Since I am on a plane today on my way to visit family in MA! VACATION! WAHOO! It is going to be the best vacay EVER! We get to see family, we get to meet culties! OMG - can you ask for anything more? 


I am seriously going to TRY to blog while home. I really am. I know I have been slacking lately. But to pick up my slack, what better than a blog post from the amazing Phyrra! She is doing a coordinating nails & face look. And the best part - if you want to see the tutorial on her eye look, she included a link to the how to on her blog! WAHOO! 


Thank you so much Phyrra for hooking my readers up! 

Hi there! Some of you may know me as Phyrra. I wanted to do a fun eye makeup look with a coordinating mani. I started with the nails and ended up with a medley of teal shades.





Nails (All Cult Nails Colors)
Thumb - Nevermore
Ring - Hypnotize Me on top of Nevermore
Middle - Hypnotize Me on top of Let Me Fly
Index - Always Winning on top of Let Me Fly
Thumb - Always Winning on top of Feelin' Froggy





So to coordinate with the nails, I came up with the following makeup look.




Eyes:
Too Faced Shadow Insurance Lemon Drop
BftE Ying Yang - inner v, inner lower lid
BftE Caribbean - middle of lid, middle of lower lid, lower crease
BftE Gem (with MAC Fix+) - outer v, outer lid, outer lower lid, later blended through crease
BftE Mermaid - upper crease
BftE Butt Naked - browbone and inner corners of eye
BftE My Pretty - outer crease to deepen
Tarina Tarantino Sparklicity Pure Opal (with MAC Fix+) - lid and lower lid
Too Faced 3 Way Liner - upper and lower lash line, cat eye
Sugarpill Lashes
Nyx Retractable Turquoise Blue Liner - lower waterline
Anastasia Caramel Tinted Brow Gel
LashControl Volumizing Mascara

Face:
Urban Decay Naked Skin Foundation in .5
Benefit Bella Bamba - blush
Urban Decay Moonshine - highlight

Lips:
Revlon lipbalm stain in Sweetheart
Venomous Cosmetics Flamingo gloss
MAC Gloss in Sugarrimmed

I even did  a tutorial for this look over at my blog if you're interested. Thanks to Maria for allowing me to do a guest post!

As many of you may already know we are planning two cultie meet ups during our vacation. Because seriously we figure if we are visiting our real families, then we should meet our Cult family as well! Makes total sense to us!

We are so looking forward to meeting you guys and of course we will be bringing some polish goodies for everyone who RSVP's! WAHOO!

For event details and to RSVP please visit the corresponding sites below:

The Foxboro, MA Meetup will be held at Tastings Bar & Bistro at Patriot's Place. There is not ticket cost for this event, but you will be responsible for your food and drink. The event takes place this Saturday July 28th at 7:00PM


To RSVP for the Foxboro, MA Meetup:
http://.cultnailsma.eventbrite.com

The NYC Meetup will be held at Bowlmor Lanes in Times Square. The cost for this event is $24 and has to be pre-paid. This includes two hours of unlimited bowling. (bowling shoes, food and drink are not included in the ticket price.) The event takes place on Monday July 30th at 7:00PM. Unfortunately Bowlmor has let us know that the tickets for this event are non refundable. 


http://cultnailsmidtownmeetup.eventbrite.com/

This is just a quick roll call of sorts. Here are some things we have going on that perhaps you may want to know about.

Calling all Nail Techs and Makeup Artists in the Miami Area:
We are looking for some Nail Techs and Makeup Artists in the Miami area for Miami Fashion Week Swim. I was contacted regarding some Cult Nails opportunities, but they also asked if I knew of any Nail Techs and Makeup Artists. Here is what I know, there are two shows on Friday Jul 20th at 6pm, one on Saturday at 6pm and one on Sunday at 2pm. Not sure of the call times, but they are usually hours before the actual show. There is no pay for the jobs, just exposure and opportunity to network. So this is great for a nail tech/artist and makeup artist to get their foot in the door. If you are interested in either opportunity, please email me so I can connect you with the proper people.

Calling all Culties in MA/RI
We are meeting up at Tastings Wine Bar & Bistro in Foxboro at Patriot's Place on Saturday July 28th at 7PM. I am so excited to meet some of you guys! I think it'll be fun and of course I'll come with polish goodies! WAHOO! I created an Eventbrite for this event, here is the link, please reserve a ticket if you plan on coming so we can get an accurate headcount in advance. Hope to see you guys there! http://cultnailsma.eventbrite.com

Calling all Culties in NYC
We will be having a meet up in NYC at Bowlmor at 7pm on July 30th. Get your bowling shoes ready and get ready to bowl the night away. (Or just gab since some of us like ME suck at bowling). I am STILL waiting on reservations to be confirmed before I set up an Eventbrite for this event, but I hope it happens today.

