Sweet Baby Octopolish!

It's time for my favorite cultural event of the year - the annual Oscars schindig!  Life is pretty hectic lately, and a whole lot of this year's nominees are more than a little depressing, so I was going to go with a more generalized movie-themed look like last year... until a dear friend (and fellow movie nerd) told me things just aren't the same without movie nails.  Inspiration struck, and here we are! In order index to pinky: Tar Triangle of Sadness Everything Everywhere All At Once Elvis Thumbs L to R: Banshees of Inisherin Women Talking and again index to pinky: The Fabelmans All Quiet On the Western Front Top Gun Maverick Avatar Way of Water As per usual, there's a lot of plates and a lot of colors in here, too many to mention, plus a smidgen of freehand.  Hope you found a film that struck you as amazing this year! ~Michelle 

 For this month's book club, my group picked The Long Haul by Finn Murphy. indoor, bright CF lighting I've started with a base of sky blue crème and dusty gold for this story about a long-haul trucker driving across the US, then added the US map, mountains, truck, and highways that feature throughout the book. Happy reading! ~Michelle 

For my last polish for Femme Fatale February, I'd been growing out my nails a bit to show off a thermal polish to best effect... and then a major cleaning project at home resulted in several chips & breaks on my swatching hand, so for this post Cindy takes the spotlight. indoor, bright CF lighting Thermals are notorious for having a finite shelf life, typically guaranteed to be working well for 6 months.  Malachite, released as a color of the month in November 2021 is my oldest untried thermal from Femme Fatale, and it's still working perfectly fine 15 months later. indoor, bright CF lighting Between the awkwardness of shooting the camera with my left hand, and the notorious trickiness of accurate color capture of teals, I find the bottle look to not be completely accurate, though the color on my nails certainly is.  Malachite is a very well-named polish, a bright earthy green when warm (above) and a deep emerald forest when cold (below), packed with "ocean flakies...

 One good "oops batch" deserves another, and I just so happen to have one vastly different than the previous example. indoor, bright CF lighting Crystal Skull was an "oops batch" released in May 2015, and is another one I'm not at all sure what it originally started as.  This is a sea-glass steel blue base filled to the brim with a greenish-gold shimmer and holographic glitters in one or two sizes. outdoor, bright daylight The shimmer overlay tilts the overall look toward aqua rather than blue, and it's prominent in both bright and lower lighting. indoor, shady/indirect daylight The holo glitters add a bit of texture to this polish, and I needed 2 layers of topcoat to smooth things out. indoor, bright CF lighting But wow do those glitters catch any possible glint of light and throw it back in beautiful sparkly rainbows!  This style of glitter is an absolute calling card for Femme Fatale, though she doesn't do as many of them anymore.  indoor, bright dire...

 Well after something delicate and floral, time to swing right on over to midnight vampy! indoor, bright CF lighting Occasionally some makers, including Femme Fatale, will release "oops batches" where a polish didn't turn out as expected, but the artist kept adding to & tweaking the container until something interesting resulted.  Such things don't have a set formula and are by nature impossible to recreate.  Marble Keys was one such "oops" from November 2015. outdoor, overcast daylight Marble Keys starts out with a smoky charcoal base, a fairly neutral off-black (neither cool nor warm on its own).  The base is sheer and required 3 coats to build up to opacity, but was much more forgiving on clean-up than an opaque black base would have been. indoor, bright CF lighting Layered over this is a coarse, not quite chunky shimmer in a deep malachite green.  It's a little more teal-leaning than emerald, but not at all aquamarine, and is much more GREEN in v...

Pink isn't my usual jam, though it often looks flattering on most skin tones including mine.  I'm drawn more to vampy or bright or unusual colors, not traditional ones... but a whole row of pink polishes inhabits my storage rack, most of them because they had a little something extra. indoor, bright CF lighting for all photos Femme Fatale created Midnight Masquerade as a store exclusive for Singapore stockist Mei Mei's Signatures back in 2014.  It's a rich, warm-leaning pink with a gorgeous flash of gold metallic shimmer, and a very light sprinkling of scattered holo dust. Just one medium coat provides full coverage, though I'm showing 2 thin coats here.  Midnight Masquerade has an utterly flawless formula with minimal cleanup needed.  Rating:  yet another really good 4 out of 5 stars for my old skool Femmes.  A seriously lovely polish, even if it's more delicate and feminine than what I usually reach for.  I had full intention of stamping this with a ...

With so many untried Femme Fatale polishes to choose from, it's easy to select a thoroughly different look and mood with each example of my journey through the oldest parts of my collection indoor, CF lighting for all photos Falling Glacier was part of Femme Fatale's 2014 Autumn release, and is the only thing I have from that group.  I've filed it under "grey" since the base is a sheer pale grey, but it's really all about the super bright aqua shimmer.  This arc of metallic, electric aqua was visible in all lighting, and is more saturated and vibrant than the pics show. This one additionally has a lightly sparkling, fine milled holo just barely over the line to having a linear arc, most visible in bright light and utterly vanishing in lower light.  I'm wearing 3 coats here to achieve visual opacity, and each of them were very smooth and even.  Rating:  a lovely 4 out of 5 stars.  Formula and color like this is what made me fall thoroughly in love with...

