Sweet Baby Octopolish!

Onward with Femme Fatale week! Last month, FF came out with a Sleeping Beauty-themed collection, and my immediate must-buy from the batch of gorgeously cool-toned purples and blues was Glass Coffin.  Spoiler: this one is absolutely a stunner, so commence  the picture spam. bright CF lighting Glass Coffin is a lavender to sky blue thermal, packed with fiery jade green shimmer.  The shimmer ends up overlaying and visually blending the two colors, so I didn't really get any of the funky french-tip effect that thermals often look like.  Instead, sometimes there was a purple tint to the sidewalls or edge of my nails that hadn't been there before. srsly, this is a pastel unicorn on my fingers. indoor CF lighting.  this is about as french-tip effect as GC gets. When my hands were warm, all traces of the purple vanished, leaving a bright, saturated sky blue.  And in bright light, the shimmer looked like glassfleck particles. DAT SHIMMER. S...

After the last 2 FFs were so thoroughly awesome, I've decided it's Femme Fatale week at my house! bright CF lighitng Maddening Whispers is one of last year's shimmer + holos, which I'm absolutely kicking myself for not trying until now.  It's a blue-leaning purple that starts to look more like a purple-tinged denim blue in bright light.  If that color shift wasn't enough, it's also  a linear holo and also also  is packed with a killer jade green shimmer. indoor, indirect sunlight Everything this has going on means that it's different but equally interesting in all kinds of lighting.  In lower light, the green over violet gives it a pearly iridescence, like a muted peacock flash. indirect overcast sunlight In brighter light, the holo starts to take over from the green shimmer... direct sunlight Except at long angles, where I discovered that the shimmer was in fact duochromatic to a vibrant pinky-purple. direct sunlight...

I totally loved  Stand in the Clouds , and was in a green mood when that shipment showed up, but when I first saw swatch pics of Femme Fatale's January Cthulhu-inspired collection, this was the one that was an instant must-buy:  In His House He Waits Dreaming indoor CF lighting Dreaming (boy is that name a mouthful!) is a rich red-toned chocolate brown jelly sprinkled with teal holo microglitters and packed with teal fiery shimmer.  It's a gorgeous warm-and-cool contrast that I swooned for, but was unusually tricky to capture in photos - while it looks near-black in a few here, it never looked black IRL. outdoor, indirect overcast light The shimmer is dense enough here that it dries down a little matted, but one layer of topcoat was sufficient to give it a glass shine. The jelly finish here went on wonderfully evenly - the pic above is a single coat with no cleanup and no particular care to avoid streaking, and it's almost even enough to wear like t...

My brother got married yesterday (congrats, bro!), so I needed something festive enough to match my dress and the lovely springtime weather, but not too blingtastic.  Shiny copper to the rescue! indoor CF lighing I'm Your Venus is part of last year's 80s Girl Bands collection from Girly Bits, most of which were holos with matching shimmer (she calls them "shimmolos").  Venus is a light, bright copper just the color of a brand new penny. outdoor, direct sunlight The holo here is a sparkly linear - while there's definitely a flame arc, this is a lot softer than plenty of my other linear ones.  The central bright flash of copper comes up in bright sunlight, but is quite subdued indoors, making this sort of like a stealthy almost-neutral. indirect, overcast light The shimmer in this meant that somehow the holo was never greyed out, and didn't get that muted, silvery-dusty look that some really strong linears show in low light. outdoor, late a...

Some days, you check your mail and know immediately upon opening a new package that you're doing your nails TONIGHT.  The first of my Femme Fatale haul is Stand in the Clouds. indoor, bright CF light Clouds is a watery jade green - it's a very organic color the color of a lush lake somewhere, and just a touch more blue than yellow.  The sheer jelly polish allows tons of very fine gold shimmer and larger gold holo microglitter to shine through.  The gold is much more prominent in bright light, while the slightly cool jelly takes the fore in the shade, so this looks different in different lighting. indirect overcast sunlight This is 2.5 coats, and I had a bit of VNL at that point.  The glitter and consistency, though, were even enough that attempting to get it opaque was wholly unnecessary.  Apparently, I'm on a kick of ethereal slightly sheer polishes lately. Though the glitter looks like it stands out, it does indeed lay very flat on the nail, w...

Residing in the depths of Mount Untried, I unearthed a gem from CrowsToes' 2013 Fall collection when the man suggested purple, and ooooh the pearly goodness! indoor CF lighting Quarter Till Today is a slightly more red than blue shade of purple that's packed with a rosy copper shimmer.  It has a jelly finish that's not completely opaque after 2 coats, but looks great that way - while I'm sure it has layering potential, I wouldn't want to lose the base color.  See, it seems to me that this color is pretty much the exact shade of Fantasy Fire and all her friends/dupes, only with a not-quite-metallic shimmer instead of the red-to-green flash (note to self: use this as a base for Darling Diva's Ringer), and I have no interest in losing that pretty. office fluorescent lighting Even in low lighting, the coppery shimmer is there, as a smooth pearly finish to the purple base.  In a lot of ways, this is the darker, more purple sister to  Orly's Fantasea ,...

"Traditional" red polish isn't often my go-to - my fair skin tends to look yellowed out or scary white with a bold red, and if I'm going for vampy sexy, I like darker wines.  Every so often, though, a red will catch my eye, and I'm really happy when they actually work. indoor, bright CF light  Love, Actually was the clear stand-out from this year's Valentine's collection from Llarowe.  It's a rich, saturated color, about 2 shades darker than true fire-engine-red, and the dark is probably what makes it so lusciously wearable for me.  You can see a good bit of holo in the bottle here, but the rainbow was extremely subtle on the nail - this is more of a soft, shimmery look, and is definitely my least POW holo, scattered or otherwise. outdoor, overcast light The first coat went on a little patchy and dried satin.  The 2nd coat and a layer of topcoat brought it to the opaque shine you see here. indoor, CF lighting It's a darker red in ...

Though Cinderella was such a disaster for me, I wasn't done with pastel easter-time blue.  As typical for me, I realized that after  Orly's Angel Rain  and Cinderella, I had yet another iteration of blue-with-pink-shimmer, and this one finally rocked my socks. indoor CF light It's Raining Men is a soft, slightly greyed-out periwinkle blue, with an utterly gorgeous pink-to-gold pearlescent shimmer.  Unlike the patchiness of the other 2 pink-in-blues I have, this sheer formula was super easy to work with.  IRM was so flawlessly self-leveling on the first coat you could leave it like that for an ethereally light wash of color, if that's your thing.  It was about 75% opaque on the 2nd thick coat, showing a bit of VNL and some of the white moons at the nail base at this point. indirect, early morning sunlight The color was straight-up spring morning sky, blue with a shot of warm pink.  The more intense the light, the brighter the blue color was;...

Sinful Colors has to be my favorite drugstore brand - their color range is super, and the quality of the polish is typically far better than the $2 price would have you thinking.  Cinderella is a fave of plenty of SC fans, but sadly, it was a total fail for me. indoor CF lighting Cinderella is a bright sky blue that appears to be very similar to the color of the dress in the Disney animated movie.  It's got a really lovely sparkly pink shimmer that peeks out of the creamy base in bright lighting. Unfortunately, there's a lot of problems for me with this formula.  It's streaky, very fast-drying, sheer, and creamy all at once:  the 2nd and 3rd coats didn't smoothly build onto one another, but instead sat on top of one another in visible layers, leaving lines where the edges of each coat weren't perfectly aligned.  It also sort of lobster-hands me, and the whole effect looks way too little-kid (says the person who loves flashy rainbow duochrome uni...