Sweet Baby Octopolish!

The sun came back out this week so it was most definitely holo time, and I really wanted a cream-and-fire palette. indoor, bright CF lighting Bite Me was a Halloween True Blood special for the Hella Holo Customs group.  True to the inspiration pic of the mostly naked vampire, it's about as pale a color as you can go while still calling it "nude."  Barely golden-sand tinted, this is a gorgeous neutral with a beautiful linear holo sparkle. indoor, bright CF lighting Interestingly enough, this polish was recently proposed in a FM group as a white holo (since truly white holos are borderline impossible to make because the holographic dust tints the base grey instead of white).  While it's a super pale nude, white? naaawww.  Then I stamped over it, and yeah, pretty close actually! bright sunlight I recently got Esmaltes da Kelly's KN-24 stamping plate that has a few layering designs, including the pair of images I used here - the outlines of the scale...

Ladies & Gents, I'm on a polish roll here - everything I've pulled out of mount untried is lovely, for a good couple of weeks now.  Winning! indoor, bright CF lighting Different Dimension made The Northern Lights Are Out for the April 2017 Holo Hookup box.  It's thoroughly true to the name: a deep charcoal that's not quite black as night, with an ethereal flash of color overlay that shimmers from piney green to soft purple. outdoor, overcast daylight I have several duochromes with this same green-to-purple shift, and it may be one of the more versatile pigments.  This version is packed with a silver holo flake that looks dense enough to be TV static or the speckling of a wild bird egg in low light, yet lies totally flat on the nail, and turns into a little holo sparkle in brighter light. window-filtered bright sunlight The green flash was anywhere from pine to ghostly green, and the purple anywhere from a tinge on the charcoal to bright wine - over...

Once upon a time in 3013, Femme Fatale put out a series of linear holos that each had a contrasting shimmer flash.  I was an idiot and only bought 2 or 3 of them... I'm now only one lonely bottle of polish away from correcting that oversight (you will be mine someday!!) indoor, bright CF lighting Starfall is the least contrasty of the bunch, but a fab color all the same.  This is a grapey lavender, just a touch darker or more saturated than my pics show, with a subtly paler lilac shimmer (as in, the base leans a little more blue while the shimmer leans a little more pink).  It's just possible the shimmer is subtly duochromatic, slightly tilting up to a warmer more bronzed pink. outdoor, direct sunlight The formula was utterly perfect, as I've come to expect from everything in this collection.  Great pigmentation, not too thick or thin (no pooling in the cuticles), covers totally in 2 coats.  If there's any downside, the brush was a little too soft, s...

The 2015 Ex Libris collection by Baroness X is, to date, the only complete collection I own in entirety.  Sure, there's only 4 of them and not the dozen typical for big mainstream brands, but there's also no filler - every one of these are utterly GOLD. indoor, bright CF lighting Alhambra, like her sisters, is a glassy shiny jelly (cobalt blue in this case), sprinkled with iridescent flakies, and packed with the Clarins 230/Fantasy Fire type shimmer that we all swoon over. indoor, window-filtered daylight This jelly was very forgiving to work with, self-leveling very nicely at each coat, and looked pretty good in 2.  I'm wearing 3 here to make sure everything is even, but that 3rd coat didn't deepen or alter the final color, so ok to stop at 2.  In some brighter light pics here, my free edge is visible, but this is one of those strange cases where the camera "sees through" the shimmer - this was absolutely visually opaque though squishy IRL, and ...

Everyone agrees that there are basically only so many multichromatic pigments available to polish wizards.  Love them like I do, there's in general just a few variations of base color or added sparkle to differentiate many of them.  When POP polish claimed their versions were more magically shifting than anything I'd seen, well, I was a bit skeptical. indoor, CF lighting WOW.  Just.  Wow.  Spoiler alert: literally every color that flashes on the far edges of that bottle is there for real, and yes indeed, all of these pics are of the same single bottle of polish. indoor, bright CF lighting POP Polish Slick Like That is an ILNP Sirene-type shifter, a deep ocean teal when viewed straight on that shifts over through steely blue and into a gorgeous metallic purple the more you tilt your nails to catch the light at angles. outdoor, bright direct sunlight indoor, bright CF lighting Where Sirene and others of her ilk in my collection stop, though,...

Femme Fatale just keeps coming out with one amazing sparkly thing after another, and their offerings are both a big chunk of my collection as well as a big chunk of my untried pile.  When the man suggested red, I knew immediately which polish I'd be grabbing! indoor, bright CF lighting Aldebaran, named for a flame-colored star in the constellation Taurus, is a juicy warm red jelly packed with the round iridescent color-shifting glitters that have been so popular lately.  There's also a scattering of teeny tiny gold holo glitters, but this is more visual interest and not at all a linear holo flame. window-filtered overcast daylight By itself, the jelly base leans ever so slightly toward the cooler, berry side of red, but the fiery glow of the glitters pulls it firmly to the warmer side of red. outdoor, direct bright sunlight I've used 3 coats here, which gave me visually opaque coverage in all but the very brightest sunlight.  This was very nicely self-le...

I'm in more than a few FB nail polish groups, and had to start a list of all the amazing designs I'd like to try out myself.  This idea of submerging stars into the layers of a pond mani was something I loved in the original and jumped on right away for my 4th of July look this year. outdoor, overcast daylight For those of you new to all the zany polish lingo, a "pond mani" is one where layers of opaque polish - most often a plain white crème - are sandwiched in between layers of a sheer jelly polish.  The end result is shapes emerging from the depths of color, like from under the waters of a pond.  In a nutshell, the technique is to brush on one layer of color, stamp in white, then another layer of color (important!! make sure your stamping is totally dry or the next layer of color will smear it), then repeat 2-3 or more times until you like the result. For this version, I've stamped stars from HeHe-003 (plus one larger accent star from XXL-3) within 3 di...

Not the first time I've mentioned it, but man do I have a backlog of much-wanted treasures that sit untried far too long at Chez Michelle. indoor, bright CF lighting Toxic Seaweed is easily in the top 5 all-time greatest hits of Cult Nails, and though I missed buying it direct from them (it was a limited edition from 2012), I was lucky enough to score a brand new one in a destash some time (>1 year, sheesh) ago.   outdoor, bright afternoon sunlight To get that gorgeously deep dark emerald underwater color, patience will be necessary: Toxic Seaweed is quite sheer.  I'm showing 3 coats here, and it's still a bit lighter than in the bottle; 4 coats would have been fine too.  Fortunately, the formula was utterly lovely, very smooth and even, so no trouble at all to build it up.  One could always layer it over a matching deep green to "conserve" the polish, but that ain't how I roll, yo. indoor, bright CF lighting So what we have here is a...