Julep Maven :: January 2013

Hello Lovely Ladies! Today I bring you my first beauty box of 2013! Woohoo! And it's Julep Maven to arrive first on my doorstep for the new year and I'm excited :D Now the cool thing about Julep is that you get to preview your box before they ship it so that you can either pick a different box if you don't like the looks of what you are getting or just opt to skip the whole month altogether and not get charged. I think you can even gift the box to someone else for the month too, cool huh? Birthday present idea maybe? Anyways I opted to go for a different box than the one they picked for me this month because when I reviewed all the boxes I noticed one of them had three polishes instead of just two so I thought why not?! I'm getting the box for the polishes not the little extra products.

For the month of January, Julep is featuring neons and nudes. How exciting do those colors look huh? I thought some bright colors would be a great way to get through the last few chilly months of the season plus I don't own anything like any of these colors already so that's always fun to try something new and different I wouldn't normally go for.

So the first color is a bright citric orange called Nina, which also happens to be my mom's name lol! I actually prefer names that reflect at least in some small way the color of the polish. I think brands like Essie and OPI do that really well. Naming polishes after just random girl names kind of makes me think that their naming process just involves going down the list of top baby names for girls or something. Not to creative but whatever, just a name right? It's the color and formula that's important here! And this is a very cool color to me, formulation though leaves a little something to be desired which I will get into later.

Next we have a neon tennis ball green/yellow called Nikki. I don't know, I can't ever decide if a tennis ball looks green or yellow to me. With the camera it's looking a little green but in person its more of a highlighter yellow. Again, cool color in the tube, formulation I found to be less than satisfying as you will see down below in the swatches and it must be noted that this polishes was very gooey. It was almost tacky and was tough to work with to get a smooth coat. More on that in a bit.

Finally we have a lovely pearly nude called Amelia. No complaints on this one, formulation was nice and easy to apply. Nice neutral shade that will go with everything and just something that will get worn a lot. Very happy with this one.

And for this month's extra items they including a sticker swatching system. Ok cool I guess. Could be nice for storage. One little annoyance is that they applied stickers to the tops of the bottles for me....now how am I supposed to swatch the color in the tube when they've already stuck it to the top of the lid?? Hmmmm....yeah you know sometimes inefficiency annoys me. Or just lack of thought >.< Whatev.... Ok I'm over it :D

One more little tidbit are these cute little neon hair-ties. I have some similar ones and I actually really like these. They don't pull your hair and they don't leave creases like the standard black elastics do. These are not as stretchy as other ones I have so I think they may not suit someone with thicker hair but more my thin fine locks this is just right. Thanks Julep :D

Ok, so as promised I wanted to go into a bit more detail on the formulation of the neon polishes. Honestly at first I was really disappointed when I applied the colors to my nails. The picture on the right shows the color payoff after SEVERAL coats. The yellow color looks like I took a highlighter to my nail. It's so sheer and unimpressive on its own. The orange is a little better but not much. Instead of being bright and happy on my nails it just looks dull and dark. So what to do? Well I scrambled around in my polishes and found a plain white Essie polish that I had gotten for doing french tips and had the brilliant idea to apply a coat of white first! So as you can see in the photo on the left I did just that and was much MUCH happier with the results. Now these are not the best pictures because my camera is too forgiving but in real life, let me tell you there is such a big difference the white polish makes. I also needed a lot less coats of the colored polish to get a nice effect. After discovering this I am now tempted to go back through some of my other polishes that I haven't been happy with to see if adding a coat of white underneath helps brighten up otherwise dull or sheer colors. I suggest you guys try this too!

Well, I think that's all I have to say for this box. I hope you guys liked it :D If you did please feel free to leave a comment, share this post, and/or subscribe! If you guys also do blogs I'd love to follow and read your thoughts and ideas on beauty, lifestyle, or whatever as well! Let's be friends! Thanks for reading!