Cloning expert needed
I need a clone ASAP! Anyone know who can help me out with that? LOL

Man it has been a busy two days. I'm beginning to think you all like Coco's polishes better than mine! LOL! That's OK, it is definitely different than anything I have done, so it is a nice change of pace. But wait until you see what we have for the rest of the year.

Our long awaited, and more than slightly derailed duplicitous collection is set to release some time in September. These are all top coats. Yup a collection of top coats. 5 of them to be exact. But what a great way to change up a mani, than with these two timing toppers. I've shared three of them previously and will share them again along with the other two in the coming weeks.

Then our last collection of 2012 is AMAZEBALLS! Seriously, this collection, OMG, it just has me flushed thinking about it. We are calling it Behind Closed Doors. I'll let you guess on the colors but the names of the colors are: Flushed (yup based on how it makes me feel), Bitten, Disciplined, After Glow and Coveted. I can tell you even if you try, you will not guess the colors right. Well hmmm that could be a contest in the future... I will show you guys these in September. But I will keep them under wraps until then. (Well some of you may have seen a sneak peak of one of the colors on FB.)

But back to the hear and now and some exciting and perhaps not so exciting changes. We really like the way this sale is going. Having the collection at pre-sale prices but shipping each day seems to be going much smoother than pre-sale events. So we are going to do Preview Pricing for future collections  rather than pre-sales from now on. We will offer the collection at the reduced pricing we used during pre-sale as a collection preview special. It will be for the full collection only, so those of you who want the entire collection can get it early and save a few bucks. Then about a week after the preview pricing, we will post all the colors for sale at the regular price individually or as a collection. What do you guys think?

As for the not so good. We have been informed that the prices on making some of our polishes is going up. :( We are not raising prices at this point. We have been given advance notice and are trying to restock some colors at our existing price point so we can have time to figure out where we can maybe cut costs to keep our pricing the same. We won't cut costs on our product, but perhaps on our business infrastructure there is something that we can do more efficiently to save money.

But what that most likely means is that we will have to discontinue some colors in order to continue to provide fresh colors and to be able to afford to grow our business. This means we will be looking at which colors should make it into our Cult Classics line. These will be the core colors of our company, then the others will go away when they sell out and will not return. We are tossing the idea of putting them in the Cult Vault and possibly re-releasing them in future years, but we aren't sure yet. What we want to be able to do is provide you with a great group of colors as part of our core line and then keep things fresh with an ever changing array of colors. We believe this will help control costs as well. Once we know which colors are going away, we will let you all know in case it is one you had your heart set on, so you can be sure to get it before hand.

Lastly International customers (with the exception of Canada) I have a bit of sad news, but not too sad. (hopefully). Our shipping prices are going up. We audited our shipping per location and found that we are losing between $2 - 3 per order for shipping. That means you may pay $11 but it is costing us $13 or more to send it. When we calculated our total loss on shipping costs we were a bit floored. So after careful review we are going to have to increase International shipping by $2-3 per location. :( However we are going to keep orders over $75 as free shipping and we are not going to increase the rates until after we come back from vacation. (I wanted to do it effective August 1st, but I know Juan isn't going to want to mess around with the site when he could be hanging with his family, so we are making it effective August 7th - my birthday ironically). I didn't want to do it now in the middle of a launch, that just didn't feel right to me and I wanted to give my loyal International friends enough notice so if that cost difference means ordering or not ordering, you can stock up now. I would hate to plan an order, budget for it and then find out it's different than I thought, so I wanted to give you all advance warning.

Many of you have been with us since the beginning and I want to make sure we stay true to who we are as we grow this business. We have always been pretty open and I don't want to change that. So for now some of this is just potential changes, while others are definite. But either way, we hope you still stick with us as we grow the Cult!

Have you ever had a bad nail day? Similar to a bad hair day, it's one of those days where you set out to do your nails, and in your head you know just how great it's going to look. You take out all your supplies and you get to work. And then, it all goes down hill. You keep hitting a nail and ruining it, or the design just doesn't work out or who knows what.

