. Wait...it gets better! I couldn't find my crown when I went to clean it so they could put it back in while I was there. I apparently threw the container it was in away without realizing while doing a quick clean of the bathroom for out of town guests! And the trash was picked up that morning! $1300 dental ware thrown away! *insert scream here* I don't have that kind of money!
Then today while looking at polish blogs to try to cheer myself up after booking a dentist appointment, I found out my name for this new blog is already taken! *cry* I Googled it, too, before deciding! It's spelled the correct way, so they're not exactly alike. But it would be too confusing to leave it that way, don't you think?
So I'll have to rethink the name or just quit it before it really begins. *sigh*
Anyone know how to make ~$1300 legally & quickly?

ready, set, go!!

It's that time of year again, fellow polish*haulics! It's August 2nd, which means the start of Allure magazine's famous annual August giveaways! Woo hoo! *does the happy dance in her chair!* :D

What's that you say? You've never heard of it before now? Get thee here for the goodies!  Meanwhile, I'll explain...

Starting at noon E.S.T. on the first weekday in August (today, peeps!) there are tons of loot up for grabs to those quick & lucky enough to grab them. Then until 5 or 6 PM, each hour on the hour a specified number of that hour's product are given away. The catch is filling out the form & getting it submitted as fast as humanly possible. A Secret Weapon!
So the 1 PM one starts exactly at 1 PM & prizes are often gone in 30 seconds or less depending on the amount being given away & the desireability of the prize. (i.e. The 30 bottles of designer parfum are near impossible to get while the 500 cans of Herbal Essence hairspray are more obtainable.) The kicker...you won't know what you've won until it shows up on your doorstep! Sound like fun to you? It is!!!


{Long story to follow...sorry! ;) }


You could say that the Allure August Freestuff Giveaway is responsible for tipping my like of polish to love of polish and by way of that, introducing me to the world of nail polish blogs. 
You see, I've always had fun with painting my nails but tended to stick to putting it on my toes because it chipped off my fingers before I knew it & on my toes it would stay forever! I felt like I was wasting my time on my hands. 
Then...last August, Orly was giving away a bunch of Enchanted Forest & being a lover of all things green, I knew I had to have it! Unfortunately, I got the days mixed up and forgot to be in front of my computer to try to grab one. I posted in my favorite freebie forum to see where I could buy it, and someone mentioned it was like OPI's Here Today...Aragon Tomorrow. Not being familiar with the brands, I got the OPI & Orly greens confused in my head while out shopping. I bought the OPI at Trade Secret thinking it looked a lot darker than I remembered. It was almost black, not the pretty forest green I remembered and it cost $8!(the most I'd ever paid for polish), not the $6 I thought it would be. I went home dejected & went online to find out why. Enter Google, Ebay, and my introduction to the nail polish blogosphere. And that, as they say, was that!
If you're still here, thanks for listening to my rambling story & I hope that you enjoy the Allure giveaway as much as I do. 
Good luck to you all!

Confessions of...

Hello,
My name is Michelle and I'm a nail polisholic. Welcome to my new blog!


I'm somewhat new to this love of all things polish related & nobody in my real-life world gets it. All too often I hear something like... "Just how many polishes do you need anyway?" (Answer = MORE! LOL! ) or "Why are you buying that? Isn't that the same color you're wearing now?" (No, heathen!  They are not the same! Shower Together & About Audrey look nothing alike!)
 
So, after spending countless hours perusing the blogs of others who do understand, I thought I'd reach out to my fellow devotees with my own thoughts, ruminations & experiences about this fun  addiction hobby. 


Why "the polish*haulic" spelled in that manner? Because I've found that I have a really hard time buying just one at a time, so all a lot of my purchases could be called "hauls"...that fun new word I learned in the polish blogosphere. ;-) I thought changing polisholic to polish*haulic would be appropriate & "polishaulic" looked a little weird to me.


Anyway...I hope that you will enjoy visiting with me every now & then and forgive my tendencies to babble on & on about stuff.


Until next time, fellow polisholics.

Michelle
the polish*haulic