I don't remember who/what/where told me about this polish, but I wish I could hug them. If you need major bling-tastic sparkle goodness on your fingertips, Joss In A Violet Haze is your girl.
indoor CF lighting
IAVH in the bottle is suuuuuper sparkly silver, with a hint of pink flash and a hefty dollop of holographic zaps. In lower light, you can tell that this is a little sheer, but IRL, the intensity of the shimmer was more than adequate to make this visually opaque. I'm wearing 2 coats here, which i thought was perfectly adequate. 3 coats would probably get you to true opacity, and 1 very light coat would make a pretty amazing topper. About 75% of the pics i took ended up showing only the silver +/- some of the rainbow goodness.
outdoor, direct sunlight
That rainbow goodness is there A LOT, though. Those sunlight pics give you the idea on how much shiny sparkle is there, but they stop short of the true amount of rainbows and flash. Below is how this works in regular indoor lighting - blurry to highlight just how much rainbow sparkles are glinting off of this, no sunlight necessary for the show. This is no subtle, professional workplace, grown-up kind of stuff, people.
indoor CF lighting
In lower light, one other thing I really liked about this polish becomes apparent - for all that the sparkly bling looks to be discrete sparkle particles, IAVH is not glitter at all. In fact, it's more of a foil finish, with chunky flaky shimmer - removal of this did not require any serious effort at all (other than, of course, anything this shimmery will leave shimmery bits all over).
indoor, indirect sunlight
In all lighting, there was a lovely magenta-pink flash in the center of the light reflections. Which, when angled up to the light...Surprise Duochome FTW!!!
both, indoor CF lighting
A lovely and thoroughly unexpected shift from magenta to a glowy pale golden firefly-green was apparent only in lower light, while the pink was there all the time. Most of my pics above aren't completely accurate, though - the saturation and richness of the magenta flash was IMPOSSIBLE to properly catch with either my point-and-shoot, or my cellphone cameras. The closest i could get is this blurry angled shot - the few scattered magenta bits of light are how intensely PINK the central flash of this polish looks most of the time, in high or low lighting (mentally paste this intensity of color over anywhere above you see pink).
indoor CF lighting
I tried a video to better catch what's going on, and I think it's a good bit closer, with a bonus sparkle of that firefly green.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. This was absolutely a can't-stop-staring sort of polish. The rainbows plus the intense color flash PLUS surprise duochrome were all great, but to top it off, this one applies very easily and wore like iron - no chips or edgewear at all after 3+ days.
I'm sure that every polish geek has a half a handful (or plenty more) topcoats - I myself have my go-to quick dry, a thicker one for chunky or unsmooth finishes, some back-up "lesser" quick drys, and a matte. Having that many, though, honestly means we're all still looking for MORE! For a couple of years now, my holy grail TC has been HK Girl. I'd been pretty happy with INM Out the Door for a year or so, but HKG dries much faster to a harder (aka more chip-resistant) finish, so I made that switch around the time we started blogging here. I've never had the love affair with Seche that plenty do - it seems more stinky to me and I get shrinkage often enough to have never bought more after my first 99 cent mini of it. I've seen a few blog posts mentioned some behemoth from WalMart, and remembered to pick up a bottle when driven to the commercial den of iniquity by a wild goose chase for multichrome notebooks, which brings us to... Topcoat Battle!!!! ...
Every time I Love Nail Polish releases another batch of their multichromes, my wallet is going to take a little hit. Their formula is always great, but the colors . OMG, I die with these super shifters. From the most recent release, my first pick was Masquerade. Ginormously pic-heavy post in 3...2...1... Masquerade is a very sheer charcoal grey base packed with magically light-bending pigment that goes from a rich magenta-wine color, through a lighter pink, then bronze, on its way to a vibrantly saturated emerald green. It took 3 coats to get it to visible opacity, of the sort where it can look sheer if you hold your fingernails up to the light. Though it's most often a metallic to slightly brush-strokey chrome, in the sunlight, a sparkly shimmer peeks out. outdoor, bright sunlight The color range can be soft and muted: ok, "muted" for something like this, anyway. outdoor, overcast/cloudy day It can be mostly wine: outdoor, ...
After my peel-off fiasco left me with 2 split nails, I immediately reached for Orly's Nail Rescue kit, which I've used on many occasions to solve these issues. Nail Rescue comes in a box that contains this small bottle of cyanoacrylate glue with an extremely convenient polish brush in the cap and a little jar of acrylic powder - yes, kids, you're going to make yourself a little patch of fake acrylic nail. Spoiler alert: this system is utterly genius, and WAY longer lasting than any tea bag patch. As a refresher, this was my problem. Shown here is the split on my thumb, but in the rest of the pics, I'll be fixing my middle finger on my cinderella hand, which had a split just as bad, but much trickier to photograph without whackadoo contortions. Fortunately, both of these splits hadn't caught on anything yet, and therefore weren't bent out of place. In other words, this fix kit works best as soon as you notice a break problem, not after it's got...
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