I used Untamed as my base polish

That was me the other day. I wanted to break out my new Bundle Monster plates and play! After what seemed like forever taking the covers off the plates, I decided I just didn't have it in me to use them. I spent too much time already. So a few days later I broke out the plates again and set out to use one of the designs that made me get the plates in the first place. It gives the look of a gradient manicure. I was super excited to see if this would make the gradient manicure easier to do. Unfortunately my plate was not properly etched and the design would just wipe off the plate each time I tried. I tried with various polishes and finally with a polish made for stamping and nothing. No matter what I did, it wouldn't pick up. Frustrated I ran my finger across the plate and instantly you could tell it was not deep enough to work. I was a bit disappointed, so I picked up another plate and this design had spots where it was not picking up. Now I was concerned, I was wondering if maybe I got a bad batch, which is not characteristic of the plates I've received from Bundle Monster in the past. So bummed. Not one to give up I tried a third and fourth design. One I didn't like while it was on my nails, so I immediately took that off and set off on repainting my nails to go with the 4th and final design. Unfortunately I didn't let the design dry enough before putting on Wicked Fast and it ran a bit on my nails. Grrr. Let's not even talk about my index finger that I kept hitting on everything and had to do 7 times!!!

I am reusing the swatch pics since I didn't retake these since I already had some, but it came out so pretty I now have it on my toes too!

I spent almost 3 hours on my nails!! HELLO! Who has this kind of time? So frustrating! The only reason I am still even sporting this manicure is because it took so long to do, but seriously I just want this off my nails for a do over!

The final product. It doesn't look this bad in person, I actually keep getting compliments on it, but I can't wait to change it!!

The only good thing is that I'm wearing Untamed and I love that pink! At least there is one redeeming piece to this manicure.

The colored denim trend hasn't died yet and it looks like it's going to continue on into the Fall/Winter season. I for one am still loving the trend, and have a few more pairs now than I ever planned on having. The problem is that here in FL the summer is so hot, that you pretty much wear tank tops and shorts or pants. Since I love looking at style blogs, you would think I would find some inspiration there, but it seems like every blogger I follow is in some perpetual state of Spring and Fall. I could never wear what they wear, or I would just be sweating all day. But then, I feel like sometimes there is just no way to dress up tanks and shorts or jeans. So in my attempt to bring some more fashion to my colored denim, I thought I would share some of the ideas I came across with you. :) Of course i'll even give you mani suggestions for each look too! What more could you ask for?


Daytime Look


Here is a look I love and don't have in my wardrobe yet. A cute pair of colored shorts and a fitted tank with a bit of a sweetheart neckline. Love it. Of course, if my daughter were to wear this she could get away with the top on the left. For those of us a bit more conservative, the one on the right is a bit better of an option.

If I had this outfit with the top on the right, I would pair it with Untamed for my mani. It is such a fun vibrant color and would be the perfect finishing touch.


Evening Look
Top from net-a-porter.com, jeans from J Brand, Shoes from Piperlime.gap.com

To bring the colored denim look to evening, you may want to pick a darker pair like these J Brand jeans in Noir Red. I have a feeling these are going to be the it jeans this Fall.  The good thing about picking a darker pair for evening now, is that these will take you well into the Winter months. I can so picture these with some knee high boots and a slouchy sweater too. I love that this is sexy and sophisticated all at the same time. I can't get over these Frank Sarto sandals either. OK I just want this entire outfit!

This outfit screams for a vampy nail to go with it. So I would rock never more with either clear rhinestone studs or some gold flakes.

I hope all of you in the States had a great 4th of July. We didn't do much of anything. Coco did my nails and then I spent most of my day off going through my personal collection of polishes. My goal was to get rid of any and all polish that is non-Cult Nails polish. I buy other brands still but not often at all. But when I see a color that I absolutely must have, then I buy it. I also sometimes buy the it colors so I can study them and research the crap out of them. Why did you all love it so much? What did you hate? Why didn't I think of this color first? (I seriously do think this sometimes! ha!) Rarely does it spurn a "Oh I have an idea!" moment so I'm not sure why I even do this really. It is probably just part of my obsessive nature. As a result, I have polishes dating back to before my blog, but also since starting my blog in 2008 especially, tons of hard to finds and many it colors.

