Sweet Baby Octopolish!

After my last 2 Dance Legends have been wholly underwhelming, I checked through the list of untried goodies from them to see if there was a shot at redemption.  A-ha!  After absolutely loving the other 2 of the LE Mortal Kombat polishes ( Reptile  and  Sub Zero ) earlier this year, I snagged the 3rd one in the collection, Rain, to make this my only 100% complete polish collection ever. indoor, bright CF lighting Check out my new oval nails!  Malta #91's insane chippiness meant that I ended up with a pretty bad break along an edge of 2 different nails, so I could either go to nubbins or round them out.  They still seem strange (I've had square/squovals for so long now these don't look like me), but they're cute and a little girly, so I'll give it a whirl for a while. indoor, bright CF lighting Like the others in the collection, Rain is a very dark not-quite-black polish when cold that then shifts tonally to a plum wine when warm.  This jelly...

For the Christmas holiday, I wasn't feeling super in the spirit, but I figured some red & green would certainly help get me there.  For starters, I pulled Dance Legend Malta #91 out of the untried pile. indoor, bright CF lighting This here bottle shot is all you need to know about this polish: The gold shimmer is utterly gorgeous against the creamy forest green The gold shimmer 100% completely settles to the bottom of the bottle within 12 hours of a vigorous 15 minute shaking session to re-suspend it I know it settles out within 12 hours because this polish is a chippy bitch that needed touch-ups in that amount of time It was a big disappointment, and the lovely color isn't worth the fussy formula and the very poor wear time, so into the trade pile it goes.  While touching things up, I also stamped some white snowflakes using Born Pretty's BP-01 plate and Pretty Serious Presence. the rarely observed cinderella hand! And then on one side, I added so...

And one (ok, two) last lovelies from Femme Fatale before I sail off to vacation for a couple of weeks. Color 4 Nails scored a pair of store exclusives (as did a few other stores around the world) earlier this year, and the near-black Ouija was an instant must-have for me.  When Maiden's Patience from the Midsummer Night's Dream collection arrived with my Black Friday haul, I was struck at how the holo glitter in each was a nice compliment for the other. indoor, CF lighting Ouija is a super smooth dark charcoal (it's so close to black that I have it filed as black, but if you're dead set on true blackest black it's not quite there) with a gorgeously perfect formula that was fully opaque in 2 coats.  It has a very subtle linear holo and a smattering of smallish silver holo glitters. indoor, bright CF lighting Ouija made a pretty compliment/contrast to the very pale off-grey crelly of Maiden's Patience, which had a few different sizes of white and silv...

Next up on this week's Femme Fatale-a-palooza is Hundred Years Winter.  I originally passed on this one from the Narnia/White Witch collection, but some swatch pics in the fan group were just too fabulous to pass up. indoor, window-filtered daylight Hundred Years winter is a rich, greyed-out mauve with a very contrasty bright teal shimmer.  It's nearly a one-coater, and 2 didn't deepen either the color or the shimmer - if it looks done, you can stop. outdoor, direct sunlight I'm a huge fan of contrasts or two-things-at-once in my polish, and this one utterly delivers.  The shimmer is not shy at all, and flashes gorgeously in any bright light.  In shade, the shimmer is much more stealthy, and the base color can look closer to grey than pink. indoor, window-filtered shady daylight The formula was ridiculously creamy and stayed exactly where I put it; clean up was minimally necessary.  There were, unfortunately, what I can only assume to be little...

A recent sample sale on Femme Fatale's FB fan group has me eager for all things FF; combine that with a good portion of my black friday haul being FF's magic, and it's time to dig these out of the untried pile right now.  From the recent Alice in Wonderland's Mad Tea Party collection, here's Mad as a Hatter. indoor, bright CF lighting Hatter is a dark pine green jelly packed with iridescent gold-to-red-to-green flakies, red microglitters, and what might be Fantasy Fire/230 shifting shimmer.  It's a whole lot going on, but it's a lovely, earthy autumn in a bottle. outdoor, shady daylight The flakies are of course the first thing that catches the eye, with the effect being rather like Essie Shine of the Times over, say, Nars Zulu.  Hatter is a bit lighter than Zulu, never looking black in any lighting, but it does pick up some of the very dark, smoky look of that other deep green jelly. indoor, bright CF lighting The flakies aren't al...

Now that we've got flakies and holos and multichromes, everyone's looking for what will be the next hot thing.  Laqcuistry's got something pretty unique with her "metal flake" polishes, of which I have 2 here, Chinese New Year and Amazeballz (fine). indoor, bright CF lighting Amazeballz was apparently Laqcuistry's first foray into this magic mix, and she now stocks several different grades, each with a different size of golden metal flake.  This one on my ring finger is "You're so Fine," touted as a one-coat wonder.  And damn if it's not pretty close - a heavier hand would have done it in one, but I needed 2 for perfection.  The formula on Amazeballz is utterly perfect, which is good because cleanup of these flakes is as tricky as it is for any other flakes (they like to stick like they're grafted to one's cuticles).  Note that many swatch pics (including some of mine) show this color as a tarnished silver, and that's dead w...

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...

Glitter is of course a love-hate thing, what with the fabulous sparkles and the hellish removal.  So far, I find that my one brand of peel-off basecoat (Nail Pattern Boldness' Glitter-a-Peel) works well if you use 2 coats, but it's going to start popping off after a max of 48 hours.  Lots of bloggers favorably reviewed Dance Legend's Glitter Base (most reviews I saw were for the black version, with no glitter on top, just trying it solo) - this line of products is tinted opaque so you don't need undies for your glitters, letting you skip a step.  I snagged a bottle of the nude version on the cheap when Llarowe sold off everything, so let's give this a whirl. Ok, to start with the formula: working over no base coat (apparently, if you use your regular base coat with this type of peel-off, it will PEEL OFF THE TOP LAYER OF YOUR NAIL when you  remove it so don't do that, kids), this went on a bit streaky and needed 2 coats.  It's not 100% smooth and even...