BEAUTY: NAIL POLISH TRAVEL SELECTION

" If I had to choose, which nail polishes would I keep and which ones would I throw away?" Back home I asked myself this question just for fun, when I was deciding which nail polish to wear. Sometimes it took me a little while, because my collection of nail polishes in every imaginable colour and shade is bigger than I ever thought it would be.

Now everything has changed, because I don´t live at home anymore; at least for half a year. So this nail-polish-struggle became real.

These little glass bottles are heavier than I expected them to be. Sadly, I made this experience when I tried to stuff my luggage with a ton of them. There was no loophole: I had to make my decision.

Here we go!

First of all I present you guys my selection of nude- light brownish nail polishes, which I love to wear in any season. The one in the left upper corner by p2 is called "030 skin" nail foundation. This one and the next one by p2, called "143 forever", have a creamy and smooth finish. The third one by KIKO ( nr. 209) is more like a light and transparent polish. It looks very neat on your nails.

This white one by essence ( "33 wild white ways") is actually better than I thought, especially for its low price. The opacity is not too bad and let´s be honest - every girl needs a white nail polish. Wearing it, your hands look so elegant - I just love it.

Even though it doensn´t happen that often, still I´m in the mood for colourful nails sometimes. Usually
I´m not the biggest fan of yellow or green on my nails, but red and pink is pretty cool though.

" 01 loose your heart on the board" by essence is just a gorgeous colour, not fluorescent or anything, just eye-catching and fresh.






And of course, no one should be traveling without a classic red. I love this look of timeless beauty that Astor´s " 305 a drive in my cabriolet?" creates.

And last but not least, my dark nail polishes, that I think I like the most, especially now, in fall.
It´s essence´s "144 black is back", obviously a plain black that I like a lot ,although my family keeps telling me that I look like a witch when I wear it.
The next one is KIKO´s "697", my newest baby. It´s pretty cool, because it has a velvet satin finish and contains very small glitter pigments in dark blue.
The very last one is my biggest love ever: " luxedoo" by essie. On the picture it may look like it´s black, but in fact it´s a really dark bloody- aubergine red. It´s super easy to apply, it´s long lasting, it dries very fast and even one coat only looks great.

Even though I couldn´t imagine a life with only nine different nail polishes, I think I´m doing fine. Besides, it´s only for a few months more.






If anyone of you guys knows a beautiful light gray colour, tell me! I´m looking for it for what feels like forever.

See you! 

REVIEW: SHATTER ME

" Shatter me" by Tahereh Mafi, published by HaperCollins in 2012 takes place in a dystopian world and deals with Juliette´s life, that it different from lives of other girls her age. The reason is Juliette being different from other girls - her touch is lethal.

The story starts with Juliette being in a prison cell as a punishment for killing a little boy a few years ago. She spends her time writing in a little notebook, till a young man called Adam becomes her cell mate.

Things develop and Juliette and Adam get to know each other, meawhile she still asks herself if
she goes insane and why she´s different from anyone else.

Everything changes when Warner, the leader of the Reestablishment´s Sector 45, tries to convince Juliette in his own, cruel way to cooperate with the government. They want to use her as a torture instrument.







When Juliette and Adam - who appears to be Warner´s best soldier and her personal sentinel - get in trouble, they decide to flee, what occurs to be a dangerous undertaking.

My personal opinion on the book

 - no spolier -

This book was everywhere! People talked about it in every book haul, enthused about it in wrap ups and TBRs.
I felt like I shouldn´t miss it, so I bought it on amazon.

Superficiality first: to me the cover looks okay; it´s not the most beautiful one I´ve ever seen, but its aspect promises a lot of suspense, at least that´s how I feel about it.




Let´s get down to my opinion on the story. First at all it may be important to know that I´m not a native speaker. That might be the reason why my view differs from others.

I honestly was a little afraid if this book measures up to everyone´s expectations, because they were raised very high.

When I first started to read this book, I liked it a lot. It´s so different from everything that I´ve read before. Tahereh Mafi´s style is so unique and the crossed out lines make you feel like you´re reading Juliette´s diary.

Nevertheless, I had difficulties with reading this book on the whole. Tahereh´s English is beautiful, but I had to look up countless words and that sucked. Sometimes there was just too much poetic stuff in one sentence. Instead of using the word " cry" to describe that the main character ... cried, Mafi made use of symbols and metaphors and allegories, what´s pretty cool on the one hand, but a pain in the neck on the other.

Still, the author makes it so easy to imagine this girl, sitting alone in a cold cell, cowering down. Juliette really starts to believe that she´s insane, because she´s so lonely and never touched a person after this horrible incident; her parents never loved her like parents love their normal children - and I felt so bad for her.

Even though it was hard for me to read this book from a perspective of a person, who behaves like she´s insane, I liked this girl so much.




Continuing reading this book, my sympathy for her shrank. To me she acted as if in a trance, she behaved in a weird way and let things just happen, instead of acting like a kick-ass heroin. Sure, this is kind of lifelike when you consider everything she´s been through, but still it wasn´t fun to read. Her free will seemed to be broken, although she tried to break free once or twice.

In the end I liked her a little more again, because she finally awakened from her weird passive state and did a few really cool things I didn´t expect from her.

Adam was my favourite character, because he is a man of action. And what´s about this Warner guy? Everyone loves him, but I don´t get it. When people talk about this book, it always sounds like a love-triangle, but I can´t see it. Please, enlighten me!

And the end of the book, seriously? I didn´t expect that, but it really makes me want to continue reading.

On goodreads I rated it four stars.
Let me know what you guys think in the comment section below.

See you!

