Sweet Baby Octopolish!

With the 90bajillion untried polishes in my stash, I usually don't even consider an old polish when picking my next color, and there's plenty of faves from before I blogged hidden on these shelves.  I guess Mystic Glacier reminded me to consider revisiting another best beloved, because this week Hits Unconventional leapt right at me. window-filtered morning daylight Unconventional was part of Hits' Mari Moon collection - a series of 8 duochromes, then another 8 with similar-sounding names that had added holo sparkle.  Like all duochromes, it's lovely in shady or lower light, showing a deep sapphire blue wash over a rich berry wine base in direct light. outdoor, overcast daylight With barely a tilt of the fingers, the warmer shades start creeping over the curve of your nails, adding magenta, then scarlet. outdoor, overcast daylight But low lighting isn't at all necessary. Unconventional absolutely blazes in bright sunlight, too. outdoor, direct...

Finishing out March, it was back to the all-green/blue all month plan with Tonic Greenglow. indoor, bright CF lighting Greenglow should win an award for the most straightforwardly honest polish name in recent memory:  it is indeed green, and it does indeed glow in most all lighting. indoor, bright CF lighting It's a delicately shifty springtime duochrome, shifting from palest celery spring green to a more vivid jade to a few shades of pink, with bronzey gold thrown in the middle somewhere.  It's a little sheer to let all the duochrome shimmer do the talking, so I have 3 coats here. indoor, CF lighting indoor, window-filtered daylight There's a soft holo sparkle thrown in here, but it's more like the scattering of tiny twinkling lights you get from a layer of Northern Lights topcoat than anything approaching a holo flame. window-filtered morning sunlight I topped Greenglow with Emily de Molly rose gold stamping polish using some pisces symbols...

There's nothing new under the sun, right?  And certainly the bigger my polish stash gets (ok, seriously, intervention is required), I really do have plenty of minutely similar things.  Since 230/Fantasy Fire shimmer is both a super fave of mine and super popular right now, surely someone somewhere  has snuck into my hoard a near dupe to the stunner that is Ninja Polish Mystic Glacier, right? Spoiler alert:  nope, not even close. In all pics for this post, I've left 3 coats of Mystic Glacier on my middle finger, and put the watermark there for easy visual reference.  My index finger is Dreamland Lacquer You Saucy Minx (3 coats), ring is Dreamland A Wedding Dress That Isn't Bright Turquoise (3 coats), and pinky is one coat of Glitter Gal Tart Yourself Up + 2 coats of ILNP The Magician.  I've used my standard slightly milky-translucent basecoat (NailTek 2 Ridge Filling) and then ProFX topcoat for all swatches to try and minimize the apples-to-orang...

Like I said, this is a big, zero-at-the-end birthday, and while I painted black like one does for the party, for my actual day-of-birth, I busted out the good stuff, probably the most HTF fancy sauce in my stash, Ninja Polish Mystic Glacier. indoor, bright CF lighting Once upon a time, back in, 2013 Suzy sent me a pic of this polish right here.  Obviously, it was an immediate must-have, and at the time she sent me the pic, I popped on over to Ninja Polish's website, saw it right there on the front page, and snagged a bottle.  I had NO IDEA that it had been restocked literal minutes before I looked at it and then sold out again that same day, and was pleasantly clueless about the frenzy of restock stalking.  This polish right here was my final stumble down the indie rabbit hole. indoor, CF lighting You know what, though?  Mystic Glacier absolutely lives up to the magical swatch photos from then.  The above pic really, seriously is what it looks like m...

It's my birthday this week, one with a big zero attached as the last digit, so for my party this past weekend, I went with the traditional thing to Paint It Black. indoor, CF lighting I stumbled across a swatch of Nfu-Oh 60 just a couple of months ago, sighed over how lovely it was, and sighed again since it was certainly gone by now (these were discontinued by the manufacturer maybe 2 years ago).  And then promptly found a bottle on Amazon for $10. indoor, CF lighting Nfu-Oh 60 is a black jelly (not brown, not espresso, not charcoal, BLACK) absolutely packed with iridescent flakes that shift from red when viewed directly to bronze at a little angle to green at longer angles - as in, yes, the exact same shade shift as the shimmer in Fantasy Fire or Clarins 230. indoor, bright CF lighting When in the totally red shift (above), Nfu-Oh 60 ends up looking a whole lot like Dance Legend Bite Tonight, but this one is black where the DL is dark red, and the flakies here ...

I sort of continued my all-teal-all-month theme but in a much lighter vein this week with Femme Fatale Silent Snowfall. indoor, CF lighting From the recent holiday exclusive trio for LLP, Silent Snowfall is a very pale grey (in bright lighting it will look nearly white) with a lovely aqua shimmer overlay.  The shimmer is more prominent IRL than my pictures capture, but not as devastatingly glowy as the over-exposed sales pics from LLP would indicate. In lower lighting, the shimmer and the pale background combine to look like a layer of pearl on the nail. window-filtered overcast daylight While in bright lighting, there's a scattered holo sparkle. bright direct sunlight Pastels can be notoriously tricky, and this was kinda in that zone.  I needed 3 coats to get to the opacity you see here, with plenty of time to dry before painting that 3rd layer to prevent stickiness and dragging.  And in some lighting, I got a subtle hint of lobster hands, so that was...

I debated making March an entire month of blue/green/aqua polishes (aquamarine is the birthstone of March!), and while that didn't completely end up striking my fancy for the whole 31 days of the month, there were a lot of pretty polishes on this end of the spectrum. indoor, bright CF lighting Enchanted Polish Time Travel is a TARDIS-blue base (somewhere between navy and slate-teal), with a shimmer overlay that shifts from pinky-purple (above) to turquoise-green (below). indoor, CF lighting This being an Enchanted, there's also a nice holographic effect, this time in a fine-milled sparkle that seems more scattered than linear to me. bright afternoon sunlight for both The shimmer flash was readily apparent in both lower light, where it looked like a duochrome shift, and in brighter lighting, where it provided a nice flash in the middle of the holo. window-filtered overcast daylight Though I usually have great luck with Enchanteds, the formula on this o...

After things warmed up quite a bit around here (flip flop time already?! Yes please!) we had another cold snap.  Since my nails were nice and long and there were no traitorous chippers, definitely thermal weather! indoor, bright CF lighting Femme Fatale A Fortune Teller's Charm is a beautiful sea-green sort of teal when cold, and a pale yellowy sandy nude when warm. bright afternoon sunlight The teal darkens (I think) just a hair more than what's in the bottle when it's really cold, and the pale sand of the warm color is warmed up even more by a red/copper/gold shimmer overlay that's visible in most all lighting. early morning sunlight, fully cold state This was just 2 absolutely perfect coats to complete opacity - kind of unusual for a thermal that's so pale on the warm side, but of course appreciated.  This dries a little satin less than most thermals do, but a layer of topcoat is always necessary IMHO anyway. outdoor, bright sunlight I have...