Sweet Baby Octopolish!

Sometimes you really need a nail-palate cleanser after tons of dark and rich colors, and it's still time to holo while the sun's out, so I pulled Girly Bits Push It off the untried pile. indoor, bright CF lighting Push It is a silver with a whole lot going on.  It's got a sparkly scattered holo finish, plus a bunch of silvery shimmer, plus a bunch of holo hex glitter in mostly copper but with a few silver ones thrown in. direct sunlight The holo is more of a sparkle than a flame, but the scattered holo particles plus the chunkier rainbows off the glitter meant this was pretty sparkle-tastic. In the shade, the glitters were more apparent than in bright sunlight, which was both more visual interest/complexity than your usual holo, and also a little bit muddy.  The formula was thick enough that glitters didn't lay totally flat on the nail, and i did need to clip a couple of them off to prevent any OCD craziness. shady, overcast daylight Push It wore ...

Glitter Gal was on crazy sale with Llarowe even before her recent liquidation, so I took the opportunity to snap up a few new ones.  Tart Yourself Up reminded me a whole lot of the vibrant medium-blue of the infamous Baker Street, so that one had to come on home. indoor, bright CF lighting Tart is a super saturated "azure" or "french" blue, in a crème finish that self-levels very nicely and is completely opaque in 2 coats. my never-seen left hand, full sunlight For the accent fingers, I used Cult Nails Time Traveler topped with INM Northern Lights Silver, then added starbursts with  Snail Vinyls . shady daylight Tart was nicely shiny before topcoat, and really pretty after.  Both of these blues are the type that cling like anything to cuticle edges, so paint as carefully as possible to minimize cleanup for these.  Neither stained my nails on removal, but very little does, so YMMV. afternoon sunlight Rating:  4 out of 5 stars, a lovely...

The magical powers of Russian nail bloggers are so amazingly perfect that they've become a sorta polish fiend joke, but when  Sveta does this gorgeous "drag marble"  or someone  just makes these look sooooo amazingly easy , I've gotta give it a go. direct sunlight Summer is also winding down, so this technique was a great way to try out as many new holos as reasonably possible at once. flash The brief version of this technique: basecoat per usual one thin coat of whatever the base for the design will be (here, Color Club's Kismet), and let it dry pretty thoroughly work one nail at a time, putting a thick coat of the base polish on the whole nail, then drops of the accent colors (here, Femme Fatale's Deepstone and Lilypad's Teal Pearl) while it's all still wet use toothpick or dotting tool to first drag through the base color, then continuing to sweep through the accent color drops, with the goal to make leaf or heart or random swirl s...

I'm an eternal 3-year-old magpie, eyes caught by bright and sparkly things, and glow-in-the-dark is certainly no exception.  Most glow polishes require a light base color to "reflect" off of, so I was a little skeptical at the darkest of Dance Legend's Firefly collection, Price of Beauty. window-filtered daylight Price of Beauty (geez, DL, what's with the name?  Is glitter removal what we pay to look sparkly??) is a faded denim blue that's packed with what visually appears to be mostly lavender and gold micro glitters.  The macro shows a whole rainbow of sparkle, though, with green and blue and pink in there too. overcast daylight It's a softly sparkly, pretty color indoors and in the shade. overcast daylight But in the sun, it's so blingtastic that it causes camera freak-out. full sunlight:  BAM! With just a few seconds of charging under any light source, this is a super-strong glow in the dark.  I managed to startle mys...

Femme Fatale is easily one of my fave indie polish makers - there's been at least a few in each of her collections lately that I utterly have to get a hold of.  From the recent Narnia set, this is Lantern Waste. overcast daylight It's debatable what color Lantern Waste actually is - in some lighting it's grey, while other times it's a smoky faded-denim sort of blue - but either way, it has the lovely color-shifting iridescent flakies from Essie's Shine of the Times that plenty of people have forgotten about in the current blitz of multichrome metalic flakies. overcast daylight Lantern Waste also has an overlay of the red-to-green Fantasy Fire pigment I love.  The green flash happened in a much more subtle way than from a topper, probably from peeking through the stormcloud of the base color.  The rusty red flash, though was a smoldering ember on the smoky background. direct, late afternoon sunlight embers & smoke The formula was patchy on t...

