Yesterday I showed you the Essence Me and My Ice Cream nail sticker with the beads on it - which is a really excellent little product. Today I have swatches of three of the four polishes from the collection.  I'll talk about the application and formula at the end of the swatches.

Always on my mint - a very very pale mint green with a silvery shimmer. All of these are very sheer

Ben and Cherries- a pale pink with a silver shimmer.

Icylicious - a light peach with a silver shimmer.

There is one more in the collection - Ice Ice Baby which is a pale lilac shade.  

All these shades are very pale, only just off white really and the formula was sheer.  They all needed four coats for opacity.  I also found the brush really stiff, which meant it dragged through the polish and would leave brush dents as I wiped.  But after four coats and a coat of Essence Gel Look top coat, these were super glossy and shimmery. 

The Essence Me and My Ice Cream collection will be available exclusively at Priceline stores in October/November..

Products provided for review.

This is one beautiful polish that is generally agreed to be a dupe of Deborah Lippmann Across the Universe.  Dark blue jelly with small square blue glitter and medium sized blue and green hex glitter.

I purchased two bottles of these as they are only small 6ml bottles.  I'm glad I did because I used three layers to achieve this look.  I wanted to use this colour on its own rather than layering with it, because I really wanted to have the depth of pieces of glitter suspended in the various layers of polish and overlapping each other.

Purchased from Target for $2.55.  Whoo Hoo.

This was Nail Tek II foundation, three coats of Blue Addicted, one coat of gelous and one coat of seche vite.  Look how smooth and glossy it is.  That's the gelous working for me!!

This mani totally rocked.  I wore it to work on Friday and the security guard at the front entrance noticed my nails and commented how cool they looked.  I love it when total strangers notice your nail polish!!

Whoo hoo, Happy Birthday to me today!  Boo Hoo, my husband is on the road with the Canberra Cavalry baseball team on the other side of Australia, in Perth.  Seriously he couldn't be further away unless he left the country.

So what is there to pep up a girl?  Awesome nail mail.  The best thing about all this nail mail is that it wasn't even for my birthday, it just arrived in time for my birthday.

First is my Ludurana Aurora Boreal.  I did a swap for these polishes with the sweetest Rafa from Nails Ink.  They were wrapped in the beautiful way with purple bubble wrap and cellophane bags with hearts on them.  It really was like opening a birthday present.  Thank you Rafa!

I didn't get Espetecular, and I see that llarowe doesn't sell it on her site either. But looking at bottle pics it looks very similar to Fascinate.  Rafa also included a Risque polish that looks like a Chanel Paradoxal dupe.  Below are all the holos. Arrrgggggh *wipe drool from mouth*

Next, after seeing Stefs post about Essence being available in Target, I did some googling and discovered that as of Thursday they are now available in every Target in Australia, not just selected stores.  So I hauled arse over to the Canberra city target to check it out.  Canberra ladies, don't bother checking it for a week or two, the display stand was well and truly picked over, with less that 1/3 of polishes left. 

But the polish Gods must have been smiling on me, because there were still two bottles of Blue Addicted left.  Blue Addicted is the dupe for Deborah Lippmann's Across the Universe, which after seeing Carli's post about it, I had to have. STAT!

Sitting next to that is Nfu Oh #51.  I have been trying to get this polish for at least two years.  I had all the other Nfu Oh Flakes through Vivid Nails, but they were never able to get me this last allusive polish.  The most awesome Erina got me this bottle. Thank you so much!!

I received my Cult nails order.  The Superheros collection.  I can't wait to try them.  Clairvoyant. WOW. It may seriously be the most awesome polish ever!  There's a very cool looking duochrome one in there too - Mind Control.  It looks to be a very special collection.

Finally, I had a gathering with my family last weekend to catch up for my birthday and my Dad's, who's was the week earlier.  I baked a cake.  The ladies instantly knew what it was, but one of my brothers was scratching his head for a while.  Not my best decoration, but it did kinda looks like a metallic orange gold bottle of polish.  It tasted yummy too.

I just don't have time at this time of year to do swatching, so it will have to be NOTD for all those bottles above.