Sweet Baby Octopolish!

As is often the case when I need a starting point to select a polish, I check in with my partner, who helpfully suggests a base color.  As he's done more often lately, though, he got awfully specific this time:  "blue with green flakies." indoor, bright CF lighting Illyrian Alfheim is a lovely cool cerulean blue - somewhere between sky and cobalt, but closer to the latter.  It's a quite sheer jelly to allow the iridescent "ocean" type flakies - the sort from the old Nfu-oh polishes that shift from green to aqua to blue - to shine through. window-filtered overcast daylight I'm wearing 3 coats here.  The base color was a touch uneven until 3rd coat, but the sea of flakies distributed very evenly on each coat and actually looked best at the 2nd.  The 3rd coat meant the flakies started to layer over top of each other, and look more like a full wall of shimmer rather than individual separate pigment elements. window-filtered afternoon sunlight...

The moment Illyrian's Moon Child showed up, I knew I'd be using it as soon as I felt like a flakie bomb.  Meanwhile, I also realized just how long I'd had We Are the Weirdos, Mister lying around.  An Illyrian double-feature was clearly in order. indoor, CF lighting Moon Child was from a collection Illyrian called Opalescent, and it most certainly is that.  This is a sheer but easily buildable jelly base in a lovely sky blue-aquamarine color, filled to the brim with translucent iridescent flakies.  It'd be a gorgeous topper over any shade of blue or turquoise, but works just fine on its own as well. outdoor, direct sunlight We Are the Weirdos, Mister is a deep eggplant purple with plenty of holo dust - I have this filed as a linear holo, but the way I'm wearing it here, the look is definitely more scattered rainbow sparkle. outdoor, shady overcast daylight This look started with a medium-thickness coat of each polish on all nails.  Once that ba...

With the fantastic weather this week, I was feeling summery-bright, the man voted for red polish, and this beauty was sitting on my mani table having just arrived... indoor, CF lighting As far as my sleuthing around the interwebs could illuminate, Illyrian released Prototype 99 as a 2017 Black Friday LE that also ended up going to a couple stockists.  It's a super subtle duochrome of the sort that looks different in different lighting, but doesn't show any shift on the nail. window-filtered bright daylight Overall, it's a cool-toned berry red, and the bottle color where it's closer to magenta is just as color accurate as the blazing scarlet in this sun shot.  There's also a light dusting of aurora pigment in there that had a sparkling lime green flash in the bottle, but again, not obvious on the nail as a shift, but as a component of the lush glow.  99 had a nicely behaved formula that was 100% opaque in 2 coats. outdoor, bright afternoon sunlight ...

Well, now that Halloween is over and I'm back at work and those loooong talons I had going on were cutting into gloves at work, I filed back down to everyday length, which is both more practical (no more surprise scratches for my poor partner!) and way less fun (less stamping space, boo!).  Oh well.  But!  Not time at all to abandon fall vampy colors, so when the man picked purple, I reached for Illyrian Dream Hopper. indoor, CF lighting A pic like this first one is what made me swoon over Dream Hopper.  It's a luscious eggplant purple filled with an emerald-to-magenta duochrome shimmer.  230/Fantasy Fire-type shimmers are the opposite of this one, which is green head-on and pink in angled light.  Buuuuuuttttt... reality was a whole lot closer to this 2nd pic instead: indoor, bright CF lighting Still purple, still a pretty color, but IRL the shimmer is only super prominent and super shifty in just the right light.  I kind of get a surprise ...

Illyrian is blowing things up lately, and several of the shiny new things that just arrived at my house immediately clamored to jump to the head of the queue.  The gorgeous copper shimmer in Awaken Your Magic just happened to match the metallic rose gold of another new arrival, Sinful Colors Kreme de la Kreme, so the 2 got paired up tout suite. indoor, bright CF lighting Awaken Your Magic is a sheer lavender jelly with a rich coppery contrasting shimmer overlay and a sprinkling of silver holo microglitters.  It needed 3 coats for level of opacity seen here, which still shows some VNL, but in an even non-streaky way i'm fond of.  Each coat was perfectly self-leveling, so you could easily use this as a topper at one coat. indoor, bright CF lighting Kreme de la Kreme is an easy one coat wonder.  Though it's a bit thicker than ideal, that's likely to suspend all the metallic shimmer it's packed with.  Cleanup is rather tricky, since the shimmer dissolves...