Sweet Baby Octopolish!

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...

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...

 2084 was a lovely neutral that just happened to also make the ideal base for some understated nail art for book club. This month's book club pick was Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, a story about a very human-appearing android.  Since I was already wearing a cool neutral - not quite skin tone - it was an ideal base for this look.  Directly over my existing mani of Femme Fatale 2084, I stamped a sun image rom Dixie Plates Isabel's Reverie using HTB Magna Opus.  The circuitry design uses Moonflower The General and Winstonia W317.  Happy reading! ~Michelle 

For the lighter color this round, I went with a true neutral, Femme Fatale 2084 indoor, bright CF lighting Wow does time fly!  I swear that Femme Fatale released their Total Recall-themed "Welcome to Mars" collection pretty recently, but nope, this beauty is from 2016! outdoor, bright sunlight 2084, named for the year the story takes place, is a cool-leaning taupe filled with a very finely milled metallic magenta shimmer.  It's just a few shades cooler and darker than my own skin tone and would be wholly appropriate in the office or any setting you wanted to look chic and pulled together but very understated. indoor, bright CF lighting I'm wearing 2 smooth coats here, which provided good coverage and complete visual opacity.  While painting, the brush drug obvious grooves through the polish, which completely leveled out even before topcoat. outdoor, shady daylight indoor, bright CF lighting Rating:  a lovely neutral and a collection staple, a solid 3 out of 5 st...

 Time for a palate cleanser after all that dramatic nail art! indoor, bright CF lighting But of course even a "palate cleanser" can't be a plain boring neutral, and just as of course I have a pile of untried things needing my attention, and the intersection of those two is Vaporous Flowers, released as an "oops batch" by Femme Fatale back in 2017.  I don't believe anyone hypothesized what this was originally going to be, but the result is gorgeous.  outdoor, shady daylight Vaporous Flowers starts with a sandy nude base that somehow manages to be unusually shifty for a neutral shade.  It looks quite different in different lighting - sometimes a warmer pink (in low or angled lighting when the shimmer isn't at its boldest) and other times cool-toned not-quite-beige sandy.  indoor, bright CF lighting That contrasting shimmer + holographic microglitter is pure classic Femme Fatale, and as always if you like this finish nobody does it better,  As you can see...

 Once more, we delve into the treasures to be found within Mount Untried... indoor, bright CF lighting Melobasina was the color of the month way back in February 2015, named for a genus of jewel-toned beetles.  Like its namesake, this one was shifty in a very organic-looking way.  outdoor, bright direct sunlight The above pic shows the full range of shift just perfectly - in some light it's black, in others it's purple, and it easily hits a deep metallic forest green, all packed with small rainbowy ultrachrome flakies. outdoor, indirect daylight The original blogger photos at the time of release showed Melobasina as a blackened green (below): outdoor, bright afternoon daylight And while it easily shifted to green at angles, this instead looked to my eye as smoky purple at least 2/3 of the time (below): outdoor, indirect daylight There's both a shifty shimmer in here, pulling this from purple to green, as well as the interplay between that shimmer and the flakies.  It...

 With my nails grown out a bit longer than usual to make enough room for Halloween nail art, plus the cooler temperatures lately, reaching for a thermal was the obvious plan. window-filtered afternoon daylight Wrapped in a Cloud is part of Femme Fatale's latest release (what??  I'm not leaving a new polish to languis untried for months??), based off of a classical painting with lots of dark, smoky earth tones.  Above, in the coldest state, it's a deeply inky teal. window-filtered bright daylight The announcement for this color said it was only "technically" a tri-thermal, and that 3 distinct color states wouldn't be obvious.  While at no point did I ever see 3 bands of color at one time on my nails, I did in fact notice 3 different colors overall.  In the warmest state, Cloud is a cool-toned concrete grey that's unfortunately much more sheer and patchy-looking than either of the other states - While 2 medium thick coats were perfectly opaque while painting...