Next up on my journey through the oldest untried Femme Fatale polishes in my collection, I took a step back even further to her 2012 Gemstones collection. indoor, bright CF lighting The Gemstones collection was a group of shimmery iridescent effects topcoats, too sheer to be worn solo (see the air bubble in the above bottle shot for an idea).  Dragonscale is a peridot green to gold shifter, and I'm showing it over an assortment of base colors to see how that impacted the shifty properties.  indoor, CF lighting My index finger is OPI Christmas Gone Plaid, with the idea that it would compliment the head-on peridot and perhaps shade it toward emerald.  Middle & ring fingers are Vapid Brown Chicken Brown Cow, in hopes to amp the warmer brown edge of the shift, assuming it was a duochrome in the vein of Cover Girl Emerald Blaze .  After wearing this, I don't think that's the case after all.  On my pinky, basic black, usually the go-to for making any sheer duochro...

New month, new brand!  Today we have the polish that inspired this year's blog theme for me, which I've put out ISOs on the resell fb groups, pinterest, and destashes for several years (I found an old ISO post from 6 years ago!)… and then from out of the blue, it became available just last month, and it's HERE! indoor, bright CF lighting Let me tell you a little tale of "if I knew then what I know now":  once upon a time in 2013 when I was starting to have to worry about storing all the polish I was acquiring from all these wonderful indie stores and stockists, I tried to put the brakes on going overboard.  I'm not someone who worries about being a completist, and if the 2nd book in a series really sucks, there's no reason to keep reading.  I originally bought only about half of Femme Fatale's 2013 collection comprised of linear holos with amazing contrast shimmer.  I loved every single one I wore - these are all 4 or 5 star polishes, easy.  But I fail...

My current mani happened to be an excellent base for my book club this weekend, and the cover image was just so striking it begged for a nail art interpretation.  indoor, CF lighting for all photos While I didn't want to do an exact copy, the twinkling microflake in Texas Flake would serve well for the stars above the winter tree branches, and the deep taupe was an excellent representation of the nighttime woods. To this twilight background, I've added the ghostly winter trees in a sheer (not stark or opaque) white polish using the bare tree branch at the top left corner of KADS Chinese 021.  I used the same tree image on all my nails, but twisted the stamper as I applied it to make each nail a little different, then used the moon image at the center of the plate as an accent.  As with all KADS plates I've tried, the images are etched very well, and the level of detail is just perfect for designs of this small - not so fine and tiny that you loose lines when lifting the i...

This week was all forecast to be rainy, so time to move on from holos to something that would show well in the lower light... and oh how is this still untried?? indoor, CF lighting Well, I'll tell you - it got skipped for a while because I think I expected something else. Texas Flake was released as a "Bespoke Batch" in August 2016, and I have it filed as being a "charcoal pewter" color, while I remember that the few swatch pics were more purple (limited swatch pics being pretty typical for these prototypes).  I can only assume my disonnect between expectation & reality caused me to set this aside for too long.   outdoor, overcast daylight I was wrong.  Texas flake is neither charcoal nor purple, but a warm raisiny taupe - if you believe that neutral shades can be vampy, this is it.  There's an assortment of microflakes in gold and metallic ultrachrome, and a very delicate scattered holo sparkle. indoor, bright CF lighting The bottle has a wicked case of...

Winter is just absolutely the worst time of year to try and show off a nice nail polish.  When the work day is a lot longer than the day light, you're pretty well stuck with indoor and bottle shots... until a coworker informs you of some amazingly cool celestial phenomenon happening right outside , prompting you to get a nice sunlight photo of your coincidentally celestially-named polish.   outdoor, bright direct sunlight Chasing Northern Lights was Pahlish's contribution to the December 2015 Holo Hookup box (blast from the past, yo!).  It's a cool greenish-leaning bronze linear holographic with a subtly duochromatic contrast shimmer that goes from coppery (center of my pinky) to gold to chartreuse (index finger) at angles.  I'm wearing 2 coats of this smooth perfect formula for complete opacity. Rating:  4 out of 5 stars, this is a lovely edgy neutral color that was very flattering on my skin tone.  The only flaw was that it wore a little quickly, but...

For the past couple years, I've decided on a theme for my nail looks - first it was colorful alternating with neutral, then light alternating with dark last year.  By some small miracle, a long-searched for DISO fell into my lap this week, which caused me to pore through all the far too long unloved polishes in my stash.  BAM!  This is the theme for 2023:  I'll pick a new brand each month, and select from the oldest yet-untrieds I have of that brand.  In shopping my stash, I'll either feel the need to purge or I'll dig up buried treasure! indoor, bright CF lighting for all photos Hooooboy I have been collecting and wearing polish for more than a decade, with some things lying untried for longer than the brand was in business, eek!  Pahlish is thankfully still going strong, and still with really personal and unique inspo for her collections.  Today I'm showing Sleep To Dream, from her 2013 Winter collection.  The name is taken from a Fiona Apple so...