That Independence Day Mani I started with

Since I have this nice little treasure of at last count was about 800 polishes (gulp), I would do a blog sale. But as I sat there going through all the polishes I began separating them into three piles. Cult Nails polishes and creations including all my multiple lab samples. (You would be surprised how many colors we send to the lab to get made and how few actually make it into the line. Sometimes I can't make a color to send to the lab to recreate for me, sometimes I have to give them my concept/idea and hope they can get what is being envisioned in my head and make it into a polish.) ANYWAY, I digress, so I was separating the polishes into 3 piles, the Cult colors, the ones I could part with and the ones I just couldn't part with. (I thought for sure I could part with more than I actually did, turns out I just can't part with a single RBL or Chanel polish, no matter what. I love each and every one I own too much.) It was amazing how many polishes instantly brought me back to a particular day, week, occasion, feeling. The ones that didn't give me that instant pang if I got rid of it, went into the give away pile. Some I dug back through and grabbed and then ended up back in the give away box. I went back and forth like this all day.

Coco giving me a mani

After several hours I organized and cleaned out all the polishes. I thought at first I would do a blog sale and maybe recoup a small chunk of the money I had spent on these polishes. But as a polish line owner I just didn't feel right about this.  It just felt kind of weird, you know? But it sure would have been nice to have a few extra bucks with a vacation coming up. But the reality is what it is, and if I am not feeling right about it, then there is a reason for that.

Coco's mani, I still have this on my nails, I really need to change my mani!

So I thought this is what I would do. I reached out to a fellow blogger who knows of a few youth groups and shelters in our Central FL area and I am going to hand off these babies off to her to divvy up and donate. She typically takes any left over swap polishes from our group meet ups to donate, so I know she will find loving places for these. I think I have about 650 - 700 to donate. I wonder if they will think it's crazy when they get all these? I wish I knew of places on my own, but all in due time I suppose. It's a start and I feel comfortable with that.

A blurred out pic of some of the stash that will find new homes. It's blurred and in B&W on purpose so  no one has a heart attack over what is in there. LOL

Kind of a nice chill day off. I spent it with memories and cleaning. It was fairly quiet around here, so it was the perfect day for it. (read: boring) We had seen fireworks Monday night, so I didn't feel like I was missing out. And once my girls returned, we watched 21 JumpStreet, had a few laughs and called it a night. No BBQ's, no friends, no crazy crowds. Quite different from years passed. I will say though as nice as it was, next year, I think I want a return of the madness.

Blogger Phyrra hosted Garnier's Greener Tour in Brandon FL this past Saturday. The event was to help spread the word about waste and recycling. Garnier has partnered with Terracycle to create a Beauty Brigade to spread the word on our beauty waste and to get us all to recycle our empty beauty care bottles and containers. I learned that 1/3 of the waste in our landfills is beauty product containers! 1/3!!! I know we are beauty obsessed, myself included, but wow!

Garnier Greener Tour

It was a great time. I got to see Phyrra and a few of my other favorite FL Beauty Bloggers and I learned a little more about recycling and Terracycle and what they do.

Posing with Phyrra, Loving her hair!

Sadly I hate to admit, I don't recycle my beauty containers. We have recycle bins in our garage and we try to recycle our trash. We do a lot, but also could do a lot better. I made an effort a few years ago to be better with this and I was doing an amazing job, but then slowly some old habits creeped back in. But as for my beauty products, I just always threw the empty containers in the trash because I don't have recycle bins in my bathroom and just never even thought to put it aside and take it downstairs with me. On a daily basis or almost daily basis, I use saline solution, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, hairspray and other hair care products, moisturizer, makeup, lip products, lotion, body sprays and the list goes on. I am one of those people that will use the entire product before going out and getting another on most of these products. With three teenage daughters doing more or less the same thing as me, we are contributing to a lot of that waste in our landfills. I wanted to cringe, why didn't I think of this before? It seems so obvious that these are recyclable containers!

Some Garnier products on display

Well Garnier and Terracycle are hoping we all open our eyes and see where we are contributing to the waste and help us make a difference. You can go to Garnier's or Terracycle's web pages to learn more and join the Beauty Brigade. You can send your empty containers to Terracycle where they will use your waste to create new goods and you earn points that can be used towards a charity of your choice. I joined and now I put a small bag under my sink where I will put my recyclable beauty containers to regularly send to Terracycle for recycling/upcycling.

Beauty Blogger Libby's Pink Vanity getting her hair done while bloggers OnceBitten and Phyrra look on

If you would like to learn more, I encourage you to check out Garnier's and Terracycle's website. You can also check and see if there is an upcoming Garnier Greener Tour heading to a city near you on EventBrite's website.

Coco recycling a beauty container

Incidentally while linking all the sites to this post I noticed that Phyrra has her swatches of Coco's Untamed Collection up on her blog today! If you want to see more swatches, go check it out!

I had to wear Coco's Deal With It as it's a perfect match for Garnier's products. Here I am showing off one of my favorite Garnier products, their BB Cream.