REVIEW: A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES

"A Court of Thorns and Roses" by Sarah J. Maas, published by Bloomsbury in 2015 is about this girl Feyre, who lives in a little hut in the woods. Her life is all about providing for her family, her crippled dad and her two sisters. She does that by hunting, what she´s really good at. 

One day in winter she enters the forest and comes across a wolf, who appears to be a fairy from the neighboring country called "Prythian". When Feyre notices the wolf´s nature, she kills him out of hatred for his kind. 

But Feyre doesn´t go unpunished: she has to pay the price when another fairy crosses the border between Prythian and the human world to get her. A life for a life.

So much for the plot.

Let´s get to the point where I talk about my opinion on the book.

- no spoiler -

When I first saw the cover, I honestly felt a little reluctant about this book. Even though everyone kept saying that the cover looks gorgeous, I personally thought and still think that it looks crappy. It looks very high-fantasy and kind of gothic, what was very deceptive to me. Only by judging this book by its cover, I expected a cheap story.

Fortunately I listened to everyone on youtube telling me that it is absolutely worth reading it - and they were so right!

When I read the first few pages, I wasn´t really sure what to think about it, because you already knew what was going to happen by what is written on the back side of the book and it didn´t seem to be very thrilling or something. I was so wrong.

Even though I usually don´t like fairies, especially when they are male - it just doesn´t seem to be very masculine and attractive to me -  I kept reading.

Although mask-wearing and shape-shifting faeries are not my favorite kind of characters, I condoned them. And at some point they even stopped bothering me, because there was just too much suspense to pay attention to something that unimportant.

The main characters I did like very much, even though Feyre seemed to be a little weird in the beginning. In the early stages I didn´t get why she did so much for her strange and cold-hearted family, but little by little you got to know her and her situation and I started to like her. 

After I read the first half of the book, I was addicted to it and I couldn´t stand not to go on reading it. I thought it was just about Feyre - whose name I pronounced so horribly wrong in my head - staying with the feary-guy to pay for her misdoing. 

Honestly, I didn´t expect this huge dimension the story had. There was such a strong love, so many complex characters with complicated relationships and an epic history of the whole empire. 

The best part of it was that all of this was unforeseeable, but still not out of clear sky. All the time I was wondering about the mysteries and secrets Feyre was wondering about as well; and when Feyre and thus me discovered the truth, I was amazed by how intelligent Sarah J. Maas plotted the whole story. It didn´t seem like she made up a weird and abrupt plot twist. It was there all the time, I just didn´t see it. All in all, I loved it despite my aversion at first.

                           

At goodreads I rated it five stars.
See you!

HAUL: LEATHER BACKPACK

Shopping in stores like H&M, Zara or Mango is fun, in most cases.

Sometimes it feels like the whole town population gathers there to jerk brand new dresses and shirts from the clothes rail, just to take a look at them and to throw them on the grubby ground afterwards.




Sometimes it´s so crowded, you have to find your way through a maze of busy people searching for the perfect dress for this date in this fancy restaurant or just restocking their wardrobe after they cleared it.




Sometimes you inspect the latest collection, unsuspecting, and suddenly a woman appears, who actually seems to be nice, but in fact takes the most beautiful shirt before you even get there.







Needless to say, in terms of shopping there are good days and bad days, we all know.

A few days ago, I actually had a good shopping day. But I wasn´t at the usual shops, I went to a market with my friends. And it was amazing! All these colorful booths, hand-made accessories, buskers everywhere, sunshine.





And when I saw this little baby here, the day turned out to be a perfect one.


I wanted a backpack like this for a long time and I actually saw a lot of them in these arabic leather kind of shops, but I never found the perfect one.


Of course, I was looking for quality, but even more important was a simple, but beautiful design.


Besides, I felt sooo good about buying this beautiful piece of leather, because I felt like I discovered it in the mass of stuff there.


It wasn´t like buying stuff in a shop, where 90%, or maybe 75% of the stuff is fashionable, more or less.


Even though I know this backpack isn´t really unique, it seems to be unique to me.

HAUL: FILOFAX SUPPLIES & WASHI TAPE

I try really hard not to spend money on things I don´t need. But when it comes to filofax supplies or anything concerning stationery, I´m weak.
All these super necessary bits and pieces with colorful designs - and then there is this thing about having fun collecting things.

Generally I´m not the biggest fan of this cartoon- kawaii- kitsch kind of stuff. I do like it more clean and simple.

stamps

That´s the reason why I´m not going to use all of these stamps. The two with bows are not really me,

but I do like the one with this twig-frame and the one with the banner on it, a lot actually. 

And it was only 2,50€ at Hema, including ink pad.

washi tape

I couldn´t resist buying these pretty washi tapes. My favorites are the blue-checkered and the pink-dotted one. They really look good on my planner´s pages and they are sober, somehow.

Decorating lists or planner pages is so much fun and of course, there is always a reasonable cause to expand your collection with new supplies.

I bought the single-colored tapes to mark important things in my planner, like assignments or appointments; not that I have a bunch of highlighter pens.

Seems like I´m into pink colours these days.

Another shot of the patterned ones. 

The second tape´s color combination of pink, yellow, gray and teal I do like a lot. I purchased it at fnac for 3€.

sticker

Even though it might seem like I lied before- when I told you I don´t like kitsch- I bought these pastry-stickers you can see in the front. I thought it would look very cute, if I used these in my planner when me and my friends meet in a café to eat some cake while chatting. 

The little hearts I want to put next to my friends´and family´s birthdays´ reminder in my planner. Just to add some detail to my pages. 

The kind of ugly stickers in the back I want to use to color-code my sport tracking book. If you want to hear more about it, let me know!

For now, I think that´s all. I hope you enjoyed reading this post. If you didn´t, please tell me what bothers you.
This blog is kind of a learning-by-doing project.

See you!