Sweet Baby Octopolish!

A couple of months ago, a polish sorceress/horrible enabler in one of my fb groups tipped me off to the magic that is Indigo Bananas' custom for a now defunct group called This Shift is Bananas.  Do I need yet another Clarins 230-infused purple polish?  Obviously, hell yes. indoor, bright CF lighting Yeeeaaaahhhhh, there's going to be a lot of pics of this business right here. bright sunlight When you ask nail aficionados what the ideal base is for "unicorn pee" shimmers, the clear top winners are royal purple, saturated cobalt blue, or straight up black - cool, dark bases really allow all of the prominent colors of this pigment's shift, from red to bronze to green, to really pop.  This Shift is Bananas manages to hit a sweet spot in between all 3 with a dark, smoky eggplant purple.  It's truly unique in my stash, and is a deliciously vampy but very wearable color. indoor, bright CF lighting In bright indoor lighting and of course in sunlig...

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...

Indigo Bananas is an indie polish maker with a little something for everyone - there's a wide range of styles in her store, from glitterbombs to holos - with most available as either minis or full-size bottles.  This one here is 2% Butterscotch Ripple, from a Willy Wonka collection. indoor CF lighting  2%BR is a wine jelly base packed with small round glitter.  If you look for the sparkles in the bottle shot there, you can see some occasional holo glitter bits thrown into the mix.  The majority of the sparkles, though, have the same sort of duochrome gold-to-green color shift as Chanel Peridot and all its various dupes. indoor, indirect late afternoon sunlight The blurry shot shows a good mix of the colors those shifty glitters flash.  Since they're glitter particles suspended in a translucent jelly base, they don't all end up laying the exact same way, so the flash is a little different off each one. outdoor direct sunlight Around the edg...