I was so NOT ready to take off the gorgeous black Together Dead and Lonely, but after a couple of days I did wish that it had more holo OOMPH, so I topped it with Darling Diva's Dangerous Driver and ended up wearing black nail polish for almost a week straight.  For verisimilitude, all pics taken in a car, while trying very much to not be dangerous (pics only while stopped at lights, yo). bright sunlight for all pics   The last time I wore Dangerous Driver , I said it was a holo sparkle and not linear.  Weeeeel, I kinda lied - this stuff is a flaming holo goodness that's as close as something can get to linear before it actually IS linear. check out those rainbows It's also filled with the Clarins 230/Fantasy Fire pigment that polish junkies swoon over, making this black shine everywhere from brick red to bronze to green. bronze flash green flash Rating:  4 out of 5 stars.  One easy, smooth coat is all that's needed for this huge spar...

Dear whoever blogger recently aimed me toward Blue-Eyed Girl's lovely polishes, thanks, you rock. bright sunlight Together Dead and Lonely (named for a lyric from the Phoenix song 'Rome' that I hadn't heard until now ) is described by the maker as "a black jelly with silver and red holographic microglitters."  I found this to be more of a crelly - this gorgeously glossy melted glass black was almost fully opaque after one coat, and it needed a layer of topcoat to get that devastating shine. TDL dried down to a satiny matte finish that still had a very subtle texture with one layer of topcoat; 2 layers was needed for it to be smooth to the touch. bright CF lighting Though some of the microglitters were indeed definitely red, to my eye the rest appeared green, sort of christmas in a bottle until the sun hit and broke all the colors to tiny rainbows. direct sunlight.  sooooooooooo shiny! shady, overcast daylight Rating: 5 out of 5 stars...

I've been lemming Rescue Beauty Lounge's Aqua Lily for quite some time now, but I'm not willing to pay the secondary market price for it.  When Llarowe dropped swatches of this year's Overboard collection, my eye instantly stuck to Katarina, and BAM lemming squashed. bright CF lighting Katarina is a creamy sky blue that is quite teal in some lighting - though I'm way too orangey in the bottle shot above, the polish color is completely accurate for this lighting on my monitor. shady, indirect daylight At other times, it's definitely blue and not teal, but most often with a little or a lot of fuchsia-pink shimmer. bright sunlight The formula was a little thick and the brush was a little bigger than ideal, but 2 coats covered nicely, and this bright poolside color is awfully fun. bright sunlight shady, overcast daylight Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.  I've proven yet again to leap toward blue-with-pink-shimmer polishes, but I still  li...

To wrap up thermal-palooza here, I have one last experiment - this thermal is probably about 20 years old. indoor CF lighting Apparently, I was sorta ready to be a nail fiend way back in the day before I knew that was a thing at all.  In college, I had a zip-top caboodle-sized makeup bag that ended up being filled with a whole bunch of polish and nothing else - my baby stash of 30 or so bottles.  When I organized and swatched my growing stash a couple of years ago, I kept everything that was still fab or salvageable with thinner, and that included a handful of these "mood changing" polishes from Toma. direct sunlight I remember picking these up at a Claire's or one of the other teen accessory places in the mall for a couple bucks each, and I know that the thermal shift still worked when I used it again circa 2005ish, but I'm sad to say this one is officially dead, with no color shift at all in any temperature (hot water, ice water, real life, nuthin')....

More thermal love!! KPT released Ophelia's Love (my bottle calls it "L ♥ ve") as part of a duo back in 2013.  I was a sucker for the flakies in Ophelia, while Suzy was smitten by the shimmer in Ophelia's sister Nostalgia, so we split the pair.  Indies that make thermals promise that the color shift will last for at least 6 months, but today's experiment shows that this one changes just as smoothly as it did 2 years ago. indoor CF lighting Ophelia is a vampy near-black when cool and a very sheer light grey when warm.  The base color is packed with lovely duochromatic flakies that shift from fuchsia through bronze and almost to green. outdoor, indirect sunlight The color really is all about the flakes - the base really is almost black to almost clear, so it's the appearance of these sheerly iridescent little flashes that lend it color. direct sunlight The warm color can be a quite sheer sexy veil of light sparkle on the nails, to a purpley-pi...