Sweet Baby Octopolish!

 It's been gloriously sunny with warm summertime weather lately, so I felt it was time to pull out a super linear holo, and it's been way too long since I've had a green mani.  Trawling through my stash I found something that'd been on Mount Untried for far too long. indoor, bright CF lighting Is Vapid Lacquer's Spider and the Fly a summer color?  Heck yes, because anything you want to wear this season is for this season.  That being said, it was released originally as part of a fall collection, and it is perfection for a warm autumnal palette... but these rainbows are all summertime. bright direct daylight I can't quite figure out if Spider and the Fly is an army green vs an emerald green with contrasting bronze-gold shimmer in the mix.  In either case, the end result is a deeply saturated, richer-than-velvet olive-leaning green. window-filtered indirect daylight The formula on this was smooth and perfect, needing 2 coats to get to complete opacity.  ...

 This holiday weekend, I got together with my book club on the beach to discuss the gonzo novel that is Tim Dorsey's Nuclear Jellyfish, which of course necessitated nails to match the eye-searing cover.   outdoor, bright sunlight for both I've started out here with 3 coats of Vapid La Fae Verte, a polish I originally considered selling, but has since come in quite handy simply because I don't have many of these super bright pretty-ugly greens. I've stamped over the green background using white, light purple, and turquoise - finding a color scheme that would both pop yet not simply look black was tricky, but I think I pulled it off.  HeHe's amazing new Magic stamping plate collection - I've never bought an entire collection, but these are all must-haves - provided the jellyfish and some spare tentacles on plate 03. Happy summer/fall/beachy reading, everyone! ~Michelle 

Suzy came to stay for a delightful long weekend quarantine bubble-merge of board games & comedy TV, so two things happened right away.  1) Star Trek was on hold in favor of treasured human interaction and 2) I was pretty instantly smitten with her neon green sparkle polish. indoor CF lighting Neons are most certainly not my jam, and I own vanishingly few greens that lean prominently yellow, so the super bright one she had on wasn't replicatable with my stash.  The closest I could come up with was Vapid La Fae Verte, about 3 notches darker but with the same fiery aurora shimmer. outdoor, bright direct sunlight La Fae Verte is an apple/spring green jelly sheer enough to let the sparkle of the aurora pigment show through easily.  This also means it needs many coats to get there, and unfortunately there is no cheat for that.  In an effort to brighten the base color and cut down on coats needed for the right look, I started with a layer of white crème...

A swatch photo in the Vapid fan group reminded me that Witching Hour is awfully pretty in a deep, dark, vampy way... and a cool effects topcoat from Dance Legend was just languishing untried, so... indoor, bright CF lighting Yes!  Slytherin nails!   First layers first: indoor, bright CF lighting Witching Hour is a deep inky off-black base with very fine-milled purple shimmer.  The bottle catches more shimmer for me than my nails do, and this is indeed one of those polishes that looks black in moderate light on down, but that was wholly expected from the get go.  It's completely opaque in 2 coats, but cleanup can be dicey if this ink gets at your cuticle egde. indoor, bright CF lighting The morning after I'd painted this, I wanted my vampy look to have more flash than just a creature of the night, and since the base layer was totally dry, it seemed a great time to try out one of Dance Legend's magnetic top coats. outdoor, bright d...

Once in a very long while, Vapid has released a single LE polish for a couple of days as a preorder, never to be seen again.  The first of these, Ride or Die, was released before I was into Vapid and has since acquired legendary status in the polish community, going for crazy money at auction.  I was lucky enough to snap up the other two as they came out, but there they sit on Mount Untried. indoor, CF lighting Each of these 3 LEs are super linear holographic polishes with a beautiful metallic chrome multichromatic finish.  The first of the two I have, Cyber Punk, starts off as a lovely light wine/dark pink when viewed directly... outdoor, shady & overcast daylight Then shifts toward a more peachy, warm, baby pink... indoor, CF lighting Then continues warming up past peach and on into gold... window-filtered bright afternoon daylight And finally over to bronze with a suggestion of green at the furthest angles. indoor, bright CF lighting ...

I'm not so much a cute pink kind of girl, but I do like a little smattering of holiday decorations, and I wanted to keep attempting to master the Russian magic of the needle marble, so all of that led to a simple heart accent nail(s) mani with Vapid's Dark Twisted Fantasies (150% appropriate for the love holiday, no?) rubbing up against a England's Rose Bower. indoor CF lighting Dark Twisted Fantasies is the darkest plum wine you can get without it looking black (in low lighting, it looks like a warm off-black).  It's almost a one-coater, but 2 evened everything out to perfectly smooth opacity.  The linear holo is light and sparkling, not scorchingly blinding.  And it drips nicely into Rose Bower to melt into little hearts once I've dragged a needle through the drops. 2 side-by-side drops made the best heart shape DTF is far, far more holo than the subtle flash of Rose Bower, especially in bright light, which just added nicely to the cute contrast betwee...

I joined a group on facebook called Hella Holo Customs a few months ago - this batch of holo-loving ladies recruits a duo of polish makers each month to come up with an interpretation of inspiration pics that the members vote on.  While straight-forward basic holos don't suck me in (I'm loaded up with goodies with great formulas from Jade and Dance Legend, thanks), I'm always a total sucker for those polishes with a little something extra. indoor, bright CF lighting My first dive into the HHC pool is this stunner, Vapid Lacquer's Spellcaster.  At first glance, it's a rich, nearly vampy purple with a sparkly bit of rainbow.  But boy does this one have plenty of other faces to show. outdoor, direct sunlight With a tilt of the fingers, the purple shifts out into rosy wine and warm golden bronze, so much so that the purple vanishes completely.  But that's not all... indoor, window-filtered daylight Is that a green flash creeping up over th...