Sweet Baby Octopolish!

Much like around this time last year, it's my birthday, and so much like last year , I pulled out something seriously special to celebrate:  Cirque Coronation. indoor, bright CF lighting Coronation was absolutely, hands-down, no questions asked, my hugest all-time lemming.  I've bid a pretty penny on this purple potion at auction, and I've bought a literal dozen other things trying get close enough.  When Cirque re-released it for the recently past holiday season, I went crazy and bought 2 bottles.  I have hundreds of bottles of polish that I would still never use up even if I changed my nails daily, I don't need backups of anything but base & top coats, but common sense be damned, this is dragon-level hoarding and the only reason I stopped at 2 was there was a limit on purchase. window-filtered daylight Coronation is a rich blue-leaning purple jelly base that's pulled over toward a warmer red purple by a wagonload of Clarins 230-type red-to-green ...

Sweet Baby Octopus, the weather has been utterly bizarre on the east coast this year!  Spikes up into the gloriously sunny 70s, then another frozen snap.  The poor buds trying to bloom don't know what to do.  Fortunately, having things bloom on my nails to greet the technical start of spring is much more straightforward. indoor, bright CF lighting Femme Fatale released Cote d' Opale (The Opal Coast) as part of her 2016 blogger collaboration with Very Emily (whose swatches I miss a whole lot).  It's a soft, pale blue somewhere between winter sky and barely turquoise, liberally dusted with a bright coppery red shimmer that shifts to bronze at angles, plus scattered iridescent flakes.  My pics show this a little lighter than official swatches, so there's a possibility it's faded a little, but what's on my nails exactly matches the swatch stick I made when I bought it. indoor, bright CF lighting Cote d' Opale had a very nice Goldilocks formula - neit...

St Paddy's day falls this year on a Saturday where I don't have going-out plans, and just wasn't feeling any elaborate nail art... but there's always time to knock out another untried green! indoor, bright CF lighting Baroness X released Obligatory Unicorn Body Fluid (the label has the name in lower case surrounded by parenthesis, as though she's just as loathe to call shifty shimmers "unicorn pee" as I am) as part of her mystery unicorn box at holiday 2016, along with an assortment of other unicorn-themed polishes & bath products.  It's a slightly murky kelly green jelly full of gold and iridescent flakes, iridescent glitters, and holo microglitters. outdoor, bright sunlight I'm wearing 3 coats here over a peel-off basecoat; the color starts out sheer but builds nicely.  The iridescent glitters that were super popular for a while there are beautifully obvious in the bottle and on the swatch stick I made when I first got this box, b...

Once upon a time (wow, 4 years ago) , I got a lovely midnight green Urban Decay LE as a holiday gift from Suzy, and though the color was pretty, I had some issues with the formula.  Well, the constantly cloudy weather has me seriously rejecting holos and sparkly things, and I thought this was due another round. indoor, CF lighting Zodiac's deep forest green base appears to have thickened up over the years, though it's been tightly sealed this whole time and there was no obvious evaporation level in the bottle.  I thought it too sheer and thin last time, and now, nope, 2 normal coats were utterly opaque and I had zero troubles with application even despite the long, tall brush handle. outdoor, partly cloudy daylight Though the sparkles of golden-green, subtle hints of blue and purple, and flashes of emerald in here all make the underlying base look black, nope, it really is forest green all around.  It's a good bit lighter than the similar sparkles in a dark ba...

I'm a total sucker for anything with the red-green rainbow shimmer from Clarins 230 (click the 230/FF/UP tag at the bottom to see what I've already swatched), and though I buy them up like a real hoarder, I'm sometimes surprised at how many of these preciouses are on Mount Untried. indoor, bright CF lighting Dreamland first released A Wedding Dress That Isn't Bright Turquoise when they were branded as Smitten polish, and then continued to keep this beauty in stock in her store on-and-off for several years running now.  It's an utterly gorgeous caribbean ocean turquoise jelly filled with the magic shimmer in question. indirect, overcast daylight Wedding Dress (which probably has the award for most unwieldy name in my collection) is quite sheer to let that shimmer shine forth totally unobstructed, and you could use it as a topper or over matching undies if you prefer.  Since I love the luminous glassy look of jellies on their own, I'm wearing 4 coats h...

Since Shape of Water somehow magically pulled off an Oscar win, and the one nail I had done it this color just wasn't enough... indoor, CF lighting Shleee has released more than a few polishes in the past couple of months with "aurora" or "unicorn" pigments in them - in polish land, we're mostly all interpreting these as having a similar color shift to the "unicorn pee" in Clarins 230 and her sister shimmers.  This particular iteration is a deep sapphire bordering on navy blue, packed with both aurora shifty shimmer and very tiny ultrachrome microflakies. outdoor, bright sunlight The overall effect is that the blue gets darkened down to nearly navy, while the red flash of the shimmers pulls the base color more violet.  And then at angles, that red shifts over to emerald green, which is of course what always makes me swoon. outdoor, bright sunlight The flakies are more of the pink-to-green sort, so they compliment and offset the re...

Last night was the big show, and for the third year in a row, I not only managed to catch all the best picture nominees, I managed to get a little memento of each one on my nails!  As with years past, I used a double handful of stamping plates, a bit of freehand painting, and tons of both stamping and regular polishes. And the nominees are: On my left hand: 1.  a map of Europe with X marking the spot where it's all going down in The Darkest Hour 2.  a small craft braving rough seas to rescue the British army at Dunkirk 3.  Lady Bird's home state of California and home city of Sacremento On my right hand: 4.  scales of the fishman in The Shape of Water 5.  the peach and piano that frame moments in Call Me By Your Name 6.  the wine bottle molotov cocktail thrown in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri 7.  lace on the Belgian princess' wedding gown, and the hidden stitched message within, from Phantom Thread ...

It seems like I've had a trend lately to wear 2 polishes by the same brand back-to-back pretty frequently.  In any case, since the last Llarowe color only got partial spotlight from me... indoor, bright CF lighting Once upon a time last May, Llarowe dropped swatch pics of her May 2017 color of the month in a few groups so that I managed to notice it before it was gone (these were only sold for a day or so right at the beginning of the month).  There had to be no way in heaven and earth for the polish to glow like those swatch photos said it would, but just in case it was even sorta close, I jumped on that with a quickness. indirect daylight Now that I've actually gotten around to wearing this one?  Absolutely not disappointed, this is magic.  Emerald Illusion is a devastatingly vibrant emerald green duochromatic shimmer in a rich aqua base.  Dead-on in bright light, it's absolutely GREEN: outdoor, bright sunlight But then in lower light,...