Sweet Baby Octopolish!

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...