Sweet Baby Octopolish!

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...

Bear Pawlish is a new-to-me indie that sucked me in with a couple of gorgeous duochromes (green + shifty = kryptonite).  The first one I snagged is Untamed. indoor, bright CF lighting Untamed is a rather sheer yellow-green jelly packed with finely-milled shimmer that can make the whole thing look radically different in any lighting.  It was honestly a borderline scary disappointment on the first 2 coats: that yellowy tinge to my cuticle edges was what the whole thing looked like, only streaky and thin, and not at all the rich forest green of the bottle.  Fortunately, continued application (4 coats here, folks!) had the color becoming more and more rich until it got to what the bottle promised. window-filtered late afternoon daylight In soft, low lighting, the shimmer vanished, and Untamed had a smoothly pearlescent shine.  In bright light, though, that shimmer would sparkle like sun on water or ground glass.  Weirdly, though the manufacturer says thi...

Earlier this fall, Swiss nail polish artiste Cadillacquer released her "Eat the Rude" collection, inspired by the recent Hannibal TV show.  While I don't usually get sucked into fun fandom nail polish based on names alone, that impulse managed to have me only stop short of buying the whole collection.  This is pretty much my favorite show in YEARS, and these were gorgeous polishes. indoor, bright CF lighting Memory Palace is a soft, creamy color somewhere between grey and green - I seriously had a hard time filing it (my stash is sorted based on color), and ultimately went with green, but it looks a little different in every lighting condition, and leans more one way or the other. indoor, window-filtered overcast daylight In cool, low light, Memory Palace is definitively green, of an earthy sort you'd expect to find as part of a wild bird's eggshell.  In most all lighting conditions, there's a twinkling glint from bronze microflakies mixed througho...

The man picked "purple" for my next color, and I unearthed something from Mount Untried that had come highly recommended to me, Orly Royal Velvet indoor, CF lighting Royal Velvet (btw, Orly duped themselves when they released Mysterious Curse, so same stuff if you have that label instead) is a sheer plum-colored base that is absolutely packed with a very finely milled blue-to-red color shifting shimmer.  The ultimate effect is that the base color always looks dark and vampy, while she pearly shimmer is duochromatic. outdoor, overcast daylight In low light, RV looked like a black pearl glowing dully, while in brighter light, a faint sparkle struck off the surface. outdoor, direct late afternoon sunlight In all lighting situations, this was a quite dark polish, but it was never black.  The shimmer often appeared as a cobalt blue flash when the base color looked darkest. window-filtered bright sunlight And then I'd get that lovely shifting duochrome w...

One look at Powder Perfect's anniversary polishes had holo stars in my eyes:  each of them is a blinding silver linear holo with a little something extra thrown in (one with holo glitters, two with ultrachrome flakies), so I snapped up both Unobtanium and her sister Microcosm (the flakie polishes).  Here's the first of the two: indoor, bright CF lighting Unobtainium is a wonderfully opaque silver holo - plenty of silvers are more topcoats to give a holo effect, but this one probably wouldn't work well in that capacity (more on that later).  It's packed with the fuchsia to red to gold to green flakies of a similar color shift as in INLP's Brilliance or Nostalgia.  At one coat, it was close to opaque: one coat, no clean-up, CF lighting And at 2 there was absolutely no VNL. indoor, window-filtered daylight The flakies were devastatingly shifty on top of this lovely silver platter: outdoor, overcast/shady daylight for both pics And the holo...

I joined a group on facebook called Hella Holo Customs a few months ago - this batch of holo-loving ladies recruits a duo of polish makers each month to come up with an interpretation of inspiration pics that the members vote on.  While straight-forward basic holos don't suck me in (I'm loaded up with goodies with great formulas from Jade and Dance Legend, thanks), I'm always a total sucker for those polishes with a little something extra. indoor, bright CF lighting My first dive into the HHC pool is this stunner, Vapid Lacquer's Spellcaster.  At first glance, it's a rich, nearly vampy purple with a sparkly bit of rainbow.  But boy does this one have plenty of other faces to show. outdoor, direct sunlight With a tilt of the fingers, the purple shifts out into rosy wine and warm golden bronze, so much so that the purple vanishes completely.  But that's not all... indoor, window-filtered daylight Is that a green flash creeping up over th...