Sweet Baby Octopolish!

The man picked "dark blue" when prompted for a color suggestion, but instead of reaching for one of my newest sparkles, I went for something a little deeper into Mount Untried. indoor, bright CF lighting Triumph is a lovely dusty denim/slate blue filled with silver holo flake.  I feel the grey undertone in this blue would make it really wearable for most skin tones, and the moody stormcloud color is just about perfect for the non-stop rainy weather that's flooded the east coast for the past few months. indoor, bright CF lighting I have several other polishes in similar finishes - opaque color with holo flake - and found Triumph to be surprisingly sheer and borderline watery.  The base is very much a jelly, and while it's thick enough that the flakes lie flat and smooth in it, 3 coats were absolutely necessary to get it to the bottle color.  For a color this saturated at the final look, I found 3 coats to be highly unusual. outdoor, overcast daylight ...

Weeelllll, my winter holiday themed month came to a crashing halt when I was so swoonily in love with this polish that I felt zero urge to stamp over it. indoor, bright CF lighting You'll notice some minor edge wear in a few of these pics - that's because I wore the utterly amazing Another Glorious Morning for a week straight. Quixotic Polish released this beauty as part of Polish Pickup's horror movies theme from September, and while I'll debate whether Hocus Pocus is horrific, there's no debate that this is one of my absolute fave magnetics. bright mid-day sunlight Another Glorious Morning starts off with a deep hunter green base that ends up typically looking eggplant purple due to the load of shimmer packed in.  On top of this, it has the type of high-sheen multichromatic magnetic shimmer that gives a 3D cat's eye effect with even medium intensity lighting.  I'm wearing 2 coats here, with my super strong ring magnet held at a diagonal o...

Do you ever have a polish just pop into your mind?  I knew several days ago that my next mani would be in black, and that it would specifically be L'Oréal The Queen's Ambition, so this design was built around that gotta-do-it-now thought. indoor, bright CF lighting The Queen's Ambition was part of a fantasy-themed group L'Oréal put out in 2012;  this is my only polish from that line.  This Queen is just barely off-black, and was very subtly dusty looking at the first coat, but deepened just a little with the 2nd coat.  It's also quite thick, and the only reason it took me 2 coats is that I do my first layer as thin as possible.  Embedded within this inky darkness is a whole boatload of silver microglitters that means it dries somewhat textured... and then it's SUPER topcoat thirsty.  2 layers wasn't adequate to smooth things out. indoor, bright CF lighting Continuing with my winter holiday themed December, I had this black & silver back...

After a way too rainy autumn, the sun finally started peeking out, so round 2 of "all winter holiday all December" needed a cheerfully blinding holo. indoor, CF lighting Treehouse is a flamingly linear holo in a shade somewhere between mossy green and old-gold bronze - I have it filed as green, because it most definitely looks green in the bottle, but in fact most of the time on the nail it wore more as bronze.  Either way, it's a flashy antique earth tone with an utterly perfect formula that threw rainbows at every opportunity.  I haven't bought a "plain" holo in quite some time - apparently, I prefer my holos to be multichromes or have flakies or something else... but this color is utterly unique in my stash and well worth grabbing. outdoor, overcast daylight Over this earthy bronze, I've stamped a wintertime forest with a touch of snow using BM-407.  There's one large dot of snow plus a few smaller ones at the top of the image, and I r...

Last year I had a lot of fun with "all Halloween all October"and then had no time for even a single stamped/nail art design this year.  Instead, I'm going for "all holiday/winter all December" to see if I can knock myself fully back into the nail game. outdoor, indirect daylight Well, I think I rocked it right out of the box.  This is 2 coats of Pahlish Mad Man With a Box, which is still a little thicker than I'd like but didn't chip on me at all like back when I first wore it.  I've layered first a more complex fabric-textured plaid from HeHe 028 in white, and then a thin subtle box plaid in light blue with CJS 06, and finally used a matte topcoat to make this look like soft flannel. outdoor, bright sunlight I love how in bright light the flakies from Mad Man are able to glimmer through the stamping pattern, while still staying understated as though they are slubs in fabric.  Gotta love it when a design actually behaves the way you want ...

I've been on a major thermal kick recently, so when this lovely showed up recently it jumped right on my nails. indoor, bright CF lighting Yeah.  Wow. Heather has apparently come into a stash of everybody's fave red-to-green Clarins 230 type shifty shimmer, and dumped a generous helping of it right into this jaw-dropping tri-thermal polish.  Ethereal is a deep eggplant purple when cold, a bright cornflower blue in the middle, and a cool-toned nude when warm.  I got everything from funky french tips to gradual color shadings across my whole nail when wearing this, and it's one of those tonal thermals that just looks lovely at all colors. outdoor, overcast daylight Ethereal is a delightfully sensitive thermal, quick to change color with minimal changes in my surrounding temp.  It's shifty enough that cold/warm water assistance was utterly unnecessary to get these pics in all the transitioning states.  Fun fact:  your hand is supplied by 2 ...

