Sweet Baby Octopolish!

Tonic Polish is absolutely blowing up the indie world, with every new thing they release being quickly sought after.  Lindsey has a great eye for color, so I'm absolutely jumped up onto that bandwagon myself. indoor, bright CF lighting Slitherin' (which is either a wink to a very silly horror-comedy or else a play on the most cunning house in Hogwarts, no idea) is a gorgeous golden spring green with a killer blue duochrome shift and a scattering of holo dust thrown in the mix.  It appears to be the same very fine holo dust as in northern lights topcoat, so more a scattered sparkle and not a linear rainbow flame.  Everything promised in that bottle pic above translated nicely to my nails. indoor, bright CF lighting In bright, direct light, the shimmer is more golden... then tilts over to aqua and close to blue (not quite as denim blue as in the bottle, though) at angles. indoor, CF lighting I'm wearing 2 coats here, and had very good opacity with just th...

It's been dreary and rainy and cloudy for about forever now, so no holo or super sparkle is going to shine their best, but snuggly warm colors seem to do the trick. indoor, bright CF lighting Burnt Apple Pie is a small oops batch from Baroness X - it's a few notches darker brown than the golden pie-crust brown of the original. window-filtered morning daylight Maybe a better name for this one would be chocolate ice cream with toppers, because that's about the exact color this was.  BAP is a creamy, chocolatey brown that went on in 2 perfectly smooth coats, sparked with a lovely duochromatic green to magenta shimmer. indoor, CF lighting The shifty shimmer went from apple-green head-on to raspberry at angles. chocolate covered raspberries, indoor, bright CF lighting window-filtered daylight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - lovely formula, smooth application, and a subtle spark to an otherwise fall/winter sort of neutral.  Several days later, I had smooth ...

Yesterday, I marched alongside half a million people on the National Mall in DC.  It was an amazing experience, and I was utterly floored by the diversity of causes and people all there to say, unreservedly, it would be not only ideal but expected for this new administration to respect the lives of its citizens. These pussies aren't backing down any time soon. (Pahlish Weasley's Wizard Wheezes + NanaCoco Love Black + Messy Mansion Crystal 02 plate) ~Michelle

Once upon a time, I found swatches of Heather's Hues October 2015 LE, Oktoberfest, and swooned.  It was of course long gone by then (that's my luck), but Heather herself was able to track down a bottle for me (way better luck!). indoor, bright CF lighting Oktoberfest is a deep smoky (not quite black) base, with a gorgeous wine to green duochrome shimmer. window-filtered daylight My camera refused to accurately pick up the wine, but it was a lot more intensely red than these shots show, yet always blackened at the edges.  Very vampy, very dead-of-winter. window-filtered daylight The emerald green shift was quite intense, and came out with barely a tilt of my fingers. indoor, bright CF lighting Like a lot of duochromes in darker bases (most of ILNP's, CrowsToes Huginn & Muninn), Oktoberfest looked smoothly pearly in low or indirect light, then very shimmery in bright light. window-filtered bright daylight I stamped using the braid pattern and...

Yeah, I could probably wear nothing but Femme Fatale for the rest of the year and still not get through all my untrieds... indoor, bright CF lighting Infamous Riddle (which wins for one of the best names of all time) is a mossy, yellowed spring green, with a very contrasting copper-red pearlescent shimmer overlay.  I'm not in the least sure whether these colors are more raven or writing desk (neither, obvs), but this is rather unique in my stash. indoor, window-filtered overcast daylight I gotta be honest, this color does not so much love my skin.  The yellow tint to the green is questionable on my not-yellow self, and the red tint to the shimmer is the color I look with lobster hands.  So though the formula, wear time, and uniqueness are all YES, the actual wearing is sorta NO. indoor, bright CF lighting See what I mean?  That pearlescent glow YESSSS.  The smooth, 2-coater formula, thumbs up.  My skin, ooohhh nope. (dat shimmer, tho) ...

My hugest lemming is Cirque Coronation.  Yeah, shocker I know, anyone who likes purple, who likes shifty polishes, or even knows about that sparkle magic in Clarins 230 has a hankering for Coronation, so my tears are far from unique.  I've bought a whoooole lot of purple polishes with some sort of shimmer or shift in them to try and calm this lemming down, and it's always a fool's game since I don't have the original to compare them to.  But I think I came pretty damn close this time. indoor, bright CF lighting indoor, CF lighting Lacquester's Doomed Diva is everything other people's lavish swatch pics made it out to be.  It's a devastatingly rich royal purple, slightly more blue then slightly more red depending on the lighting, and always suffused with a gorgeous coppery pink shimmer that stands out as a brighter flash along the center of the nail, so you get a devastating "glowing from within" look.  Yeah, I'm gushing.  Yeah, it...

One of my nail polish groups had a "thermal" prompt for this week, so I pulled out Femme Fatale's Whispers of Velvet. Originally, I'd skipped this one because of the flaming hot pink the warm state was often photographed as, but ended up quite pleasantly surprised. indoor, CF lighting Whispers of Velvet is a lusciously vampy dark plum when it's cold, then a soft rosy pink when warm. window-filtered daylight for all 3 That funky-french effect that we all love a bunch in thermals was quite evident here.  Though it's about a year old now, the transition is still going strong with no problems. more window-filtered overcast daylight.  seriously, there is NO SUN this winter. In addition to the change from the thermal effect, Whispers is also jam-packed with duochromatic aqua-green to fuchsia-pink microflakies. slightly brighter filtered daylight indoor, bright CF lighting The color shift in those flakies is the cause of all those s...

For my first new mani of this year, I went straight for one that was on so many people's best of 2016 lists, China Glaze Pearl Jammin'.  This lovely lady sold out super quick, and for a while was going for INSANE prices on ebay, but I found one at normal retail price on Amazon. indoor, bright CF lighting for both Pearl Jammin' is a greyed sky-blue base packed with warm coppery shimmer that's thankfully just as beautifully flashy on the nail as it is in the bottle.  The formula is a little squirrely, the sort that's both slightly too thin and yet dries so fast that it gets gummy if you go over the same area twice.   3 coats are needed for even coverage with the sorta thin/sheer formula, but that's the price to pay for having the shimmer this bright, and all minor irregularities smooth out perfectly with a layer of topcoat.  I stamped my accent nails with the cute dreamcatcher image on BM-407 using Hit the Bottle Copper Haired Girl. Then we promptly had...

I've recently received so many polish packets in the mail that I was overwhelmed with choices for a New Year's Eve look - bronze, gold, purple, wine???  This one happened to be sitting at the front edge of the mani table shouting "LOOK AT MEEEEE" that all my plans instantly got simplified down to a clean monochromatic but blingy look. indoor, bright CF lighting Cirque Idyllic has the exact same perfect formula as her sister Halcyon, this time as a barely blue-tinted silver foil.  It's nearly a OCW, though I'm showing 2 thin coats + topcoat here.  After noticing that the bright turquoise polish on my toes was badly chipped, but having no time to fix it properly, I later slapped one single thick coat on top as a touch-up.  Idyllic covered the dark, saturated color opaquely in that one coat with no troubles. bright CF lighing I've stamped using my trusty NanaCoco Love Black polish with the perfectly well-etched numbers from Sugar Bubbles SBS-04 an...