Azature: Opal Diamond

*Purchased by Me*

Hi guys! I hope you had a great weekend! It didn't rain the entire weekend here!! It did rain insanely hard for most of Saturday, but the sandbag in front of the garage worked like a charm! Sunday was cloudy and it drizzled a lot, but it wasn't a bad day. I'll share a little more about my weekend at the end of the post, but for now... let's get to the polish!

During the July 4th sale, I picked up quite a few Azature polishes for my birthday, and one of them was Opal Diamond. All of the swatches that I could find online showed it as a pretty pinkish light gray polish, and I knew it would be something unique for my collection. I'm not sure if the formula changed or what, but when I got the polishes, I noticed that my Opal Diamond didn't look anything like the bottles that I saw online.

Opal Diamond is inspired by the opal. The bottle that I received is a beigey taupe color with a delicate pink shimmer. The shimmer really works with this polish. It's not noticeable all of the time, but when the light hits just right, oh wow... it's gorgeous!

For these photos, I used 2 coats and a top coat.

So besides the color not being exactly what I expected, the brush (as you can see below) is a little wonky. It's not something that a quick trim can't fix, but it's still annoying combined with the color not being as expected! It would have been especially annoying if I'd paid the full retail price on the polish  ($25.00) rather than getting it on sale.

You can see the gorgeous pink shimmer very well on this photo!

Overall, I'm glad that this was not my first Azature purchase because I don't think I would have purchased any other polishes. Luckily, I picked up a lot more at the same time, and had worn a few prior to this one... so I knew this wasn't the norm. It's still a very pretty color... just not what I expected.

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So my weekend... I finally bought a new car! I've had the same car (2004 Scion xB) for the past 11 years, and I just loved that car. It was so cute, unique, and fun! And the radio display changed color (that was my favorite thing!) But being 11 years old, it was starting to have a few issues (power door locks not wanting to work all of the time, windows that didn't like to be cold or wet, a few funny noises every now and then). They were all pretty minor things that I could fix, but there have been so many advances in car technology and safety features in the last few years.

In August, my husband bought a Prius C, and that gave me the new car bug. So for the past 2 month, I've been doing a lot of research into new cars to see if I could find one that I liked. I finally narrowed it down to the Subaru Impreza, Hyundai Elantra, and Toyota Prius. The Impreza got eliminated because the dealerships around here had a terrible selection of them. Both dealers only had 2 models each, and neither were what I really wanted.

Yesterday, I went to test drive my remaining two choices. For my first 2 cars (yes, I'm almost 40, and I've only owned 2 cars), I made my husband do the test drives. I drove the Prius first, and I really liked it, and I loved the gas mileage it gets. But I didn't like that the only extra that it came with was a backup camera, and every time I asked the sales guy about one of the features that I saw online, it was only available on the 2 highest trims. I was going to have to spend close to $30k to get anything that I wanted. The biggest issue that I had was the pressure that I felt from the salesman and the finance manager. I get that they don't want a customer to leave because there's a chance that they might not come back, but don't they realize that the pressure is such a turn-off to buying?

We drove down to the Hyundai dealership, and they had sold the car that I had seen online that I wanted to look at, but they had another one with the same trim, but just a different color. So we looked at it, and the salesman told us about the different features and the safety features - all without any pressure. I took it for a test drive, and it drove and handled really well. It had everything that I wanted and then some! My husband checked the cost of ownership between the two cars, and it was comparable, as was the safety ratings. So I decided to buy it. I had to do a little negotiating on the price that they were going to give me for my trade-in, but all in all, I was pretty happy with the entire process.

Here's a photo of my new 2016 Hyundai Elantra Limited! Now we'll just see how many times I'll walk right past it in parking lots!

So what did you do this weekend? Anything fun?