When I opened my most recent package from Shleee, I gasped when this little gem caught the light, and it's been a hot minute since I wore green anyway so... indoor, CF lighting Shleee named this utterly gorgeous green polish Samhain, but being in between the two holidays now, I think it feels just as much Christmastime as Halloween.  Samhain is a brightly saturated forest green somewhere between kelly and pine that ends up leaning just a bit darker and more earthy due to the heavy copper-bronze aurora shimmer and flakies.  If that wasn't enough, there's a scattering of delicate holo dust - all in all this is an amazing sparkler. bright afternoon sunlight The base is pretty jelly-ish, enough so to let all of the elements shine forth unobstructed by opacity, and yet, Samhain comes to decent opacity at 2 coats, and as deep as the bottle promised by 3 coats. window-filtered daylight As much as this is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, it all flat-out works -...

I am most assuredly on a thermal polish kick, and I've also recently re-sorted all my Clarins 230-type UP polishes into one Helmer drawer, and so by those powers combined... outdoor, bright direct sunlight Indigo Bananas released a trio of UP thermals this past winter, and while I thought I had similar things to the other two, the super juicy pink-to-red Cherry Pie had to head my way.  bright direct sunlight I found Cherry Pie to be a very subtle tonal thermal - I never noticed an obvious french tip effect, though it did appear to be more red or more pink overall in different temperature conditions.  Based on how the swatch photos on the Indigo Bananas store look, with a significantly darker berry-wine cool state, this might well be a dead thermal at this point.  In any case, the formula was perfectly smooth and easy to work with, nicely opaque in 3 thin coats with no dulling of the 230 sparkles by the co-mingling of thermal pigment.  It dried down only s...

A couple good thermals most definitely deserve another!  Not only is it thermal season - i.e., that time of the year when cool outdoor and warm office temps mean a thermal polish will show off nicely, but also the instantaneous nail art from the colors changing is pretty ideal when you're too crazy busy to put together something that would take more time. indoor, bright CF lighting Crepuscular Awakening was one of Femme Fatale's collaboration shades with Emily de Molly last year, and unlike most box sets where only one catches my eye, I absolutely had to have the whole quad of these.  The bottle pic above tells you everything you need to know about Crepuscular Awakening:  it's a dusty cadet blue when cool that warms up into a sandy nude, overlaid at all times by an opalescent blue shimmer, and sprinkled with silvery holo microglitters. indoor, bright CF lighting Oh, wait, not everything ... turns out that blue shimmer is actually the sort that shifts to lavend...

My life isn't done being all in a tizzy, not by a long shot, but it is time for Halloween and even in a no-time-for-nails shenanigan, I have to Halloween! indoor, CF lighting As soon as I saw swatches of KBShimmer's Resting Witch Face, I knew what my Halloween look would be this year, and it quite obligingly showed up just in time to jump on my nails.  It doesn't hurt at all that I'm apparently on both a thermal kick and a Polish Pickup kick lately! window-filtered daylight The utterly perfectly named Resting Witch Face is a black to almost clear thermal jam packed with lime green glitters - it's the Wicked Witch's face and her dress, all in one go, and it's delightfully fun.  The glitters come in a couple of sizes, and some of them glint metallic holo in bright sunlight. bright afternoon sunlight I'm wearing 2 coats here, which at arm's length was always adequate coverage, but it looks a little more sparse in macro photos than it...

The next major item in my life gone hectic list was the annual big conference this week - since I'm known for my nails (ha!), but this is a grownup sort of gig, slightly flashy but tasteful was the plan. indoor, CF lighting After my major love affair with Kaleidoscope/El Corazon (I think that El Corazon is the brand name, and Kaleidoscope is their line of stamping polishes, but I don't read Russian so it's all a guess) Mysterious Mars, I recently jumped at the chance to order all of their multichrome stamping polishes at a discount with a group buy.  A few of them are somewhat sheer and will look very different over different base colors, but the rest are just as opaque and shifty and universally usefully awesome as Mysterious Mars.  outdoor, bright sunlight Egyptian Scarabaeus is predominantly a slightly greenish-tinted gold head on - it's in the realm of OPI Just Spotted the Lizard/Chanel Peridot.  Like those duochromes, it shifts to minty green, then n...

After the summer lingered unseasonably warm for months, a switch has been flipped to super chilly here on the east coast.  It drives me absolutely bonkers to turn the a/c off then the heat on all in the same week, but hey, that also means it's thermal season. indoor, bright CF lighting Fancy Gloss released Captured Butterfly as part of the books theme for this past March's Polish Pickup.  It's a fairly reactive thermal that on me tends to stay on the warm side - this was the kind of polish that was already turning colors as each coat was still drying.  In its cold state, it's a very dark, moody slate teal. outdoor, bright direct sunlight While in the warm state it's an unusual violet purple that drove my camera nutty. outdoor, bright direct sunlight The funky french tip effect was in fine form, and would have been much more dramatic if I'd left my nails a bit longer.  Over both the warm and cool states, Captured Butterfly has a gorgeous bright ...