Thursday 30 January 2014

A Butterfly Moment

Out of all the neutrals I've tried over the years, who'd have thought my absolute favourite would come from the Mariah Carey collection?  OPI's A Butterfly Moment is the perfect shade for my skin tone, with the perfect amount of shimmer to give it interest while still staying subtle.  A gorgeous, go-to polish.

This is one coat of OPI Matte Nail Envy, three coats of OPI A Butterfly Moment, and one coat of Sally Hansen Insta-Dry Anti-Chip Topcoat.

Sunday 26 January 2014

The Great Milky Foot Experiment of 2013 - The Stunning Conclusion!

By Day 1 - It's like nothing ever happened.  There is no change.  I am disappointed.

Day 2 - There's a slight shine to my soles, a faint feeling of dry tightness, and the area between my toes is flaking.  It's not a huge change but I'm hoping for big, gross things.  Fingers crossed!

Day 3 - And so it begins.  Day 3 dawns and the long promised peeling begins in earnest.  It's vile and cool in equal measures - vile because peeling skin obviously, but cool because the layer peeking from underneath the gross layer is lovely.  I'm seeing potential!  Must.  Not.  Peel.


Day 4 -  Dear god they never told me the TOPS of my feet would also peel off!  This is awful!  Huge sheets of skin just flapping in the breeze like the sails of a yacht.  I'm walking around town like a normal person and all the while I'm hyper aware of this leprous secret I'm hiding inside my shoes.

Day 5, and the grossness is almost impossible to quantify.  I am disgusted by my own feet.  Worse, though, is that it's no longer possible to ignore the flesh sloughing from my soles.  Yeah, it's ugly, but it's also itchy, tight, and uncomfortable.  I've resorted to doing the expressly forbidden - I'm manually peeling the worst of the hanging skin off.  I'll just have to hope I won't be scarred for life.


 

Day 6 - I've exfoliated and peeled the worst of the dead skin off.  The peeling process is not complete by any means, but there's a lot of fresh, pretty skin on the tops of my feet and the thinner skin of my soles like the arches and between the toes.  The heels and balls of my feet, having thicker skin, are taking a bit longer.

Day 7 - I resorted to the trusty Ped Egg to hurry the last of the skin off.  I'm so over this whole thing and I'm bored of having to shake dead skin out of my shoes.  But, and here's the thing you've been waiting for, my feet look AMAZING.  And, as advertised, they are as soft as balls.  Actually, I don't think that's exactly how Milky Feet are advertised, but if they were they would not be lying.  I slathered them in shea butter and wore socks to bed because they looked so bare and helpless.

Day 8 - I fine tuned the cuticles and dressed the toenails in some deep red glitter polish and, I swear, my feet look like something out of a catalogue.  Incredible.  I'm very pleased with the final result.

Day 9 - Day 16 - I took my fabulous feet with me on vacation and they looked perfect pretty much the whole time, although the soles are starting to thicken up again.

Day 17 - My feet are dry.  Dryer than normal.  

Day 18 - My feet are peeling from the dryness!  In the name of everything holy, NOOOOOOOOO!  I mean, they're not peeling the way they did after the Milky Feet exposure, but they are a lot dryer and rougher than usual and I haven't been treating them badly.  This sucks.

Day 19 - Back to the Ped Egg I think.  It's true that my feet were truly gorgeous for a couple of weeks there however a week of grossness is too much to pay for a mere two weeks of perfection, followed directly by another week of dry, cranky feet.

Conclusion - Milky Foot works, no doubt about it.  But it's vile.  Vile and inconvenient.  And the results don't last long enough to make the inconvenience worth my while.  Maybe if you're getting married barefoot or something...