Er. That's sounds slightly wrong.

Anyway a few days ago it was my birthday! I'm officially sixteen and can do all those things that I've been doing since I was thirteen!

Moving on...I got some nice makeup-related items to celebrate.

 Nails Inc Colour Collection from my lovely brother and sister! I was so excited to see this, let me tell you. It's got four lush Autumn/Winter colours - a red, a grey, a blue and a taupe...
 It comes with ribbon, too!I also got some Bundle Monster plates from my parents! I've been wanting these for a while. I'm going to do a fuller, indepth review/tutorial later on, but I thought I'd quickly cover my feelings here. You do get an awful lot of designs for the price, which is great. But the edges /will/ cut your hands to shreds and I find on at least two of the plates the designs are too shallow as to show up effectively, which kind of negates the point. Plus they're incredibly difficult to clean effectively. While I'm not putting my plates up for display, I'm always worried that say, some of the pink nail polish I used previously will ruin the design of the next thing I am planning to stamp...

Oh, and perhaps this is the polish I use, but I haven't had this problem with any other brand of plate - the design often doesn't transfer correctly to the nail and pulls, stretches, or comes off altogether, which is obviously a huge pain in the bum. I'm trying to work out how to rectify this problem - and yes, I've removed the plastic!
 Can't wait to try this mascara out, but it'll probably be a looong time because I've got two others to get through before I tackle this one. Mini rant - why are drugstore mascaras so expensive these days? There's usually only a couple of pounds in it between those and the high end ones...

A quick round-up:

Adventures in Makeup have a great MAC Venomous Villians giveaway going on.

Jessica Allison are doing a giveaway including lots of Sleek, Sugarpill, Barry M, E.L.F...

At Suburban Beauty, you can win Urban Decay, Nars and China Glaze!

Win an insane amount of stuff at Babbling Brooke - and you have until New Years Day to enter!


A Christmas Giveaway at Confessions of a Make Up Addict - and this goes on for twelve days, with a different prize every day. Twelve chances to win, amirite? :P

Win Sleek and Chanel at Frootibeauty!

Fifty Follower Giveaway at Communicating Beauty!

Win some nail art plates at Konad-Licious!

The much coveted and blogged about "Stereo Rose MSF" is up for grabs at Beauty Reflections!

Cosmetics Aficiando's 200 Follower Giveaway includes Urban Decay!

Long time friend and commenter Toes That Twinkle is having a very generous (and international!) giveaway!

 World's most famous Pokemon, am I right?
 Pity it's eyes look so bizarre. Oh, and I like Pikachu for another reason - there's a song by the Korean rapper "e.via" named "Pick up Chu". Sounds just like she's repeating Pikachu for the entire chorus though. It's amazing.

 This was Nails Inc Milan (the free ones that they released with the Diet Coke bottles) and the rest, as usual, are nail art pens. I drew half Pikachus on my fingers and the real deal had pride of place on my thumb.

Be honest, did you not mentally say to yourself, "Pikachu, I choose YOU!"
No?
Oh, right then. #foreveralone.

I see how it is.

 The four fingers are Diglett, which is Dugtrio before it has evolved, and the thumb is Dugtrio. If I remember correctly :/
 I totally failed at doing the rocks. This Pokemon is basically always half underground, but mine look like they're just swimming in silver coloured cookie dough...
 I've chosen a far more well known Pokemon for my next task, haha.Oh, and these are nail art pens and Nails Inc Jermyn Street as the base colour.

 I can't even be bothered to make a snide comment about the naming choice.
 I really dig the glitter in this. It's dense enough so that the entire polish looks more like a dark gunmetal grey from a distance, and close up it looks really interesting. It's not quite "stars in the night sky" though, which is probably what they were aiming for. It's too small and evenly sized for that.
 I dig this. If I remember correctly, it was opaque in one coat and the formula was lush to apply. I did two coats to be on the safe side, though.
 It's not your basic black, it's funky and interesting. I like it. It wore well but I took it off about only two days as I had a design I wanted to try out. Typical of me. Sorry!
I purchased this for £2 as Boots were doing their £5 off vouchers at the time. Has anyone else noticed that prices vary regionally? The big Boots in the city sold these for £1.75 with the voucher, and I get to my Boots locally (still quite large, but with only two floors as opposed to three in the city) and it's £2.00. Why the inconsistancy?

It's actually a seriously hot pink, but whatever.

 In what alternate universe is this the colour of a berry? A berry on crack, maybe. Not your average berry, certainly.
 This colour is bizarre. For the Jigglypuff manicure, I wore two coats, no topcoat, and it went about four days before I even saw any tipwear. Understandably I was proclaiming it's awesome from rooftops, converting to Bootism et cetera. But I put it on for this swatch and no less than a morning afterwards, it's got tipwear like nobody's business. And I used a topcoat!
Berrylicious, why are you like this?

Have any of you guys run into this problem before?

I'm hoping some of you will remember, not too long ago I told you all about the Free Nails Inc polish with the December issue of Glamour? Well, I picked one up myself and found the little gem that is Nails Inc Jermyn Steet.

 This went on really well and was opaque in two coats. I'm still eager to try out Barry M Nail Paint in "Mushroom" because that looks like a really dark brown and I felt this was quite cool on my skintone. Still, I like it. It's a cool nude.
 No bubbles. It didn't last particularly long without a topcoat though, only a day before it began chipping. Which sucks. If I'd paid £10 a bottle for this, which is the RRP if I remember correctly, I'd be fuming. I shouldn't have to wear a topcoat, dammit :P I haven't tried it with one yet, though, so perhaps I'll update this when I have.
 It dried really quickly as well, which is always a plus since I ran out of my fast drying topcoat. Boo, Sally Hansen. Way to go cloudy and gloopy halfway down the bottle. Thanks for that.
The real plus of this polish, in my opinion, is in the removal. It genuinely melts off the fingernail when you apply removal to it. No rubbing, no effort of any kind involved, just wipe and you're ready to go. Makes my life so much easier. A+
Did anyone else pick up a copy of Glamour this month? Let us know if you did!